Fuseli and the Modern Woman: Fashion, Fantasy, Fetishism

Abstract

within antiquarianism and the related field of bibliography, and the idea of a public sphere as a jostling encounter between high and low was increasingly occluded” (226). Sarah Sophia Banks’s Grand Jubilee Pass Ticket and collection points to the function of “the ticket system” in structuring “the micro-politics of sociality,” marking access, inclusion, and exclusion (233). Russell brilliantly demonstrates “different interpretations of the condition of England in 1814” (237) by comparing Banks’s ephemera with the choices made by the tailor Francis Place, a member of the London Corresponding Society and a radical social reformer. Banks’s Soho Square and Place’s Charing Cross represent different worlds of “archival domiciliation of printed ephemera in Regency London” (234). While Banks collected “fashionable sociability and ephemeral print publicity” (237), Place collected evidence of “sceptical reporting... in cuttings from radical newspapers” (238) and of the Jubilee’s aftermath, including the catalogue of the “wood, fixtures, and fittings of the Temple of Concord and the Royal Booth” (237). While Banks had privileged access to the Royal Booth, Place documented its dismantling and sale in lots. A folded poster is repurposed as a book cover to collect handbills in a codex form whose materiality captures “the poster’s radical alterity to the book” (238). Collected, preserved, and defined within the horizon of the book in the age of print, in the digital age ephemera take on new configurations. Whether or not digital culture can recognize “the diversity of the paper spectrum” remains to be seen. The dream of an “impossibly unmediated,” ephemeral absolute (254) feels like a new incarnation of the rhetoric of Romanticism. Meanwhile, Piranesi Unbound and The Ephemeral Eighteenth Century rematerialize the codex as a material repository of practice.