Tea at Trianon: The Lost Oz

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, July 6, 2025

The Lost Oz

From Woman's World:

The Wizard of Oz follows a young girl named Dorothy Gale who gets transported from Kansas to the magical land of Oz via a cyclone. While there, she meets a talking scarecrow, a tin man and a lion who join her on her journey to defeat the Wicked Witch of the West, as demanded by the all-powerful Wizard of Oz, who claims to have an item that can get Dorothy home.
[...]
As mentioned above, there are several different adaptations of The Wizard of Oz that hit theaters long before Garland’s film. They were produced back in the 1910s and 1920s, when black and white silent movies were all the rage in Hollywood.

These films came after the widely popular 1903 Broadway stage production, which was written by Baum and scored by Paul Tietjens. It had a total of 293 shows and has been revived several times since then, including in the form of the 1910 silent film The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. (Read more.)