Snuff was quite common when I was a kid, my dad used it for starters. It's dried tobacco and there were many artisans and industries in Victorian times dedicated to it.... tobacco growers, shippers, goldsmiths, silversmiths, wood carvers, ivory carvers and a dozen in between and after.

Evelina can be found at Project Gutenberg, much to my delight, and I'm sure Frances Burney's other novels can too. 

I've read Evelina and 18th century literature is an acquired taste, once which I haven't quite acquired. It didn't inspire me to read any more of her novels.

7 January 1619 - Nicholas Hilliard died.

Court painter to Elizabeth I and James I. Renowned miniaturist.

Trained as a goldsmith but with a talent for painting Hilliard was attached to the Court of Queen Elizabeth around 1570 continuing under James I until his death. During this time he painted miniatures and a few larger portraits of most of the influential figures of the age in England. 

8 January 1824 (William) Wilkie Collins born. 200 years ago today.

Author of sensationalist novels who in the 1860s rivalled Dickens for success and popularity.

He made his name with his two great works The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868). In all he wrote about 25 novels plus collections of short stories. But from the mid 1870s ill health and an addiction to opium sapped his literary powers, his later works are poor when compared to his earlier output.

He is one of my favourite authors and I intend to read all of his novels. I've read the first 16 and have got to the point where his genius is beginning to fail. 

One class act that lad was, an ordinarry man who literally changed the world.

9 January 1954 - Philippa Gregory born.

The Queen of historical fiction is 70 today.

Her 15 volume series of late Plantagenet/Tudor novels covering the period from the 1430s to the 1570s are her most popular, several of which have been made into films and TV dramas. 

They tell the story from a woman's perspective, in all of her 15 volume series the main characters are women. 

10 January 1961 - (Samuel) Dashiell Hammett died.

American writer of tough realistic detective fiction, most notably The Maltese Falcon (1930) and The Thin Man (1934) both made into films.

Sounds like your kind of thing Tom?

11 January 1928 - Thomas Hardy died.

English novelist and poet one of the most successful in the latter half of the 19th century.

Most of his novels are set in rural Dorset, Hampshire and Wiltshire and are so well loved that the area is marketed by the Tourist Board as Hardy Country or Hardy's Wessex. His best known include Far From the Madding Crowd (1874), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) and Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891) all of which plus many others have been dramatized for film and TV. 

However the hostile reaction to his 1896 novel Jude the Obscure convinced him to give up writing novels and for the final 30 years of his life he concentrated on poetry.

His birthplace in Higher Brockhampton is open to the public.  

The horrific scene in which Jude's young son, who's about ten, hangs his two younger half siblings and hangs himself because of the poverty his father has sunk to. He leaves a note "Done because we are too menny". The critics and many readers were appalled by the story.

GB's first TV weather forecast was broadcast 70 years ago today. One forecaster who never made it full time is here -

The horrific scene in which Jude's young son, who's about ten, hangs his two younger half siblings and hangs himself because of the poverty his father has sunk to. He leaves a note "Done because we are too menny". The critics and many readers were appalled by the story.

Retroactive abortions.

A new Sam Spade TV series is coming to AMC, Sunday, 14 January.

William Powell and Myrna Loy were the perfect Nick & Nora Charles.

I've read very little Thomas Hardy due to The Mayor of Casterbridge as a set text at school, when you're 16 the last thing you want to read is Thomas Hardy. It took me decades to pick up another of his novels, but I tried one of his lesser known works Two on a Tower which was very good. Some of his short stories are excellent too.  

12 January 1976 - Dame Agatha Christie died.

Arguably the greatest author of detective fiction, certainly the most prolific, publishing over 200 crime stories involving the characters of Hercule Poirot, Jane Marple and Tommy & Tuppence in a career spanning nearly 60 years with many published posthumously. She also wrote a number of non-crime novels under the pseudonym Mary Westmacott.

She was created a Dame in 1971.

13 January 1941 - James Joyce died.

Irish writer, author of three increasingly complex and some say unreadable novels - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Ulysses (1922) and Finegans Wake (1939).

I've no intention of reading any James Joyce novels, their reputation as being impenetrable to the average mind puts me off.