Snoozecast

Tonight, we’ll read the section on baking cookies from “Woman’s Institute Library of Cookery Volume 4”, written by The Woman’s Institute of Domestic Arts and Sciences. This is the same set of cookbooks Snoozecast’s “Breadtime” episode draws from. 

The Woman’s Institute was founded by Mary Brooks Picken in Scranton, PA. Born in Kansas in 1886, Picken wrote the first dictionary to be published by a woman in the English language, beyond the over one hundred other books she wrote."

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We hope you enjoy this preview of an episode from our back catalog available to our premium subscribers. Tonight, we’ll read “The Gift of the Magi” a short story by O. Henry, followed by the poem “The Night Before Christmas.” To unlock full episodes, ad-free listening, and more, please go to snoozecast.com/plus.

Published in 1905, this O.Henry story tells of a young husband and wife and how they deal with the challenge of buying secret Christmas gifts for each other with very little money.

“The Night Before Christmas” is formally titled “A Visit from St. Nicholas” and written by Clement Clarke Moore, anonymously published in 1844.

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We hope you enjoy this preview of an episode from our back catalog available to our premium subscribers. Tonight, we’ll read the opening to “The Exploits and Triumphs, In Europe, of Paul Morphy, The Chess Champion.” It was published in 1859 and written by Frederick Milnes Edge, who was Morphy’s secretary. To unlock full episodes, ad-free listening, and more, please go to snoozecast.com/plus.

Paul Morphy, born in New Orleans in 1837, was considered the greatest chess player of his era. He was a child prodigy who learned playing chess simply by watching family members play. When he was only 9 years old, he was hailed as the best chess player in his city.

This book describes Morphy's trip to Europe in 1858. After his triumphs in Europe, he was considered the unofficial World Chess Champion, as official championship tournaments were only held starting in 1886, almost thirty years later.

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We hope you enjoy this preview of an episode from our back catalog available to our premium subscribers. Tonight, we’ll read the opening to “Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803”, a travel memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth. Her six-week, 663-mile journey through the Scottish Highlands with her brother William Wordsworth and mutual friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge has been called a masterpiece and one of the best Scottish travel writings during a century which saw hundreds of such examples. To unlock full episodes, ad-free listening, and more, please go to snoozecast.com/plus.

Dorothy wrote "Recollections" for family and friends and never saw it published in her lifetime. The three travelers were important authors in the burgeoning Romanticism movement and thus the trip itinerary was in part a literary pilgrimage to the places associated with Scottish figures significant to Romanticists.

Dorothy's descriptions and judgments of the countryside and landscapes were a mixture of her own personal aesthetics and the in-fashion aesthetics of the sublime, beautiful and picturesque—in fact, Recollections is considered today a classic of picturesque travel writing. Venturing to Scotland in 1803 was not an easy trip and the thirty-year-old Dorothy would experience much of the rougher nature of Scottish life: a depopulated rural land due to industrialization and emigration, along with rough roads, coarse lodgings and sometimes meager food.

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We hope you enjoy this preview of an episode from our back catalog available to our premium subscribers. Tonight, we’ll read the next part to “The Princess and the Goblin”, a children’s fantasy novel, published in 1872. To unlock full episodes of this series, ad-free listening, and more, please go to snoozecast.com/plus.

If you’d like to start from the beginning, the first episode aired on April 15th, 2019. If you’d like to listen to the previous episode, part four aired November 6th, 2020.

One of the most successful and beloved of Victorian fairy tales, George Macdonald’s “The Princess and the Goblin” tells the story of young Princess Irene and her friend Curdie, who must outwit the threatening goblins who live in caves beneath her mountain home. 

When we left off, Princess Irene found her way back to her mysterious great-great-great-great-grandmother, after she couldn’t sleep due to an injury from pricking her finger earlier in the day.

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We hope you enjoy this preview of an episode from our back catalog available to our premium subscribers. Tonight, we’ll read a short story by Charles Dickens called “A Christmas Tree”, from 1850. To unlock full episodes, ad-free listening, and more, please go to snoozecast.com/plus.

It was only ten years earlier, in 1840, that Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert, introduced the German concept of a Christmas tree to England. Before then, nobody in England had placed a Christmas tree in their home.

Just as Dicken’s “A Christmas Carol” isn’t actually a song, “A Christmas Tree” is barely a story and the tree is merely a launching off point for a series of dreamy impressions from the author’s mind.

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We hope you enjoy this preview of an episode from our back catalog available to our premium subscribers. Tonight, we’ll read the next part to "The Secret Garden", a novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett first published in 1911. Set in England, it is now one of Burnett's most popular novels and seen as a classic of English children's literature. To unlock full episodes and ad-free listening of this series and more, please go to snoozecast.com/plus.

In the last episode, Mary spends a lot of time outdoors wandering around the gardens and moor. It begins to help her grow healthier and heartier. The maid Martha tells Mary the forbidden story of how Master Craven’s garden became “secret.” Mary also insists to Martha that she hears a child crying somewhere in the manor. Martha insists it’s just the roar of the wind playing tricks on her ears.

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We hope you enjoy this preview of an episode from our back catalog available to our premium subscribers. Tonight, we’ll read from "The Journals of Lewis and Clark". The Lewis and Clark Expedition, from 1803 to 1806, was the United States expedition to cross the newly acquired western portion of the country. The Corps of Discovery was a select group of Army and civilian volunteers under the command of Captain Meriwether Lewis and his close friend Lieutenant William Clark. To unlock full episodes and ad-free listening of this series and more, please go to snoozecast.com/plus.

President Thomas Jefferson commissioned the expedition shortly after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 to explore and to map the newly acquired territory, to find a practical route across the western half of the continent, and to establish an American presence in this territory before other powers tried to claim it. The campaign's secondary objectives were scientific and economic: to study the area's plants, animal life, geography and to establish trading. The expedition returned to Jefferson, with maps, sketches, and journals in hand.

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We hope you enjoy this preview of an episode from our back catalog available to our premium subscribers. Tonight, we’ll read “The Opal”, a fairy tale about how the gemstone was formed. To unlock full episodes and ad-free listening of this series and more, please go to snoozecast.com/plus.

Depending on the conditions in which it formed, precious opal may be iridescent with white, black, or nearly any color of the visual spectrum as a background color. Black opal is considered to be the rarest, whereas white, gray, and green are the most common. 

Opal was rare and very valuable in antiquity. In Europe, it was a gem prized by royalty. Until the opening of vast deposits in Australia in the 19th century the only known source was beyond the Roman frontier in Slovakia.

Following the publication of Sir Walter Scott's Anne of Geierstein in 1829, opal acquired a less auspicious reputation. Due to the popularity of Scott's novel, people began to associate opals with bad luck. 

Opal was also said to grant invisibility- if wrapped in a fresh bay leaf and held in the hand- and thus it was considered the gemstone of thieves.

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Tonight, for the 300th episode of Snoozecast, we’ll read a story about Princess Guinevere from our King Arthur’s series.

If you’d like to listen to the first stories in this series, you can find our episode titled “The Sword Excalibur” that aired on April 10, 2020. If you’d like to listen to the previous episode, it aired on September 14, 2020.

King Arthur was a legendary British leader who, according to medieval histories and romances, led the defense of Britain against Saxon invaders in the late 5th and early 6th centuries.

Guinevere is the wife and queen of King Arthur in the Arthurian legend. Early versions of these stories starting in the twelfth century had only a brief mention of her. As time went on, her character has been fleshed out depending on the author’s desires. Guinevere has been portrayed as everything from a villainous and opportunistic traitor to a fatally flawed but noble and virtuous lady.

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