About Speedysnail

It’s a website. Named after rapid gastropods. Made by this bloke. Not much else to it, really.

The Backgrounds

Unless otherwise noted, the images listed are in the public domain.

Religious engravings: illustrations by George Scharf Junior, engraved by Dalziel, from Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy; or, The Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise, translated by Frederick Pollock (London: Chapman and Hall, 1854).

Eighteenth century scenes: plates from Captain Topham, Edinburgh Life in the Eighteenth Century, With an Account of the Fashions and Amusements of Society, new edition (Edinburgh: William Brown, circa 1898).

Sleeping girl: “In the last ray of Sunset, and the last day of the Year, 1872,” plate from (and by) Francesca Alexander, The Story of Ida: Epitaph on an Etrurian Tomb, edited by John Ruskin (Orpington, Kent: George Allen, 1883).

Man and pony: “Donald McAdie, who looked after the Londonderry ponies, with a sick foal—1898,” reproduced in Maurice Cox, The Shetland Pony, second edition (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1976), p. 17.

Avalanche, the Nile, and Madras: engravings from Marvels of Creation: Earth and Sea (London: T. Nelson and Sons, 1867).

Limericks: illustration from (and by) William Makepeace Thackeray, The Rose and the Ring (London: Smith, 1855).

In Theory: frontispiece from Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme, & Power of a Common-Wealth, Ecclesiasticall and Civill (London: Andrew Crooke, 1651).

Rory Central: R.E. in the Cowgate, August 2003. Copyright 2004 Jane Ewins.

Cartoon Lounge: Self portrait, 1999. Copyright 1999 Rory Ewins.