Episode Details

Last week we shared a strange little Victorian love poem about a cannibal bride.

This week… things escalate.

In this Five Minute Friday episode, Shea reads another cannibal-themed poem from the archives: “How Three Were Made One,” published in The White Pine News in 1891.

The poem features a love triangle, a violent rivalry, and a punchline that only Victorian newspaper readers could find amusing.

But it also reveals something interesting about the cultural moment that produced it. Nineteenth-century Americans and Europeans were fascinated with stories of “savages” and cannibals, and those ideas showed up everywhere—from adventure novels to newspaper jokes.

This episode explores how those stereotypes appeared in everyday entertainment and why historians sometimes pay attention to odd little artifacts like this one.

Because sometimes the strangest things in the archive tell us the most about the world people thought they lived in.