The Victorian Peeper

Dishing the Victorian Dirt

2011-04-25T13:12:00.014-04:00

Imagine living anywhere near this gray mountain of trash in the first year of Queen Victoria's reign. It's the "Great Dust-Heap at Kings Cross" as seen from Maiden Lane (now York Road), painted in 1837 by the watercolorist E. H. Dixon, surrounded by slum housing and adjacent to the Smallpox Hospital.

The crud all around us is the focus of a fascinating new exhibition at the Wellcome Collection, London. "Dirt: The Filthy Reality of Everyday Life," brings together a variety of art, documents, cultural ephemera, photos, videos, and art installations to -- as curator Kate Forde puts it -- "uncover a rich history of disgust and delight in the grimy truths and dirty secrets of our past."

The exhibition uses six different historical times and places as starting points for exploring attitudes towards dirt and cleanliness: a home in seventeenth-century Delft, a street in Victorian London in the 1850s, a hospital in Glasgow in the 1860s, a museum in interwar Dresden, a community in present-day New Delhi, and the Fresh Kills landfill site in New York City.

Highlights include paintings by Pieter de Hooch, Joseph Lister's medical instruments, and a wide range of contemporary art on related themes. You can peer through one of the first primitive microscopes used to discover bacteria (which had been collected from the mouth of a Dutch scientist), learn about the cesspools that turned the Thames into a "monster soup" in the early nineteenth century, and gaze on "Laid to Rest," a sculpture by Serena Korda featuring bricks that incorporate dust sent to her by modern Londoners.

The exhibition's display on Broad Street (now Broadwick Street) in London's Soho district, ground zero of a cholera epidemic in 1854 that killed more than 600 people, is particularly interesting. At the time, an infecting "miasma" was thought to cause the disease. It took the brilliant detective work of the physician (and royal anaesthetist) John Snow (DNB bio here; Wiki bio here) and the Rev. Henry Whitehead (Wiki bio here) to find the true culprit: fetid water that was being distributed through a public water pump. Snow's famous "ghost map," which traced the progress of the terrifying disease through the city, is included in the exhibition.

As for Kings Cross ... similar dustheaps featured in Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend (the "Golden Dustman" Noddy Bofﬁn is one of the writer's most indelible creations) and were the subject of "Dust, or Ugliness Redeemed," an essay by the poet R. H. Horne that appeared in Household Words, the weekly journal Dickens edited from 1850 to 1859. Horne vividly describes the underclass of "Searchers and Sorters" who scaled the debris and painstakingly raked through the refuse, separating animal and vegetable matter from broken pottery, bones, rags, metal, glass, and other detritus. Everything was sold off and recycled: coarse cinders were sold to brickmakers, bones to soapmakers, threadbare linen rags to papermakers. [Shown here: The sifting process at a dust-yard in nineteenth-century London; Mayhew, 1862.]

The Kings Cross dustheap pictured at the top of this post was packed up and shipped to Russia in 1848 when city developers decided to convert the site into what is now the Kings Cross railway terminus. The Russians mixed ash from the pile with local clay to make bricks that were used to rebuild their war-ravaged country.

This exhibition is part of the Wellcome's "Dirt Season" that involves a collaboration with the BBC (a series called "Filthy Cities" with accompanying scratch-and-sniff cards), an environmental theatre piece at this summer's Glastonbury Festval, related events for children at the Eden Project in Cornwall, a "Dirt Banquet" held earlier this month at Joseph Bazalgette's Crossness Pumping Station, and a free iPhone/iPad word-puzzle app called "Filth Fair."

"Dirt" runs through 31 August at the Wellcome Collection, 215 Euston Road, London.

Read more...

"Wellcome Collection Takes a Filthy Look at an Age-Old Obsession," The Guardian, 23 March 2011.

Henry Mayhew, "Of the Dustmen of London." London Labour and the London Poor, 1851.

Brian Maidment, Dusty Bob: A Cultural History of Dustmen, 1780–1870. Manchester University Press, 2007.

H. P. Sucksmith, "The dust-heaps in Our Mutual Friend," Essays in Criticism 23.2 (1973), pp. 206–212.

Costas A. Velis, David C. Wilson, and Christopher R. Cheeseman, "19th century London dust-yards: A case study in closed-loop resource efficiency." Waste Management 29.4 (April 2009), pp. 1282-1290.

Steven Johnson, The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic -- and How it Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World. Riverhead Press, 2006. There's a wonderful website for this book here.

"From Mama V.R. to Helena"

2011-04-11T13:32:00.002-04:00

A gold, enamel, and garnet bodice brooch from 1830 that belonged to Queen Victoria made fourteen times its pre-sale estimate at auction last week, selling for £11,400.

The intricately worked brooch features two large cabochon garnets in a setting of green and red enamel.

The brooch (shown at left) originally belonged to Victoria, Duchess of Kent (DNB bio here, Wiki bio here), who on her death in 1861 left her jewelry to her daughter, Queen Victoria.

Queen Victoria subsequently gave the brooch to her fifth child and third daughter, Helena, Princess Christian of Schleswig-Holstein (DNB bio here, Wiki bio here), as a present on her 24th birthday in 1870. The reverse of the brooch has a simple yet very personal engraving: “Belonged to dear Grandmamma V. From Mama V.R. to Helena 25th May 1870."

Although Princess Helena married the German prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein in 1866, the couple remained in Britain close to the Queen, who liked to have her daughters nearby.

Helena was an extremely active member of the royal family, carrying out an extensive program of royal engagements. She was also a committed patron of charities, and was one of the founding members of the Red Cross. She was also the first president of the Royal School of Needlework and the first president of the Royal British Nurses' Association.

She is, perhaps, my favorite of Queen Victoria's children...the Jan Brady of the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha clan. She fell in love with her father's German librarian, who was promptly sent back to the continent when "Mama V.R." discovered the liaison. There is an excellent biography of her by Seweryn Chomet, Helena, A Princess Reclaimed: The Life and Times of Queen Victoria's Third Daughter (New York: Begell House, 1999).

Restored: Ellen Terry's Beetle-Wing Dress

2011-04-06T07:24:00.027-04:00

"Look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under't." This briefest of lines from Act I, scene 5, of Shakespeare's Macbeth inspired one of the most famous stage costumes ever constructed.

When the Victorian actor-manager Henry Irving [DNB bio here; Wiki bio here] decided to produce "the Scottish play" in 1888, with he playing the title role and Ellen Terry, his acting partner, playing his wife, Terry [DNB bio here; Wiki bio here] called on her close friend Alice Comyns Carr to design her dresses. Carr wanted one of them to "look as much like soft chain armour" as possible and "yet have something that would give the appearance of the scales of a serpent." Working with Lyceum dressmaker Mrs. Nettleship, Carr devised a garment "sewn all over with real green beetle wings, and a narrow border in Celtic designs, worked out in rubies and diamonds, hemmed all the edges. To this was added a cloak of shot velvet in heather tones, upon which great griffins were embroidered in flame-coloured tinsel. The wimple, or veil, was held in place by a circlet of rubines, and two long plaits [of hair] twisted with gold hung to her knees."

The result was magnificent, and John Singer Sargent painted Terry as Lady Macbeth in 1889 (shown at left, on display at Tate Britain).

Now this costume, an irreplaceable link to the Victorian theatre and one of its most famous and fascinating stars, has been restored and put back on view at Smallhythe Place, Ellen Terry's former home in Kent.

[Read the National Trust's press release here,]

Via Kent News: 'One of the most iconic dresses of the Victorian era – shimmering with 1,000 real beetle wings – is returning home to Kent. The emerald and sea-green gown, which is covered in iridescent wings of the jewel beetle, was made famous by the celebrated actress Ellen Terry in her portrayal of Lady Macbeth in 1888.

'The 120-year-old dress was one of the most iconic costumes of the time, immortalised by the John Singer Sargent portrait at the Tate Gallery. Now, after 1,300 hours of painstaking conservation work costing £50,000, the gown is on display at Smallhythe Place, near Tenterden, where Ellen Terry lived between 1899 and 1928. House manager Paul Meredith said the beetle wings that had dropped off were collected and reattached along with others that had been donated by an antiques dealer.

'"The 100 or so wings that were broken were each carefully repaired by supporting them on small pieces of Japanese tissues adhered with a mixture of wheat starch paste," he said. "But the majority of the work has involved strengthening the fabric, understanding the many alterations that were made to the dress and ultimately returning it to something that is much closer to the costume worn by Ellen on stage in 1888."

[Read a description of the restoration and see additional photos here.]

'The actress, known as the Queen of the Theatre, was famed for her portrayal of Shakespearean heroines and played opposite Sir Henry Irving at the Lyceum Theatre in London for more than 20 years.

'Her beetle dress stage costume was one of the most important items in the National Trust’s collection and was on the priority list to be conserved. Brighton-based conservator Zenzie Tinker and her team carried out the work.

'"We have restored the original shape of the elaborate sleeves and the long, trailing hemline that Ellen so admired," Tucker said. "If she were alive today, I’m sure she’d be delighted. She really valued her costumes because she kept and reused them time and again. I’d like to think she’d see our contribution as part of the ongoing history of the dress."

'The gown is now in a new display space at Smallhythe Place alongside other features from Ellen Terry’s dressing room which have never been viewed by the public before. The half-timbered house, built in the early sixteenth century when Smallhythe was a thriving shipbuilding yard, was Terry's home from 1899 to 1928 and contains her fascinating theatre collection. The cottage grounds include her rose garden, orchard, nuttery, and the working Barn Theatre.

'Mr Meredith said the setting was an intimate area, bursting with theatre history and stage costumes. "Now the beetle wing dress is back and we finally have a really good contemporary display space, we hope to show many more people just how special the house and collections are."'

Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth, Tate Collection

"Ellen Terry's Beetlewing Gown Back in Limelight," The Guardian, 11 March 2011

Alicia Finkel, Romantic Stages: Set and Costume Design in Victorian England (McFarland, 1996)

Representing the Unrepresentable: Portraying Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam, on the Victorian Stage

2011-03-04T11:12:00.034-05:00

As many of you know, I'm writing a PhD thesis at the University of Leicester on (broadly speaking) representations of Islam in Victorian drama. I'm focusing on one play in particular, Hall Caine's Mahomet, which was written for Henry Irving's Lyceum Theatre but never produced. (You'll see why if you continue reading.) That's Caine at left, c. 1898, in a portrait by R. E. Morrison.

Because several Peeper readers have expressed an interest in my scholarly work, I thought I would share with you an essay on the play that was first published by Ashgate Publishing in Henry Irving: A Re-Evaluation of the Pre-Eminent Victorian Actor-Manager (2005), a collection edited by Richard Foulkes, my supervisor at Leicester. The essay is based on my discovery of the play in the archives of Manx National Heritage in Douglas and a revised and expanded version of it will form the basis of one chapter of my thesis. Please note that the essay reprinted below is copyrighted material. I have left out the extensive footnotes that accompany the printed essay for ease of reading in this blog format; if you're interested, you can consult them in Professor Foulkes's book or contact me by email (tetenskr@msu.edu) and I'd be happy to send them to you.

In addition to being an important and interesting dramatic work in its own right and a touchstone to the literary and theatrical tastes of its day, Mahomet illustrates a shift that was taking place during the late-Victorian period in the Western perception of Islam. The play rejected the common view of Islam as a heresy and Muhammad as an impostor and charlatan in favour of an understanding of Islam as an authentic, divinely inspired religion and its leader as a man of sincerity and piety. It is the only nineteenth-century play—and one of only a few creative works in any medium of the period—that attempted to show a fully rounded and largely sympathetic portrait of Muhammad to non-Muslim audiences. It is an important example of what the historian John M. MacKenzie, taking issue with arguments made by Edward Said, has called the “endlessly protean” Orientalism of the late nineteenth century: written by one who repeatedly sought inspiration and rejuvenation through travel and contact with Arab cultural traditions, Mahomet is a work of admiration, not vilification.

Yet for reasons that will be familiar to those aware of recent examples of Islamic iconoclasm (for example, the controversy over cartoons printed in a Danish newspaper in 2005, the furore created by a production of Mozart's opera Idomeneo in Berlin in 2006), Mahomet was never produced. A few months after Caine began work on the play, rumours of the impending production appeared in English and Indian newspapers, leading to a firestorm of protest by Muslims in Britain and British India. Like their contemporary co-religionists, certain sections of the Empire’s 80 million Muslims objected strenuously to the physical impersonation of their prophet. The Lord Chamberlain, as licenser of plays, recognized the political exigencies involved, and out of a desire not to arouse Muslim animosity toward the Queen and her government in India, as well as a desire not to upset the precarious geopolitical alliances that Britain had crafted with other Muslim powers, he ordered Irving to drop his plans to produce Mahomet, to its author’s deep and lasting disappointment.

Hall Caine's Mahomet could not be produced today for much the same reason it could not be produced in 1890. It is, rather, a unique document of nineteenth-century theatrical history that deserves scholarly attention precisely because it is unlikely ever to be seen on stage. One of my goals is to recover the play for future considerations of late-Victorian representations of Islam.

I invite Peeper readers with a special interest or expertise in nineteenth-century British Islam to get in touch with me.

The Lyceum and the Lord Chamberlain: The Case of Hall Caine's "Mahomet" ~ By Kristan Tetens

Bram Stoker notes in his Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving that Irving had long wanted to produce a play based on the life of Muhammad, the prophet of Islam. The explorer Sir Richard Burton had been among the first to suggest an ‘Eastern’ topic to Irving; at a supper party in London in September 1886 he told his friend how much might be done with a play taken from some story, or group of stories, in the Arabian Nights, an unexpurgated translation of which Burton had published the year before. ‘Burton had a most vivid way of putting things—especially of the East,’ Stoker recalled. ‘Burton knew the East…its romances; its beauty; its horrors. Irving grew fired as the night wore on, and it became evident that he had it in his mind from that time to produce some such play as [Burton] suggested, should occasion serve.’

Irving had caught a glimpse of the East in 1879 during a cruise taken with his patroness, the Baroness Angela Burdett-Coutts, which included Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and the eastern Mediterranean from Turkey to Egypt. This voyage is often credited with providing Irving with his conception of Shylock, thought to be based on his observations of Levantine Jews, but it also provided him with first-hand knowledge of Islamic cultures. When a new play on the life of Muhammad was published in Paris by Henri de Bornier and accepted for production by the Comédie-Française in 1888, an English production on the topic seemed timely. Irving obtained a copy of de Bornier’s five-act verse drama, which was called Mahomet, had it translated into English, and asked the novelist and playwright Hall Caine to revise it for production at the Lyceum.

Irving first met Caine in Liverpool in the summer of 1874 while on tour under the management of Hezekiah Bateman and his wife, Sidney. The actor’s performances thrilled Caine, who was then just 21 years old and working as a draughtsman in a firm of Liverpool builders while he tried to launch a literary career. Later that year, when Caine was preparing the first issue of a new monthly magazine, he contacted Irving to request a photograph that could be used to illustrate an essay on the actor’s influence on the contemporary theatre. Irving, touched by the young man’s interest and well aware of the benefits of being on good terms with up-and-coming writers, complied and then invited him to the London premiere of Hamlet on 31 October, which Caine attended in his capacity as theatrical critic for the Liverpool Town Crier. His enthusiastic review of the production, with Irving as Hamlet and Isabel Bateman as Ophelia, was reprinted and distributed widely as a broadsheet pamphlet. Caine followed this with a number of lectures and essays on Irving’s art.

‘Caine seemed to intuitively understand not only Irving’s work but his aim and method,’ Stoker later wrote. ‘Irving felt this and had a high opinion of Caine’s powers. I do not know any one whose opinions interested him more.’ In 1876, when Edward Aveling claimed to be Irving’s brother, prompting Aveling’s Nonconformist minister father to rage against the theatre and all those associated with it, Caine wrote a rebuttal at Irving’s behest that was published in the Liverpool Argus, a service that earned him the actor’s lasting gratitude. In September 1878, at Caine’s invitation, Irving presided at a meeting of the Liverpool Notes and Queries Society. Three months later, on 30 December, Caine attended one of the most brilliant nights in British theatrical history: Irving’s first performance at the Lyceum under his own management, when he presented a new production of Hamlet with Ellen Terry as Ophelia. It was at this time that Caine met Stoker, Irving’s business manager, who was to become one of his closest friends. In 1881, Caine left Liverpool and moved to London to serve as amanuensis to the painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossett. After Rossetti’s death in 1882, Caine turned his attention to writing fiction. He was by this time on friendly terms with the leaders of London’s literary and artistic circles and a regular at Irving’s Beefsteak Room gatherings at the Lyceum.

The actor had hoped to produce a play based on Caine’s third book, The Deemster, a novel of Manx life published in 1887, but discovered when he returned in April 1888 from his third American tour that the stage rights had been bought by Wilson Barrett. From that time, according to Stoker, Irving ‘had a strong desire that Caine should write some play that he could act.’ The actor repeatedly suggested subjects, themes, and characters; Caine spent considerable time and energy ‘in an effort to fit Irving with a part, and the pigeon-holes of my study are still heavy with sketches and drafts and scenarios of dramas which either he or I or our constant friend and colleague Bram Stoker (to whose loyal comradeship we both owed so much), thought possible for the Lyceum Theatre.’ Many of the ideas discussed had weird or supernaturally tinged religious themes. Two of them, the Wandering Jew and the Flying Dutchman, featured a main character that is made to wander the face of the earth until Judgment Day, by land and sea, respectively, after spurning or challenging God. In another, the Demon Lover, based on an old Scottish ballad, the main character is the Devil disguised as a sailor who lures the wife of another man to her death. Yet ‘in spite of the utmost sincerity on both sides,’ according to Caine, these efforts came to nothing.

By 1889, when the idea of a Lyceum Mahomet arose, Caine was enjoying a growing reputation as a novelist and playwright. He had found popular success with the novel and stage versions of The Deemster. His fourth novel, The Bondman, appeared in serial form between June and November and would become an instant bestseller upon its publication as a book in January 1890. A new play, Good Old Times, had been produced by Barrett at the Princess’s Theatre in February. Thus, when Irving brought to his rooms one day a typewritten translation of De Bornier’s Mahomet, Caine was a rising man of letters with some experience in writing for the stage. Of De Bornier’s play Irving told him, ‘It’s not right, but it’s the right subject. See if you can do it over again.’ Perhaps to inspire Caine, the actor lent him several volumes of Burton’s Arabian Nights, which included copious annotations on Muslim manners and customs.

On 29 November 1889, Caine sent his initial thoughts on De Bornier’s play to Irving. ‘I have read Mahomet, and am profoundly impressed by the potentialities of the subject, but deeply disappointed with the play as a creation,’ he said. Caine found the first, second, and third acts ‘quite valueless.’ The fourth and fifth acts, however, he thought were (or could be) ‘as fine & stirring as anything in drama. The scene of Mahomet’s return after saving the life of the lover of his wife is really thrilling. But it could be enormously heightened … the catastrophe ought to be fine, & yet it is not. You want the thing worked up to from the opening lines.’ Despite the inadequacies of the French play, Caine urged Irving not to reject it until they had an opportunity to discuss it further. ‘The subject is too fine, the atmosphere too rich & new to be lightly set aside. But the changes (as you thought) would have to be very great. Indeed the whole fabric ought to be built up again.’ Caine was already thinking of ways in which that might be done: ‘I have one leading idea, which stirs my blood to think of,’ he wrote. ‘It centres in the Jewish mistress, who is completely thrown away in this play. I see a very stirring & picturesque first act, too.’  Caine asked Irving if he thought De Bornier would permit him to use the subject as well as all of the fourth act and half of the fifth act, but otherwise to rewrite the play.

The following month, Caine wrote to Irving again. ‘I have thought much on Mahomet, & the subject grows larger & yet more impressive. There is a great play in it.’ Caine regretted that De Bornier had been the first in the field with a new treatment of the subject. While he and Irving waited to hear whether the playwright would allow extensive changes to be made to the play, Caine told the actor he had developed an alternative plan in case such permission were denied. Muhammad would be dropped as the play’s central character. ‘I would call it The Prophet & the scene only would be similar. In all other particulars the play would be different.’ In a postscript, and perhaps in response to a request that he not discuss his work on the play with others, Caine assured Irving that he had not mentioned Mahomet to anyone except Stoker.

By the beginning of 1890, Caine had discarded De Bornier’s play as a starting point and instead was preparing an original scenario for Irving’s consideration. In the late afternoon of 26 January he presented his idea of the play to Stoker and his wife, Florence, at their Chelsea home, where Caine was staying. ‘His image rises now before me,’ Stoker recalled:

'He sits on a low chair in front of the fire; his face is pale something waxen-looking ... His red hair, fine and long, and pushed back from his high forehead, is so thin that through it as the flames leap we can see the white line of the head so like to Shakespeare’s. He is himself all aflame. His hands have a natural eloquence—something like Irving’s; they foretell and emphasise the coming thoughts. His large eyes shine like jewels as the firelight flashes … As he goes on he gets more and more afire till at last he is like a living flame. We sit quite still; we fear to interrupt him. The end of his story leaves us fired and exalted too.'

The next day the two men went to see Irving in his office at the Lyceum. Caine told him the story of the play, which Irving enthusiastically approved. Caine set to work. In March he spent three weeks in Morocco to gather details of Muslim life for the play and for a new novel. In April, a surprise: the French government announced that it was halting the Comédie-Française production of De Bornier’s play. The public was told that because the production of the play would create serious diplomatic difficulties, the Council of Ministers had decided that it could not be produced by a state-supported theatre like the Comédie-Française. This decision had been prompted in part by the intervention of Abdülhamid II, the Ottoman sultan, who perceived in the play an insult to Muslim traditions (particularly Sunni traditions) of aniconism, which hold that the representation or impersonation of the prophet is a form of idol worship prohibited by the Qur’an and several hadith.

To a modern reader, De Bornier’s play is breathtakingly arrogant in its treatment of Islam. It is, in part, a duel between Islam and Christianity, with Christianity triumphant at the end as the character of Muhammad, declaring that Jesus was the greater prophet, commits suicide by drinking poison so that his unfaithful wife can be reunited with her lover. Caine, who had been wise to drop the play as a model, called its plot ‘false to history, untrue to character, Western in thought, and Parisian in sentiment.’ The Spectator, however, one of several English journals that followed the affair, wondered what all the fuss was about. Noting that the play would be very effective on the stage, it attributed the play’s suppression to the French government’s dislike of nobility—De Bornier was a viscount—and its anti-Christian bias. Little did anyone know that the elements for a similar showdown between government authority and dramatic art were coming together at Irving’s theatre in Wellington Street.

With Paris in a frenzy over the banning of De Bornier’s play, Caine quietly continued work on his own version of the prophet’s story, which would centre on Muhammad’s flight from Mecca (the Hijra of 622 CE) and his triumphant return there from Medina some years later. On 17 May, Caine wrote to Irving to tell him that he had completed the first three acts of Mahomet. ‘They seem to me to justify our expectations of the subject. They possess me. I can scarcely put my hand to anything else.’ He worried that Ellen Terry would be unhappy with her part and asked Irving to reassure her that he would soften ‘the one act of great treachery which she would have to do’ with additional passages of pathos and also that the final two acts would show the noble and contrite aspect of her character: ‘You will see that acting on your hint I have given her one pretty, playful scene (with the boy) … if I could at some time have a chat with her I might much enhance the charm of it.’ Caine noted that he had added a situation for her at the end of the third act that seemed to him to ‘afford scope for acting such as hardly anything in modern drama … I must not weaken the effect of it by saying in advance what it is. What I’ve said already will sound vain enough, but the subject possesses me, & you will forgive the vanity.’ Caine seemed even more pleased with the character of Muhammad. ‘The prophet himself I must leave you to judge of. I love him.’ Caine cited the character’s nobility, simplicity, unselfishness, wisdom, humour, and passion. ‘Naturally he is least operative in the 3rd Act, where he is the victim of a base plot, & only when in the 4th & 5th Acts the evil is laid bare before him will all his greatness appear,’ Caine told Irving. ‘But I have no doubt of him even in the 3rd Act, & in the 1st & 2nd he is without equal.’ Caine sent his handwritten manuscript to Stoker for typing and asked for a meeting with Irving after he had had an opportunity to review the partially completed play.

The tenor of this exchange between author and actor was typical of their relationship. ‘There was to both men a natural expression of intellectual frankness, as if they held the purpose as well as the facts of ideas in common,’ Stoker recalled later. ‘The two men were very much alike in certain intellectual ways. To both was given an almost abnormal faculty of self-abstraction and of concentrating all their powers on a given subject for any length of time. To both was illimitable patience in the doing of their work.’ Stoker noted that the two men also shared ‘a faculty of getting up and ultimately applying to the work in hand an amazing amount of information.'

On 31 May Irving and Terry completed their twelfth Lyceum season, which had featured The Dead Heart, The Bells, Louis XI, and Olivia. Beginning on 3 June they toured the provinces for nearly a month, giving readings from Macbeth. Irving then played The Bells and Louis XI for two weeks at the Grand Theatre, Islington. After that Irving and Terry went their separate ways on vacation, reuniting in Winchelsea before returning to London to prepare for the new season, which would include Herman Merivale’s Ravenswood, an adaptation of Sir Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor.

While Irving was away from London, rumours that he intended to portray the prophet of Islam began to spread. 'The very fact of approaching De Bornier regarding his play had somehow leaked out,' Stoker recalled. On 20 June a brief item in the French Journal des débats asserted that De Bornier’s Mahomet had inspired the English production. Although this was true, a longer paragraph in the Pall Mall Gazette one week later went to great lengths to clarify the connection: ‘We are in a position to state that, though Mr. Irving had never the very slightest intention of producing M. Henri de Bornier’s play at the Lyceum, or any play founded upon it, he bought the English rights of it, partly as an act of courtesy, and partly to hold control of the subject.’ The paper noted that Irving had commissioned an Eastern play from a well-known English novelist and dramatist: ‘This play, which is not in any sense whatever an adaptation of M. de Bornier’s play, but an entirely original work, in all its essentials quite different, is now nearly written and ready, and report speaks of it in very warm terms."

Such highly detailed information could only have come from someone intimately involved with the planned production; almost certainly it was provided by Caine himself, who throughout his career was known for his brazen self-promotion, or by one of his literary friends on his behalf. It could also have come from Stoker. If the goal had been to distance the Lyceum production from the banned French play, it was an ill-conceived strategy that backfired terribly, serving only to bring Irving’s plans to the notice of Muslim communities at home and abroad.

The play -- in four acts, not five, as Caine had told Irving in May -- does in fact owe little to De Bornier. It begins in Mecca just before the return of Mahomet -- 'this son of the desert, this man of the book, this brand new Prophet’ -- from the Jabal al-Nour mountain. Among those waiting for him is Rachel, a Jewess, who has persuaded her lover, Omar, to kill Mahomet in revenge for the murder of her father. When Mahomet arrives in the city (he is described as ‘a man of forty years, bare-headed, his hood fallen back, dressed in the pilgrim’s garb of sheepskin, and walking with a staff’), he proclaims that his doctrine is ‘to worship one God and to serve no false gods.’ When the jeering crowd threatens him, Rachel takes him into her house and later lulls him to sleep with a song and a slow 'Egyptian' dance. Omar raises a knife to kill Mahomet, but his courage fails and instead he provides the prophet with a password that will allow him to escape enemies waiting outside.

As Act II begins, Mahomet and his followers, including Omar, approach Medina after several days on the open desert. ‘Twelve midnights past [Islam] was driven out of Mecca in disgrace, with derision, before the assassin’s knife,’ says Mahomet, ‘yet the day is coming when it will return in honour, with triumph and before bended knees.’ Rachel arrives and tells Mahomet that she wishes to join him. Privately Rachel tells Omar that her conversion was insincere and that she has come to be with him, not with Mahomet. Omar, dismayed at her duplicity, tells her to return to Mecca but she refuses. He begins to tell Mahomet of Rachel’s involvement in the plot to murder him in Mecca, but Mahomet refuses to listen.

Act III takes place in Medina two years later. Mahomet, now married to Rachel, has brought peace and order to the city. He sends a mission to the leaders of Mecca, demanding that they adopt Islam. When they refuse, Mahomet vows that Mecca will fall. Rachel learns of Mahomet's plans and plays at marching into Mecca with Mahomet's young grandson, using fans for swords (this is the ‘one pretty, playful scene [with the boy]’ that Caine added for Terry and described to Irving in May 1890.) Rachel sees her chance for revenge at last. She persuades Mahomet to lead the advance party into Mecca and then writes a letter to the city's leaders, warning them of the impending attack. As Mahomet addresses the people of Medina from the minbar of the mosque, he decides that Omar will lead the advance party instead. Rachel, still in love with Omar, falls to the ground with a scream.

The final act begins with Mahomet and his followers encamped at night on the plain outside Mecca. A messenger brings the news that the advance party has been captured. Rachel confesses her treachery to Mahomet, who now suspects she is having an adulterous relationship with Omar. Intending to kill Omar, Mahomet arranges to have him returned to the camp. Omar denies Mahomet's charges of adultery and tells him that he gladly led the advance party, knowing that it would save the prophet's life at the probable cost of his own. Mahomet begs Omar's forgiveness. In Mecca, the jailer in charge of Mahomet's imprisoned advance party is ordered to find 4,000 Bedouins to attack Mahomet's camp; instead, he arranges to open the city gates to Mahomet, who enters Mecca peacefully and forgives those who had prosecuted him. He announces that he will return to the desert to rest and pray: ‘The faith of Islam is founded, its empire begun … Mahomet’s task is finished, his life’s work is done.’ He then turns to the crowd: ‘Farewell, everyone who has followed me in hunger and thirst and the want of all things. I must leave you now. But God has been more merciful to me than to Moses, for he has suffered me to see the day of my people’s glory. The face of Allah shine on you forever! He rides upon the heavens; his excellence is in the sky. Truth has come and falsehood has fled before the sword. The night is gone, and look, the day has dawned! Farewell! Farewell!’ At the very moment the sun rises over the horizon, Mahomet climbs the hill outside the city and then descends behind it, going out at the place he was first seen.

One of Caine's friends, the novelist Robert Leighton, had read Mahomet in manuscript and noted that ‘without an inartistic adherence to the strict lines of history,’ the play follows ‘with reverent fidelity the great landmarks of the prophet’s life.’ Caine himself asserted that ‘the dramatic grit of Mahomet’s story lies … in his struggles with the Coreish [Quraysh].’ Onto this historical armature Caine layered the fictional intrigue of a love triangle, a highly sentimental plot device that figures prominently in his other works, and comic relief in the form of teasing scenes between a pair of young lovers and the antics of a jester.

It is not difficult to imagine the extravagant romantic realism with which Irving would have staged the play, which provides significant scope for exotic display: the swirling sights and sounds of the Meccan marketplace, with its shopkeepers beseeching passersby to buy their wares as men cross the stage with mules decorated with fringed harnesses; the approach of Mahomet from the rocky red hills surrounding the city, his figure outlined in gold as the fiery sun sets behind him; the entrapment of Mahomet by Rachel as she sings and performs a sensual harem dance as he falls asleep on the divan, a scene lit by spirit lamps; Omar poised above the sleeping Mahomet with knife in hand; the heat- and wind-blasted desert between Mecca and Medina, with its burning red sand and ridges of black volcanic rock; Mahomet’s weary caravan of followers, their meagre worldly possessions strapped to the backs of camels; the prosperous city of Medina, with its massive gate, high stone battlements, and graceful minarets; Mahomet’s address to the people of Medina in the spacious mosque, its enormous columns, intricately patterned walls, and high dome illuminated by flickering flambeaux as his followers make offerings of gold and silver; Rachel’s collapse in the mosque as she is forced to prepare her lover for a mission she knows he is unlikely to survive; Mahomet’s encampment on the plain outside Mecca, with tents extending to the horizon and the lights of the city glittering in the distance; and the prophet's exit in a blaze of rising sun, symbolic of the dawn of a new day for humanity. Much of the action of the play is accompanied by multiracial throngs of men, women, and children, including Arabs, Jews, Bedouins, and Egyptian slaves. Hundreds of supernumeraries and dozens of live animals would have been required. Without question the production would have been a thrilling theatrical realization of Richard Burton’s East, brought to vivid life by Irving and his designers.

Within weeks of the appearance of the paragraph in the Pall Mall Gazette, however, newspapers across India had published notices on the subject and Muslims both there and in England began to organise protests that took the form of public meetings, petitions, and letter writing campaigns. In Delhi, several Muslim leaders told Deputy Commissioner Robert Clarke that they were ‘unwilling to give unnecessary publicity’ to newspaper reports of the Lyceum production; Clarke thanked them for taking the ‘quieter and probably more effective course of representing their anxiety’ directly to him. In a letter to the Delhi superintendent, Clarke noted that ‘the mere fact of Muhammad being represented by an actor on the stage could not be other than painful to every believing Mahommedan.’

Among the prominent Indian Muslims who led protests was Abdul Luteef (or Latif), founder of the Mohammedan Literary Society in Calcutta and a leading advocate for the social, cultural, and intellectual progress of Muslims in Bengal. Luteef had taken an active role in protesting the proposed Comédie-Française production of de Bornier’s play; now he was incredulous that a similar sacrilege might happen in London. He wrote to Lord Lansdowne, the viceroy of India, and to several former viceroys, including Northbrook and Ripon, whom he urged to ‘exercise all legal powers as well as moral persuasion to prevent such an outrage to Mohammedan feeling.’ On 2 September, he sent an impassioned letter to several English-language newspapers in India. ‘Little did I think that the evil which we Mohammedans so much dreaded would raise its head in England itself,’ he wrote. ‘I can assure you that this news has been received by the Indian Musselmans with the greatest regret and surprise … Ordinarily, the matter might not have any importance attached to it in the eyes of the British public, but the French incident, the Turkish protest, and the agitation which even then spread up to India, should open the eyes of all thinking men to the inadvisability of allowing such representations to take place.’ Luteef was a trusted broker between the British administrators of India and the Muslim community there; in 1883 he had been made a Companion of The Most Eminent Order of the Indian Empire in recognition of his services. The high esteem in which he was held is reflected in the speed with which his concerns about the Lyceum production were addressed. One week after Luteef’s letter was published, Richard Assheton Cross, the Secretary of State for India, requested that the Lord Chamberlain’s Office and the Home Office investigate whether the production was rumour or fact.

On 26 September, a letter from the vice president of the Liverpool Moslem Association, Raffiüddin Ahmad, appeared in The Times. ‘The Indian Mussulmans are deeply irritated to learn of the proposed mockery of the prophet on the stage of a country which has pledged itself to respect their religious feelings, and the Queen of which has been destined by Providence to reign over a greater number of Moslems than any single ruler, Mahomedan or Christian, on the surface of the globe,’ he wrote, asking the newspaper’s readers: ‘Is it right and proper to hurt the religious feelings of so many of your fellow-subjects in the East, to satisfy the whims or fill the coffers of a theatrical company, however influential it may be?’ Ahmad’s letter prompted immediate action on the part of Edward Frederick Smyth Pigott, the Examiner of Plays, who sent a copy of it to Sir Spencer Ponsonby-Fane, comptroller of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office and Pigott’s immediate superior. ‘With respect to the enclosed,’ he wrote, ‘pray assure all whom it may concern, whether Mahomedans or Managers, that I shall never dream of submitting to you, for the LC’s licence, any piece calculated to offend the religious feelings of any portion of Her Majesty’s subjects of whatever creed.’ Muslims, he asserted, had ‘the same right to be respected as Christians, and we do not permit Jesus Christ to be represented on the stage.’ He observed that he had, however, ‘never heard a whisper of any such intention on the part of any manager … and I make it my business to know all that is going on in theatrical affairs.’ Clearly he had missed the announcement of Irving’s plans in the Pall Mall Gazette three months before.

Official communications warning of dire consequences should the Lyceum production go forward poured into Whitehall. Abdülhamid II, through Rustem Paşa, the Turkish ambassador to Britain, expressed his deep concern to Salisbury, the prime minister. The India Office received numerous letters from civil servants throughout India describing the probable effect of the production on the ability of Britain to maintain peace in key regions of the subcontinent. Lord Lathom, the Lord Chamberlain, recognizing the political exigencies involved, wrote privately to Irving, requesting that further work on Mahomet be halted and informing him that such a play would not be licensed. He told Irving that Britain was obliged to consider the religious sensibilities of India’s 50 million Muslims and the tens of millions located elsewhere in the Empire. Despite the example of what had happened to De Bornier’s play in France, which he must certainly have been aware of, Stoker called this a ‘bolt from the blue’ and seems to have been genuinely surprised that anyone could object to the Lyceum Mahomet. ‘None of us had the slightest idea,’ he wrote, ‘that there could be any objection in a professedly Christian nation to a play on the subject.’ He noted that ‘the Lord Chamberlain’s department does its spiriting very gently; all that those in contact with it are made aware of is the velvet glove. But the steel hand works all the same—perhaps better than if stark. It is an understood thing that the Lord Chamberlain’s request is a command in matters under his jurisdiction.’

Irving complied at once with the Lord Chamberlain’s wishes, then sent a telegraph to Caine apprising him of the situation. Caine recalled that it was ‘a deep disappointment to Irving himself, for the dusky son of the desert was a part that might have suited him to the ground, and to me it looked like an overwhelming disaster, slamming the door on the efforts of years.’ The Lyceum Mahomet was, he claimed, ‘by much the best of my dramatic efforts.’  Irving offered to compensate Caine for his labour, but Caine refused to accept any payment.

Although life at the Lyceum went on—Irving and Terry had opened their thirteenth Lyceum season on 20 September with Ravenswood—Caine found it difficult to get over the loss. In October he wrote an angry article for The Speaker that allowed him, he later said, to relieve his feelings ‘by spitting on my antagonists.’ What Caine most resented was the Lord Chamberlain’s interference with his prerogative as an artist to depict a subject of his own choosing. ‘I claim the right … to protest in the name of literary liberty against the blind bigotry and silly superstition that would cry “Hands off!” whenever a sacred subject comes within the province of imaginative art,’ he wrote. ‘I hold that the only right a man wants to touch any subject, however sacred, in any art, no matter what, is the right of an honest intention to do it well … To pay court to all religious feelings, as such, is either to narrow all art by the exclusion of the highest themes, or to reduce it to child’s play.’ Pointing out the thousands of Christians who had travelled that very year to see the passion play at Oberammergau, Caine asserted that ‘Christianity has recognised what Islam has never seen—that art may be a help towards spiritual life, and that the divinity of its Founder is not obscured, but vivified, by truthful representations of His humanity.’ He declared that if the Indian Muslims claimed for ‘the mere human incidents of the flight and return a sanctity that no dramatist may violate, they are not to be pampered in their religious sensibility, but to be reasoned out of it.’

Many agreed with Caine, including Leighton. ‘So far from doing any possible wrong to the faith of Mohammedans … the play is calculated to be of the greatest service,’ Leighton wrote in a letter to the editor of The Speaker, adding, ‘it appears to me a grievous thing that a dramatic censorship which allows the performance of farces such as The Pink Dominoes and burlesques such as Venus should set its face rigidly against a serious subject treated with the seriousness, the good taste, and the learning which Mr. Caine has devoted to the dramatic delineation of the grand figure of the prophet.’ Another person who claimed to have read the play told the Graphic that ‘in the opinion of competent judges, this play is in entire sympathy with Islam.’

Muslim leaders declared that such justifications were beside the point. Jahan Kader Mirza, a member of the royal family of the Indian princely state of Oudh and a vice-president of Luteef’s Mohammedan Literary Society, observed that ‘the real objection of my co-religionists was based not on the particular tone and language of the play, but upon the repugnance which they feel to any human beings personating the character of the Holy Prophet and revered members of his family, and their being dragged down into a spectacle for public amusement.’

It may be argued that Caine's failure to fully appreciate Muslim objections to the physical depiction of Muhammad means that his interest in the life of the prophet was largely mercenary. This would be incorrect. Over the course of his career, Caine wrote richly textured stories set in Africa and the Middle East that were based on his personal observation of Islamic cultures during extended visits to Morocco, Egypt, the Sudan, and Palestine. Displaying an obvious empathy for those fighting to preserve their political and cultural autonomy, he wrote with urgency about the forces reshaping traditional Arab ways of life and with unflinching directness about religious bigotry and racial tension. He supported the nationalist aspirations of Arabs in Egypt, outraging Britain's imperial administrators and earning the admiration of George Bernard Shaw. A committed Christian Socialist who had substantial contacts in the British Muslim and Jewish communities, he dared to imagine a reconciliation of the world's great religions. Although Irving's production of Mahomet would undoubtedly have shared certain tropes of orientalist discourse with other late-Victorian depictions of Eastern subjects, it would have been unique during this period in its attempt to show a fully rounded and sympathetic portrait of Muhammad to non-Muslim audiences.

By the time Caine’s article appeared in The Speaker, he had finished the play, changed its name to The Prophet, and sold it to the actor E. S. Willard for production in the United States, although there is no evidence that Willard or anyone else ever staged it. Caine’s efforts were not entirely wasted, however: Stoker notes that he ‘preserved his work by privately printing, three years later, the scenario of the story in dramatic form’ after altering some characters and changing its setting to modern Morocco.

In December 1890, just over a year after he began work on Mahomet, a dejected Caine wrote to Irving: ‘I return at last the 9 vols of Burton’s Arabian Nights which you were so good as to lend me when we were considering the Mahomet which began so hopefully & ended so disastrously,’ he said. ‘I am going to publish the thing, so many of my literary friends have urged me to do so after reading it, but there is no great public for printed plays.’ In this letter he mentions he is working on a new play that might appeal to Irving, one that seems to him to ‘possess very great possibilities indeed, & to present one character of great strength. It is called The Lord Chief Justice.’  Apparently hope sprang eternal. Like Caine’s other efforts to ‘fit Irving with a part,’ however, this one also was doomed to failure. Still, those who study Irving and his circle today owe much to Caine, who from his earliest acquaintance with the actor was one of his most perceptive observers. In describing the Mahomet episode in his autobiography, Caine provides a shrewd assessment of Irving’s temperament:

‘The truth is that, great actor as Irving was, the dominating element of his personality was for many years a hampering difficulty in the way of popular success. When in my boyhood I knew him first, he was a young fellow of thirty, very bright, very joyous, not very studious, not very intellectual, full of animal vigour, never resting, never pausing, always rushing about, and hardly ever seen to go upstairs at less than three steps at a time. At the end of his life he was a grave and rather sad old man, very solemn, distinctly intellectual, and with a never-failing sense of personal dignity. Between his earlier and his later days he had done something which I have never known to be done by anybody else—he had created a character and assumed it for himself … It was a character of singular nobility and distinction, but a difficult character, too, not easy to put on, and having little in common with the outstanding traits of his original self—a silent, reposeful, rather subtle, slightly humorous, detached, and almost isolated personality, with a sharp tongue but a sunny smile and certain gleams of the deepest tenderness … There was nothing artificial or theatrical in Irving’s assumption of this character, which grew on him and became his own and gave value to every act of his later life; but all the same it stood in the way of his success in a profession wherein the first necessity is that the actor should be able to sink his own individuality and get into the skin of somebody else …Toward the end of his life, with the ever-increasing domination of his own character and the limitation of choice which always come with advancing years, it was only possible for him to play parts that contained something of himself.’

Small wonder, then, that Irving had been intrigued by the opportunity to add another theatrical portrait of a grand charismatic figure to his gallery of characters.

Picture Show

2011-01-02T23:55:00.004-05:00

In addition to providing a useful list of nineteenth-century illustrated newspapers, this page from the 6 December 1890 issue of The Graphic is...well, just beautiful.

Papers in the UK, US, Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Argentina, Denmark, Holland, and Russia are represented.

Click the image and then the magnifying glass icon for a much larger (and readable) version.

Undershaw Under Threat

2010-12-31T16:37:00.006-05:00

I previously posted about the threat to Undershaw, the Surrey home of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, in 2007.

As I noted then, quoting The Guardian, it was at Undershaw that Doyle "wrote the 'Hound of the Baskervilles' and a patriot defence of Britain's Boer War; resurrected Sherlock Holmes, having previously thrown him off the Reichenbach Falls; campaigned for justice for the falsely accused solicitor George Edalji, and attempted to learn the banjo."

Anyone who has read Julian Barnes's magnificent novel Arthur & George will feel that they know every inch of this house (shown above in 1897). At the time, I expressed the hope that the worldwide network of societies devoted to Doyle and his immortal creation, Holmes, would be able to rally private support to rescue the house from developers.

The following update is cross-posted from The Folio Newsletter, December 2010.

"Undershaw, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's home in Hindhead, Surrey, is the subject of a legal bid by campaigners aiming to prevent it from being converted into flats. The house, which overlooks the South Downs, was built by Conan Doyle in 1897 for his wife Louisa, who suffered from ill health. After her death a decade later, he sold it. The house is virtually untouched from the period and retains such features as the family coat of arms, which appears on the impressive stained glass windows. Undershaw also remains significant to fans of Conan Doyle as the place where he wrote many of his most famous works. With continued uncertainty about its future, however, it is in a state of neglect and has been boarded up because of recent acts of vandalism.

"The Undershaw Preservation Trust claims to have identified a buyer for the property who wants to restore it to its former glory as a single family home, but has so far failed to convince the local council to stop developers from pushing forward with plans to convert the property despite its status as a listed building. Julian Barnes, Stephen Fry, and Mark Gatiss are among those supporting the Trust in its legal action.

"The Trust sees Undershaw as the last physical link to Conan Doyle. 'This house is part of Conan Doyle's history and it is important to remember that if these plans go ahead, there will be no going back,' say Trust representatives. 'The work will be irreversible.'"

You can read more about the Undershaw Preservation Trust and how you can help its efforts at http://www.saveundershaw.com and http://undershawhelp.blogspot.com.

Portraying Poverty

2010-09-12T10:41:00.007-04:00

More news from the art world...

Four paintings by Augustus Edwin Mulready (1844-1904) are to be sold at Bonhams' Nineteenth-Century Paintings sale on 29 September in London.

Mulready's works frequently highlighted the social issues of the Victorian era -- particularly the poverty experienced by homeless street children, whom he often depicted gazing despairingly out at the viewer. The artist returned again and again to this subject in an attempt to draw official and public attention to the condition of these children.

Mulready (Wiki bio here) was a member of the Cranbrook Colony, a small group of painters who lived and worked in the picturesque town of Cranbrook, Kent. They were influenced by Dutch and Flemish genre painting and shared a sustained interest in child subjects. (Other members of the group included Frederick Daniel Hardy, Thomas Webster, John Callcott Horsley, and George Bernard O’Neill.)

Although the quality of Mulready's works as paintings leaves much to be desired, they are important social documents. As art reviewer Keith Roberts has noted, "Children could be used to publicize the iniquities of the social justice system without seeming to attack the social structure; reform might well be achieved by appeals to the conscience through sentiment rather than by reasoned argument and criticism of an overtly political character." This was an approach that Charles Dickens knew well and deployed to devastating effect in his novels.

In Uncared For (1871, shown above), one of the works that will be sold by Bonhams (estimate: £10,000-15,000), a pale, barefooted waif stares miserably at the viewer and a young boy buries his head in his hands. Their desolation contrasts powerfully with the more privileged group in the background. Above their heads is a torn street poster ironically proclaiming "The Triumph of Christianity." The juxtaposition would have been considered more provoking and subversive by Victorian viewers had the subjects been adults.

In Fatigued Minstrels (1883), also to be sold by Bonhams (estimate: £4,000-6,000), a pair of exhaused young street musicians slump against a stone pillar as a well-dressed family and couple walk along the brightly lit street opposite.

"This is a fascinating group of pictures, and it is particularly poignant to be selling them at a time when the plight of the urban poor is so much in the public eye," says Charles O'Brien, head of Bonhams' Nineteenth-Century Paintings Department.

Such paintings were soon eclipsed by documentary photography, which could induce an even more profound shock in viewers through their harrowing realism.

Read more...

Poverty and Families in the Victorian Era (part of the superb "Hidden Lives Revealed" website)

Childhood -- Children -- Street Arabs (part of Lee Jackson's "Victorian London" website)

Pamela Horn, The Victorian Town Child (Sutton, 1997)

"Eadweard Muybridge" at Tate Britain

2010-09-10T21:33:00.005-04:00

The pioneering Anglo-American photographer Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) is the focus of a new exhibition that opened earlier this week at Tate Britain. Bringing together more than 150 works, the exhibition demonstrates how Muybridge broke new ground in the emerging art form of photography.

Born in Kingston-upon-Thames in 1830, Muybridge (DNB bio here, Wiki bio here) studied photography in England before starting his career in the United States. Perhaps best known for his studies of animal and human subjects in motion, he was also a highly successful landscape and survey photographer, documentary artist, war correspondent, and inventor. Muybridge’s revolutionary techniques produced timeless images that have profoundly influenced generations of photographers, filmmakers, and artists, including Francis Bacon, Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, and Douglas Gordon.

The exhibition, which was organized by the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., is presented chronologically, with an emphasis on the rapid technological and cultural change that occurred during the second half of the nineteenth century. It features Muybridge's celebrated experimental series of motion-capture photographs, including The Attitudes of Animals in Motion (1881) and Animal Locomotion, a series of 781 collotype prints in 11 volumes published by the University of Pennsylvania in 1887. The exhibition also considers how Muybridge constructed, manipulated, and presented these photographs. A special highlight is an original "zoopraxiscope," a device Muybridge invented that projected his images in a way that created the illusion of movement.

Muybridge’s motion studies and carefully managed studio photographs of celebrities contrast with his panoramic landscapes of America. He was fascinated by change and progress and his photographs recorded both the natural beauty of this vast continent and the rapid modernization of its towns and cities. The exhibition includes many of his images of the Yosemite Valley, along with views of Alaska and Guatemala, urban panoramas of San Francisco, and a photographic survey of the construction of the Central Pacific, Union Pacific, and Californian Pacific railroads.

In conjunction with the exhibition, the Tate is launching a new iPhone photo app called "The Muybridgizer," which will allow users to freeze-frame the moving world around them just as Muybridge did and to apply grids and sepia tones that will simulate his motion-capture photos. The app is expected to be available in iTunes by the end of September.

"Eadweard Muybridge" runs through 16 January.

Shown at top: Eadweard Muybridge, Dancing (fancy.) (Movements. Female). Plate 188, Animal Locomotion (1887). Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Museum Purchase, 87.7.188.

Shown above: Eadweard Muybridge, Athletes. Posturing. Plate 115, 1879, from The Attitudes of Animals in Motion (1881). Albumen silver print. Courtesy Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries.

Read more...

The Eadweard Muybridge Bequest (Muybridge returned to Kingston in the 1890s and when he died in 1904, he bequeathed his equipment and prints to Kingston Museum; this website provides an excellent overview of his life with extensive documentation and images)

"Muybridge: The Man Who Made Pictures Move," National Public Radio, 13 April 2010

"Iron Horses: Leland Stanford, Eadweard Muybridge, and the Industrialised Eye," Oxford Art Journal (October 2005) 28 (3): 407-428.

The Compleat Eadweard Muybridge: His Life, Work, and Legacy (a superb blog by Stephen Herbert with links to a wide range of resources)

“A New Land at Last to Be Seen”: William Morris and Iceland

2010-09-05T23:42:00.005-04:00

Lo from our loitering ship a new land at last to be seen;
Toothed rocks down the side of the firth on the east guard a weary wide lea,
And black slope the hillsides above, striped adown with their desolate green:
And a peak rises up on the west from the meeting of cloud and of sea,
Foursquare from base unto point like the building of Gods that have been,
The last of that waste of the mountains all cloud-wreathed and snow-flecked and grey,
And bright with the dawn that began just now at the ending of day.

Ah! What came we forth for to see that our hearts are so hot with desire?
Is it enough for our rest, the sight of this desolate strand,
And the mountain-waste voiceless as death but for winds that may sleep not nor tire?
Why do we long to wend forth through the length and breadth of a land,
Dreadful with grinding of ice, and record of scarce hidden fire,
But that there 'mid the grey grassy dales sore scarred by the ruining streams
Lives the tale of the Northland of old and the undying glory of dreams?

-- William Morris, “Iceland First Seen” (1891)

Tucked away in a small cabinet in a corner of William Morris’s Red House in Bexleyheath, Kent, are several small objects that tell an unlikely tale of adventure.

The 32 items, all on loan from the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter, were collected by Morris on two trips to Iceland. Among the eclectic group are a sixteenth-century Bible; carved horn containers, drinking vessels, and utensils; and various items of clothing, including woven belts, a bodice, a girdle, a cap, slippers, and a corded sash.

The container shown above, made from goat horn and adorned with an intricate floral design reminiscent of some of Morris’s own patterns, was carved in honor of Morris if not at his express direction. His initials are engraved in its brass cap.

Morris visited Iceland for six weeks in 1871 and for two weeks in 1873. The first trip was a watershed event in his life. Morris biographer J.W. Mackail called it a journey that “had to be taken in adventurous explorer's fashion, with guides and a string of pack horses ... it was a prolonged picnic spiced by hard living and rough riding.” It is described well in materials that accompany the display at Red House, which draw on Fiona McCarthy’s William Morris: A Life for Our Time (1994) and Jan Marsh’s Jane and May Morris: A Biographical Story, 1839-1938 (1986).

Morris’s Expedition to Iceland, 1871

“Morris went to Iceland as a place of pilgrimage. The importance that the journey had for him is suggested by the way in which Morris, the atheist, would refer to it afterwards as his ‘Holy Land.’ He went there to see for himself the landscape that had inspired the Sagas, the folktales of a race who had survived the barrenness and stark reality of Iceland by sitting out the winters conjuring tales of their steely tribal forebears.

“Morris had begun his literary journey in advance of his first expedition and had been devotedly translating the Sagas over the preceding two years, ensconced in his study at Queen Square with his Icelandic interpreter and collaborator, Eirikr Magnusson. Magnusson noticed early on how clearly Morris identified with the defiant spirit and unflinching sense of duty shown by the Sagas’ heroic warriors.

“Morris and Magnusson set off with the faithful Charley Faulkner, one of Morris’s inner circle, in July 1871. In many ways the expedition reprised those of his bachelor days; perhaps this was part of the motivation for the trip, as Morris particularly admired the Saga treatment of male friendship. The concept of returning albeit briefly to the carefree life he had enjoyed before Rossetti and pre-Raphaelite influence took hold must have been an attractive proposition. His new passion for the Sagas was itself in effect a discarding of those old allegiances: he regarded the bluntness of the Old Norse literature as ‘a good corrective to the maundering side of mediaevalism.’

“Morris’s pursuit of the Saga sites gave shape to the itinerary and slowly Iceland seemed to justify the writer’s calling: here were people saved by literature. At the same time, the artist in Morris was buoyed up by the Icelandic folk art he saw. The daughter of a doctor they lodged with briefly was introduced in full gala dress which included a spectacular silver belt, dated by Morris as not later than 1530. He observes that ‘the open-work of the belt was very beautiful, the traditional northern Byzantinesque work all mixed up with the crisp sixteenth century leafage.’

“Morris also came to greatly admire the traditional turf-walled Icelandic farmers’ houses. Indeed, he seized on them as a confirmation that beauty was a matter of the functional and decorous (‘Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful’). In these so-called bonders’ houses Morris took note of how the loom was never cast out into an outhouse but regarded as the family furniture, so essential was weaving to the economy of rural self-sufficiency.

"Iceland had an effect on Morris that was purgative and cathartic. He wrote that ‘the glorious simplicity of the terrible and tragic, but beautiful land with its well-remembered stories of brave men, killed all querulous feeling in me, and have made all the dear faces of wife and children, and love, and friends dearer than ever to me.’ Certainly he began to allow himself to long for the familiar sweetnesses of domesticity. He returned from Iceland at the end of the summer with a treasure trove of mementos. As they had travelled around Iceland, he and Faulkner had scoured the steads they stayed in and negotiated prices for desirable objects. Faulkner had acquired some Icelandic silver spoons. Morris’s hoard comprised some of the objects shown here.

"Morris related his traveller’s tales and demonstrated his success in cooking on an ‘outdoor kitchen’ built of bricks. Thirty years later his daughter May discovered the ‘rather melancholy remains’ of such a campfire in one of the garden fields. Morris’s trip to the land of glaciers and geysers meant that ever after Iceland was to her both a real and a legendary place, overpoweringly beautiful and sad. For the rest of her life, she dreamt of voyaging there herself.”

In fact, the items that Morris collected were donated to the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in 1939 by Mary Frances Lobb, May’s companion. Lobb had been a “land-girl” during World War I (a member of the Women’s Land Army), putting skills she had learned during her West Country upbringing to use as a farm laborer. She moved in with May at Kelmscott Manor following May’s divorce from her husband and failed affair with George Bernard Shaw.

The collection can be seen at Red House, a National Trust property, until at least March 2012. For visiting information, click here.

Read more…

William Morris, “Iceland First Seen,” 1891

John Purkis, The Icelandic Jaunt: A Study of the Expeditions Made by William Morris to Iceland in 1871 and 1873 (William Morris Society, 1962).

“William Morris Climbing a Mountain in Iceland,” caricature by Edward Burne-Jones, c. 1871

“William Morris and the Legendary,” BBC

Richard L. Harris, “William Morris, Eiríkur Magnusson, and Iceland: A Survey of Correspondence,” Victorian Poetry, vol. 13, no. 3/4, Fall-Winter 1975, pp. 119-130. Summary: The diversified interests of William Morris led him, in the late 1860s, into a serious study of Iceland and its literature. With his Icelandic friend, Eirikur Magnusson, who taught him the language and collaborated with him in translating a number of sagas, Morris visited Iceland in the summer of 1871. He returned there in 1873 and maintained an interest in, and contacts with, the country and its people until his death. Letters and documents found recently in Iceland suggest the extent, depth, and nature of the poet's relationships with Eirikur Magnusson, his fellow countrymen, and their culture. This material is helpful to a better understanding of Morris' desire to provide a true representation in English of the sagas as he saw them, his concern for Iceland during a period of famine in 1882, his views on the possibilities of economic reform there, and his lifelong friendship with Jón Jónsson, the saddlesmith from Hliðarendakot, who was his guide on the 1873 visit.

“William Morris in Iceland,” The Guardian, 27 March 2010 (describes how Morris’s travels inspired “Earthly Paradise,” a new work for chorus and opera by Ian McQueen named for an epic poem written by Morris).

Restoration of Tennyson's Farringford Continues

2010-08-17T12:16:00.028-04:00

I last wrote about Farringford, Tennyson’s Isle of Wight retreat, one year ago, when the poet laureate’s library there was the site of a small but exquisite exhibition of manuscripts, printed works, paintings, photographs, and furniture celebrating the bicentenary of his birth. Since then, there have been important developments in the building’s restoration.

Tennyson lived at Farringford, near Freshwater, with his wife, Emily, and their sons, Hallam and Lionel, from 1853 to his death in 1892. (Lionel died in 1886; Emily and Hallam outlived Alfred.) Shown at left: Alfred and Emily Tennyson with their sons Lionel, left, and Hallam, right, in the garden at Farringford, May 1863; photograph by Oscar Gustave Rejlander.

Among the writers, artists, politicians, and philosophers who visited Tennyson there were Prince Albert, Edward Lear, Charles Dodgson, Frederic Denison Maurice, William Allingham, Helen Allingham, Thoby Prinsep, Henry Irving, Ellen Terry, Bram Stoker, George Frederic Watts, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Julia Margaret Cameron (whose own home, Dimbola Lodge, was nearby) and many, many others.

Major restoration work on Farringford began last October and is expected to continue for the next year to 18 months, according to Rebecca FitzGerald, who with Martin Beisly, international director of Victorian & Impressionist Pictures at Christie's, bought the property four years ago.

“Our intention is to return the house as much as practically possible to how it was when Tennyson lived here. The library was the first room to be fully restored. Farringford has been a hotel since the mid 1940s and was in a state of considerable disrepair when we took it on in January 2006.

"However, to our delight we have uncovered original flagstones, working shutters, and plastered-over staircases and bookshelves fitted in the original study on the top floor. We are carefully stripping back layers of wallpaper and paint and discovering the original paint colour beneath, and we have a fair idea of how the house was furnished and the furniture arranged.” (Shown below: Tennyson's library at Farringford in 1892, with dog, writing desk, and other furniture; drawing by W. Binscombe Gardner.)

The house will be closed to all but a few private functions until completion, although 23 self-catering cottages on the property are available to rent with a minimum stay of two nights. Nine have full central heating. Five also have wood burning stoves and therefore can be rented throughout the year. The new Garden Restaurant serves both guests and visitors all year, using local and seasonal produce including vegetables from the kitchen garden. A wood-fired oven is a beautiful feature in the dining room.

"Guests staying in our self-catering accommodation have full use of the grounds within the estate and enjoy direct access to Tennyson Down, which Tennyson walked daily with his dogs, and which so inspired his best-loved poems,” says FitzGerald. To book a cottage, call 01983 752500 or 01983 752700 or e-mail contact@farringford.co.uk. More information is available online at www.farringford.co.uk.

Once opened the house will no longer be a hotel but an exclusive wedding venue that can also be reserved for private functions, conferences, and workshops, as well as weekend courses and retreats with an emphasis on the creative arts.

“The house will have four principal beautifully restored bedrooms where the bride, groom, and respective parents can stay, these being Alfred and Emily’s rooms and the two original guest rooms. We will take additional private bookings in the house for those looking for an exclusive, private country house experience, but principally for those with a keen interest in Tennyson. Our intention is to mount regular exhibitions, host concerts and poetry readings, and give regular tours.”

Tennyson at Farringford, a beautifully produced catalogue of the 2009 exhibition edited by the curator Veronica Franklin Gould with an introduction by Leonée Ormond, is also available. It can be ordered online here, by e-mail at contact@farringford.co.uk, or by calling 01983 752500 or 01983 752700.

The exterior of the house today:

And the library before restoration:

Read more...

Farringford: Home of Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Lewis Carroll and Xie

2010-08-15T17:56:00.000-04:00

This charming photograph is one of three albumen print portraits of Alexandra ("Xie") Rhoda Kitchin (Wiki bio here) by Lewis Carroll that were sold recently by Bonhams for £24,000.

Alexandra (1864-1925) was the daughter of Rev. George William Kitchin, who for 15 years held a theological position at the University of Oxford, where Carroll, a fellow of Christ Church, lectured on mathematics. Kitchin later became Dean of Winchester and Dean of Durham. Alexandra was named for her godmother Alexandra, Princess of Wales, wife of Prince Albert Edward (later King Edward VII).

The three photos show Alexandra in Danish and Oriental costumes. They were given to her by Carroll’s brother, William, on the occasion of her marriage to Arthur Cardew in 1890, along with a copy of The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll, in which two of the photographs are reproduced.

Read more...

Helmut Gernsheim, Lewis Carroll, Photographer (Dover Publications, 1969)

"Victorian London" on Facebook!

2010-08-08T13:10:00.002-04:00

Hello Peepers:

I hope you'll be as excited as I am about "Victorian London," the new Facebook counterpart to this blog. While "The Victorian Peeper" will continue to focus on a full range of topics in British cultural history during the reign of Queen Victoria, my Facebook page will narrow the focus to one city: the boisterous, tumultuous, industrious, maddening metropolis that was imperial London in the nineteenth century.

Do you see the "Find Me on Facebook" box in the right sidebar? Just click on "Victorian London" to check it out, or, better yet, click on "Like" to receive regular updates on your Facebook Wall.

Feel free to join in the first discussion topic, which is "Victorian Traces in Modern London." Where can you go in London to get a sense of what it might have been like to live there during the Victorian era? There are such places, and we'll explore some of them together in the coming weeks.

I'm also expanding my presence on Twitter. You can follow me there at http://twitter.com/Tetens.

As always, I welcome your feedback and suggestions. Please let me know how I can make both this blog and the new Facebook page more useful and enjoyable for you.

Shown above: Henry Dawson, St. Paul's from the River Thames, 1877.

Playing with Pictures

2010-07-23T16:42:00.009-04:00

Constance Sackville-West (English, 1846–1929) or Amy Augusta Frederica Annabella Cochrane Baillie (English, 1853–1913), untitled page from the Sackville-West Album, 1867/73; collage of watercolor and albumen silver prints; 9 5/8 x 11 13/16 in. (24.5 x 30 cm); courtesy of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film

This wonderful collage combining photography and watercolor, part of an album created by relatives of Vita Sackville-West, is featured in the fascinating exhibition "Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage," which originated at the Art Institute of Chicago last autumn, made a stop at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York earlier this year, and is now at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto through 5 September.

Anticipating the avant-garde collages of Braque and Picasso by about six decades and showing a sly, absurdist sense of humor, aristocratic women of the 1860s and 1870s cut figures from photographic cartes de visite and glued them onto watercolor backgrounds in ways that created new and surprising narratives, simultaneously validating and parodying the exclusive circles in which they moved. Photos of people known to the artists, and in many cases photos of the artists themselves, imbue several of the collages with personal meaning. Others seem to be constructed in the same way that a teenager today would assemble magazine clippings of her favorite celebrities.

"The compositions are whimsical and fantastical, combining human heads and animal bodies, placing people into imaginary landscapes, and morphing faces into common household objects," say the Art Institute of Chicago curators.

Is it possible that the creators of these collages anticipated literary modernism, as well? Their works remind me of many contemporary novels in which minutely observed characters are foregrounded against the barest suggestion of a physical setting, forcing the reader's attention onto the specific and idiosyncratic. Playthings of the artist, plucked from disparate sources, the characters in these collages find themselves arranged against one another in dramatic juxtaposition, prompting the viewer to imagine the story behind each one.

What story does the Sackville-West collage suggest to you?

Read more...

Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage (Art Institute of Chicago, 2009)

The Marvelous Album of Madame B: Being the Handiwork of a Victorian Lady of Considerable Talent (Scala Publishers, 2009)

New York Times, 4 February 2010, "The Pastime of Victorian Cutups" (exhibition review)

Toronto Star, 9 June 2010: "The Roots of Surrealism in Victorian Collage" (exhibition review)

How I Would Spend £18 Million

2010-06-23T10:30:00.008-04:00

J.M.W. Turner's Modern Rome: Campo Vaccino (1839), to be sold by Sotheby's in London on July 7.

Read more...

Overview of the sale at artdaily.com

Sotheby's exquisite sale catalogue [PDF]

Update via The New York Times...

LONDON, July 8 — A world record was set for Turner on Wednesday night when a landscape, "Modern Rome. Campo Vaccino," was sold for £29.72 million, or $45 million. The large canvas, 90.2 by 122 centimeters (35 by 48 inches), was acquired by the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles bidding through Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox, the London dealers specializing in Old Masters and 19th century painting.

The panoramic view was done by the English painter from memory, without paying much attention to the many precise sketches that he had done in the course of his various trips to Rome. It is an impressionistic evocation of the city bathed in a golden sunset haze touched with salmon pink, and some liberties are taken with topography.

Very few Turners of this size and caliber remain in private hands — five or six at the most, according to David Moore-Gwyn, Sotheby’s distinguished expert in British painting. This one was acquired directly from the artist when it was included in the Royal Academy show of 1839. The buyer, Hugh A.J. Munro of Novar, was a close friend of the artist and the executor of his estate who oversaw the vast bequests made by his late friend to the National Gallery, which together with the Tate Gallery holds the largest collection of Turners in the world. “Modern Rome. Campo Vaccino” remained in Munro’s family until April 6, 1878, when his collection was dispersed at Christie’s London. It was then bought by Archibald, the fifth earl of Rosebery, and his wife Hannah (née Rothschild), for 4,450 guineas, a huge price at the time. The landscape remained in the hands of their descendants until a family trust consigned it this year to Sotheby’s.

The historical background of the picture, preserved unlined in its plaster gilt and glazed frame, played its part in the enormous interest aroused.

The price is in line with the previous record set when another large painting, a Venetian view of "Giudecca, la Donna della Salute and San Giorgio" appeared at Christie’s New York on April 6, 2006, where it fetched $35.85 million.

The likelihood of another Turner of remotely comparable importance coming up at auction in the near future is slim. While Wednesday’s picture cannot really compare with the greatest Turners in which the visible world is reduced to luminous impressions, now in the two London museums, a few professionals seemed disappointed that it had not gone for even more.

Awareness of a unique opportunity regarding the work of the greatest British painter of all times and of the urgency of acting there and then was evidently a factor in the wise decision of the Los Angeles museum’s board of trustees to go all out, despite the current mood favoring austerity and financial restraint.

Notes on Faraday Lectures Come to Light

2010-06-20T12:11:00.019-04:00

Notes taken during Michael Faraday’s groundbreaking Royal Institution lectures on the nature of light and magnetism were sold last week by Bonhams for £5,400.

The notes, bound in one volume, were compiled by Maria Herries, daughter of the politician and financier John Charles Herries, and cover many of Faraday’s lectures from the mid 1830s to 1850. Also included are letters to Maria Herries from Faraday’s close friend, The Reverend John Barlow, who took over the running of the Royal Institution from Faraday in 1843 and who, with him, introduced reforms to admit women members and ensure them equal access to lectures.

Next to nothing is known about Maria Herries, although women such as the popular-science writer Jane Marcet, whom Faraday called his "first instructress" (DNB bio here, Wiki bio here) and the painter Harriet Moore (Wiki bio here) played important roles in the shaping of Faraday's thought and legacy.

In one letter included in the Herries material, Barlow writes of his excitement at Faraday’s announcement of his discovery that all substances are magnetic. “Wonderful as was his discovery about light,” he says, “this seems still more surprising and comprehensive in what it leads to.”

Faraday (1791-1867; DNB bio here, Wiki bio here) was one of the key figures of the Victorian era and, indeed, one of the most influential scientists in history. His discoveries laid the foundations of the field theory of electromagnetism and much of modern science. A modest man – he refused a knighthood and turned down the honor of burial in Westminster Abbey – Faraday was also a man of strong principle who declined to participate in the development of chemical weapons for use in the Crimean War. Passionate about education, he established the Royal Institution's Christmas Lectures for children and the Friday Evening Discourses for members – two series that continue to this day.

Shown above: Michael Faraday delivers a Christmas Lecture at the Royal Institution, c. 1855, with Prince Albert and his eldest son, Albert Edward (later King Edward VII), in attendance.

Further reading...

James Hamilton, A Life of Discovery: Michael Faraday, Giant of the Scientific Revolution (Random House, 2002)

Victorian Things: Galleon Tile Panel by William De Morgan

2010-06-19T04:28:00.001-04:00

Galleon Tile Panel

William De Morgan (1839 - 1917)

Medium: painted earthenware tiles in oak frame

Dimensions: 60.5 x 153 cm

Created: De Morgan's Sands End Pottery in Fulham, London

Consisting of 40 handpainted six-inch-square tiles backed by unglazed stoneware tiles, this gorgeous panel depicts a colorful and exotic scene of sailing ships, birds, and cavorting sea creatures in a tropical setting [click on it for a larger version]. It was one of twelve designs created by William De Morgan (DNB bio here; Wiki bio here) between 1882 and 1900 for the luxury liners of the Peninsular and Oriental (P&O) Steam Navigation Company. Although all of the installed panels have been lost, four duplicate sets are known to survive, including this one, which was acquired in 2006 by the De Morgan Foundation in London from a private American collection. (The others are held by the Southwark Art Collection.)

The galleon panel, comprising what De Morgan called "two flank panels [of 20 tiles each] -- crusaders in wessels [sic] on the sea," was most likely designed for the SS Malta. Look closely at the ships' pennants. De Morgan has slapped on some ersatz heraldry: in addition to symbols associated with the Christian crusaders, he also uses (on the ship at right) the star and crescent, that potent symbol of the Christians' enemy, the Ottomans.

The De Morgan Foundation's website, which is in the process of being updated, offers some additional information about the panel here.

From 2002 until last year the foundation's collection of more than 1,000 ceramic pieces and 500 paintings and drawings was exhibited at the De Morgan Centre in southwest London. The centre closed to the public when the foundation lost its lease in a library operated by the Wandsworth Borough Council. A new venue for the collection, which is truly one of the nation's cultural treasures, is being sought.

In the Footsteps of Leighton and Carlyle

2010-06-14T16:39:00.035-04:00

I admit it: I'm a house museum junkie. (I'm guessing you are, too.) Visiting the homes of the individuals I'm researching never fails to give me a frisson of pleasure at the thought that I'm walking where they walked (more or less) and seeing what they saw (more or less). They often provide intimate insights into past lives that are impossible to gain any other way. In the words of the biographer Richard Holmes, writing in Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (1985), such places provide an essential reversal of perspective: instead of looking in from the outside, you are quite literally looking outward from within a life...it allows the historian to recapture time by "turning the viewpoint inside out, if only for a moment." For more on the various delights of house museums, see this article by Tony Perrottet at Smithsonian.com.

The two house museums below -- the first an artist's spectacular palazzo in the middle of bustling London and the second a modest family home in a tiny Scottish village -- are not to be missed.

Even before its recent £1.6 million ($2.4 million) restoration was completed, Leighton House, the Holland Park home of the painter Frederic, Lord Leighton (1830-1896), was a magical place to visit.

Designed by George Aitchison and built in several stages between 1865 and 1895, the house included private living quarters, an expansive working studio, and glamorous reception rooms that became the hub of Victorian artistic life in the last three decades of the nineteenth century. Its centerpiece is the gorgeous Arab Hall, built to accommodate Leighton's priceless collection of Islamic tiles. The meticulous restoration, undertaken by the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, which owns the house, involved extensive repairs to the original fabric of the building as well as the redecoration of the main rooms. There's no substitute for visiting this stunning temple of art in person but you can enjoy several of its glories -- including the Arab Hall, Narcissus Hall, and Leighton's studio -- by way of a cleverly designed interactive online tour. Read more: The Guardian (26 May 2010); The Guardian (17 April 2010); The Telegraph (5 April 2010).

The Arched House in Ecclefechan, Scotland, in which the writer and historian Thomas Carlyle was born on 4 December 1795, reopened its doors to the public earlier this month. “Thomas Carlyle is one of Scotland’s greatest men and his birthplace provides an insight into the times he inhabited as well as his life," says Richard Clarkson of the National Trust for Scotland, which manages the house.

Built in 1791 by Carlyle's father and uncle (both of whom were master masons), the simple two-story, whitewashed house (shown above) is currently furnished to reflect domestic life in the early nineteenth century and contains a fascinating collection of portraits and some of Carlyle's personal belongings. It owes its name to the large keyed arch that divides the house in two and leads to a courtyard and garden. Carlyle reportedly was born in a small room directly above the arch. He lived in this house until he was 13, when he left to study at the University of Edinburgh. Carlyle's grave is located in the nearby Ecclefechan churchyard. When he was buried there next to his parents in 1881, the village had fewer than 800 residents, approximately the same number it has today. Ecclefechan is located off the M74 about five-and-a-half miles southeast of Lockerbie. (You can also visit Carlyle's London house, which is decidedly more upscale than his humble birthplace; its peaceful walled garden is one of my favorite spots in the entire city. Another Carlyle home, Craigenputtock, located just 30 miles by road from Ecclefechan, is open to the public by appointment. Carlyle lived there with his wife, Jane Welsh Carlyle, from 1828 to 1834, when the couple moved to London. It remained a cherished retreat for the rest of Carlyle's life.)

Do you have a favorite house museum? Please share in the comments.

Rescued!

2010-06-13T23:20:00.015-04:00

Speaking of Lawrence Alma Tadema (see "Victorian Masterpieces at Auction" below), his original autograph stock book, found earlier this year nestled in a box of discarded 1960s girlie magazines, was sold in May for £25,000 at the Shropshire auctioneers Mullock's in Ludlow.

The morocco-bound ledger is an inventory of the paintings completed by Alma Tadema between 1851 and 1912 and those completed by his wife, Laura, between 1872 and 1909. It was uncovered by a vendor at a clearance auction in the London area earlier this year.

“The man who spotted it rang me up and asked me for my opinion as to whether he should bid for it,” says Mullock's historical documents specialist Richard Westwood-Brookes. "I told him immediately that what he had discovered was a true art historical treasure and he should try to get it at any price. In the end he paid just a few pounds for the whole carton, and then the underbidder asked him if he would sell him the magazines – which I gather he did.

“Alma-Tadema has listed everything he ever painted and everything which has been attributed to his wife, so this is a definitive record of what is and what isn't an original painting by him," says Westwood-Brookes. "Of particular interest are the copious notes which he wrote about both sets of paintings – and also the indication that some of them were overpainted, altered, and given different titles. There are also details on where paintings were exhibited and who the original customers were.”

The book also contains a number of original poems written by Alma Tadema, each assigned to specific pictures.

At the Mullock's sale on May 27, the ledger attracted international interest from private, trade, and institutional bidders, but sold to an anonymous buyer.

Shown here : Lawrence Alma Tadema and Laura Alma Tadema.

Victorian Masterpieces at Auction

2010-06-13T15:38:00.024-04:00

(Via artdaily.org)

Works by some of the most important British painters of the nineteenth century will be auctioned at Christie's later this week, including Sir Lawrence Alma Tadema's Under the Roof of Blue Ionian Weather (1901) (shown above), which is expected to fetch at least £1,000,000. [Note: it sold to a private buyer in Europe for £1,026,850 / $1,516,657 --KT]

The market for Victorian paintings and drawings has been on fire for the last several months, and the sale on Wednesday, comprising 108 lots, is expected to realize approximately £6 million. The star lots include, besides Alma Tadema's masterpiece, Chloe (1893) by Sir Edward John Poynter (estimate: £600,000-800,000) and The Sea Maiden (1894) by Herbert James Draper (estimate: £800,000-1,200,000). Works by John Ruskin, Frederic, Lord Leighton; Edward Burne-Jones; Edward Lear; George Frederic Watts; J. W. Waterhouse; John Lavery; John Everett Millais; and Laura Knight will also be sold.

Sir Lawrence Alma Tadema (DNB bio here, Wiki bio here), one of the great exponents of High Victorian classicism, worked on Under the Roof of Blue Ionian Weather for more than two years as a commission for the financier Ernest Cassel. The title is adapted from Shelley’s "Letter to Maria Gisborne." The painting bathes the viewer in glorious sunshine, the generous sweep of marble benches with reclining sitters against an azure sea and sky suggesting infinite beauty and tranquility. It received extensive critical acclaim when it was first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1901.

Poynter's Chloe (above) was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1893, three years before the artist's appointment as president of the Royal Academy (Poynter's DNB bio here; Wiki bio here). The rich tapestry of colors and textures in this highly decorative work is enhanced by the graceful elegance of the sitter and the presence of music in the form of pipes, a lyre, and a small bird. [Note: this painting was unsold -- KT.]

Draper's The Sea Maiden (above) was the artist's first popular success when it was shown at the Royal Academy in 1894 (Draper's Wiki bio here). Studies for the background were made in the Isles of Scilly and in Devon, where Draper joined a fishing trawler at sea to observe the nets being hauled in; afterward he made a model of the boat to examine the way it caught the light. This work belongs to the genre of mermaid subjects that figures so prominently in Victorian art, including Sir Edward Burne-Jones’s The Depths of the Sea (1886) and J. W. Waterhouse’s The Siren (1900). Unusually, Draper’s sea maiden has no fishtail, an artistic decision guided by the authority of Swinburne's tragedy Chastelard (1865). [Note: This painting sold to a private buyer in the United States for £937,250 / $1,384,318 -- KT]

Read the auction results press release here.

Kevin Bacon and the Pre-Raphaelites

2010-06-12T19:56:00.039-04:00

The literary magazine Lapham's Quarterly has an interesting take on the "Six Degrees of Separation" idea, which posits that everyone in the world is connected to everyone else in the world by a chain of no more than six acquaintances.

One popular version of this idea is a game in which players link any living actor -- through his or her roles in films or commercials -- to the American actor Kevin Bacon within six steps. By expanding the number of connections to accommodate historical figures, the editors of the magazine have managed to show that a host of eminent Victorians are connected to Mr. Bacon, whose movies include Footloose, Flatliners, A Few Good Men, Apollo 13, Mystic River, and The Woodsman.

The social flowchart “Friends, Lovers, and Family” (shown at left, click for a larger version) is a color-coded web revealing the surprising connections between 70 art-world personalities, including writers, painters, architects, and actors. The Bacon connection to the Victorians goes roughly as follows: Kevin Bacon > Edmund Bacon (Kevin's father, a noted urban planner) > Buckminster Fuller > Margaret Fuller > Ralph Waldo Emerson > Walt Whitman > George MacDonald (1824-1905), the influential Scottish author (DNB bio here; Wiki bio here). From MacDonald, Bacon's links to the Victorian great and good expand exponentially to include John Ruskin, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (and through Millais and Rossetti to the other Pre-Raphaelites and their circle), William Morris, Ford Madox Brown, Lewis Carroll, and Elizabeth Siddal, among others.

Through his father, Bacon is separated by just four degrees from Thomas Carlyle and Leigh Hunt. Even Queen Victoria can be linked to the star of Animal House (through her son Prince Leopold, a lover of Alice Liddell and godfather of her second son; it was Alice Liddell who inspired Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland).

Full Steam Ahead

2010-03-11T08:03:00.019-05:00

To accompany its spectacular exhibition on Steampunk, which closed in February after drawing more than 70,000 visitors in four months, the Museum of the History of Science at Oxford University published a mini-website that continues to provide the perfect introduction to the genre. A well-organized set of links takes you to resources that include informative videos, a virtual tour, and a photo gallery.

The exhibition showcased the work of 18 internationally acclaimed Steampunk artists. Shown here: a mechanical man by Winchester-based artist Amanda Scrivener. "As her creator persona, Professor Maelstromme, Scrivener crafts items in her laboratory that bring to mind romance by gaslight, arcane science, the steam age, and carnival sideshow curios inspired by aged materials from the tombs of Victorian England," says exhibit curator Art Donovan. "All in all the Professor’s curiosities have been hailed as imaginative oddities epitomizing the rich landscape of Steampunk design." Check out Scrivener's weird and wonderful Etsy store, where she sells clockwork cannibal dolls, razor necklaces, and Steampunk-style top hats festooned with feathers, ribbon, old watch faces, metal stamping, broken spectacles, and keys.

This five-minute video provides an overview of the Oxford exhibition and captures its look and feel through interviews with curator Donovan, museum director Jim Bennett, and several of the featured artists:

In other Steampunk news, Orbit Books, a major fantasy/sci-fi imprint owned by Hachette, has just issued a short video that compresses the process of creating the cover of Blameless, a new novel by Gail Carriger, to just two minutes. The book is the third in Carriger's "Parasol Protectorate Series," comprising "comedies of manners set in Victorian London: full of vampires, dirigibles, and tea" that feature the predicaments and peregrinations of the intrepid Alexia Tarabotti. The first book in the series, the Steampunk-vampire mashup Soulless, will be followed by Changeless on 30 March; Blameless is due to be published in September.

Snippets #2

2010-01-26T20:30:00.008-05:00

An early Victorian tea set of unglazed red earthenware mounted in silver by Josiah Wedgwood that may have belonged to Queen Adelaide (above) is featured in "A History of the World in 100 Objects" organized by the British Museum and the BBC...

John Galliano channels Sherlock Holmes...

The racy love life of a 19-year-old Victorian clerk is serialized online...

Charles Dickens fails to make the grade...

A disease prevalent among the Victorian poor makes an unexpected return...

And finally: The prime minister is inspired by a Victorian poem...

Coloring the Victorian World

2010-01-25T21:46:00.009-05:00

An absolutely unique and precious visual record of the Victorian era came to light last autumn as it was readied for sale. A set of photographs and hand-tinted magic lantern slides created by Henry Harrison, a paymaster-general in the Royal Navy, was the star of an auction by Duke's in Dorchester.

Harrison traveled the world in the last two decades of the nineteenth century and apparently took a camera with him everywhere he went. And I mean everywhere.

He sailed from Egypt to the South Pacific, taking in most of the important ports of call along the way. The photographs include scenes of Egypt, India, Venice, Pompeii, Tonga, and the West Indies. One of the never-before-seen slides (below) is labeled "An English party ascending the Great Pyramid."

There are pictures of a giant crocodile being captured on the Nile, Nelson's flagship HMS Victory, and the royal yacht Victoria and Albert, a 360-foot steamer. From the Holy Land there are pictures of King David's Tomb on Mount Zion, the Garden of Gethsemane and the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, Nazareth, and Jericho.

There are pictures of Egyptian snake charmers:

Sudanese warriors:

Officers of the Khedive camel corps:

. . . along with ships in the Suez Canal, fighting Sikhs, Bengali lancers, and Indian mahouts with their elephants (shown at top), whose behavior Harrison likened to well-trained dogs. Even a “Howling Dervish” is recorded:

Especially interesting are Harrison's photos of the very early stages of the Boxer Rebellion in China, which are dated 1895. The rebellion was a violent anti-imperialist, anti-Christian movement by the "Righteous Fists of Harmony," or "Boxers," between 1898 and 1901.

Harrison captured several images of the rebellion and the names he gave to them highlight the nature of the uprising. They include: "executioners for minor punishments," "prisoner to be tortured," "prisoner chained to wall in street," "prisoner in cage," and "prisoners decapitated." These are thought to be punishments meted out to the Boxers who were caught, rather than acts perpetrated by the Boxers.

One photo shows a captured rebel imprisoned in a tiny crate:

Other rebels are prepared for execution:

Harrison (right), who was also an accomplished marine artist, turned his photographs into slides for the magic lantern by painstakingly tinting each one by hand. Because he was on the spot, he was able to record colors accurately. He also made detailed notes of his subjects, which are fascinating ethnographic documents in their own right. The collection has been handed down in Harrison's family since his death at age 66 in 1907. Thirty were sold at the auction by its current owner, the widow of his grandson, along with the paints he used and a mahogany brass-bound paint box and pallet.

“Henry Harrison went on seven-year tours and covered much of the globe taking pictures, painting pictures, and collecting specimens," says Moiya Harrison. “I’ve kept the family pictures and the specimens, but those for sale include the ones of the Boxer Rebellion, which are a bit gruesome. He must have been a very interesting man and his life spanned the Victorian age.”

The auction house set a presale estimate of £1,000 on the collection; it sold for exactly three times that amount.

Royal Art from the Heart

2010-01-24T19:15:00.042-05:00

If you enjoyed the recent film "The Young Victoria," which centered on the early years of the queen's reign and her marriage to Prince Albert, be sure to put this exhibition on your "must see" list.

From 19 March, the Queen's Gallery at Buckingham Palace presents "Victoria and Albert: Art and Love," the first exhibition to focus on the couple's shared love and enthusiasm for art. It will bring together more than 400 items from across the Royal Collection, celebrating Victoria and Albert's delight in collecting and displaying works of art from the time of their engagement in 1839 to the prince’s death in 1861.

Several pieces in the exhibition are gifts from one to the other, such as an orange blossom parure designed by Albert, the pieces of which he gave to Victoria over a period of six years.

For her part, the queen showered Albert with gifts of art, including portraits of herself. She referred to this painting by Franz Xaver Winterhalter (below), showing her in romantic deshabille, as the "secret painting." It was a surprise gift to the prince on his 24th birthday and hung in his waiting room at Windsor, where the queen referred to it as "my darling Albert’s favourite picture." The painting shown above right, also by Winterhalter, was another gift to Albert, showing Victoria in her wedding dress and given to the prince in 1847 on their seventh wedding anniversary.

Beyond the upcoming exhibition, the Royal Collection has a magnificent illustrated set of web pages detailing the royal couple's art acquisitions...more than 1,000 in all, ranging from exquisite lockets, bracelets, and pendants to maps, books, photos, paintings, and fans. Definitely worth a detailed browse.

Victorian Entertainers Honored by English Heritage

2010-01-23T16:41:00.003-05:00

Two Victorian entertainers were honored by English Heritage with blue plaques last year.

Fred Russell (1862-1957; born Thomas Frederick Parnell) is generally acknowledged to be the father of modern ventriloquism. Unlike other ventriloquists of the era, who worked with many dolls, Russell worked with only one, the Cockney "Coster Joe," which he perched on his knee. He was also a leader in improving conditions within his profession: in 1906 he helped create the Variety Artistes Federation, a trade union that later incorporated Actors' Equity. A plaque was placed on the house at 71 Kenilworth Court, Lower Richmond Road, Putney, where he resided for twelve years between 1914 and 1926. Russell lived long enough to perform on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1955. Wiki bio here. Recommended resource: Steven Connor, Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (Oxford University Press, 2001).

Eugen Sandow (1867-1925), known as "the forefather of bodybuilding," was a Victorian muscleman who became a freak show attraction in London and across the world for his extreme feats of strength. A Prussian by birth, he first appeared on the London stage in 1889. Eight years later he founded the Institute of Physical Culture, an early gymnasium for bodybuilders. In 1901, he sponsored the first bodybuilding contest: the "Great Competition" held at Royal Albert Hall and judged by himself, the athlete and sculptor Sir Charles Lawes, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Sandow's life was commemorated with a plaque at 161 Holland Park Avenue, where he lived for 21 years. DNB bio here; Wiki bio here with great photos and useful links. Recommended biography: David L. Chapman, Sandow the Magnificent: Eugen Sandow and the Beginnings of Bodybuilding (University of Illinois Press, 2006).

Stitching Lives

2010-01-22T22:06:00.000-05:00

Victorian artistry will be front and center in “Quilts 1700–2010,” an exhibition opening on 20 March at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

"Quilts evoke the past – they stimulate our earliest memories of security and comfort and resonate with historical and cultural references challenging the assumption that stitching is simply ‘women’s work,'" says Sue Prichard, the V&A's curator of contemporary textiles. The exhibition promises to be a visual feast, with thousands of minute pieces of fabric in 65 historical and contemporary quilts reflecting three centuries of pattern and print.

A patchwork bedcover commemorating Queen Victoria's coronation will be one of many highlights. The central panel of this piece features a coronation scene surrounded by a wreath of roses, thistle, oak, and shamrock in red, green, brown, mauve, and yellow on a white ground. The coverlet is quilted in white cotton in running stitch with interlacing circles, leaf-shapes, chevrons, and other geometric patterns. It was given to the museum by a woman in Burton-on-Trent who discovered it at the bottom of a box following the death of her aunt, its previous owner.

On loan from the National Gallery of Australia will be the Rajah quilt (shown at top), made in 1841 by women convicts aboard the HMS Rajah as they were being transported to Van Diemen's Land (present-day Tasmania). The women used sewing provisions donated by Elizabeth Fry's social reform initiative – including tape; 10 yards of fabric; four balls of white cotton sewing thread; a ball each of black, red and blue thread; black wool; 24 hanks of colored thread; a thimble; 100 needles; threads; pins; scissors; and two pounds of patchwork pieces – to create this extraordinary work, which is the only transportation quilt in a national collection, never before shown outside Australia.

Elizabeth Fry (1780-1845; DNB bio here; Wiki bio here) was a remarkable Victorian whose efforts on behalf of female prison inmates deserve to be more widely known.

You can get a behind-the-scenes peek at the making of "Quilts 1700-2010" on Prichard's blog.

In conjunction with the exhibition, the V&A has delved into its legendary archives to produce a limited-edition series of vintage fabrics that will be available online and in the museum shop. The 18 designs in the debut collaboration between Liberty Art Fabrics and the V&A Shop are inspired by several nineteenth-century patchwork coverlets.

Shown below is "Seaweed," adapted from a quilt commemorating the Duke of Wellington's victory at the Battle of Vittoria. Made in England in 1829 by Elizabeth Chapman, the patchwork incorporates several block-printed cottons dating from the first quarter of the nineteenth century.

Other patterns, including "Lattice," "Palm Tree," and "Petals" were inspired by English and Welsh coverlets of printed cotton and linen that had been painstakingly adorned with appliqué and embroidery.

The Victorian Freak Show

2009-12-27T17:34:00.009-05:00

As part of its "Bodies of Knowledge" series, the British Library offers a fascinating online gallery of posters and handbills used to publicize Victorian freak shows.

"Titillating publicity was crucial, as the people described in these adverts often bore little resemblance to what lay behind the curtain or turnstile," the site notes. "Exaggerated and stylised illustrations lent age to dwarf acts, stature to giants, and plausibility to mermaids and bear boys. The advertisers of these shows aroused the curiosity of the audience by overplaying, often entirely inventing, 'true life' stories. The public thirst for stories of adventure, struggle, and hardship was quenched by the story of how each 'anomaly' came to be. The new and different had strong appeal; difference was often judged according to popular fantasies of racial and imperial hierarchies, adventurous exploration, and scientific discovery."

A new scholarly treatment of the subject, Lillian Craton's The Victorian Freak Show: The Significance of Disability and Physical Differences in 19th-Century Fiction, analyzes freak show imagery as it appears in Victorian popular fiction, including the works of Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Guy de Maupassant, Florence Marryat, and Lewis Carroll. Craton finds that images of radical physical difference are often framed in surprisingly positive ways by these writers, ultimately helping Victorian culture move toward more inclusive and flexible gender norms.

Steamed

2009-12-26T18:33:00.014-05:00

The film company Focus Features has a nifty overview of steampunk by Jeff VanderMeer on its website for the movie "9," an animated fantasy epic that draws on the genre's language and imagery.

"Over the past decade, Steampunk has gone from being a literary movement to a way of life, a part of pop culture, and a mechanism to look at the idea of 'progress,'" says VanderMeer, the co-editor of Steampunk (Tachyon, 2008), an anthology of short stories by masters of the form.

"Steampunk has gained strength and momentum as it has transitioned from a 'movement' to an 'aesthetic.' A Steampunk aesthetic now permeates movies, comics, fashion, art, and role-playing games, as well as events such Maker Faire and the Burning Man festival. Media coverage from juggernauts such as the New York Times and MTV has fostered its spread through the zeitgeist."

Indeed, there are now more than two dozen Steampunk iPhone apps--and counting--from games to pulp fiction.

Resources:

Publishers' Weekly review of Boilerplate: History's Mechanical Marvel (Abrams, 2009)

TIME Magazine, "Steampunk: Reclaiming Tech for the Masses" (December 14, 2009)

A Visit to a Steampunked Home in Sharon, Massachusetts (via The Steampunk Workshop)

Hemophilia Confirmed as Victoria's "Royal Disease"

2009-12-25T14:57:00.003-05:00

A new analysis has confirmed that the “royal disease” suffered by the male descendants of Queen Victoria was in fact a rare type of hemophilia, the genetic disease marked by a deficiency in blood clotting. The disease spread as the queen's children married into other royal families across Europe. Modern researchers had already hypothesized that the royals suffered from hemophilia, but until now they had lacked definitive evidence. Recent DNA analysis on bones belonging to members of the last Russian royal family, the Romanovs, indicates the disease was indeed hemophilia, a rare subtype known as hemophilia B. The genotyping study was published in the journal Science.

Shown here: Prince Leopold (1853-1884), Duke of Albany, Queen Victoria's youngest son, who suffered from hemophilia.

Queen Victoria On One Pedestal, Off Another

2009-12-24T15:25:00.001-05:00

Two recent (and extremely amusing) sightings of Queen Victoria.

First, queen re-enactor Sylvia Strange of Shropshire spent an hour on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square in London in October as part of the sculptor Antony Gormley's weird and wonderful One and Only public art project (above). Watch here as the queen mounts the plinth via cherry picker, denies an inappropriate relationship with John Brown, and knits balaclavas for British soldiers fighting in the Crimea; read more here. I previously wrote on Mrs. Strange here.

More recently, an East Enders villain met his end after being whacked in the head with a heavy golden bust of Queen Victoria in the Albert Square pub named for her (above). Archie Miller was killed off in the Christmas Day special of the BBC1 soap. Read more here.

Snippets #1

2009-09-16T18:23:00.018-04:00

John Ruskin ponders penguins. . .

John Keats borrows a book from the journalist Thomas Alsager. . .

An 1849 court case shapes current discussions about British libel law. . .

Jeannette Winterson restores a Victorian building in the Cotswolds. . .

Ada Lovelace, pipe-smoking computer programmer (right), impresses Queen Victoria. . .

Brontë, Nightingale, and Darwin jump to conclusions about that nagging headache. . .

And finally: Afghanistan? Been there, done that. . .

Census Records Reveal Details of Ripper Victims

2009-09-15T09:18:00.020-04:00

Some of Jack the Ripper's victims appear to have been living respectable domestic lives just a few years before their murders, according to census records that went online today.

The company findmypast.com trawled records of Britain's 1881 census for information on the five women generally accepted as victims of the Ripper: Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly. All were killed between August 31 and December 20, 1888, in London's East End, where they worked as prostitutes. Their bodies were horribly mutilated.

The records reveal that several of the victims were living with husbands and children in 1881, apparently resorting to prostitution only later, following the disintegration of their marriages. According to newspaper reports of the time, none of the victims was living with their husbands at the time of their deaths.

Catherine Eddowes, who was 38 in 1881, appears in the census as "Kate Conway" (below) and is listed as a "charwoman" living with her husband John Conway, an Irishman listed as a "hawker," and their two children.

Annie Chapman, then 40, was living with her parents but listed as a 'stud groom’s wife.' Her husband, John Chapman, was living above stables in St Leonard’s Hill, Berkshire; later in the year his wife joined him there. But in 1882 the couple’s 12-year-old daughter Emily died of meningitis and both parents began drinking heavily. The marriage ended in 1884. It seems that Annie Chapman was then forced onto the streets to support herself.

Elizabeth Stride, 37, was living with her husband John, a carpenter, in 1881. Unlike the others, Stride, who was from Sweden, had already been registered with the police as a prostitute, at the age of 22 in Gothenburg.

The other two 'canonical' victims of the Ripper, Mary Ann Nichols and Mary Jane Kelly, do not appear on the census, suggesting that they were already out walking the streets on the night the census was taken, April 3, 1881.

However, Nichols, who was 43 at the time of her murder, was married with three children at the time of the 1871 census.

"Some people treat the Jack the Ripper story as a bit of a game," says Alex Werner, a Museum of London historian who curated a recent Jack the Ripper exhibition at the Museum in Docklands. "It wasn't a game. It was a crime against real people in the East End, people who had fallen on really hard times, who had gravitated to the East End as a place where they could earn some kind of living as a prostitute."

Resources

"Jack the Ripper and the East End" (Museum of Docklands), Podcast Tour: Part 1

"Jack the Ripper and the East End" (Museum of Docklands), Podcast Tour: Part 2

A War Between Science and Love

2009-09-14T22:58:00.029-04:00

Here's the trailer (below) for the upcoming film Creation, which is based on the book Annie's Box by Charles Darwin's great-great-grandson Randal Keynes and shot in part at Down House, the Darwin family home in Kent.

The film, which opened the recent Toronto International Film Festival, stars real-life couple Paul Bettany (in photo above) and Jennifer Connolly. Visit the film's excellent website here; The Hollywood Reporter has a glowing review here; the Los Angeles Times previews the film here. Roger Ebert has some interesting things to say about the film in his online journal, as does Eugenie Scott at Panda's Thumb.

Can it possibly be true that Creation is having trouble finding a US distributor because Darwin's theory is, according to Jeremy Thomas, the film's producer, "too controversial for American audiences"? His assertion that "outside of New York and LA, religion rules" is patently absurd. Thomas's comments smack of a disingenuous marketing ploy. . .they're just too ridiculous to be sincere. How unfortunate, since all signs are that the movie is superb and can stand on its own without the whipping up of a fake controversy.

"A Wonderful Dog"

2009-09-13T21:34:00.038-04:00

The Victorians adored dogs, which were by far the most popular domestic pet of the era, and perhaps no breed was more beloved than the Newfoundland, a frequent subject of artists such as Sir Edwin Landseer, Arthur Batt, George Earl, Samuel West, John Emms, and George Stubbs. Generally depicted with great sentimentality, the breed featured in countless paintings, songs, and poems. (See my previous post on a life-size sculpture of a Newfoundland named Bashaw by Matthew Coates Wyatt here.)

The newly restored Landseer work shown above, "A Distinguished Member of the Humane Society" on loan from Tate Britain, is the centerpiece of "Pets and Prizewinners: An Exhibition Depicting the Development of Victorian and Edwardian Canine Art" on display at the Kennel Club Art Gallery in London through January 2010.

As noted in Landseer's Wiki biography, "so popular and influential were [his] paintings of dogs in the service of humanity that the name 'Landseer' came to be the official name for the variety of Newfoundland dog that . . . features a mix of both black and white; it was this variety that Landseer popularized in his paintings celebrating Newfoundlands as water rescue dogs, most notably Off to the Rescue (1827), A Distinguished Member of the Humane Society (1838), and Saved (1856), which combines Victorian constructions of childhood with the appealing idea of noble animals devoted to humankind—a devotion indicated, in Saved, by the fact the dog has rescued the child without any apparent human direction or intervention."

The valour and intelligence of the Newfoundland were regularly hailed in the press, as in this article from The Times, 1 October 1859:

"A WONDERFUL DOG. -- On Sabbath last two local preachers, belonging to the Primitive Methodists at South Shields, went to preach at Usworth, a colliery village some eight or nine miles off. They finished the labours of the day a little after 8 o'clock, and soon after set their faces homeward. The evening had passed, and night, robed in her starry stillness, had approached, giving the two preachers an opportunity of conversing on the sublimities of the stellar regions.

"They had not proceeded far in their interesting conversation when they were overtaken by a large Newfoundland dog, and some time elapsed before they took any particular notice of the animal. They pursued their way and still the dog followed, when they thought it necessary to drive him back, as he appeared to be a valuable animal, and his owner might come to some loss should he stray away from home. Notwithstanding all the means employed, the dog followed, keeping the two preachers ahead at a respectful distance.

"They continued on their way, and came through some fields which lead to the main road. When coming through one of those fields, the dog passed them, making a whining noise as he came by, which, by their interpretation, sounded like a mark of disapprobation at their driving him back. Before they came to the hedge at the bottom of the field they heard the dog growling and barking, and upon advancing a few steps further, they were terror stricken at beholding three men in the hedge ready to pounce upon them. Two leaned back in the hedge, and the other slunk down, as the dog snarled and the two preachers passed by. The preachers went on quickly, leaving the dog in front of the rascals.

"After they had got about a mile further the dog came up to them again, and appeared pleased, as if he had found his master. They determined that he should follow, and that, when they separated, the one he followed should take him home, give him his supper and a night's lodging, and take him back the next day. They went on and down the railway, and as soon as they turned off the line to come into a lane leading into the town, the dog turned round and took his departure home, leaving the two preachers in safety, and thankful for his sagacity and protection." -- first published in The Newcastle Daily Express

Above, Landseer's Saved; below, sheet music with similar imagery for a song by Henry Russell celebrating Carlo, the Newfoundland dog that saved a child who had fallen overboard from a ship on the Atlantic.

Recommended Reading

Deborah Morse and Martin Danahay, eds., Victorian Animal Dreams: Representations of Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture (London, Ashgate Press, 2007)

Salmagundi #11

2009-09-12T23:57:00.005-04:00

The film The Young Victoria, which tells the story of Queen Victoria's accession to the throne, her first shaky steps as monarch, and the courtship that led to one of the most famous romances of all time, will open in the U.S. on November 13. It stars Emily Blunt and Rupert Friend and was produced by Sarah Ferguson and Academy Award winners Martin Scorsese and Graham King. Read my previous post on the film here.

A catalogue to the collections housed in the Brontë Parsonage Museum is now accessible online. This is a landmark achievement in the history of the museum, allowing global access to information on more than 7000 items, including books, manuscripts, letters, paintings, drawings, furniture, household items, and personal possessions belonging to the Brontë family, their friends, and associates.

A yellow-and-white-gold pin designed by Queen Victoria to commemorate her faithful ghillie John Brown after his death in 1883 (shown at left) has fetched £5,760 at a Bonhams auction in Edinburgh. The pin, which shows a likeness of Brown and his initials on one side and the royal monogram on the other, made ten times its estimate after what was described as "frenzied" bidding. It was designed by the queen to be given to her Highland servants and cottagers, to be worn by them every year on the anniversary of Brown's death (27 March).

And speaking of Bonhams . . . on 8 October the firm will auction an important nineteenth-century emerald and seed-pearl necklace that was reputedly worn by Maharani Jindan Kaur (1817-1863), wife of the Maharajah Ranjit Singh and mother of Duleep Singh, who became a godson of Queen Victoria. The necklace, which features 50 carats of emeralds, is expected to sell for about £35,000. A plaque was unveiled in July 2009 in a West London cemetery to commemorate the maharani, a formidable woman who fought two wars against the British in the mid-nineteenth century. Read more about the unveiling of the plaque here. Read my post about the fascinating and tragic life of Duleep Singh, the last maharajah of Punjab, here.

Queen Victoria vs Zombies

2009-09-11T19:55:00.000-04:00

To coincide with the release of A. E. Moorat's Queen Victoria: Demon Hunter, a "blood-curdling and hilarious historical zombie mash-up novel" and "alternative history . . . packed full of blood, guts, and flesh-eating zombies," publisher Hodder & Stoughton is sponsoring a short film competition. Send them your Victorian-inspired zombie short film or animation and you could win £100 of Hodder books. For information and a look at the first chapter of the book, click here.

Tennyson's Farringford Library Restored

2009-08-06T21:38:00.017-04:00

"...Take it and come to the Isle of Wight:

Where, far from the noise of smoke and town,
I watch the twilight falling brown
All around a careless ordered garden,
Close to the ridge of a noble down.
You'll have no scandal while you dine,
But honest talk and wholesome wine.
And only hear the magpie gossip
Garrulous under a roof of pine:
For groves of pine on either hand,
To break the blast of winter stand;
And further on the hoary Channel
Tumbles a billow on chalk and sand."

That's how Alfred, Lord Tennyson, described his life at Farringford in a poem to a friend in 1854. Now the poet laureate's library there has been restored and opened to the public.

From The Guardian, 6 August 2009:

"Although Benjamin Disraeli, Charles Darwin, Lewis Carroll, Giuseppe Garibaldi, and the Queen of Hawaii have been unable to accept the invitation to Lord Alfred Tennyson's birthday party today, his library on the Isle of Wight will again be full of distinguished guests talking of literature, science, and art.

"A private passion for Victorian art has given rise to a new museum at Farringford House, Tennyson's home of 40 years, opening today to mark the bicentenary of the birth of a giant of the Victorian literary scene. Furniture, including his writing desk and chair, and portraits by his friend G. F. Watts – of the poet, his wife, and their sons – have come back to the house for the first time in over a century.

"The poet laureate was an A-list celebrity of his day, hounded by fans. His works, including The Charge of the Light Brigade, Maud, In Memoriam, and his Arthurian cycle, Idylls of the King, were read by millions, recited, painted, sung, and dramatised. He moved to Isle of Wight in 1853 when he was so stalked that he could no longer work in London. But everyone who was anyone followed him there – many as house guests – including politicians, painters, authors, scientists, and royalty.

"The house became a hotel in the early 20th century, owned at different times by both Thomas Cook (of the travel firm) and Sir Fred Pontin (of holiday camp fame). Older islanders, including the craftsman who restored pieces for the exhibition, remember bonfires in the grounds of surviving Victorian furniture, many commissioned by the Tennysons from trees on the estate.

"The hotel was bought three years ago 'on a whim, not a very well-thought-out business plan,' by Martin Beisly, senior expert on Victorian painting at Christie's auction house, and his friend Rebecca Fitzgerald. Beisly was brought up on the Isle of Wight, but didn't start out particularly interested in poetry, never mind Tennyson or crumbling Victorian architecture. 'I really came to Tennyson through painting. Wherever I looked at the painters I loved – Millais, Holman Hunt, Watts – I realised they were completely in awe of Tennyson. The house struck me as like a work of art, too, a painting in urgent need of sensitive restoration.'

"Beisly and Fitzgerald spent the winter making the building watertight before restoring the extension the Tennysons had added to make a party room and a library – with a staircase concealed in the corner so he could flee visitors. The extension was designed by another Tennyson worshipper, the architect of the Natural History Museum in London, Alfred Waterhouse.

"The library (shown below) has been restored to museum display standards, and will house regular exhibitions. With curator Veronica Franklin Gould, an expert on the period, they have secured major loans from national collections, including the Watts Gallery in Compton and the Tennyson Research Centre in Lincoln, which holds the family archives. The paintings, letters, and photographs by his next-door neighbour, the pioneering photographer Julia Margaret Cameron – who kidnapped his most distinguished guests – give a vivid impression of the life of the house.

"Visitors were sometimes overawed: in 1865 Anny Thackeray, daughter of the novelist, herself renowned as an eccentric, wrote: 'Everybody is either a genius or a poet or a painter or peculiar in some way.'

"The islanders were highly entertained by the procession of notables, including Prince Albert leaving with a bunch of primroses from the garden; or Garibaldi, campaigner for Italian unification, in embroidered shirt and scarlet-lined white poncho. They queued to wave to the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, author of Hiawatha (Tennyson also brought him to the village stores to buy tobacco and clay pipes), but clearly every day was as good as a cabaret: Thackeray recorded locals coming to their doors to stare as Tennyson, Watts, and Henry Thoby Prinsep, brother-in-law of Cameron, walked past in sweeping cloaks and giant hats.

"The exhibition includes the throne Tennyson had made of timber from the garden for the widowed Queen Emma of Hawaii when she came to stay for four days in 1865. Photographs include Cameron's portrait of Longfellow. When he escorted the poet to her door, Tennyson warned: 'You will have to do whatever she tells you. I'll come back soon and see what is left of you.'"

Update: "Poet’s home may be forced to close," Isle of Wight County Press Online, 28 August 2009.

Big Ben Celebrates 150th Anniversary

2009-07-11T09:19:00.005-04:00

An excellent new website created by Parliament commemorates the 150th anniversary of its famous Clock Tower, Great Clock, and Great Bell ("Big Ben").

Construction on the clock tower began in September 1843; the clock first kept time on 31 May 1859.

The website offers a wealth of facts and figures about the clock tower, historical and contemporary images, a virtual tour, links to YouTube and Flickr resources, animations, and (of course) downloadable ringtones, banners, and wallpapers. There's even an online game for kids called "Race Against Chime" that requires players to clean the clock's face while dangling on a rope and dodging birds and gusts of wind.

UK residents (only) can arrange a tour of the clock tower through their local MP.

Shown above: "New Palace of Westminster," c. 1858, colour lithograph on paper, in Parliament's Works of Art Collection.

Darwin at Home

2009-03-12T01:02:00.003-04:00

A full-scale replica of Charles Darwin’s cabin on HMS Beagle is one of the highlights of a new exhibition at Down House (shown above), the naturalist's family home in Kent, that celebrates his 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species.

"Uncovering Origins" charts the progression of Darwin's ideas and the controversy they provoked. Multimedia tours include the Darwins' living quarters and the extensive gardens that served as Charles's outdoor laboratory.

Can't get to Kent? The next best thing is a virtual tour of Down House created by English Heritage, which manages the property. You can explore Darwin's study, listen to Sir David Attenborough describe what the house meant to Darwin and his family, and page through interactive versions of his field notebooks and Beagle diary.

Darwin's life at Down House with wife Emma and their children will be the subject of two upcoming films. The first, Creation, is based on the book Annie's Box by Darwin's great-great-grandson Randal Keynes and was shot in part at Down House. It stars real-life couple Paul Bettany and Jennifer Connolly. (Visit the film's excellent website here.) This will be Bettany's second turn as a naturalist: in 2003 he played Dr. Stephen Maturin to Russell Crowe's Captain Jack Aubrey in the film adaptation of Patrick O'Brien's Master and Commander. (Below: Bettany as Darwin in Creation.)

The second new film is Mrs. Darwin, with Joseph Fiennes and Rosamund Pike, who says, "I'm definitely a Darwinist, but playing his wife has been a real eye-opener. She was very religious and his discoveries placed a heavy strain on their marriage. We are exploring different angles to his life story."

Resources

Darwin Correspondence Project (Cambridge University)

Emma Darwin's Diaries 1824-1896 (Darwin Online)

The HMS Beagle Project will launch a sailing replica of the ship, crewed by scientists and sailors, that will retrace the 1831-36 voyage of the original Beagle.

For What It's Worth . . .

2009-03-10T21:16:00.005-04:00

Two economics professors, one from Maine and one from Illinois, have provided an invaluable service to those wanting to measure the relative worth of things over time, from the eighteenth century to today.

Their website, http://www.measuringworth.org/, features several calculators based on a variety of official UK and US government statistics and economic indicators, including the retail price index (the cost of goods and services purchased by a typical household in one period relative to a base period), average earnings, and three measures based on gross domestic product.

One calculator allows you to learn the present worth of a past amount (for example, the cost of Big Ben, the salary of the Archbishop of Canterbury, or the price of tea); another tells you what a historic price in British pounds is worth in US dollars today (and vice versa).

A quick crunch of numbers related to my own specialty, theatre history, reveals that Lillie Langtry's £250-per-week salary at the Haymarket Theatre in 1882 translates into a whopping £126,478 in purchasing power per week today. Of course, exorbitantly paid performers like Langtry were by far the exception and not the rule.

This site should come with a Surgeon General's warning about how addictive it is.

Shown here: The Royal Exchange and the Bank of England in an undated photo, c. 1890.

"The Young Victoria" Arrives

2009-03-09T21:02:00.022-04:00

"The Young Victoria" has opened in London to a resounding . . . thud. This despite two very attractive lead actors in Emily Blunt and Rupert Friend (above).

"The [film] is intended to blow away the cobwebby image of the grumpy old Empress in her widow's weeds and show us instead the vibrant, brilliant younger woman who was very much amused by the glorious freedom she suddenly assumed at the age of 18," says The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw. Instead, "a tone of celebratory reverence for Victoria predominates" and "the film sometimes tasted like a damp slice of Balmoral-heritage shortbread." Read the rest of Bradshaw's review here. The Daily Mail (click here for the full review) called it a "pleasant but plodding biopic of our longest-serving sovereign, mainly to be recommended for those with a limitless appetite for stately homes, lavish costumes, and Mills & Boon romance. . .It has more than a faint whiff of mothballs and antimacassars." The Times liked it better; click here to read the review and see the trailer. (Below: the film's poster.)

Apparently, the most egregious historical howler in the film is the depiction of Edward Oxford's attempt to shoot Victoria as she rode in a carriage down Constitution Hill with Albert on 10 June 1840. In real life, Oxford's two shots missed; in the film, Albert shields his wife with his body and is hit in the chest. Victoria and Albert had been married just four months at the time, and Victoria was pregnant with the first of her nine children, a daughter named Victoria (who would become the German Empress in 1888). Edward Oxford (Wiki bio here) was later tried and found not guilty by reason of insanity. (Below: detail from an 1840 engraving by J. R. Jobbins of the assassination attempt.)

I'll review the film after it's released here in the United States. In the meantime, visit the film's pretty website here (and try not to be distracted by the anachronistic music, which was also used prominently in the film Love, Actually). Sarah Ferguson discusses her fascination with Queen Victoria and her role as a producer of the film here. Emily Blunt talks with the BBC about corsets and court etiquette here.

Paxman's Partial View of the Victorians

2009-02-15T01:05:00.002-05:00

Christopher Howse takes issue with the way the Victorians are presented in Jeremy Paxman's new series, which starts today (Sunday, 15 February) on BBC1. "To Jeremy Paxman, Victorian houses look grim," he says. "Grimness is a leitmotif . . . workhouses, gruel, industrial accidents, slums, the usual suspects of 'Dickensian conditions.' But that is all wrong. The Victorians were a fiery bundle of energy – noisy, voracious, partial to bright colours and bad jokes, fit, energetic, sentimental but hardy, unconventional but addicted to reform and liberty."

A. N. Wilson has another take on the series: "The programme is a meditation on the Victorian success story: how they invented the modern city and learnt to live in it. Behind each sequence is a pair of self-contradictory thoughts. As someone who has himself written about the Victorians, I completely sympathise with Paxman's dilemma. On the one hand, we recognise the sheer monstrous cruelty of it. On the other, how can you not admire the brilliance which constructed the London sewers, or the railway system, or the ever more ingenious machinery that spun cotton or smelted steel?"

Read more about the series and get broadcast times here; Paxman is interviewed by the BBC here. The book based on the series is reviewed -- er, savaged -- by The Times here and given the "Digested Read" treatment by The Guardian here. Read my previous post on the series here.

Shown here, two of the paintings featured in the series. Top: The Bayswater Omnibus (1895) by George William Joy (1844-1925), in the collection of the Museum of London (click for much larger image). Bottom: Eventide: A Scene in the Westminster Union (1878) by Hubert von Herkomer (1849-1914), in the collection of the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.

Salmagundi #10

2009-01-24T21:28:00.053-05:00

Pathetic phallacy: Actress Emma Thompson and her husband, the actor Greg Wise, will reportedly travel to Majorca in March to begin work on "Effie," a film based on the marriage of John Ruskin, the Victorian art critic, and Euphemia ("Effie") Gray. Thompson and Wise wrote the script together and will co-star as the unhappy couple, whose marriage was annulled in 1854 based on the charge (attested to by physical examination and never contested by Ruskin) that, after five years, the marriage remained unconsummated. Ruskin was widely supposed to be impotent. Effie later wed the painter John Everett Millais, with whom she had eight children. Shown here: Millais's portrait of Effie from 1873.

UPDATE, 5 February: Here's one clue to how the marriage might be portrayed; Thompson is quoted as saying the film is "about the great Victorian art critic John Ruskin, who was married to this frightful woman named Effie." Hmm. Seems to me Ruskin was the more frightful of the pair.

Celebrating Darwin: The January 2009 issue of Scientific American is all about the 150-year-old theory that still drives the contemporary scientific agenda. Charles Darwin was born 200 years ago next month.

Cabinets of curiosities: England’s oldest university zoological collection, the Grant Museum of Zoology at University College London, is a treasure trove of skeletons, mounted animals, and specimens preserved in jars -- all crammed into a series of rooms lined with old-fashioned cabinets that recreate the atmosphere of a Victorian natural-history museum. Founded as a teaching collection in 1827 by the radical zoologist Robert Grant (one of Darwin's mentors), the museum is still used for teaching by the Department of Biology at UCL. Look out for the bones of a dodo, the skeleton of a quagga (a type of zebra), and the dissected corpse of a Tasmanian tiger. You can adopt one of the 55,000 specimens and have your name displayed on a label next to it.

Grueling: Earlier this month the Royal Society of Chemistry in London served gruel to members of the public after recreating the workhouse porridge made famous by Charles Dickens in Oliver Twist (see my post of December 27 here). The glutinous concoction of water, oats, and milk was prepared by a French chef in the society's kitchen and ladled onto pewter dishes for those brave enough to sample it. The event coincided with the premiere of Cameron Mackintosh’s revival of Oliver! at the Drury Lane Theatre (visit the show's amusing website here) and was a clever way to generate press coverage of the society's new report on sustainable food. "The part that food plays in our lives has perhaps never been more memorably portrayed in literature than in the workhouse scene [in Oliver Twist]," says RSC chief Dr. Richard Pike. "Thankfully in Britain matters have improved tremendously but it remains a daily threat in many parts of the world. This year we will be looking closely at food sustainability and the part that science and engineering play in this." Shown here: Lawrence Wright tries some of the gruel on offer outside the RSC office at Burlington House, Piccadilly. The apparent presence of Napoleon behind Mr. Wright is unexplained. Perhaps it is the French chef, who -- if he ever returns to France -- will be imprisoned for this crime against gastronomy, sans doute.

Speaking of orphans: The large cast of child actors who portray nameless workhouse inmates in the Mackintosh Oliver! are believed to be earning around £20 a night, less than the fee recommended for child performers by Equity, the actors' union. Children playing named characters are thought to be earning between £35 and £60 a performance. More than 150 children are employed in the £4.5m production, including three Artful Dodgers and three Olivers. Lewis Jenkins, a spokesman for the production company, said that the company was meeting all applicable legal requirements and explained that the children taking part are divided into three grades. "There are those playing Oliver and the Artful Dodger on one grade, and there are three gangs of children on another grade. And then there are 'the coach kids', as we call them, who are in the workhouse scene and have a little less to do." Hmm. It's enough to make one wonder who the real pickpockets are. Shown above: Some of the talented actors in Oliver! who could be making more money working at McDonald's.

The best London museum you've never heard of: The quirky Cuming Museum in Southwark houses one of the very few Victorian private collections to have survived intact to the present day. Opened in 1906, it’s the legacy of Richard Cuming and his son Henry Syer Cuming, who bought more than 25,000 artifacts from all over the world at London sales between 1780 and 1900. The collection spans the areas of archaeology, British social history, ethnography, decorative art, geology, textiles, natural history, prints, coins, ceramics, and ancient Egyptian and Etruscan objects. The many treasures include a nineteenth-century beaded apron from Guyana, a Hawaiian gourd bottle acquired during one of Captain Cook’s voyages, slippers belonging to Queen Anne and Queen Victoria, and a dentist’s cap embroidered with extracted teeth. You can also gaze at a small group of prints by Daumier, photos that document the development of the Elephant and Castle area of Southwark, and several items belonging to the experimental scientist Michael Faraday. The "Lovett Collection of Superstitions" features lucky charms and fetish objects that show the myriad ways in which the Victorians attempted to appease the Fates. The Cumings collected with abandon: important objects, worthless objects, fake objects . . . they didn't care. It all adds up to a wonderful testament to Victorian curiosity and acquisitiveness. Shown here: A bracelet of blue beads of a type worn in London by children under their clothes as a cure for rheumatism, c. 1870-1900.

The Workhouse Diet: A New "Twist"

2008-12-27T19:57:00.025-05:00

An article published last week in the BMJ (British Medical Journal) is creating quite a stir in Victorianist circles. In it, dietitians conduct a nutritional analysis of workhouse diets in use throughout England in 1836 and find that although the food provided was dreary, it would have been adequate to support the health of inmates.

The popular belief that the opposite was true -- that the diets barely sustained life -- was fostered in large part by Charles Dickens' vivid depiction of workhouse life in Oliver Twist, published in 1838. In that novel, little Oliver gets by on three meals of gruel a day, an onion twice a week, and half a roll on Sunday. On feast days he's given an extra two ounces of bread. (Shown above: a scene from Roman Polanski's 2005 film Oliver Twist.)

Such a diet would have resulted in multiple nutritional deficiency diseases, including anemia, scurvy, rickets, and beriberi.

After studying a unique contemporary source, Jonathan Pereira’s Treatise on Food and Diet with Observations on the Dietetical Regimen, the researchers conclude that the diet described in Oliver Twist was not typical of that given to children in workhouses at the time and note that inmates usually received a ration that included bread, cooked meat, potatoes, rice pudding or suet, and cheese in addition to gruel, soup, or broth.

Historian Peter Higginbotham comes to a similar conclusion in The Workhouse Cookbook, published last August. (Read The Independent's review here.) Higginbotham discovered that at various times in the history of the workhouse, the fare included beer, chocolate, and cheesecake.

In fact, Oliver Twist is a polemic written in response to the passage of the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, which Dickens opposed. He seems to have exaggerated for dramatic effect.

(Shown at left: Oliver "asks for more" gruel in one of George Cruikshank's 24 illustrations for the first edition of Oliver Twist; click for a much larger image.)

The BMJ website includes an excellent video featuring interviews with the researchers and a group of modern-day schoolchildren who try the Oliver Twist diet, with mixed results.

Resources

The Dickens Project (University of California)

The Workhouse (Peter Higginbotham)

Gertrude Himmelfarb, “The Dickensian Poor” in The Culture of Poverty (1983)

Sheila Smith, The Other Nation: The Poor in English Novels of the 1840s and 1850s (1980)

Victoria's "Two-Horse Open Sleigh" on Display at Windsor

2008-12-24T15:51:00.014-05:00

To mark the festive season, Queen Victoria’s sleigh has gone on display for the first time at Windsor Castle. Built by the carriage-makers Hooper & Co., the sleigh, which is painted in bright red and gold and lined with red velvet, will be on view in St George’s Hall until 12 January.

Queen Victoria and Prince Albert spent many Christmases at the castle, and the queen often enjoyed sleigh rides around Windsor during the winter months. According to contemporary newspaper accounts, Prince Albert drove the sleigh, which was pulled by a pair of gray horses with harnesses decorated with ostrich plumes and silver bells. The grooms and outriders who accompanied the royal couple were dressed in scarlet livery. The royal children often travelled in a smaller sleigh, pulled by a pony.

Extracts from Victoria's journal reveal her enjoyment of sleigh rides. In the entry for 12 February 1855, the queen recalled an outing with Princess Clémentine of Orléans: "Another sharp frost and a fine day – Albert drove Clem and me out in the sledge … with the exception of 2 or 3 little places, we went beautifully and as smoothly as though we were on ice. The sun bright & the sky so blue. We were out for an hour!"

The Victorian Painting that Inspired Barack Obama

2008-11-28T11:13:00.024-05:00

This is Hope by the Victorian artist George Frederic Watts (DNB entry here, Wiki entry here), an oil on canvas painted in 1885. It has been called the most influential, striking, memorable, and strange of all Watts’s works.

One copy (Watts painted several) was presented to the nation by the artist in 1897. It can be seen in Room 15 of Tate Britain, where it hangs next to other works depicting "Victorian Spectacle." Another copy is on display now through April as part of "GF Watts: Victorian Visionary" at the Guildhall Art Gallery in London. (A related exhibition, "GF Watts: Parables in Paint," opens at St Paul's Cathedral in London next week.)

"The figure of Hope is traditionally identified by an anchor," says the caption on the wall next to the Tate's version. "In this picture she is blindfolded, seated on a globe, and playing a lyre of which all the strings are broken except one. Watts wanted to find a more original approach to symbolism and allegory. But Hope’s attempts to make music here appear futile and several critics argued that the work might have been more appropriately titled Despair. Watts explained that ‘Hope need not mean expectancy. It suggests here rather the music which can come from the remaining chord.'"

Twenty years ago this painting was the subject of a now famous sermon delivered by the Reverend Jeremiah Wright at Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ. In the audience: a 27-year-old community organizer named Barack Obama.

"The painting's title is Hope," Wright told his congregation. "It shows a woman sitting on top of the world, playing a harp. What more enviable position could one ever hope to achieve than being on top of the world with everyone dancing to your music? As you look closer, the illusion of power gives way to the reality of pain. The world on which this woman sits, our world, is torn by war, destroyed by hate, decimated by despair, and devastated by distrust. The world on which she sits seems on the brink of destruction. . . . [yet despite all this] she had the audacity to make music and praise God . . . the audacity to hope." (Here's a link to one version of the complete sermon.)

That last phrase struck the young Obama and he adapted it both for the title of his speech at the Democratic National Convention in 2004 and for the title of his second book in 2006.

Obama was not alone in being inspired by the imagery of this painting; Nelson Mandela reportedly kept a reproduction of it on the wall of his Robben Island prison cell.

Resources

"Where There's Life, There's . . ." Paul Barlow on George Frederic Watts, from Tate Etc (August 2004)

Victorian Lives: Sarah Greengrove, Hopper

2008-11-24T08:54:00.001-05:00

In case you were inclined to think that Dickens made up some of the more piteous episodes in his novels . . .

From The Times, 17 October 1844:

"Maidstone Petty Sessions ~ Sarah Greengrove, a girl about 15 years of age, was charged with stealing 10 turnips, value 4d., the property of Mr. Charles Frederick Baxter. James Smith, a man in the employ of Mr. Baxter, stated that on going into the field yesterday (Thursday) morning, about 6 o’clock, he observed the prisoner pulling turnips; he went up to her, when she dropped them and walked away, but was apprehended in the course of the morning.

"The girl denied taking 10, but stated that she had come from Marden that morning, where she had been hopping [i.e., harvesting hops -- KT], and being very hungry and thirsty, went into the field and drew four turnips.

"Mr. Ellis [the magistrate] said there was no direct evidence of her having taken 10 turnips, but from her own admission she had taken four under the circumstances stated. It did not appear that she was one of those that had committed depredations there before, and he should leave it for Mr. Baxter to use his own discretion in going any further with the case.

"Mr. Baxter said he wished to press the case, as he had lost a great many turnips, and had been subject to several severe depredations lately on his farm.

"Mr. Ellis thought this a very different case to that of an old offender.

"Mr. Baxter said they had a great difficulty in catching them, and he was determined to make an example of the first one.

"Mr. Ellis regretted very much that his appeal to Mr. Baxter had no effect, for he felt extremely sorry to be obliged to send her to prison; but, as Mr. Baxter seemed determined to press the charge, they had no alternative but to do that. She was then sentenced to pay 4d., the value of the turnips, 3s.6d. costs, and 6d. penalty.

"Prisoner said she had no money, and was ordered to sit down.

"Shortly after, a boy entered the court, crying bitterly, and on going towards the bench said that he had taken his shoes from off his feet and pawned them to pay for his sister. He then gave the money to the magistrate's clerk, Mr. Case, and the girl was discharged.

"We understand that the money was refunded to the boy, and he immediately went to redeem his shoes."

Shown here: Unidentified "Waif Girl," from Hidden Lives Revealed: A Virtual Archive ~ Children in Care, 1881-1918 (this fascinating website features unique archival material about poor and disadvantaged children cared for by The Waifs' and Strays' Society).

Resources

"Hopping Down in Kent," The Museum of Kent Life

"The Hoppers of Kent," BBC Legacies

Charles Darwin on Display

2008-11-23T14:46:00.007-05:00

Next year the world will mark the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species and the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth with several blockbuster exhibitions and events. Here are a few; you can find a comprehensive list (more than 100 so far) at Darwin Online. If you attend any, please feel free to provide a short review in the comments.

I've added a special set of Darwin links in the right-hand sidebar that includes selected events and online resources.

While you're thinking about Darwin, why not donate to the HMS Beagle Project, which will launch a sailing replica of the ship next year? Crewed by scientists and sailors, it will retrace the 1831-36 voyage of the original Beagle.

In the UK

Now through 31 January at University College London: "Charles Darwin of Gower Street" ~~ Darwin lived in a house on the site now occupied by UCL's Darwin Building from 1839-1842, just over two years after his return from H.M.S. Beagle's second voyage. The exhibition illustrates Darwin's life, work, and the influence of his ideas about inheritance and evolution on his contemporaries and successors. UCL's long association with the development of genetics stems from this period, and several items come from the personal libraries and papers of Sir Francis Galton, Darwin's cousin, and Karl Pearson, first Galton Professor of Eugenics. An online exhibition is available here.

Now through 19 April at the Natural History Museum, London: "Darwin" ~~ This "biggest-ever" exhibition about Charles Darwin celebrates his ideas and their impact. Discover the man and the revolutionary theory that changed our understanding of the world. See incredible, revealing, and rare exhibits, some on display for the first time. There's a cool slideshow here and an interactive map of the Beagle voyage here.

Summer 2009 at Christ's Church College, Cambridge: "Darwin at Christ's" ~~ Darwin attended Christ's College from 1828 to 1831. This exhibition, which will be held in Darwin’s former rooms in the College, will feature rare letters, paintings, and the university diary of William Darwin Fox, a second cousin of Darwin and the person who introduced him to beetle collecting.

In the US

Starts 12 February at the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut (and then moves to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge University, on 16 June): "Endless Forms: Charles Darwin, Natural Science, and the Visual Arts" ~~ Science meets art in this groundbreaking exhibition exploring Darwin’s interest in the visual arts and the vast range of artistic responses to his ideas in the later 19th century. "Endless Forms" considers how Darwin’s ideas penetrated the consciousness of the great artists of the era, inspiring visual representations of the struggle for existence, of natural attraction and sexual selection, and the origin and descent of man. This will be explored through paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, sculpture, taxidermy, and fossils, many of which will be on public display for the first time. Among the artists featured will be Monet, Degas, Cezanne, Turner, Church, Landseer, Tissot, and Rossetti.

Great Ball of Fire in County Durham, 1855

2008-11-22T07:38:00.001-05:00

From The Times, 12 December 1855 (click for larger image):

Life in Broadmoor Hospital Revealed

2008-11-20T08:10:00.006-05:00

The Berkshire Record Office in Reading has recently made nineteenth-century patient records from Broadmoor Hospital available for the first time, enabling researchers to get a better picture of life inside England's first "criminal lunatic asylum," which opened in May 1863.

The archives tell the stories of some of the hospital's most famous patients, including William Chester Minor (DNB entry here; Wiki entry here), the "Surgeon of Crowthorne" and amateur lexicographer who supplied entries for the Oxford English Dictionary while a patient at Broadmoor, and Richard Dadd (DNB entry here; Tate Britain bio here; Wiki entry here), murderer and celebrated painter of fairies and other supernatural subjects. Roderick MacLean, who shot at Queen Victoria at Windsor Station in March 1882, was sent to Broadmoor after being found not guilty by reason of insanity.

(Concerning the last, there's a famously awful poem by the even more famously awful Victorian poet William McGonagall, one stanza of which goes: "MacLean must be a madman / Which is obvious to be seen / Or else he wouldn't have tried to shoot / Our most beloved Queen.")

Some of the newly released records are included in an exhibition that runs through 22 February at the Reading Museum. "The Secret World of Victorian Broadmoor" features documents and artifacts never before seen by the public, revealing the hidden lives of the hospital's patients, doctors, and staff.

The exhibition marks the completion of Berkshire Record Office’s project to catalogue and conserve Broadmoor’s archives, and includes paintings by Dadd on loan from Bethlem Royal Hospital.

"Broadmoor is one of those collections where every page tells a story," says Dr Peter Durrant, county archivist of Berkshire. "There are many sad tales of lives destroyed by mental illness, of families broken up and never mended, of fear and paranoia.

"It is not history for the fainthearted. Yet at Broadmoor's heart is a community of patients and staff, and it is the history of this community that is now available to all."

Broadmoor, in Crowthorne, still operates as a secure psychiatric unit.

Shown here: Broadmoor Hospital (top), Minor (middle), Dadd (bottom).

Resources:

Patricia Allderidge, The Late Richard Dadd, 1817-1886 (Tate Gallery Publications, 1974).

Simon Winchester, The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (HarperCollins, 1998).

Halloween Grotesquerie at Balmoral

2008-10-28T08:50:00.003-04:00

From The Times, 4 November 1869:

"Halloween at Balmoral Castle. – This time-honoured festival was duly celebrated at Balmoral Castle on Saturday evening in a manner not soon to be forgotten by those who took part in its enjoyments.

"As the shades of evening were closing in upon the Strath, numbers of torch-lights were observed approaching the Castle, both from the cottages on the eastern portion of the estate and also those on the west. The torches from the western side were probably the more numerous, and as the different groups gathered together the effect was very fine. Both parties met in front of the Castle, the torch-bearers numbering nearly 100.

"Along with those bearing the torches were a great many people belonging to the neighbourhood. Dancing was commenced by the torch-bearers dancing a “Hulachau” in fine style to the lilting strains of Mr. Ross, the Queen’s Piper. The effect was greatly heightened by the display of bright lights of various colours from the top of the staircase of the tower. After dancing for some time the torch-bearers proceeded round the Castle in martial order, and as they were proceeding down the granite staircase at the north-west corner of the Castle the procession presented a singularly beautiful and romantic appearance.

"Having made the circuit of the Castle, the remainder of the torches were thrown in a pile at the south-west corner, thus forming a large bonfire, which was speedily augmented with other combustibles until it formed a burning mass of huge proportions, round which dancing was spiritedly carried on. The scene at this juncture was one to be long remembered by those who witnessed it. The flames of the bonfire shot up to an immense height, illuminating the Castle wall with a ruddy glare, while the figures of the dancers in their agile and grotesque movements were shown to great advantage.

"Her Majesty witnessed the proceedings with apparent interest for some time, and the company enjoyed themselves none the less heartily on that account."

Shown here: Balmoral Castle, Deeside, Scotland

Delicious Autumn

2008-10-17T08:37:00.000-04:00

"Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns." -- George Eliot

OK, OK, I hear you. A few Peeper readers have written to point out the similarities between Cardinal John Henry Newman (see post below) and the Crypt Keeper from the old HBO series Tales From the Crypt, and to beg me to replace that image in their minds with something, er, prettier.

So, as an antidote, here's one of my favorite paintings, the beautiful and serene Chill October, painted by John Everett Millais in Scotland around 1870. It's currently part of Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber's spectacular and priceless collection of Victorian art.

Millais attached the following note to the back of the painting:

"Chill October was painted from a backwater of the Tay just below Kinfauns, near Perth. The scene, simple as it is, had impressed me years before I painted it. The traveller between Perth and Dundee passes the spot where I stood. Danger on either side -- the tide which once carried away my platform and the trains which threatened to blow my work into the river. I chose the subject for the sentiment it always conveyed to my mind, and I am happy to think that the transcript touched the public in a like manner, although many of my friends at the time were at a loss to understand what I saw to paint in such a scene. I made no sketch for it, but painted every touch from nature, on the canvas itself, under irritating trials of wind and rain."

Another Millais work, Autumn Leaves (at left) seems perfect for this Friday, surrounded as I am (in Michigan) by crisp air and flaming autumn trees. Millais wanted this painting to inspire "the deepest religious reflection" in its viewers. Today, it's putting me in mind of caramel apples and candy corn. Sorry, Sir John.

Resources:

"Poetic Encounters: Kathleen Jamie on Millais's Chill October" (Tate Britain)

"Sir John Everett Millais's Landscapes -- The Pursuit of Truth and Beauty in Nature" (The Victorian Web)

The Case of the Missing Cardinal

2008-10-08T09:18:00.006-04:00

Some red tassels from his galero are apparently all that remain of Cardinal John Henry Newman's remains.

Newman (1801-1890; DNB entry here; Wiki entry here; shown at right one year before he died) was a leading cleric in the Church of England until 1845, when he converted to Roman Catholicism. His grave in a cemetery in Rednal was opened last week at the request of the Vatican, which wanted his body transferred to the Oratory in Birmingham as part of a plan to beatify Newman next year.

Newman had been buried--at his express wish--alongside his close friend, companion, and fellow convert, Father Ambrose St John, with whom he had shared a house. The two men have a joint memorial stone that is inscribed with words chosen by Newman: "Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem" ("Out of shadows and phantasms into the truth").

Gay rights activists, including Peter Tatchell, have called the exhumation an "act of religious desecration." Says Tatchell: "Newman repeatedly made it clear that he wanted to be buried next to his lifelong partner, Ambrose St John. No one gave the Pope permission to defy Newman's wishes. The re-burial has only one aim in mind: to cover up Newman's homosexuality and to disavow his love for another man." The Vatican, naturally, dismisses such claims; in August, the UK government gave permission for the exhumation to proceed.

However, when the cleric's grave was opened last week, it was found that his body had decayed completely.

From The Times, 4 October 08:

"The bones of the Victorian cardinal who is in line to become Britain’s first saint for almost 40 years have disintegrated, hampering plans to turn his final resting place into a centre of Christian pilgrimage.

"Church officials exhuming the body of Cardinal John Henry Newman were surprised to discover that his grave was almost empty when it was opened on Thursday. All that remained were a brass plate and handles from Newman’s coffin, along with a few red tassels from his cardinal’s hat.

"The discovery will not affect Newman’s case for sainthood. But officials have had to abandon plans to transfer his bones from a rural cemetery in Rednal, Worcestershire, to a marble sarcophagus at Birmingham Oratory, which Newman founded after converting to Catholicism from the Church of England.

"Thousands of worshippers were expected to descend on the Oratory from the end of this month to pay their respects to Newman and seek his intercession. Now the Oratory is left with only a few locks of his hair. Some of his remains were also to have been sent to the Vatican.

"Newman is expected to be beatified in December following claims that he was responsible for a miracle in which an American clergyman was 'cured' of a crippling spinal disorder. This would gain him the title 'Blessed,' one step short of sainthood, which will require the Vatican to verify a second miracle.

“'I have been visiting that grave since I was a very young boy,” said Peter Jennings, a spokesman for the Oratory. “I will never forget how I felt, standing there last Thursday, looking at this deep hole which had been dug out. This was the greatest churchman of the 19th century and there was nothing there, only dust.'

"There is no conspiracy theory over what has become of Newman’s remains: experts believe that damp conditions led to their complete decomposition.

"The decision to exhume Newman’s body had been fiercely resisted by gay rights campaigners because the priest had asked to be buried close to the body of Father Ambrose St John, a lifelong friend. With Newman’s grave now lying empty, the controversy is expected to fade away, sparing the Vatican any possible embarrassment over claims that the priest was a closet homosexual.

"Newman, who was born in London, was ordained in 1824 and led the Oxford Movement in the 1830s to draw Anglicans back towards their Catholic roots. He shocked Victorian society when he converted to Rome in 1845. A file on Newman’s 'cause' for sainthood was opened in 1958, but the miracle attributed to him took place only in 2001."

Resources

BBC Radio 4: "In Our Time: The Oxford Movement" (excellent; from 2006; 43 minutes)

Commonweal, 8 October 08: "The Empty Tomb: Cardinal Newman's Last Laugh?"

Dracula To Rise Again

2008-10-06T18:32:00.008-04:00

From The Guardian (6 October 08):

"Van Helsing and his intrepid band of vampire hunters might have disposed of Bram Stoker's creation Dracula more than a century ago, but a sequel to the novel by Stoker's great grand-nephew will see them under attack from the undead once again.

"Dacre Stoker delved into his ancestor's handwritten notes on the original Dracula novel to pen his sequel, Dracula: The Un-Dead -- the original name for Dracula before an editor changed the title. The novel, out next October, draws on excised characters, existing character back-stories and plot threads that were cut from Stoker's original novel, first published 111 years ago.

"The new book is set in London in 1912, a quarter of a century after the Count apparently 'crumbled into dust.' Vampire-hunter Van Helsing's protégé Dr Seward is now a disgraced morphine addict, and Quincey, the son of Stoker's hero Jonathan, has become involved in a troubled theatre production of Dracula, directed and produced by Bram Stoker himself. The play plunges Quincey into the world of his parents' terrible secrets, but before he can confront them his father is found murdered, impaled in Piccadilly Circus.

"The original is written in classic epistolary form, alternating between different narrators; the sequel adopts a more direct storytelling route. '[This] makes it more immediately accessible to a modern thriller readership, while remaining faithful to the spirit and atmosphere of the Victorian original,' said publisher Jane Johnson of HarperCollins UK.

"The book has caused a storm in the publishing world, selling for more $1m to Dutton US, HarperCollins UK, and Penguin Canada. A film version is also in the works, with shooting expected to begin next June.

"Dacre Stoker, who formerly coached the Canadian Olympic Pentathlon team and now lives in the US, is writing the novel with Dracula historian Ian Holt, a screenwriter and member of The Transylvanian Society of Dracula. The Un-Dead is the first Dracula story to be fully authorised by the Stoker family since the 1931 film starring Bela Lugosi.

"Stoker, speaking to guardian.co.uk from a fishing trip in Tennessee, said he had initially been 'a little sceptical' about the project to resurrect Bram Stoker's original themes and characters, which was dreamed up by Holt. "Growing up, all the Stokers in my generation were pretty blasé about the fact we were related to this great horror writer. At Halloween we'd get all these comments about 'are we going to get bitten if we go round to the Stokers?'," he said, admitting that he only got around to reading his great grand-uncle's novel when he went to college. 'But Ian seemed to be the real deal.'

"Stoker and Holt say they have each written equal amounts of the novel. 'When we started I was worried because Dacre had never written a novel before, but he was great,' Holt said. 'I think I've got a little bit [of my ancestor's skills] in the bloodline,' said Stoker, who spent some time researching the London of 1912 in order to write the book. 'We really needed to do the detail the way Bram did - we owed it to him,' he said.

"'At times we felt in a weird way that Bram was there with us as a third author,' added Holt. 'We had his notes, and the stories and legends passed down through the family -- we were able to give him back his legacy -- reclaim Dracula for his roots.' Stoker agreed. 'Our intent is to give both Bram and Dracula back their dignity. Maybe even more important is to give the novel's legions of loyal fans what they have been waiting over a century for . . the return of the real Dracula."

"Stoker's original Dracula, the forefather of the wave of vampire novels currently flooding the bookshops, has never been out of print since it was published in 1897. The sequel will be competing with two other high-profile vampire novels published next year: film director Guillermo del Toro's debut The Strain, about a vampiric virus that invades New York, and Justin Cronin's The Passage, about a vampire plague spawned by medical experiments."

Shown here: Bram Stoker

Salmagundi #9

2008-08-27T08:55:00.005-04:00

The weird and wonderful paintings of New York artist Travis Louie depict alternate Victorian lifeforms -- what he calls "human oddities, mythical beings, and otherworldly characters who appear to have had their formal portraits taken to mark their existence and place in society." His influences include sci-fi and horror films, circus sideshows, vaudeville, and the conventions of Victorian portraiture. "Jack Longfellow," shown at left, reminds me a bit of Gladstone. Check out the complete gallery of characters here.

Royal Holloway, University of London has announced that it is sending its world-famous collection of Victorian-era paintings on a two-year tour of the United States. The majority of the 60 canvases -- amassed in the late nineteenth century by self-made English millionaire Thomas Holloway -- have never been seen outside England. "Paintings from the Reign of Victoria: The Royal Holloway Collection, London" opens at the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, Oklahoma, then travels to the Delaware Art Museum, the Yale Center for British Art, the Brigham Young University Museum of Art, the Huntsville (Alabama) Museum of Art, the Society of the Four Arts (Palm Beach, Florida), the Cantor Center for the Visual Arts at Stanford University, the Fresno (California) Metropolitan Museum, and the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia. Learn more about Royal Holloway's outstanding collection here.

To mark the 200th anniversary of its founding, the famous tour operator and travel agent Thomas Cook is opening its archives, housed in Peterborough, to the public. The company was founded by, er, Thomas Cook, a Baptist missionary and cabinet maker from Derbyshire who began offering breaks for Temperance campaigners in the 1840s. Visitors to the archives can consult destination brochures and handbooks dating back to 1845, issues of Cook's Excursionist newspaper (1851-1902) -- first issued to promote trips to London's Great Exhibition in 1851 -- and its successor, The Traveller's Gazette (1902-39), travelers' diaries, railway timetables, business records, photos, and film. Shown above: a detail of a map showing Cook's steamer and dahabeah service on the Nile, 1897.

Just after being married for the third time, the architect A. W. N. Pugin told a friend: "I have got a first-rate Gothic woman at last, who perfectly understands and delights in spires, chancels, screens, stained glass, brasses, vestments, etc." Rosemary Hill's biography of Pugin, God's Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain, has just won the 2008 James Tait Black biography prize. Read the TLS review by John Carey here.

Salmagundi #8

2008-08-21T09:17:00.008-04:00

Victorian art: Jeremy Paxman is to present a new television series about his “first love”: Victorian art and culture. The four-part series will air on BBC1 next year. “All human life is there in Victorian paintings," Paxman says, "from the huddled poor in the workhouse to the queen at her court to the seamstress in her garret and the soldier reading letters from home. They show the Victorian world in all its moods -- swaggering self confidence and anxious doubt, cheery festivity, and aching loneliness." Paxman will use paintings such as The Derby Day by William Powell Frith and Work by Ford Madox Brown [shown above; click for a larger image] to evoke the great changes that took place in England during Victoria’s reign. He will also examine broader Victorian themes, including Gothic architecture, Mrs Beeton’s household manual, and the civic pride of Britain’s great industrial cities. Cultural landmarks include the arrival of the football league, the tabloid press, and fish and chips. Paxman will be seen travelling by canal boat and steam train, as well as pouring molten metal in a Victorian ironworks and wading through a Victorian sewer.

Charles in charge: Speaking of TV, Channel 4 in the UK is currently airing a three-part series called "The Genius of Charles Darwin." The website created in conjunction with the series is quite good, with video and audio clips, background information on the major figures in mid-Victorian debates on evolution, and an "Ask an Expert" page where you can submit a question to Professor Anthony K. Campbell, scientific director of the Darwin Centre for Biology and Medicine in Pembrokeshire. The series has a very specific point of view: it's presented by Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist and author of The God Delusion.

Pistols at ten paces: The Honourable Henry Lytton Cobbold, of Knebworth House in Hertfordshire, will travel to the town of Lytton, British Columbia, Canada, later this month to debate the founder of the International Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, Professor Scott Rice. The contest seeks the opening sentence to the worst possible novel, inspired by Bulwer-Lytton's notorious "It was a dark and stormy night." Says the Honourable Henry, who is the author's great-great-great grandson: "Bulwer-Lytton was a remarkable man and it's rather unfair that Professor Rice decided to name the competition after him for entirely the wrong reasons. He was a great champion of the arts . . . [a] politician, writer, playwright, and philosopher." Rice, who founded the contest in 1982 at San Jose State University, is having none of it: "The evil that men do lives after them, in Lytton's case in 27 novels whose perfervid turgidity I intend to expose, denude, and generally make visible." That's Bulwer-Lytton, caught in the act of purveying the perfervidly turgid, on the right; you can visit the contest's website here.

Things that would have been sold on Victorian infomercials if the Victorians had invented TV: Through 10 November, visitors to the British Library's Business and Intellectual Property Centre can see "Weird and Wonderful Gadgets and Inventions," a small display of Victorian labor-saving devices from the collection of Maurice Collins, author of Eccentric Contraptions and Ingenious Gadgets. Included in the display are a "memorandum clock" (1890), used to indicate the end of a business appointment (or, as a label points out, the end of a session in a brothel), a two-handled self-pouring teapot (1886), a clockwork burglar alarm (1852), a grenade to put out fires (1890), and a mechanical page-turner (1890).

Time machine: A Victorian time capsule was discovered recently in Exeter. Dated April 1897, it contained newspapers and letters written by two builders working on the restoration of an old Devon coaching hotel. In one letter, the writer refers to the outbreak of war between Greece and Turkey. The items are currently on display at the Red Lion Hotel, Chulmleigh. Shown on the left: Rod Taylor takes off for the past in George Pál's science fiction film The Time Machine (1960), based on the 1895 H. G. Wells novel [click for a larger image].

Cheers: Beer and architecture experts Geoff Brandwood and Jane Jephcote have identified London's most important historic pub interiors, a list that includes six lavishly decorated late Victorian hostelries: the Princess Louise in Holborn, the Red Lion in St James's, the Black Friar in, er, Blackfriars; the Salisbury in Harringay, the Prince Alfred in Maida Vale, and the Falcon in Battersea. If you're interested in historic pubs, be sure to check out the Campaign for Real Ale's National Inventory of Historic Pub Interiors, where you can find descriptions and images of these and other Victorian pubs. Shown here is my own favorite historic London pub, the Salisbury on St Martin's Lane. It's named for Robert Cecil, the third Marquess of Salisbury, who was three times the prime minister during Victoria's reign. Heaven on earth: shopping for used books up and down Charing Cross Road on a cold and rainy day and then slipping in here to warm up with cider and a traditional ploughman's lunch. (By the way . . . how does one go about becoming a "beer and architecture expert"?)

Tyntesfield Treasure

2008-08-05T09:16:00.007-04:00

So you think spring cleaning is a major undertaking at your house? Consider what National Trust staff are up against in their effort to catalogue the contents of Tyntesfield, a Grade I-listed property near Bristol that is thought to be the most complete Victorian Gothic Revival mansion in England.

From The Guardian (5 August 08):

"Cataloguing the clutter and everyday items that make up the contents of a family house is an unenviable task. But when the property in question is a 43-bedroom house that was occupied continuously by four generations of the same family 'who kept everything,' the task becomes that little bit harder.

"Since January 2004, National Trust staff and volunteers have been faced with just such a daunting project at Tyntesfield, a Grade I-listed Victorian property in north Somerset, near Bristol [BBC panoramic tour here; Wiki entry here].

"The cataloguers have just recorded their 30,000th item and expect that by the end of the painstaking process, which is likely to last another year, they will have recorded the details of more than 40,000 objects. So far the project has thrown up everything from the mundane--the plastic bags of the late Lord Wraxall, the last inhabitant of Tyntesfield before it was acquired by the trust after a remarkably successful public appeal--to the bizarre: item 29,999 was a sinister-looking coconut, hollowed out and with a face carved into it and plant fibres added for hair.

"The origin of the coconut, which sits in the gun room, only recently opened to the public, is unknown, but the Gibbs family, who occupied the house, were a well-travelled clan. Antony, who began the business empire on which Tyntesfield was built, was an international wool merchant. His sons made their fortune from importing seabird droppings for use as fertiliser from South America, while Wraxall (George Gibbs) served in the Coldstream Guards and the local Yeomanry regiment.

"Among other objects discovered at the property were a jewel-encrusted chalice, moth-eaten teddy bears, and unused Christmas crackers. A prime find has been a spare roll of original 19th-century flock wallpaper. The same design currently hangs in an anteroom and the discovery demonstrates how different the room would have looked when it was first decorated. Ruth Moppett, the inventory supervisor, described the change in colour as 'quite amazing,' from 'plush mink' on the unused roll to 'orangey gold' on the walls.

"Tyntesfield was saved for the nation in 2002 after Wraxall died and a public appeal saw more than 77,000 people donate £8.2m in 100 days. The project to buy the house also attracted the largest ever single grant, £17.4m, from the National Heritage Memorial Fund. [You can make an online donation here. -- KT]

"The spectacular Gothic revival house captured the imagination of the public, but there were critics who felt that it was not sufficiently old and distinctive to warrant the expense. However, for Tyntesfield's visitor services and enterprise manager, Rebecca Aubrey-Fletcher, the finds provide compelling justification for the purchase.

"'It's quite unique, four generations of the Gibbs family who kept everything--they really did keep everything,' she said. 'The interesting thing about it is the range of items, from the 19th-century objects to Lord Wraxall's 20th-century washing machine.'

"So far, the contents of 65 rooms have been recorded, with another 10 remaining, plus the stables and gardens. Among the items yet to be catalogued are parts of the textile collection. The plan is that eventually the fully photographed inventory will be put online so the public can view the miscellany on their computers. Conservation on the property is continuing, as is fundraising, with a target date for completion of renovation work of 2012. But the estate remains open to the public, who have flocked to Tyntesfield in increasing numbers since it was opened up weeks after being bought by the trust.

"Visitors can see almost all of the items catalogued, although there is one notable exception. An unexploded second world war bomb was found sitting on a shelf in the old servants' hall shortly after the inventory process began.

"'He [Lord Wraxall] was a soldier, so perhaps he wanted it as a souvenir,' said Aubrey-Fletcher. 'Unfortunately, that was taken away.'"

Addendum, 23 August:

According to Sarah Stevens, house manager, the conservation program has reached another milestone with the opening of two of the property's main bedrooms to the public for the first time. "We're still finding evidence of how the rooms would have looked in the past," she says. "So, for now, we're not plumping up the pillows and arranging the furniture. Instead we're showing them almost 'as found.'"

Pillow Talk

2008-08-04T09:08:00.005-04:00

Further to my last post about the recent auction of some of Queen Victoria's undergarments...

Over the weekend Peeper reader Imelda Murphy of Nashua, New Hampshire, got in touch to let me know that she had been the high bidder for Queen Victoria's nightgown.

From The New Hampshire Union Leader (1 August 2008):

"In the scheme of things, Imelda Murphy's $10,000 nightie was a steal.

"Without it, her recently penned play, The Quane's Laundry, would just be another work of historical fiction about royal bloomers and the fallen women who washed them one fateful night in turn-of-the-century Ireland.

"In the heat of auction, Murphy, of Nashua, broke her budget but scored the lace-trimmed sleepwear, once worn by England's Queen Victoria, for 5,500 sterling -- about $10,800 U.S. dollars.

"'It was like I was in a trance,' Murphy said of her winning moment.

"She was listening to the auction in Derbyshire, England, by telephone Wednesday morning. She could hear the sound of the competition -- and all the media buzz -- in the background as she relayed the auction action to her husband, Manchester lawyer Frank Murphy, who was within earshot clutching his wallet.

"Murphy said she learned of the historic auction items while surfing the Internet a few weeks ago.

"A native of Dublin, Ireland, Murphy felt like she already knew Queen Victoria intimately, having researched her life and her historic final trip to Ireland in April 1900. Owning the royal undies would be like icing on the cake -- sort of.

"Murphy's play was inspired by a newspaper clipping about the queen's trip to Ireland, during which Victoria's laundry was in fact sent out to be washed at the Magdalene Asylum, an institution designed to reform prostitutes by having them process laundry all day.

"'The Quane's Laundry' -- the word 'quane' meant to portray the Irish peasantry pronunciation of 'queen' -- focuses on one woman's story, Nellie Clifton, who after 39 years living at the laundry, finally comes clean about the incident that landed her there: a scandalous affair with the queen's eldest son, Bertie -- eventually to be known as King Edward VII.

"In real life, Nellie Clifton, an Irish actress, did indeed have a scandalous affair with the future King of England. The compelling story line involving the queen's laundry was conjured from Murphy's imagination.

"Amid the play version of the scandal emerges a story of a poor Irish girl, born during "The Night of the Big Wind" in 1839, orphaned during Ireland's famine, and taken in by the Wrens of the Curragh -- prostitutes who serviced military men.

"Innocent Nellie, through a twist of fate, ends up in Bertie's bed and is sent off as punishment to the Magdalenes at age 22, where she spends the rest of her life.

"So naturally, Murphy sees winning the nightgown as providence -- luck of the Irish, if you must.

"Luck or godsend, Murphy feels she was meant to own the nightgown just as she was meant to write this particular play.

"'That's what I told my husband -- it was meant to be. Of course, all day long, after winning the auction, friends were calling to ask if I'd managed to pick him up off the floor yet,' Murphy said of the aftershocks of the pricey peignoir.

"Pre-auction estimates for all three royal garments, auctioned by Hansons Auctioneers, were so low Murphy fully expected to bid on and win all three items -- a chemise, a pair of bloomers and the nightgown.

"'My husband and I thought, wouldn't that be lovely for my play? My thought was to have the garments in the foyer so when people come out of the theater at intermission they can have a look at her real clothes. I was going to swoop up all three of them, not realizing the rest of the world wanted them, too,' Murphy said.

"Murphy said during the six months she spent writing the play she found a unique way to connect with the spirit of the deceased monarch.

"'I only dressed in black. Queen Victoria was in mourning for most of her life and I felt better and more comfortable wearing black when I was writing the play in the evening, by candlelight,' Murphy said.

"She's already made progress toward her goal of seeing her play produced -- through recent connections made with some Irish actors in New York City, who are coming here next week to read through the play.

"She has enjoyed the creative process and is optimistic that her compelling story and juicy dialogue will be enough to propel her play from obscurity to -- who knows, says Murphy -- maybe the big screen."

Shown here: The royal nightgown won by Murphy.

Fit for a Queen

2008-07-31T08:47:00.013-04:00

As reported by the Associated Press:

"A pair of Queen Victoria's bloomers, with a 50-inch waist, were snapped up for $9,000 by a Canadian buyer at a central England auction Wednesday.

"Auctioneer Charles Hanson said Queen Victoria's underpants belonged to 'a very big lady of quite small stature with a very wide girth.' She was said to be 5 feet (1.52 meters) tall. The handmade cotton knickers, which date to the 1890s, bear the monogram 'VR' for Victoria Regina. They are open-crotch style, with separate legs joined by a drawstring at the waist, a popular style in the late Victorian era.

"The royal drawers belonged to a family in western England whose ancestor was a lady-in-waiting for the queen.

"'These pants, considering their provenance and pedigree, are very exciting,' Hanson said. 'They are monogrammed and crested and we know that they are hers.'

"Also up for auction was Queen Victoria's chemise, with a 66-inch bust, which sold for $8,000. Her nightgown sold for $11,000.

"Before the auction, Hanson valued the underwear at $1,000, while the chemise and nightgown were valued at $600 each."

Additional information via The Globe and Mail (Canada):

The buyer, Barbara Rusch of Toronto, has collected Queen Victoria memorabilia of all kinds for about 25 years, but has never been able to bid on a pair of her bloomers before.

"This is a wonderful, wonderful find for me today and a great acquisition, a great treasure to add to my collection," she said.

Rusch also owns a pair of Queen Victoria's pink hand-embroidered stockings.

Read the BBC story here, The Guardian story here, and The Telegraph story here. The Mail Online previewed the auction here.

Shown here: Auction assistant Sam Rhodes models the royal bloomers.

Further Reading

Casey Finch, "'Hooked and Buttoned Together'": Victorian Underwear and Representations of the Female Body," Victorian Studies, Spring 1991, pages 337-363.

Leigh Summers, Bound to Please: A History of the Victorian Corset (Oxford: Berg, 2001).

It's Jelly, Baby

2008-07-24T09:27:00.012-04:00

Sam Bompas and Harry Parr of London create unique sculptures of British architectural icons such as St Paul's Cathedral, the Millennium Bridge, and the Eden Project. Their medium? Why, that ubiquitous Victorian foodstuff: jelly.

Bompas and Parr say that their work occupies a niche "in the space between food and architecture . . . jelly is the perfect site for an examination of food and architecture due to its uniquely plastic form and the historic role it has played in exploring notions of taste."

The Victorian period was the golden age of jelly and other gelatin-based foods such as aspics. Mrs Beeton's Dictionary of Everyday Cookery (1865) includes four pages of jelly recipes, although she notes that jellies "are not the nourishing food they were at one time considered to be." Still, they looked spectacular on the table or sideboard.

Shown above is part of the Victorian breakfast with jelly created by Bompas and Parr for Warwick Castle's 2007 celebration of nineteenth-century Christmas traditions. The 12-course, 300-ingredient, 4000-calorie feast included Scotch woodcock (scrambled eggs made with egg yolks and cream spread on toast with anchovy paste) and haddock in puff pastry. Read the BBC report here and watch the YouTube video here.

Earlier this month, as part of the London Festival of Architecture, Bompas and Parr sponsored a jelly mould competition and workshop that led to the creation of 1000 wobbling jellies consumed at a banquet at University College London.

Resources:

Historic Food: Jellies and Creams

Victorian Writers' Rooms

2008-07-17T08:55:00.007-04:00

One of my favorite features of the online version of The Guardian is a page called simply "Writers' Rooms." Once a week or so, a photo and brief description are provided of the writing den of a famous novelist, biographer, or literary critic. These used to be primarily living authors; recently some historical figures have been included.

Check out:

The spartan shed behind a modest house in Ayot St Lawrence, built on a platform that rotated with the sun, in which George Bernard Shaw churned out his voluminous correspondence.

The Jacobean beamed study lined with Indian rugs in which Rudyard Kipling wrote, watched by a stern portrait of his wife, Carrie.

Charles Darwin's study at Down House, Kent, in which On the Origin of Species first saw the light of day (shown above).

The "perfection of warmth, snugness, and comfort" that was the Haworth Parsonage parlour in which Charlotte Brontë wrote.

Contemporary writers profiled who are of particular interest to Victorianists include the novelists A. S. Byatt (Possession), Sarah Waters (Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith) and Colm Tóibín (The Master); the biographer Michael Holroyd (Bernard Shaw, vols. 1-4); and the historian Eric Hobsbawm (The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital, and The Age of Empire).

Salmagundi #7

2008-07-16T08:41:00.004-04:00

Steampunk music? Hmm. Take a listen.

Times reporter Hannah Betts (left) plays Victorian housemaid for 24 hours under the supervision of English Heritage and lives (barely) to tell the tale.

Robert Downey Jr. will play Sherlock Holmes in Guy Ritchie's upcoming film of the same name. Reportedly inspired as much by Lionel Wigram's comic book as by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's classic stories, the film will begin shooting this October for a scheduled 2010 release.

The story of a murder case that gripped Victorian England has won Britain's Samuel Johnson Prize for Nonfiction. Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr Whicher: Or The Murder at Road Hill House tells the story of an 1860 child murder that tested the mettle of one of Scotland Yard's first detectives and inspired writers including Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle. Francis Saville Kent, the three-year-old son of a factory inspector, was stabbed in the chest and had his throat slashed. His body was found in a toilet at the family's country house. With jealous half-siblings, a dead mother who had gone mad, a cruel governess turned stepmother and a staff of gardeners, stable-hands, and servants in the mix, the crime scandalised Victorian society. Theories about the killing were debated at dinner parties and the murder fuelled the 1860s phenomenon of the "sensation" novel. Detective Inspector Jack Whicher, one of the original eight Scotland Yard detectives, was put in charge of the case and concluded that the murder was an inside job. Whicher was 45, shabby and grizzled, and the country went wild for him, but the case left him a broken man.

Jack the Ripper and the East End

2008-05-28T11:23:00.009-04:00

Via EDP24 News (24 May 2008):

With gore tours all the rage -- and near-permanent queues outside the revolting London Dungeon, our very own theme-park chamber of horrors -- it was inevitable that the East End should finally capitalise on its most despicable attraction. So a big welcome to jolly Jack the Ripper.

The Museum in Docklands, distant satellite of the wonderful Museum of London, has struggled to win big audiences to date. But all that is about to change with the blockbuster exhibition "Jack the Ripper and the East End." And quite beyond the thrills for those who enjoy being chilled, this saga remains a compelling story and in the new museum survey it is very well told.

Inevitably dramatic, the Ripper show puts the East End centrestage -- and, truth to tell, that can be even more shocking than the gruesome facts of the Whitechapel murders between April 3, 1888, and February 13, 1891. Although at least seven other murders and violent attacks on women have been connected to Jack the Ripper by various authors and historians, only five victims are universally attributed to a single serial killer: Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelley -- the degree of mutilation becoming more marked with each cutthroat killing.

With exhibits such as Charles Booth's meticulously drawn poverty maps, previously unseen photographs of late-Victorian Whitechapel, and oral history recordings from local residents growing up at the time of the murders, the Museum in Docklands display shines a piercing light into East End slums and the grim lives of their inhabitants. It also reveals how the sensation of the murders shocked public opinion and galvanised politicians into finally doing something about the hellish slums in the shadow of the world's richest city.

We follow the tale through police files, newspaper reports, and letters from members of the public both well-intended and malicious. Before our forensic era -- and with such things as criminal profiling and fingerprinting poorly understood or else unknown -- the detective hunt used a range of pseudosciences, philosophies, and superstitions, including spiritualism. The scapegoating of immigrants, and Jews most particularly, was a dire diversion in an investigation that famously saw no killer, or killers, convicted. In view of the diligent savagery of the knifeman (or men), lunatics, medical students, doctors, and butchers were also targeted. Bloodhounds were brought in, but the police still had a great deal to learn.

The media too was in serious need of reform, with fierce competition between newspapers producing flights of fantasy that would shame even today's tabloids. The name of Jack the Ripper was signed on a letter sent to the Central News Agency, one of many thousands received by the police and the papers. Many were well-intentioned, but some were deliberate hoaxes. The worst letter "From Hell" contained half a kidney and the claim that the other half had been fried and eaten. Just such an organ was missing from the corpse of poor Catherine Eddowes. DNA testing would have solved that macabre mystery.

While "Jack" has been identified variously as a deranged member of the royal family, a Blackheath medic, and now, thanks to American crime writer Patricia Cornwell, the painter Walter Sickert, he exists in the same legendary world as Jekyll and Hyde and Sherlock Holmes. The new show splendidly sorts horrible facts from some frightful fiction.

"Jack the Ripper and the East End" is at the Museum in Docklands until 2 November.

Shown here: An illustration from Le Journal Illustré (13 February 1891) depicting the murders of prostitutes by Jack the Ripper in London; image: Museum in Docklands.

Resources

Casebook: Jack the Ripper

"The Enduring Mystery of Jack the Ripper" (Metropolitan Police Service)