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The Diplocks, the Bramahs, a Rather Cross Historian, and the Scalping of a Library

This little bit's from "The Green of the Peak, Part II: Thomas Bramah Diplock 1830-1892" (Linford, Savage, O'Flaherty), which appeared in Ripperologist No. 64, February 2006 (Maidstone, Kent, UK). There's some background on the subject's mother, father, elder half-brother, and a funny story from the 1830s about a library they operated in Hastings, England. We owe much of what we know about Thomas Diplock's roots in Hastings to research by Roger Diplock and John Manwaring Baines in 1958, and contributions by Mr. Diplock to The Sussex Family Historian in the 1970s. Since both men are deceased and their work never addressed the life of Dr. Thomas Diplock outside of Hastings (and Diplock left that place while still a child), it has always been a regret of mine that we could never share our own research about him with them. We felt that they would have been interested in whatever became of this son of Hastings, so we dedicated our article about the good doc
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Beating the Bounds

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Lately I have been thinking about boundaries. This train of thought was brought upon by a few too many midnight ponderings about the nature of relationships between people, and what makes them work or not work (see my post from October), but I've been thinking of the concrete, too--literal, physical boundaries. Much of this has been influenced by many, many bowls of an intricate little pipe mixture that I've been smoking, Embarcadero . That, and a fellow in Florida whom I've never met but have corresponded with. This acquaintance of mine is working on a book about the political boundaries of London during the Late Victorian Period. That's an interesting point in London's history as it marks the metropolis' transition in 1889 from being a sort of Frankenstein monster that was composed of parts of several different counties into its own single identity, the County of London. This was a topic that Robert, John, and I had touched upon when we were writing our articl
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