In 2011–12 Tate Britain mounted a major exhibition dedicated to the painter and printmaker John Martin (1789–1854). His most sensational painting, Belshazzar’s Feast (1820), was displayed alongside works illustrating how others capitalized on its success through imitation and copying (Fig. 1). These were all prints of some form except one, the ‘most striking’, painted on a large piece of glass (Fig. 2).1 As a curiosity closely associated with Martin’s early career as a glass painter, this has a long-established presence within the written history of Martin’s work.2 In the accompanying publication the
{"title":"Seeing Red","authors":"S. Rush","doi":"10.16995/ntn.2897","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/ntn.2897","url":null,"abstract":"In 2011–12 Tate Britain mounted a major exhibition dedicated to the painter and printmaker John Martin (1789–1854). His most sensational painting, Belshazzar’s Feast (1820), was displayed alongside works illustrating how others capitalized on its success through imitation and copying (Fig. 1). These were all prints of some form except one, the ‘most striking’, painted on a large piece of glass (Fig. 2).1 As a curiosity closely associated with Martin’s early career as a glass painter, this has a long-established presence within the written history of Martin’s work.2 In the accompanying publication the","PeriodicalId":90082,"journal":{"name":"19 : interdisciplinary studies in the long nineteenth century","volume":"15 12 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-08-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86958929","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article presents stained glass as an important source of material evidence for attitudes to monarchy in Victorian Britain. It argues that expressions of veneration for Victoria by different religious constituencies were not merely instinctual and affective but considered and erudite. The ways in which different Anglican constituencies in particular marked key moments in Victoria’s reign within their churches made her person and throne a symbol for their ecclesiastical visions. The article supports its argument by offering a close, contextual reading of one such memorial, Charles Eamer Kempe’s Diamond Jubilee window (1898) in St Saviour’s, Southwark. Although nominally intended as a memorial to the long dead Prince Albert, it made only oblique reference to him. Instead, the window’s patron and the church’s rector William Thompson described the four figures depicted in its lights — Pope Gregory, King Ethelbert, Stephen Langton, and William of Wykeham — as ‘illustrating the union of Church and State’. Its message that the national Church had always been the indivisible ally of godly monarchs since the dawn of English history was the more powerful when read against Kempe and Thompson’s broader scheme for the redecoration of the restored St Saviour’s. Together they created a series of windows which not only interwove the English monarchy with the cosmic salvation narrative of Christianity but represented the church as a benevolent and inclusive patron of eminent writers, thinkers, and philanthropists in Southwark.
{"title":"‘Daylight upon magic’: Stained Glass and the Victorian Monarchy","authors":"Michael Ledger‐Lomas","doi":"10.16995/ntn.2896","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/ntn.2896","url":null,"abstract":"This article presents stained glass as an important source of material evidence for attitudes to monarchy in Victorian Britain. It argues that expressions of veneration for Victoria by different religious constituencies were not merely instinctual and affective but considered and erudite. The ways in which different Anglican constituencies in particular marked key moments in Victoria’s reign within their churches made her person and throne a symbol for their ecclesiastical visions. The article supports its argument by offering a close, contextual reading of one such memorial, Charles Eamer Kempe’s Diamond Jubilee window (1898) in St Saviour’s, Southwark. Although nominally intended as a memorial to the long dead Prince Albert, it made only oblique reference to him. Instead, the window’s patron and the church’s rector William Thompson described the four figures depicted in its lights — Pope Gregory, King Ethelbert, Stephen Langton, and William of Wykeham — as ‘illustrating the union of Church and State’. Its message that the national Church had always been the indivisible ally of godly monarchs since the dawn of English history was the more powerful when read against Kempe and Thompson’s broader scheme for the redecoration of the restored St Saviour’s. Together they created a series of windows which not only interwove the English monarchy with the cosmic salvation narrative of Christianity but represented the church as a benevolent and inclusive patron of eminent writers, thinkers, and philanthropists in Southwark.","PeriodicalId":90082,"journal":{"name":"19 : interdisciplinary studies in the long nineteenth century","volume":"231 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-08-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82752667","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Review of Aubrey Beardsley at Tate Britain","authors":"Sasha Dovzhyk","doi":"10.16995/NTN.2942","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/NTN.2942","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":90082,"journal":{"name":"19 : interdisciplinary studies in the long nineteenth century","volume":"17 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-08-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"80818380","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Although nineteenth-century writers frequently conceived of rail travel as a dream space of collaged, fleeting, and disjunctive experiences, the transition from everyday life to travel dream state has been rarely explored. This article uses the Flinders Street Station portal (Melbourne, Australia, 1900–09) and its large stained glass lunette to examine the primary role of the station portal as a material and psychological gateway to the railway dream space. I locate the Flinders Street stained glass within a particular historical moment when a communication and technological turn produced fertile convergences between aesthetics and technology. I argue that stained glass was regarded as a medium of privileged proximity to psychological states and perceptual conditions. In the fin-de-siecle period these long-standing associations were called upon as Arts and Crafts theory reconfigured design and stained glass as media for storing, processing, and transmitting memory. New conceptions of the artwork as a medium enabled art to become an instrument for attuning spectators to aesthetic and perceptual states. Art could stimulate and awaken the spectator’s memory. Racial thinking on memory entered this discourse. The Flinders Street glass was commissioned during a key moment of nation building in Federation Australia, and I argue that a racial logic underpinned the iconographic and phantasmatic qualities of the glass. This article locates stained glass within the media, optical, communications, and other technologies of the nineteenth century and suggests future directions for stained glass scholarship, including work in settler contexts.
{"title":"Time and Telegraphy: Nineteenth-Century Contexts for Stained Glass","authors":"K. Burns","doi":"10.16995/ntn.2902","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/ntn.2902","url":null,"abstract":"Although nineteenth-century writers frequently conceived of rail travel as a dream space of collaged, fleeting, and disjunctive experiences, the transition from everyday life to travel dream state has been rarely explored. This article uses the Flinders Street Station portal (Melbourne, Australia, 1900–09) and its large stained glass lunette to examine the primary role of the station portal as a material and psychological gateway to the railway dream space. I locate the Flinders Street stained glass within a particular historical moment when a communication and technological turn produced fertile convergences between aesthetics and technology. I argue that stained glass was regarded as a medium of privileged proximity to psychological states and perceptual conditions. In the fin-de-siecle period these long-standing associations were called upon as Arts and Crafts theory reconfigured design and stained glass as media for storing, processing, and transmitting memory. New conceptions of the artwork as a medium enabled art to become an instrument for attuning spectators to aesthetic and perceptual states. Art could stimulate and awaken the spectator’s memory. Racial thinking on memory entered this discourse. The Flinders Street glass was commissioned during a key moment of nation building in Federation Australia, and I argue that a racial logic underpinned the iconographic and phantasmatic qualities of the glass. This article locates stained glass within the media, optical, communications, and other technologies of the nineteenth century and suggests future directions for stained glass scholarship, including work in settler contexts.","PeriodicalId":90082,"journal":{"name":"19 : interdisciplinary studies in the long nineteenth century","volume":"25 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-08-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74624312","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The science of chemistry revitalized the art of stained glass in nineteenth-century Europe, recovering old techniques, developing new materials, and discovering new artistic methods. However, rather than examining the vital technical function science served, this article considers the role chemistry played in the discourse surrounding the revival. Close analysis of a variety of texts reveals that chemistry was a critical means by which stained glass practitioners and commentators positioned the revived art in the broader artistic culture. This article first considers the ways in which different parties across France and Britain employed chemistry to mediate modern stained glass’s relationship with its medieval past. The second half of the article charts the diverging responses to this intertwining of art and science and demonstrates that as the century progressed the contribution of chemistry to the medium was disavowed in France and embraced in Britain.
{"title":"Recovered or Perfected: The Discourse of Chemistry in the Nineteenth-Century Revival of Stained Glass in Britain and France","authors":"Thea Goldring","doi":"10.16995/ntn.2893","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/ntn.2893","url":null,"abstract":"The science of chemistry revitalized the art of stained glass in nineteenth-century Europe, recovering old techniques, developing new materials, and discovering new artistic methods. However, rather than examining the vital technical function science served, this article considers the role chemistry played in the discourse surrounding the revival. Close analysis of a variety of texts reveals that chemistry was a critical means by which stained glass practitioners and commentators positioned the revived art in the broader artistic culture. This article first considers the ways in which different parties across France and Britain employed chemistry to mediate modern stained glass’s relationship with its medieval past. The second half of the article charts the diverging responses to this intertwining of art and science and demonstrates that as the century progressed the contribution of chemistry to the medium was disavowed in France and embraced in Britain.","PeriodicalId":90082,"journal":{"name":"19 : interdisciplinary studies in the long nineteenth century","volume":"172 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-08-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73946090","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Afterword","authors":"J. Rignall","doi":"10.16995/ntn.2000","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/ntn.2000","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":90082,"journal":{"name":"19 : interdisciplinary studies in the long nineteenth century","volume":"18 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82708611","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Vincent Van Gogh had a deep and abiding interest in the fiction of George Eliot and her mode of depicting the ordinary matter of ‘provincial life’ in luminous detail. This article argues that Eliot’s influence on Van Gogh can be seen in the formal, and not just thematic, radicalism shared by both. How might we read Van Gogh’s works as an ekphrastic reworking of Eliot’s insistence on the full colour spectrum of aesthetic experience lurking within the apparently dull and everyday and the need for radical shifts in perspective in the journey of life; a shared quest for the sacred within a secularized world? This underacknowledged debt that crosses media, periods, and national boundaries brings into focus the radical experimentalism of Eliot’s works and the redemptive forms of provincial realism. Eliot’s use of settings in rural or provincial life in the recent ‘just’ past is often read as nostalgic and conceived of as part of a conservative aesthetics of her realism. We tend to think of Van Gogh’s work, conversely, as part of that broad shift towards a cosmopolitan and experimental modernism in the twentieth century, as writers and artists looked beyond Britain for new ways of seeing the world. The story of Van Gogh’s passion for Eliot’s art reminds us that the forms of nineteenth-century realist provincialism have within them a means of radically transforming the appreciation of the everyday and stimulating modernity at large.
{"title":"George Eliot and Van Gogh: Radiant Realism","authors":"R. Livesey","doi":"10.16995/ntn.1936","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/ntn.1936","url":null,"abstract":"Vincent Van Gogh had a deep and abiding interest in the fiction of George Eliot and her mode of depicting the ordinary matter of ‘provincial life’ in luminous detail. This article argues that Eliot’s influence on Van Gogh can be seen in the formal, and not just thematic, radicalism shared by both. How might we read Van Gogh’s works as an ekphrastic reworking of Eliot’s insistence on the full colour spectrum of aesthetic experience lurking within the apparently dull and everyday and the need for radical shifts in perspective in the journey of life; a shared quest for the sacred within a secularized world? This underacknowledged debt that crosses media, periods, and national boundaries brings into focus the radical experimentalism of Eliot’s works and the redemptive forms of provincial realism. Eliot’s use of settings in rural or provincial life in the recent ‘just’ past is often read as nostalgic and conceived of as part of a conservative aesthetics of her realism. We tend to think of Van Gogh’s work, conversely, as part of that broad shift towards a cosmopolitan and experimental modernism in the twentieth century, as writers and artists looked beyond Britain for new ways of seeing the world. The story of Van Gogh’s passion for Eliot’s art reminds us that the forms of nineteenth-century realist provincialism have within them a means of radically transforming the appreciation of the everyday and stimulating modernity at large.","PeriodicalId":90082,"journal":{"name":"19 : interdisciplinary studies in the long nineteenth century","volume":"21 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79177348","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article centres on George Eliot’s allusions to music by two long-dead composers, George Frideric Handel and Henry Purcell. References to Handel are frequent in her writing and reverence for his oratorios was ubiquitous in the Victorian period. However, Handel’s music turns out to be of far wider resonance for Eliot than is represented by the chorus-loving Caleb Garth in Middlemarch. In The Mill on the Floss, first Handel’s and then Purcell’s music takes possession of Eliot’s heroine. What was this music’s role in Eliot’s assimilation of tragedy and myth within the realist novel? What could she expect her contemporary readership to make of allusions to composers whose music was already old at that time, and how can they continue to illuminate the experience of readers today? To help explore that last question, the article discusses specific musical repertoire where this can be identified with a reasonable degree of likelihood. It marks a new departure in combining analysis of musical allusion with an investigation of how listening and reading experiences might interact for readers now as well as in the Victorian era. While we can never listen to the identical sounds that Eliot heard or hear this music with nineteenth-century ears, embedded sound-links enable readers to reflect on what difference it makes to their experience of Eliot’s fiction to hear performances of some of the repertoire that she, and her original readership, had in mind. This innovation is intended to inspire reflection on potentially important relationships between the experiences of reading and listening.
{"title":"From ‘the great Handel chorus’ to ‘wild passion and fancy’: Listening to Handel and Purcell in The Mill on the Floss","authors":"D. Correa","doi":"10.16995/ntn.1934","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/ntn.1934","url":null,"abstract":"This article centres on George Eliot’s allusions to music by two long-dead composers, George Frideric Handel and Henry Purcell. References to Handel are frequent in her writing and reverence for his oratorios was ubiquitous in the Victorian period. However, Handel’s music turns out to be of far wider resonance for Eliot than is represented by the chorus-loving Caleb Garth in Middlemarch. In The Mill on the Floss, first Handel’s and then Purcell’s music takes possession of Eliot’s heroine. What was this music’s role in Eliot’s assimilation of tragedy and myth within the realist novel? What could she expect her contemporary readership to make of allusions to composers whose music was already old at that time, and how can they continue to illuminate the experience of readers today? To help explore that last question, the article discusses specific musical repertoire where this can be identified with a reasonable degree of likelihood. It marks a new departure in combining analysis of musical allusion with an investigation of how listening and reading experiences might interact for readers now as well as in the Victorian era. While we can never listen to the identical sounds that Eliot heard or hear this music with nineteenth-century ears, embedded sound-links enable readers to reflect on what difference it makes to their experience of Eliot’s fiction to hear performances of some of the repertoire that she, and her original readership, had in mind. This innovation is intended to inspire reflection on potentially important relationships between the experiences of reading and listening.","PeriodicalId":90082,"journal":{"name":"19 : interdisciplinary studies in the long nineteenth century","volume":"93 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81410246","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article focuses on one of Eliot’s last and strangest pieces of writing: ‘Shadows of the Coming Race’ (the penultimate chapter of Impressions of Theophrastus Such). It argues that ‘Shadows’ was strikingly prescient — less in its imagining of future machine intelligence than in its prediction of how the cultural debate has developed around AI and AI’s consequences for humanity. By reading ‘Shadows’ alongside a near contemporary work, Ernst Kapp’s Elements of a Philosophy of Technology (1877), the article seeks to cast light on the peculiarly demanding style of an essay that projects strong characters, given to hyperbolic arguments, and quite uninterested in ‘the wisdom of balancing claims’. In Kapp’s conception of language and culture as tools, whose technological function becomes clearer if we consider the etymological connection of ‘character’ with engraving and printing, we may find a model for what Eliot is doing: putting the technology of her art visibly to the fore, in order to gain critical purchase on the challenges of imagining the future.
{"title":"Artificial Intelligence: George Eliot, Ernst Kapp, and the Projections of Character","authors":"H. Small","doi":"10.16995/ntn.1993","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/ntn.1993","url":null,"abstract":"This article focuses on one of Eliot’s last and strangest pieces of writing: ‘Shadows of the Coming Race’ (the penultimate chapter of Impressions of Theophrastus Such). It argues that ‘Shadows’ was strikingly prescient — less in its imagining of future machine intelligence than in its prediction of how the cultural debate has developed around AI and AI’s consequences for humanity. By reading ‘Shadows’ alongside a near contemporary work, Ernst Kapp’s Elements of a Philosophy of Technology (1877), the article seeks to cast light on the peculiarly demanding style of an essay that projects strong characters, given to hyperbolic arguments, and quite uninterested in ‘the wisdom of balancing claims’. In Kapp’s conception of language and culture as tools, whose technological function becomes clearer if we consider the etymological connection of ‘character’ with engraving and printing, we may find a model for what Eliot is doing: putting the technology of her art visibly to the fore, in order to gain critical purchase on the challenges of imagining the future.","PeriodicalId":90082,"journal":{"name":"19 : interdisciplinary studies in the long nineteenth century","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83021009","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article considers two works by Eliot, Silas Marner, her most provincial of novels, and Daniel Deronda, the most cosmopolitan, through the lens of hospitality. Both novels repeatedly stage scenes in which a stranger arrives, and is welcomed or excluded by their hosts. Through these scenes, both novels examine questions regarding refuge, asylum, and settlement, as well as the politics of kinship and the exclusion of women from democratic society. This enables us to read Daniel Deronda as an ‘inquiry’ into the conditions that make the act of colonial settlement seem to be inevitable.
{"title":"Hospitality in Silas Marner and Daniel Deronda","authors":"J. McDonagh","doi":"10.16995/ntn.1991","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.16995/ntn.1991","url":null,"abstract":"This article considers two works by Eliot, Silas Marner, her most provincial of novels, and Daniel Deronda, the most cosmopolitan, through the lens of hospitality. Both novels repeatedly stage scenes in which a stranger arrives, and is welcomed or excluded by their hosts. Through these scenes, both novels examine questions regarding refuge, asylum, and settlement, as well as the politics of kinship and the exclusion of women from democratic society. This enables us to read Daniel Deronda as an ‘inquiry’ into the conditions that make the act of colonial settlement seem to be inevitable.","PeriodicalId":90082,"journal":{"name":"19 : interdisciplinary studies in the long nineteenth century","volume":"195 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-03-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"74725124","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}