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Today in Orlando
This is a small sample drawn from within and beyond the lives and careers of writers. Look again tomorrow! Read more about The Orlando Project chronology.
9 February 1709
The Wesley home at Epworth Rectory was destroyed by fire: all the family got out alive.
9 February 1714
Catharine Burton died as Mother Superior of the English Carmelite convent in Hopland, Antwerp; she was said to have made a holy death.
9 February 1724
Teresia Constantia Phillips married Henry Muilman, a wealthy young Dutch merchant who had fallen in love with her and lived with her for some time already; he knew of her first marriage, understood it was not valid, and did not mind it.
9 February 1743
Leading trade publisher Thomas Cooper died, after which his business was taken over by his widow, Mary Cooper.
Mary was already an important mercury (who bought works from trade publishers and sold them to hawkers, often women, who would re-sell in the streets). She now moved into a new shop nearby (still in Paternoster Row, still at the sign of the Globe), and continued the business until her death in August 1761. She advertised in excess of a hundred titles a year, far more than the biggest publishers.
9 February 1771
Ann Masterman Skinn’s first husband, William Skinn, petitioned for divorce in the ecclesiastical court, on grounds of her adultery with Matthew Browne.
9 February 1775
Edmund Burke wrote that he supported “full civil protection”, including freedom of “publick religious worship, and a power of teaching in schools . . . to Jews Mahometans and even Pagans.”
Six years later he argued that all human nations had a responsibility to protect the Jews, who had “no fixed settlement in any part of the world.” Nevertheless, he often later uses a discourse which sounds to modern ears anti-semitic. In 1791, for instance, he complained of “itinerant Jew discounters at the corner of streets” and argued that London’s “very respectable persons of the Jewish nation” were counterbalanced by housebreakers, receivers of stolen property, and forgers.
9 February 1782
Hannah Cowley’s comedy Which Is the Man? opened belatedly at Covent Garden.
9 February 1810
Mary Ann Radcliffe, after interruptions from sickness and weariness, pressed on with her Memoirs.
9 February 1814
Mary Balfour’s Kathleen O’Neil. A Grand National Melo Drame had its opening performance at the Belfast theatre.
It was printed anonymously the following year. Its protagonist is a national heroine whose exploits and assertiveness are here balanced with a tendency to refer to “the timidity of my sex.” Balfour’s Hope, A Poetical Essay; with various other poems had appeared at Belfast in 1810, bearing her name.
9 February 1848
Ann Batten Cristall, approaching eighty years old, died apparently at Lewisham, where she was buried.
9 February 1876
The nine-year-old Beatrix Potter made the first surviving botanical sketch to which she signed her name: Foxglove and Periwinkle.
9 February 1878
Isabella Banks’s first contribution to the Notes and Queries section of the newly founded Manchester City News appeared, entitled Boggart Hole Clough after an area in Manchester.
9 February 1886
London was shut down for two days by a dense smog; crowds rioted and plundered.
That year almost 12,000 inhabitants died from asthma, emphysema and bronchitis.
9 February 1894
Oscar Wilde’s Salome was first published in the English translation by Lord Alfred Douglas from the original French, with illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley.
9 February 1906
Edith Alice Harper (later Anna Wickham) married Patrick Hepburn in a small ceremony at St Margaret’s Church in London.
9 February 1907
The National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies organised a demonstration to coincide with the opening of the next session of Parliament (the biggest suffragist public event so far); because of the pouring rain, it became known as the Mud March.
3,000 women marched in the procession from Hyde Park Corner to Exeter Hall. Lady Strachey walked at the head of the march and her daughter Philippa was a leading organizer.
9 February 1911
A revised version of the Conciliation Bill (on suffrage) passed its first reading in the House of Commons.
The revisions dropped the £10 qualification, prohibited a husband and wife from registering in the same parliamentary borough or county constituency, and altered the title of the bill so that it could be amended.
9 February 1912
Elizabeth Baker’s one-act comedy Edith was performed at a fundraising event for the Women Writers’ Suffrage League at the Prince’s Theatre.
9 February 1918
Lady Sackville (mother of Vita Sackville-West) noted in her diary that there had been no meat for more than two weeks in the shops at Sevenoaks in Kent.
Butter, margarine, and coal were also unavailable because of the war.
9-13 February 1920
Vita Sackville-West and the now married Violet Trefusis eloped to France, where they had previously enjoyed the freedom to enact the roles which went with their love-affair.
9 February 1927
New York city police raided Mae West’s sensational drama Sex, which had been playing on Broadway for over a year.
The future film star was author, producer, and leading lady. Her heroine in this play is a feisty prostitute who does not hesitate to tell a respectable woman that only circumstances make any difference between them. The police department’s real aim was to prevent another play by West, The Drag (subtitled A Homosexual Comedy in Three Acts), from playing on Broadway. West was tried and found guilty of producing a “wicked, lewd, scandalous, bawdy, obscene, indecent, infamous, immoral and impure” play, and sentenced to ten days in jail and a $500 fine. She turned her prison sentence into a spectacle, arriving at the jail in a limousine with armloads of white flowers. On her release she donated $1,000 to establish a Mae West Memorial Library in the women’s prison, and immediately went to work on a new sex play.
9 February 1941
Elizabeth von Arnim died from complications of influenza at the Riverside Infirmary in Charleston, South Carolina.
9 February 1943
US forces captured Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands from the Japanese.
US troops first landed on Guadalcanal on 7 August 1942. By the time the US captured the island, there were 1,600 US soldiers dead and 4,700 wounded, and the Japanese had lost almost 24,000 soldiers.
9 February 1944
A. Mary F. Robinson died at Aurillac in the Auvergne, France, where she had lived since early in the Second World War.
9 February 1962
Fleur Adcock made a second marriage, to popular writer Barry Crump, which proved even more short-lived than her first: five months instead of five years.
