The other day I saw this image on one of the blogs I look at, and my initial impression was that it was a current live person and someone had made the pic look old. Usually people who live in the 19th Century, because of diet, or other factors, look different than people do today, but it's a legitimately old photo. His name is Louis Lingg and he died in 1887 at the age of twenty-three. He died of a self-inflected wound to avoid being hung, as he was found guilty of taking part in the Haymarket Affair in Chicago. An interesting item I found out was that while anarchy and terrorism are never tolerated, the reaction by the police was not so different than what would happen now, but it was only for a limited time. Of all the guys that were convicted in the Haymarket Affair, he would have stood out as the hot young one.
I do have to wonder if being twenty three, idealistic, and single was any sort of reflection on his sexual orientation. We all know that before Stonewall in 1969 gay people didn't exist, guys were just confirmed bachelors. There is really no way to know anything personal about this guy, him being dead for more than a hundred years, but if I came across a guy online looking like him, I'd chat with him.
I think he is a of a upper middle class family, he would have had a good childhood, including plenty of food, schooling and not having to work at a young age to support himself or the family.
ReplyDeleteso many in 1800's were old men at 23 to 25.
The wikipedia entry doesn't sound like he had a particularly hard life, but certainly not a well off life. He became an apprentice carpenter at age 5, his father apparently died in a lumber mill when he was young, and it was his mother's new husband that sent him off to America.
ReplyDeleteMaybe he got by with his looks, any rate he was still a nice looking man in his early twenties, when most men in his day looked older than their age.
The bad ones always look cute, he took a terrible way to kill himself suffering for 6 hours after the deed it must have been painful.
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