About the Old World News blog

The Old World News blog features old, interesting and bizarre news from around the world. It includes newspaper articles about World War 1, links to photo albums including a World War 1 photos. of death photo. album or photo gallery, and links to other photo. albums or photo galleries.

Old World News is written and published by writer and photojournalist Paul Gooch.

Writing style and English grammar

All of the newspaper articles are genuine; this may be obvious by the comparatively old-fashioned grammar and style of English used.
By modern standards the style of English isn’t perhaps very fluid. The journalist that wrote the articles or the editor that edited them has sometimes broken up sentences with commas, this may be because it wasn’t considered important to create sentences which were fluid.
It could be that this relatively leisurely, slow-moving writing style is a reflection of the Victorian age. Perhaps the  `pacy’ or fast-moving writing style that is usual in modern journalism is a reflection of our pacy, fast-moving age.

Story treatment

Inevitably, the stories are treated ie. they are written from a Victorian perspective, they reflect Victorian attitudes. It would be unreasonable to condemn these attitudes, to judge them by modern standards; they were the attitudes that prevailed during this period and nothing can change that. This is why I haven’t edited the stories - this is why I haven’t re-written them to make them more acceptable.
Journalists – in fact no-one - should attempt to re-write history.