Pub Date : 2022-10-20DOI: 10.1080/08905495.2022.2144207
Amanda Lowe
ABSTRACT In the early months of 1843, Edmund Ruffin began a geological tour of South Carolina to survey the landscape and the current state of plantation farming across the region. Commissioned by governor James Hammond, Ruffin’s survey aimed to diagnose the decline in plantation productivity in the state. In the diary that he kept during his tour, Ruffin describes stories of nature spirits called “simbi,” whom enslaved and indigenous inhabitants believed guarded limestone springs in the south-east of the state. This paper argues that in the accounts of simbi, which are embedded in a geological survey that aims to increase the efficiency of resource extraction, Ruffin’s reader glimpses a competing geology composed of stratified historical, environmental, and phenomenological meanings. The paper recontextualizes simbi in order to suggest how truly destabilizing a simbi metaphysics is to Ruffin’s own ecological project. By drawing on a rich body of recent religious studies of the African diaspora, the paper suggests possible ecological claims being made in these simbi stories, and that these claims are deeply rooted in knowledge about land use, sustainability, inheritance, and privatization that unsettle the plantation system. The paper aims, in other words, to more thoroughly perceive the network of relationships between enslaved persons, the fountains, spirits, the dead, and the African continent co-present with Ruffin’s geology. It also examines the interpenetration of Ruffin’s political and geo-agricultural writings in order to illustrate how he grounds his racial politics in his understanding of ecology.
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Pub Date : 2022-10-20DOI: 10.1080/08905495.2022.2144249
Alissa R. Adams
During the 1830s, a collection of unusual prints of Napoleon Bonaparte began to appear throughout France and Europe. Their strangeness derived from the fact that, although they honored the memory of the Emperor and can be described as images of him, he does not appear in the works directly. Instead, he takes the form of a blank space. These prints, which this study will refer to as “ silhouette-ghost prints, ” depict the island of St. Helena. Viewers are shown a fi ctionalized version of Bonaparte ’ s grave, where mourners weep at the gravestone as the sun sets in the distance. Despite the melodramatic nature of this subject matter, the most striking characteristic of the prints is the con fi guration of tree trunks, branches, and twigs that create an outline of the Emperor. During the Bourbon Restoration (1815 – 1830), such hidden images of the Emperor were often used to evade censorship, for the carefully hidden silhouettes often took time to detect and allowed Bonapartists to collect images of their idol while evading government scrutiny (Kroen 2000, 190 – 191). However, the silhouette-ghost prints appeared after 1830, when King Louis-Philippe lifted censorship of Napoleon ’ s image and even actively promoted it (Marrinan 1988, 158 – 164). For this reason, their use of the silhouette form likely is not meant for political subterfuge. Other works, known as puzzle prints, used hidden silhouettes as brainteasers for their audiences. Certain of these, especially depic-tions of Lord Byron, closely resemble the silhouette-ghost prints (Jones 2008, 22). Here again, however, the prints diverge from a likely model. For even in the most subtle examples, the Emperor ’ s form is usually obvious and even fi guratively highlighted through the use of captions or titles. The prints ’ use of the silhouette form to honor Napoleon ’ s memory, then, requires elucidation. We
{"title":"Adaptation and layers of influence in Napoleonic silhouette-ghost prints","authors":"Alissa R. Adams","doi":"10.1080/08905495.2022.2144249","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2022.2144249","url":null,"abstract":"During the 1830s, a collection of unusual prints of Napoleon Bonaparte began to appear throughout France and Europe. Their strangeness derived from the fact that, although they honored the memory of the Emperor and can be described as images of him, he does not appear in the works directly. Instead, he takes the form of a blank space. These prints, which this study will refer to as “ silhouette-ghost prints, ” depict the island of St. Helena. Viewers are shown a fi ctionalized version of Bonaparte ’ s grave, where mourners weep at the gravestone as the sun sets in the distance. Despite the melodramatic nature of this subject matter, the most striking characteristic of the prints is the con fi guration of tree trunks, branches, and twigs that create an outline of the Emperor. During the Bourbon Restoration (1815 – 1830), such hidden images of the Emperor were often used to evade censorship, for the carefully hidden silhouettes often took time to detect and allowed Bonapartists to collect images of their idol while evading government scrutiny (Kroen 2000, 190 – 191). However, the silhouette-ghost prints appeared after 1830, when King Louis-Philippe lifted censorship of Napoleon ’ s image and even actively promoted it (Marrinan 1988, 158 – 164). For this reason, their use of the silhouette form likely is not meant for political subterfuge. Other works, known as puzzle prints, used hidden silhouettes as brainteasers for their audiences. Certain of these, especially depic-tions of Lord Byron, closely resemble the silhouette-ghost prints (Jones 2008, 22). Here again, however, the prints diverge from a likely model. For even in the most subtle examples, the Emperor ’ s form is usually obvious and even fi guratively highlighted through the use of captions or titles. The prints ’ use of the silhouette form to honor Napoleon ’ s memory, then, requires elucidation. We","PeriodicalId":43278,"journal":{"name":"Nineteenth-Century Contexts-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-10-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48571801","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-20DOI: 10.1080/08905495.2022.2140993
D. Holmes
some fled London to the country, mirroring a change described by Defoe (1722) during the plague of 1665. It may be that these émigrés will never return. London is still polluted, but not by coal smoke, and more recent times have seen the city troubled by nitrogen rich fogs in winter and photochemical smog in summer. While many pollutants are at lowered concentrations, London still struggles to meet the World Health Organization guidelines. Scientists examining environmental change have increasingly turned to the historical record. In recent years there has been a flurry of studies, for example, on the impact of historical pollutants on the changing rate of damage to building façades in cities. The rate of damage has decreased as the levels of smoke and sulfur dioxide in the air have declined (Brimblecombe and Grossi 2009; Grøntoft, 2021; Ionescu et al. 2012). Such studies remind us that our interest in long term change in the environment benefits from an understanding of history and the importance of historical materials as a source of data. History seems more important than ever, but also leaves us with a sense of the legacy that the early reformers in London created; they did not solve the air pollution problem, so much as ensure that we saw it as a problem to be solved.
{"title":"The Belle Époque: a cultural history, Paris and beyond","authors":"D. Holmes","doi":"10.1080/08905495.2022.2140993","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2022.2140993","url":null,"abstract":"some fled London to the country, mirroring a change described by Defoe (1722) during the plague of 1665. It may be that these émigrés will never return. London is still polluted, but not by coal smoke, and more recent times have seen the city troubled by nitrogen rich fogs in winter and photochemical smog in summer. While many pollutants are at lowered concentrations, London still struggles to meet the World Health Organization guidelines. Scientists examining environmental change have increasingly turned to the historical record. In recent years there has been a flurry of studies, for example, on the impact of historical pollutants on the changing rate of damage to building façades in cities. The rate of damage has decreased as the levels of smoke and sulfur dioxide in the air have declined (Brimblecombe and Grossi 2009; Grøntoft, 2021; Ionescu et al. 2012). Such studies remind us that our interest in long term change in the environment benefits from an understanding of history and the importance of historical materials as a source of data. History seems more important than ever, but also leaves us with a sense of the legacy that the early reformers in London created; they did not solve the air pollution problem, so much as ensure that we saw it as a problem to be solved.","PeriodicalId":43278,"journal":{"name":"Nineteenth-Century Contexts-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-10-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42707226","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-10-20DOI: 10.1080/08905495.2022.2144243
Jordan T. Watkins
Joseph Smith ’ s early followers seemed to exhibit a dual historical consciousness that rendered sacred pasts both foreign and familiar. To make room for Smith ’ s new scriptural productions in the Bible culture of Protestant America, some among them insisted that historical di ff erences separated their present from the biblical pasts. In an 1832 letter, Reverend Benton Pixley recorded a sermon by “ Mormonite ” preacher Sidney Rigdon, in which Rigdon proclaimed that the New Testament “ epistles are not and were not given for our instruction, but for the instruction of a people of another age and country, far removed from ours, of di ff erent habits and manners. ” Rigdon thus con-tended “ that it is altogether inconsistent for us to take the Epistles written for that people at that age of the world, as containing suitable instruction for this people at this age of the world. ” Rigdon ’ s critique included the “ Gospels, ” which he described as “ so mutilated and altered as to convey little of the instruction which they should convey. ” These assertions about historical di ff erence and distance, and about time ’ s cor-rupting in fl uence, countered Protestant assumptions regarding the Bible ’ s enduring relevance. Rigdon ’ s reasoning rested on Smith ’ s revelatory claims. Rigdon declared that “ a new revelation is to be sought. – is to be expected, – indeed is coming forthwith ” (Pixley 1832, 177). In this way, the belief in new revelation could encourage a sense of distance from biblical pasts. 1
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Pub Date : 2022-10-20DOI: 10.1080/08905495.2022.2140995
Patrick Colm Hogan
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Pub Date : 2022-10-20DOI: 10.1080/08905495.2022.2144238
Jessica Straley, Leslee Thorne-Murphy
The 36th annual meeting of the Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies association – held in Salt Lake City and co-hosted by the University of Utah and Brigham Young University – invited participants to dig into the theme of “Nineteenth-Century Strata.” Celebrating the breathtaking geological stratigraphy that constitutes the state of Utah, from the red rock of the Colorado Plateau to the snowy peaks of the Wasatch Mountain Range, as well as the rich diversity of the peoples and species that have made Utah their home, the conference sought to showcase the varied ways that nineteenth-century scholarship can think about literal and figurative layerings. Our conference opened with a welcome reception at the Natural History Museum of Utah, a copper-toned and terraced building nestled beautifully into the natural contours of the surrounding foothills. Inside, the Museum houses a vast array of specimens from Utah’s prehistoric past, and our guests enjoyed having the galleries all to ourselves in the after-hours reception. We walked among the colossal skeletons of Utahraptor, Triceratops, and other ancient species, learned about the bounty of fossils trapped in the gooey mud of the nearby Cleveland Morrison Formation, and, from the museum’s grand balcony, watched the sunset over Salt Lake City, whose deep prehistory as Lake Bonneville is still visible in the sedimentary layers of the Pleistocene rock that hugs its curves. The more recent temporal dislocation was not lost on us either. Our conference was originally proposed for 2021 but, like so many of our plans, was disrupted by the COVID outbreak. The previous INCS conference in Los Angeles in early March 2020 was likely the last in-person humanities conference in the United States before the pandemic drove us online, and INCS 2022 in Salt Lake City may have been one of the first conferences to return face-to-face. We were very lucky. At the end of March, case numbers were low, vaccines had become widely available, our attendees were vigilant about masking in sessions, and spring temperatures allowed us to explore outdoors. The opportunity to engage with each other in ways that we had missed during the previous two years was indescribably invigorating, both professionally and personally. When the organizing committee chose the theme of “Nineteenth-Century Strata,” we hoped to attract papers on geology and deep time; stratifications of gender, class, and race; the rise of cities and urban architecture; layering in the visual arts through
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Pub Date : 2022-10-20DOI: 10.1080/08905495.2022.2144215
Ashley Miller
When American spiritualist Andrew Jackson Davis wrote in 1868 that there is “an inhabitable zone, or a circular belt of refined and stratified matter in the heavens which recently has been denominated ‘The Summer Land,’” he drew upon advancements in astrology to theorize a very material afterlife (1868b, 18). Davis’s foundational spiritualist theology describes heaven as a Swedenborgian series of ascending spheres, each one increasing in perfection. The afterlife as Davis depicts it is one of endless development, refinement, and progress. Abolished is the idea of heaven as eternal rest: in this deeply Victorian paradise, everything from atoms to immortal souls is working its way upward toward God. And there is perhaps no better guide to the strata of the Summerland than the spirit of an infant. This article investigates the fate of the infant in the Victorian afterlife. I argue that the figure of the infant plays a crucial role in the writings of nineteenth-century spiritualists on both sides of the Atlantic. Believers insisted that lost infants – including ones who died at birth – still had the chance to develop and progress in the afterlife. Depictions of the Summerland offered consolation to grieving parents by describing the nurseries and schools in which the spirits of infants were raised. Those heavenly educational systems were even imported back to earth: the Progressive Lyceum – the spiritualist equivalent of Sunday School – was modeled on visions of education in the Summerland. Yet the spirits of infants who communicated with spiritualists often sent messages that challenged Victorian beliefs about maternity and parentage. Infants in the Summerland raise important questions about what it means to be alive, what it means to be born and unborn – questions that shaped Victorian ideas about reproductive rights, the afterlives of which we still live with today.
1868年，美国通灵学家安德鲁·杰克逊·戴维斯（Andrew Jackson Davis）写道，“天空中有一个可居住的区域，或一个由精细和分层物质组成的环形带，最近被命名为‘夏日之地’”，他利用占星术的进步，推测了一个非常物质的死后（1868b，18）。戴维斯的基础唯心主义神学将天堂描述为瑞典人的一系列上升球体，每一个都在完美中不断增加。正如戴维斯所描绘的那样，来生是一个不断发展、完善和进步的过程。天堂是永恒的安息地的想法被废除了：在这个维多利亚时代的天堂里，从原子到不朽的灵魂，一切都在向上走向上帝。也许没有什么比婴儿的精神更能引导我们了解Summerland的阶层了。这篇文章探讨了婴儿在维多利亚时代死后的命运。我认为，婴儿的形象在大西洋两岸19世纪的唯心主义者的作品中扮演着至关重要的角色。信徒们坚持认为，失去的婴儿——包括那些在出生时死亡的婴儿——仍然有机会在死后发育和进步。对Summerland的描述通过描述养育婴儿灵魂的托儿所和学校来安慰悲伤的父母。这些天堂般的教育系统甚至被带回了地球：进步学园——相当于周日学校的唯心主义者——是以Summerland的教育愿景为模型的。然而，与通灵论者交流的婴儿的灵魂经常发出挑战维多利亚时代关于母性和亲子关系的信仰的信息。Summerland的婴儿提出了重要的问题，即活着意味着什么，出生和未出生意味着什么——这些问题塑造了维多利亚时代关于生殖权利的思想，我们今天仍然生活在这些权利的后遗症中。
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Pub Date : 2022-10-20DOI: 10.1080/08905495.2022.2146898
Jennifer Tucker
ABSTRACT “Chemical Affinities” explores how chemistry and visual culture were entwined in the long nineteenth century, focusing here on the role of photography as both a material cause of pollution and the aesthetic means to visualize the pollution that it caused. Chemical layering was a common dimension of all nineteenth-century photography and photographic printing, making photography a by-product of the chemical revolution of the nineteenth century, no less than fertilizer and paper. Drawing on hundreds of visual representations (drawings, engravings, photographs, and graphs), most of them located in local, scientific, and business archives in northern England, my research approaches photography as a material, economic, and social process: an extractive resource that raises questions about the global future alongside recording the tangible present and arrested moments of the past. Here, I examine the nineteenth-century industry in Widnes, Cheshire, as a particularly representative and vexed site of photography’s chemical effects on land and people, as well as its instrumentation in documenting and recording – and in so doing promising to expose and moderate – those effects. The article concludes with some reflections on the value of photographic archives and critical industrial heritage studies for historical understanding of nineteenth-century chemical industry and its legacies.
{"title":"Chemical affinities: photography, extraction, and industrial heritage in nineteenth-century northern England","authors":"Jennifer Tucker","doi":"10.1080/08905495.2022.2146898","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2022.2146898","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT “Chemical Affinities” explores how chemistry and visual culture were entwined in the long nineteenth century, focusing here on the role of photography as both a material cause of pollution and the aesthetic means to visualize the pollution that it caused. Chemical layering was a common dimension of all nineteenth-century photography and photographic printing, making photography a by-product of the chemical revolution of the nineteenth century, no less than fertilizer and paper. Drawing on hundreds of visual representations (drawings, engravings, photographs, and graphs), most of them located in local, scientific, and business archives in northern England, my research approaches photography as a material, economic, and social process: an extractive resource that raises questions about the global future alongside recording the tangible present and arrested moments of the past. Here, I examine the nineteenth-century industry in Widnes, Cheshire, as a particularly representative and vexed site of photography’s chemical effects on land and people, as well as its instrumentation in documenting and recording – and in so doing promising to expose and moderate – those effects. The article concludes with some reflections on the value of photographic archives and critical industrial heritage studies for historical understanding of nineteenth-century chemical industry and its legacies.","PeriodicalId":43278,"journal":{"name":"Nineteenth-Century Contexts-An Interdisciplinary Journal","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-10-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47905387","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-08-08DOI: 10.1080/08905495.2022.2106718
J. Dillion
ABSTRACT This paper takes as its starting point an important conversation held between Thomas Hardy and Leslie Stephen in 1875 in which they discussed the “unreality of time” (Maitland 1906, 203). This idea informs Hardy’s (1873) novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes, in which the amateur geologist Henry Knight hangs from a cliff and before him flashes a vision of deep time, which culminates in an eye-to-eye encounter with a trilobite. Several critics have argued for Leslie Stephen’s “A Bad Five Minutes in the Alps” (1872), published just weeks before, as a source of inspiration for Hardy’s scene. I investigate these claims, and argue that Gideon Mantell’s Wonders of Geology (1848) was a greater influence. Drawing on the work of Patricia Ingham and Adelene Buckland, I consider the differences between these texts, and explore the implications of Hardy’s removing the gaze of Mantell’s “higher intelligence” and replacing his teleological view of time with a backwards slide down the evolutionary scale. This prefigured Thomas Henry Huxley’s fear that with the cooling of the sun, humankind would eventually devolve into “low” and “simple” organisms “such as the Diatom of the arctic and antarctic ice” (1894, 191). This paper also draws on Hardy’s copy of The Wonders of Geology, now in the Beinecke, and contested questions around its provenance. Finally, I conclude that this scene raises questions of scale that are never fully resolved and that these questions haunt the rest of Hardy’s oeuvre.
本文以托马斯·哈代和莱斯利·斯蒂芬在1875年的一次重要对话为出发点，讨论了“时间的非现实性”(Maitland 1906, 203)。哈代(1873)的小说《一双蓝眼睛》(A Pair of Blue Eyes)中就体现了这一观点。在小说中，业余地质学家亨利·奈特(Henry Knight)被吊在悬崖上，眼前闪现出一幅深时空的景象，最终以与一只三叶虫的对视而告终。几位评论家认为，几周前出版的莱斯利·斯蒂芬(Leslie Stephen)的《阿尔卑斯山上糟糕的五分钟》(A Bad Five Minutes in the Alps, 1872)是哈代这一场景的灵感来源。我调查了这些说法，并认为吉迪恩·曼特尔的《地质奇观》(1848)影响更大。借鉴帕特里夏·英厄姆和阿德琳·巴克兰的作品，我考虑了这些文本之间的差异，并探讨了哈代移除了曼特尔“更高智慧”的目光，用进化尺度上的倒退取代了他的目的论时间观的含义。这预示了托马斯·亨利·赫胥黎的担忧，即随着太阳的冷却，人类最终将退化为“低级”和“简单”的生物，“如北极和南极冰上的硅藻”(1894,191)。本文还引用了哈代的《地质奇观》副本(现藏于拜内克)，并对其出处提出了争议。最后，我得出结论，这个场景提出了从未完全解决的规模问题，这些问题困扰着哈代的其余作品。
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Pub Date : 2022-08-08DOI: 10.1080/08905495.2022.2107417
Lucy Hanks
“I am in the Hornet’s nest with a vengeance” (Gaskell 1997b, 453) is how Elizabeth Gaskell described the reception of her 1857 biography, The Life of Charlotte Brontë (LCB). It is a fitting image to describe the indignation which met some of the memoir’s portraits of people associated with Charlotte Brontë during her life. The fact that Gaskell considered this reaction as “vengeance” indicates how, in the process of writing the memoir, she believed that her personal reputation was tied up and associated with Brontë’s to the point that she felt victimised by the controversy surrounding it. However distressing the memoir’s reception was for Gaskell, though, it was not unexpected. She used the “Hornet’s nest” image to explain how this social awareness influenced her sometimes inconsistent approach to writing the memoir in a letter after its publication:
伊丽莎白·盖斯凯尔（Elizabeth Gaskell，1997b，453）描述了她1857年的传记《夏洛特·勃朗特的一生》（the Life of Charlotte Brontë，LCB）受到欢迎的情景。这是一个恰当的形象来描述回忆录中一些与夏洛特·勃朗特有关的人在其一生中所表现出的愤慨。盖斯凯尔认为这种反应是“复仇”，这一事实表明，在撰写回忆录的过程中，她认为自己的个人声誉与勃朗特的声誉息息相关，以至于她觉得自己受到了围绕这本回忆录的争议的伤害。尽管这本回忆录受到了盖斯凯尔的欢迎，但这并不意外。她在回忆录出版后的一封信中用“黄蜂窝”的形象解释了这种社会意识是如何影响她有时不一致的写作方式的：
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