Full Steam Ahead

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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"

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

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

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

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

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"

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

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

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

"...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

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

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 . . .

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

"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

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

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"

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)