It's Charles Babbage's 220th birthday today, and if you want a spot of relevant, erudite and heavily-footnoted post-Christmas steampunk webcomic entertainment, I recommend Sydney Padua's website 2D Goggles, where you'll find the continuing saga of Babbage & Lovelace as 19th century crimefighters. Their current adventure involves Vampire Poets. Read on (the strange numbering is, I assume, intentional):
Vampire Poets, Prologue (in which the shade of a Gothic poet arises to set the scene, and we get examples of real-world bad Victorian poetry featuring the protagonists).
Vampire Poets - Part One! (in which Babbage, collecting statistics on window-smashing, encounters a mysterious young woman high on maddening draughts of Hippocrene; she later disappears, and her sisters - she is in fact Emily Brontë - enlist Babbage's help in finding her).
Vampire Poets Part the Third (in which Babbage introduces the sisters to Lovelace, whose hereditary temperament has acquainted her with the dangers of poetry. We see a spot of Byronic/Holmesian target practice, and get no explanation from Babbage as to why he thought he would have been a poet if he had been blind).
Here's the index to all the stories. And there's a great list of primary documents.
- Ray
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