Second Essay Due Three Weeks from Now

On March 24, your second brief essay is due by the start of class (upload your file to the shared folder on the blog). This is your opportunity to activate some of your interests and questions about the PRB. For example, I've lately been interested in William Holman Hunt's conversion from atheism to a fairly dogmatic Christianity, and what affect it had on his work. You should find your own angle. What do you want to learn more about? 

Papers should be double-spaced, 5-7 text pages, using either MLA or Chicago documentation style. This essay requires the use of secondary research, at least three different sources (not including our textbook). Make sure your final essay has an arguable core idea. It shouldn't be obvious or impossible to disagree with. For those of you who are skeptical about the whole PRB enterprise, this is your chance to make your case. But make your case using a specific lens, avoid generalization.  Revise and edit. Remember to give your essay a meaningful title.

The choice of subject is up to you. Your non-binding proposal  (one typed paragraph) is due next week, March 10, at the start of class. 

Send questions to me at kcs@gwu.edu.

Much Better (but not exhaustive) Inventory of PRB Work Online

The tumblr source for PRB images that we used for last week's in-class exercise turned out to be radically unreliable, so I deleted it from the blog. I didn't see how faulty the tags were until I started to look a little bit more closely. Let this serve as a cautionary tale. The best source for this kind of thing is probably Art-Stor, but it requires a log-in (easy to do from a Corcoran/GW computer). It seems that wikiart.org isn't bad. At least it's better than effyeahprb.

Ford Madox Brown's Manchester Town Hall Murals

Ford Madox Brown's Manchester Town Hall Murals (1879-1893) make for ideal "case-studies" of the after-effects of the PRB on English art in the last quarter of the 19th century. The 12 paintings operate as a kind of "Stations of the Cross" telling the story of Mancunian civic pride and leadership in the Industrial Revolution (no depiction of the famous Peterloo slaughter, for instance). Eight of the twelve were painted directly on the wall in a quasi-fresco technique. The other four were painted on canvas and then mounted directly on the wall. 

Today in class, each student is going to randomly select one of the twelve murals and subject it to a close reading. What is going on in the narrative (the story depicted)? What is going on in formal terms (how is it painted, composed, colored, etc)? How does your mural embody or challenge some of the major ideas and themes explored by the PRB? Look closely. "Read" the symbols and cues. Magnify the image. Click on the relevant background information. Be prepared to make a brief (5 minutes) presentation to the class after about 30 minutes of preparation. 

Here are two good sources for information about Brown's murals:

Victorianweb.org

Julie Codell's essay "Ford Madox Brown, Carlyle, Macaulay and Bakhtin: The Pratfalls and Penultimates of History" appeared in the journal Art History (September 1998).

Abstract

Ford Madox Brown’s Manchester Town Hall mural series was the site of late Victorian contentions about both history and history painting. A long-standing discourse of history, represented in Manchester’s many local histories and guidebooks, debated the ‘facts’ and significance of Manchester’s history and contributions to British history. Brown’s murals participated in this debate at the very moment of the city’s new emergence as an independent municipality with its own self-government and new rebuilding projects.

Brown’s murals commented on this discourse through imagery and the accompanying narratives he wrote. Unlike his earlier narratives for paintings, these narratives were not about Brown’s ideas and intentions. Instead, they incorporated the new historical language of satire, displacement and factual ambiguity. Brown was an avid reader of Carlyle and Macaulay who, despite their differences, shared innovative methods; a criticism of cause and effect; and a focus on quotidian, collective, and anonymous actors and motives. Brown employed their methods, including passages from Carlyle’s French Revolution, to satirize official history. His selection of ‘minor’ details and figures foregrounded the selection process itself and problematized historical content, as did Carlyle’s and Macaulay’s methods.

Brown’s relationship to history painting, however, was not satirical. He admired Dyce, Maclise and the German Nazarenes without imitating their idealism. Brown eschewed high seriousness, diluted important events with banal incidents, put crucial events in the street rather than the court, and juxtaposed ‘heroes’ with anonymous passers-by to interrogate notions of idealism and heroism. Respectfully quoting Maclise’s works through visual reversals, Brown conveyed his own `reversal’ away from idealism toward the revisionism of Carlyle and Macaulay.

The murals authored and authorized Manchester history. Bakhtin’s themes of the carnival, novelization, surprise and the ‘word with a loophole’ illuminate how the murals forged a new civic history built on collectivity, working-class contributions, and corporate capital. Radical in his support for the working class, Brown was also nationalistic in his expression of Manchester’s English pedigree and mercantile hegemony. His murals express innovations and contradictions in their melding of Manchester history into broader Victorian discourses of history, history painting, British hegemony and the Empire, while offering criticism of cherished Victorian ideals and revealing the depths of Brown’s own intellectual comprehension of changing Victorian notions of history.

BBC PRB Documentary

Here's a link to part one of the three part BBC documentary. Tim Barringer, the author of our textbook, makes several appearances. Consider the question I asked last week: How does Ken Russell's 1967 film inform us about the PRB compared to this somewhat standard documentary approach? 

Pre-Raphaelitism in 21st century Popular Culture

Last week I showed the PRB cat paintings, one of many many reincarnations (re-imaginings?) of PRB art and culture. It's an interesting phenomenon. One of my favorite fan websites is Pre-Raphernalia by Raine Szramski. It looks like she's starting to post with greater frequency in 2016. Let's keep our fingers crossed. 

Wombat-mania in Victorian London

 It would be a grand overstatement to say that there was a "wombat craze" throughout Victorian society, but in the subculture of the PRB, wombats were indeed quite the thing. Here's a link to an engaging lecture (text not video) on the subject. My wombat's name is Top Jr., a nod to Rossetti's famous wombat cheekily named after Morris. 

Ken Russell's "Dante's Inferno""

 Perhaps the best re-telling (re-imagining?) of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was made for the BBC in 1967 by experimental filmaker Ken Russell. Oliver Reed stars as Rossetti. Here he is popping out of the bonfire at the start of the film. The film on youtube suffers from poor sound quality, so it's helpful to read the captions. Other film adaptations have been far less successful. Desperate Romantics appeared in 2009. Widely panned, its six hour-long episodes gets almost all of the details wrong (and the music is insufferable). Here's a link to episode 2.

Elizabeth Siddal's Death & Exhumation

The amazing opening scene of Ken Russell's Dante's Inferno (1967) conflates a scene from 1869 (Rossetti digging up the grave of his dead wife to retrieve a manuscript of his poems) with a scene wholly from imagination (rioters in 1848 throwing Joshua Reynolds paintings into a bonfire). 

Learn more about the actual exhumation at this link.

Milk in Tea, Before or After the Pour?

Luxury brand Fortnum & Mason (est. 1707) makes the debate quite clear in class terms:

Victorian Workers in 1900

All I know about this splitscreen video/film is that it was uploaded to Youtube by a guy named Guy Jones and purports to be from the year 1900. The added-in sound is unforgivable.

Victorian Women Writers Project

A Project from Indiana University

Check out the genre view.

Blanchard Jerrold and Gustave Dore's "London: A Pilgrimage"

After thinking about Chambers' Book of Days (see previous post), I wanted to compare it to Jerrold and Dore's London: a Pilgrimage  (1872). However, there appears to be no full-text facsimile on either Hathitrust or Google Books. This proves the continuing value of actual brick and mortar libraries.

Here is a link to a collection of 27 of Dore's iconic images from a web exhibition at the British Museum. However, the images are divorced from the text that originally appeared alongside them. Of the 180 images in the original, only 27 were chosen. Why? Are they more dramatic? How could they have left out the final image, the "New Zealander" artist sketching the dystopian ruins of central London (below)? 

 There are at least two editions of London: a Pilgrimage in print. The Dover edition presents just the images. The Anthem edition has the advantage of including the text and images in their original layout, though in a smaller page format. 

Even though the book wasn't particularly well-received when it was published in 1872, it has become a kind of touchstone for the popular imagination of Victorian London, especially its poverty and inequality.

"Chambers' Book of Days": Victorian Buzzfeed

Here is a link to the calendar page of the online Chambers' Book of Days, a compendium of trivia and oddments that was first published in London and Edinburgh in 1864. New editions came out in 1866 and 1869, but they remained essentially the same. 

Consider the page for today, February 11: A brief list of births, deaths, and information about Christian history associated with the day followed by seven unrelated brief articles about British and world history, art, culture, and a number of other sometimes obscure areas of knowledge.  

Here is a link to the scan of Harvard's copy of the first volume of the 1864 edition from Hathitrust.

Tips and Ideas for Next Week's Short Essay

I know that for many of you, this assignment is frustratingly open. In other words, it's radically non-prescriptive. I apologize half-heartedly for this.

Your short essay (5-7 double-spaced pages, not including illustrations, works cited page, and other appendices) is due next week at the start of class. Now that we've finished Matthew Sweet's somewhat breezy history of Victorian popular culture, it's time to take a deeper look. Which chapter intrigued you the most? Why? Chase down some of the primary sources that Sweet mentions. What else is there to learn? How does it relate to our cultural milieu in 2016? This is not primarily a research paper (although it does require some research); it's a critical thinking paper.

One of many great online sources is BRANCH. The essays are academic but not primarily for specialists. Click on the tab at the top, "Topic Clusters". This might be a good place to generate ideas.

As always, send me an email message if you would like an informal consultation.

Remember to revise and edit your paper carefully (details matter). Give it a meaningful title. Submit your paper via email to kcs@gwu.edu no later than 9:45 next week.

New Google Drive Folder for Victorian Avant-Gard

Under the heading "Required Reading" in the column on the right, you'll find "Assignments, PDFs, Etc." The link should work. I just uploaded some files from Inventing the Victorians because some students still haven't received the book.

Victorian-Era Maps of London

London Maps

In-Class Reports on Inventing the Victorians

Today in class we're breaking into small groups to explore primary materials from the Victorian period on Google Books and Hathitrust. Here's how it will work: with your partner choose one of the assigned chapters for today. I've roughly summed them up below.

Ch 4, serial murder
Ch 5, drugs, opium, Chinese
Ch 6, manners, etiquette
Ch 7, home decor
Ch 8, freak shows

Look through the chapter for primary sources;they're usually printed in italics. Now go to Googlebooks and/or Hathitrust and try to find the precise edition mentioned in Sweet's text. Examine this primary text closely. What additional information does it bring to light? Be prepared to present your findings to the class.

Hello Victorian Avant-Gardistes...

Class will meet tomorrow morning as scheduled. Because of the disruption in mail service, some of you might still be waiting for your copy of Inventing the Victorians. Let me know if that's your situation and I'll send you a pdf. Thanks.

Blondin at Smithsonian Online

Here's an article that gives a little more detail on the exploits of the great Blondin.

Other than recount his extraordinary and terrifying athletic feats, why does Matthew Sweet feature Blondin so centrally in his book Inventing the Victorians? What does he signify in terms of Sweet's thesis? 

The Great Exhibition represented in the pages of Punch Magazine

In class this week we'll be looking closely at a large number of images, mostly woodcuts and wood-engravings from Volume XX and XXI (1851) of one of the most influential and innovative magazines of the Victorian era. Here is a link to a full-text digital facsimile that will give a better and more full understanding of the text/image relationships. Every image in today's slideshow references the Great Exhibition and the Crystal Palace in one way or another. Sometimes it's quite literal, and at other times the connections are obscure to viewers separated by 165 years and the Atlantic Ocean. Through the months of 1851 we can see a trajectory of hope and curiosity, amazement, spectacle. saturation, exhaustion. In the pages of Punch everything was laced with brutal humor. Close inspection of the frontispiece to Volume XXI (above) shows the jousting horses of "Satire", "Wit", and "Justice" beating down "Hum-bug" and "Twaddle".  The image below is one of dozens that depicts the Crystal Palace as a backdrop to social, cultural, and political events of the day. 

The VictorianWeb has a great collection of information about the Great Exhibition.  From the British Library, see also Dickinson's Comprehensive Pictures of the Great Exhibition of 1851 (1854).