Selling Sentiment 1: Comfort and Joy

Take a twinkling trip back to Christmas Past with the first podcast in a new series from our 2024 Bedford Fellow Dr Ruby Rutter. Ruby leaves the festive bustle of Leeds’ arcades behind to discover how a Victorian candlemaker harnessed the ancient association of light and magic to invent fairy lights. Looking closely at a 19th-century advert in The John Evan Bedford Library of Furniture History, Ruby and fellow historian Joanna Beaufoy trace the hidden heritage of hygge, and the darkness and danger that it guards us from. Each instalment of Selling Sentiment explores what a trade card or advert in the Bedford Collection can tell us about the time and place it came from.