May 06, 2005

Heeere's Harriet!

Looking a little grainy, it's true; but no lady is at her best just after having dealt with the rakish despoiler of her younger sister. Let us never speak of it again.

May 05, 2005

Jessica Alba to play Elizabeth Bennet

Planning to read my book this evening instead of blogs — a novel idea — but had to pass on this tidbit: there is apparently to be a Jane Austen action figure, though if it is at all realistic I suppose we are to understand "action" loosely. She comes, one hears, with a quill pen, a tiny copy of P&P, and a writing desk, and will debut this summer (news from AustenBlog via Emily Friedman on C18-L, who wonders if this mightn't be a sign of the apocalypse).

And here is a lovely group-authored mash-up of, I kid you not, Austen and The Terminator:

The tall and handsomely dressed figure of Mr. Terminus stood a moment with an expression of resolution upon his features, as does a man contemplating a plunge from a precipice, or perhaps a proposal of marriage (the two carrying nearly equal terror to most). Then he began to relate the most astonishing tale Patience had ever heard.

"As you know, Miss Patience," he began, "I am, to a great degree, a machine; my exterior, and some portions of my interior, are made as are those of Mr. Connor and yourself, but the greater part is metal and other materials, some of which you would recognize, and others of which you and even the wise men of your universities would know nothing at all."

And there is a movie, Pride and Extreme Prejudice: "The CIA and the KGB both pursue a former operative (Brian Dennehy) who seemingly has become unstable."

Finally, there was a wonderful satiric book cover I saw some years ago, but it doesn't seem to be on the net, though I did find someone's description:

"My favorite take on PRIDE AND PREJUDICE sequels was the parody cover illustration for (the non-existent) PRIDE AND EXTREME PREJUDICE, showing an elegantly-dressed 18th-century lady holding a smoking gun--a new Bennet sister 'Dirty Harriet' who tells Lady Catherine 'I have no objection, your ladyship, to your proceeding, since, by so doing, you shall render my afternoon quite agreeable.'"

Perhaps it is the apocalypse.

April 30, 2005

Dangerous books

Pseudo-Adrienne at Alas, a blog posts, via Bitch | (S)HITLIST, about an interesting study by a grad student that suggests a correlation between reading too many romantic stories, and being passive and hence susceptible to violence in relationships. Senior academics at the student's institution are making no claims: "Susan's work is an interesting study which is sure to spark debate, but further research is required in this area." But in various guises, this is an idea that has had real legs. I am doing a reading course this summer with one of our graduate students about the novel of female education in the eighteenth century. Inappropriate reading is a recurrent theme: I'm thinking Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote, in which the heroine's mind was turned by the reading of chivalric romances. An interesting preemptive defence against criticism: this is a moral novel, qualitatively different from those trashy novels. Eliza Haywood has a character, an older man, seduce a young girl by giving her ... yes, bad literature. And it works.

Bonus links:

Charlotte Ramsay Lennox
The Charlotte Lennox Page
Literary Encyclopedia: Lennox, Charlotte
The Life of Harriot Stuart by Charlotte Lennox

April 24, 2005

Ye Olde Linkes

A Variety of Ladies' Head Dresses, The New lady's magazine (1786). Click for larger image.

Ladies' headdresses at the Beinecke (via Jim Chevalier on C18-L).

Sharon posts a multitude of links on crime. She writes, "Has to come around sooner or later in an election campaign." Indeed. She has also scored a copy of Hanging not punishment enough (1701) and plans to make it available. Please do!

The Gutenberg Bible held at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin is available on CD-ROM. G. Zombie has one. Here it is online. There are a number of other copies online: two at the British Library, which one can compare; the Göttingen Gutenberg Bible (ca. 1454); and the Keio Gutenberg Bible. Bible links from the University of Calgary. See also The Oliver Cromwell Website and The Goodspeed New Testament Manuscript Collection (both via Plep).

Libraries as fingerprints at Historiological Notes.

The fantastic architectural drawings of Achilles G. Rizzoli (1896-1981) at Giornale Nuovo.

The Opium Wars (via Plep).

Britain's 18th-c canal system being restored (via Metafilter).

Click for larger image.

April 17, 2005

Big old books

14 Fatum Subscribat Eliza / Princess Elizabeth / A blank tablet. Click to enlarge.

Minerva Britanna, or A Garden of Heroical Deuises, furnished, and adorned with Emblemes and Impresa's of sundry natures, Newly devised, moralized, and published, By HENRY PEACHAM, Mr. of Artes. (London, 1612), the "sophisticated and intriguing" emblem book posted online as a student project — how wonderful! (via Bibi).

More emblems at Giornale Nuovo: Johann Theodor de Bry and Pieter Bruegel the Elder, and a reprint of Théâtre d’Amour (1620).

Johnson's Dictionary: an appreciation by Verlyn Klinkenborg in the NY Times (free; reg. required). Heads up from Kevin Berland on C-18L. (See also John Carey's review, in the Times Online, of Dr. Johnson's Dictionary: The Extraordinary Story of the Book that Defined the World by Henry Hitchings, and Samuel Johnson's Dictionary: Selections from the 1755 Work that Defined the English Language edited by Jack Lynch.)

Seeing is Believing: 700 years of scientific and medical illustration: online exhibition based on 2000 exhibit at the NY Public Library (via Exclamation Mark).

Notes on the Book of the Revelation by John Nelson Darby (1876; 2nd ed.) (via Plep).

And, old but not so big: Masterpieces in Miniature: Italian MSS from the middle ages and Renaissance (also via Plep).

April 10, 2005

Two Romantic links

Elizabeth Inchbald. Click image for larger view.

The William Blake Archive has announced the publication of the electronic edition of Blake's 116 water-color illustrations to Thomas Gray's poems.

And this is marvellous: Before Victoria: Extraordinary Women of the British Romantic Era: an online exhibition related to an exhibition at the NY Public Library. (Which I wil be able to see! It is on until July 30 and we will be there in June). Here are two items which relate to Life Mask, a novel on which I posted a few weeks ago: a satire on Georgiana Cavendish, and an engraving of the Ladies of Llangollen (n.b. they have a cat). And be sure to see Anne Wagner's Friendship Album: the entire album has been digitalized, and it is beautiful.

(both from C18-L).

Finis. Anne Wagner album. Click image for larger view.

April 03, 2005

Those were the days

The Juvenile Miscellany (1826-1836): Cover for 1828. Click for larger image.

Marking papers, still fighting a cold, hovering over at The Valve checking for comments on my comments, wondering how this ALSC issue is going to play out, particularly as I am an unregenerate race-class-gender kinda gal — but, the show must go on!

"Quack, Quack, Quack: The Sellers of Nostrums in Prints, Posters, Ephemera & Books." Doesn't seem to be much online, but here are some links to photos in the media.(via BoingBoing).

Visit Giornale Nuovo for misteraitch's post about George Psalmanazar (1679?-1763):

a man of uncertain origins who came to claim that he was a native of the island of Formosa (i.e. Taiwan). So little was known about this island in Europe at the turn of the eighteenth century, that Psalmanazar got away with an elaborately fanciful back-story, one which he eventually expanded into a marvellously inventive book-length Historical and Geographical Description of Formosa, which was published in London in 1704.

Read the post and see the novel illustrations of "Formosans" and their putative language.

A Small Gallery of Magazine Covers: covers of nineteenth-century children's magazines (lots of great illustrations, including the one above); old magazine covers from Nostalgiaville; "Magazine Covers and Cover Lines: An Illustrated History" by Gerald Grow, Ph.D. (has some nice late 18thc and 19thc covers) (all via growabrain. Check the post for other magazine links).

The original handwritten MSS of Madame Bovary will be online next year (also via growabrain. Be sure to see his other book links).

The Persistent Puppet: Pinocchio's Heirs in Contemporary Fiction and Film by Rebecca West. A lovely article about the century-old Italian tale and its successors (via Plep).

Ramelli's Machines: original drawings of 16thc machines (via Plep).

Literary Landscapes:

The rise of the English novel during the 18th century coincided with a growing pride in the landscape of Britain. As novels portrayed society, so maps and topographical views delineated the grandeur of Nature and the man–made elegance of new urban streets and squares. Town and country often provide the travelling backdrop to novels and poems, sometimes exerting such a strong a presence they almost become players in the plot.

From the British Library (via Plep).

Alexander Cruden and his concordance of the Bible (at Metafilter).

Moliere in English: translations by Timothy Mooney, online (via Plep).

Volcanoes, slugs and comets: rare scientific books at UCL (via C18-L, via Sharon).

Two posts by Sharon from some days back, Women’s history and gender history: what and why? and Alice Clark, working women’s historian. Loaded with her usual astute analysis, and links.

And, I don't usually post about ancient history, but this caught my eye: Welcome to the Obsolete Technology Website (via Plep).

from Ramelli's Machines

March 30, 2005

Ye Olde Linkes

François Houtin, Hommage à Pozzo, 1997. Click for larger image.

Read misteraitch's excellent post on how Bishop John Wilkins, in his An Essay Toward a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language (1668), works out, among other things, how much hay Noah would have needed to stow on the Arc. Wilkins, remember, features as a character in Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, and at times his project of developing a "philosophical language" rivals anything in Book Three of Gulliver's Travels.

Also see misteraitch's third post on Bolognese graphic artist Giuseppe Maria Mitelli (1634-1718).

Mark Woods posts some Laurence Sterne links:

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent. (1759-67)
Laurence Sterne in Cyberspace

Six Centuries of Prints and Drawings at the National Gallery, Washington D.C. (via Life in the Present).

"London's Victorian Garden Cemeteries" by Catherine Richards (via Exclamation Mark). Very restful.

François Houtin's etchings. Okay, this one is cheating; he is a contemporary artist. But so eighteenth-century, no? (link from CatalogueAnnie).

Check out the Philosophical Powers: action dolls like Lethal Locke ("with Tabula Rasa: enemies' faces leave an imprint when struck") and Bashin' Bishop Berkeley (via grow-a-brain).

March 26, 2005

And I just went on South Beach

Bibi posts to a wonderful site about medieval and Renaissance food. Check out Gode Cookery, a large site with lots of links with intriguing names like A Tale of Two Tarts and Gentyll manly Cokere (from the manly Pepys).

Other tasty links:

Cressee, an Anglo-Norman recipe
Medieval and Anglo Saxon Recipes and Medieval European Recipes
Medieval Italian stew
Medieval and Renaissance Food Homepage
Recipes from Cariadoc's Miscellany
Monumenta Culinaria et Diaetetica Historica: Corpus of culinary & dietetic texts of Europe from the Middle Ages to 1800
The Medieval & Renaissance Cookery Webring Homepage
The Forme of Cury, A Roll Of Ancient English Cookery, Compiled, about A.D. 1390, by the Master-Cooks of King Richard II, Presented afterwards to Queen Elizabeth, by Edward Lord Stafford, and now in the Possession of Gustavus Brander, Esq. Illustrated with Notes, And a copious Index, or Glossary (facsimile)
The Renaissance at the Dinner Table
Sabina Welserin's cookbook (1553)
Food in Tudor England
Two fifteenth-century cookery-books
Jacobean Dinner Recipes
The Accomplisht Cook, or The Art & Mystery of Cookery (1685), and The Compleat Cook (1658): online facsimiles, Biblioteca de la Universitat de Barcelona.
Receipts of Pastry and Cookery For the Use of his Scholars?, by Ed. Kidder, 17-- (facsimile)
Lady Logie's Recipes
18th Century Cooking Equipment
Tallyrand's Culinary Fare: History of Cooking
Seeds for an 18th Century Historically Themed Garden
Jed Wentz's Favorite 18th Century recipes (Quince trifle, anyone?)
"Was death by fire common in Colonial kitchens?" (No.)
Three period restaurants at the fascinating Fortress Louisbourg, N.S. (we visited a few years back)
18thC Cuisine: a blog
Regency Collection: Recipes
Victorian Cake Recipes from Godey's Lady's Book (1860)

Update (12:19pm): Don't know how I could have forgotten to check with the unparallelled linker of things early-modern: Sharon has a great page of foodie links.

March 24, 2005

Life Mask by Emma Donoghue

Here is one description:

The bestselling author of Slammerkin turns her attention to the Beau Monde of late eighteenth-century England, turning the private drama of three celebrated Londoners into a robust, full-bodied portrait of a world, and lives, on the brink of revolution. The Honourable Mrs. Damer is a young widow of eccentric tastes, the only female sculptor of her time. The Earl of Derby, inventor of the horse race that bears his name, is the richest man in the House of Lords-and the ugliest. Miss Eliza Farren, born a nobody, now reigns as Queen of Comedy at Drury Lane Theatre.

In a time of looming war and terrorism, of glittering spectacle and financial disasters, the wealthy liberals of the Whig Party work to topple a tyrannical prime minister and a lunatic king. Their marriages and friendships stretch or break; political liaisons prove as dangerous as erotic ones.

A colleague lent me this novel, saying that she had enjoyed it. As she is a discriminating reader I looked forward to reading it, but when I did I was horrified to find that I was not enjoying it. The characters were flat, it was over-researched in a superficial way, and it seemed nothing more than an up-market lesbian bodice-ripper.

(Not that there's anything wrong with that.)

But since it had been lent to me by the aforementioned colleague, I did not follow my impulse to put it aside; instead, I persevered, complaining loudly to Joe all the while. And I'm glad I kept at it, because it grew into an interesting novel. I still think it wears its historical detail heavily — there are countless instances where we are told something for no apparent reason other than, it would seem, Donoghue had come across some titbit about late 18th-century waste management or powdered wigs or the Prince of Wales and could not forebear from sharing; instances that are all the more irritating because her primary method of offering such information is to have one character or another reflect, in a self-conscious and unnatural way, on waste management, etc.& — but even though the novel is guilty many times over of this, one of the most annoying faux pas possible in a historical novel, it still manages to evoke a sense of time and place almost in spite of itself.

And an interesting evolution occurs with the characters. Initially one-dimensional, the three main characters take on a sort of evocative opacity that is much more interesting. Eliza Farren, a "virtuous actress" in the style of her better-known contemporary, Sarah Siddons, seems designed to fulfill the role of object of desire and not much else. Her insistence on maintaining her reputation — a potentially rich, and vexed, topic — is largely unexamined. However, by the end of the text this no longer seems like a fault; Donoghue addresses the issue with an almost oblique suggestiveness that surprises. Well, at least, it surprised me as I had decided, somewhat prematurely, that Donoghue was heavy-handed. The other two main characters are likewise developed in subtle and interesting ways. Derby, with whom one might sympathize for his long, frustrating courtship of Farren, has a brutal streak. The scenes in which Damer is targeted for being a "Tommy" are harrowing, and her growing self-realisation is nicely done.

Donoghue is not a stylist, but this novel has other strengths that only increase as it progresses. And it is interesting on the politics of the period, and on English responses to revolution in France. Which is more or less what my colleague told me when she lent it to me, now that I think of it.

"Derby & Joan or the platonic lovers, a farce" by Robert Dighton, 1795

Bonus links:

"A Sapphick Epistle, from Jack Cavendish to the Honourable and most beautiful Mrs D****" (1778). Reproduced by Rictor Norton, Homosexuality in Eighteenth-Century England: A Sourcebook.

An interview with Emma Donoghue.

Life Masks is a Lambda Literary Award Finalist for Lesbian Fiction for 2004 (winners to be announced June 2, 2005).

Anne Damer links.

"Anne Damer and Mary Berry in the Library at Little Strawberry Hill" (drawing).

March 17, 2005

Poetry coffeehouse

this evening, part of IWW@UNBSJ. It was organized by two of our fabulous local poets, Heather Craig and Susie Bowers, who both read, along with Anne Compton, Robert Moore, and several others. The idea was to read poems by women who had been influencial, ones own poems, or both. Bob read three poems about Helen of Troy, including "Helen" by H.D. and Margaret Atwood's "Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing," then read his own poem about Helen, and another about Penelope, both from So Rarely in Our Skins. Anne read a wonderful poem, part of a group project with which she is involved: several poets were turned loose in the basement of the Beaverbrook Art Gallery and asked to choose a piece of art and then write about it. Anne chose "Victoria Kynaston" by Allan Ramsay (1749), above, and wrote a lovely poem from the perspective of the sitter. It reminded me of Browning's "My Last Duchess" in some ways — the portrait of a woman, the emphasis on her as object — but with the corrective of being from the woman's point of view.

(Now that I think of it, the two poems would be powerful, taught together.)

March 07, 2005

In the stacks

Wakefield Library, 1949

I have been thinking about online learning and how the campus itself is central and how I remember Robarts Library in Toronto in vivid detail but can hardly recall most of my undergraduate classes so if my degree had been online I would have missed most of it. I remember every library I've ever been in, I think, and certainly the early ones: the bookmobile that came to the parking lot of the bank around the corner from where I grew up; the public library on Concession St. in Hamilton, Ont., where my mother, with me in tow, loudly asked for a picture book about menstruation; the huge old Public Library downtown, with its vaulted ceilings and oak; the dusty little library at Ridge School, long since demolished; TerryBerry library, where my friend Chuck told me that Bill Moore had dumped me because it cost too much in bus tickets to keep up the relationship, and I read through all of Anaïs Nin; the windowless library at Westview Senior Public where I read through all the fairy tales: The Blue Fairy Book, The Violet Fairy Book, and all the others; the library at Westmount High, with the librarian with the laquered hair ... And more recently: the Victorianana of the main public library in Leeds; the beautiful library in Brooklyn Heights; the Bodliean; and a host of more modest libraries. We have a lovely public library in downtown Saint John, overlooking the harbour. Libraries are imbued with all we have experienced there; how can they help but be imprinted so strongly on our minds?

Library links:

Another link from the tireless Jim Chevalier, posted to C18-L: a no-frills database, Library History — The British Isles — to 1850: "information on over 27,000 libraries in the British Isles, ... based on over 1,200 published works" (though if you bookmark it, keep in mind, according to the front page, that it is due to relocate soon).

Boots Booklovers Library: 1898-1966. A couple of great photos.

Public Library History: "The history of rate supported public libraries in London 1850-1900."

"Relation of State to Public Library" by Melvil Dewey, 1898 (via The Dusty Bookshelf, a collection of articles dating from the beginning of librarianship as a profession.)

"The Order of Books": how Thomas Jefferson organized his library.

"Dramatised account of the meeting in Exeter Guildhall at which the Public Libraries Act was adopted, 6 May 1869."

"Not only suitable, but specially attractive" by Evelyn Kerslake: "looking back on 100 years of women in libraries."

"Mudie's Select Library and the Form of Victorian Fiction" by George P. Landow. Ads for Mudie's.

Libraries Today: "a web site for those who are interested in the history of Canadian libraries and librarians, especially in the province of Ontario."

Branch Libraries in the Bronx — Photographs 1905 - 1972.

Libraries: History of the Private, Royal, Imperial, Monastic and Public Libraries: exhibition; from the ancient world to the Renaissance.

"The Mysterious Fate of the Great Library of Alexandria."

Arms, Crests & Monograms: Libraries and Museums.

Library Cats Map: "Click on a region to see a list of library cats!" (Previously mentioned. But you can never have too many library cats.)

And finally, visit, if you dare, the three "Ghostcams" at Willard Library in Indiana. The basementcam is particularly creepy. And it crashed Firefox twice. I'd be careful if I were you.

March 04, 2005

Something old

Frontispeice engraving from Adolph Christoph Bentz Philosophische Schau-Bühne Nurnberg, 1706.

Early Modern Carnival No. 4 is up at Philobiblon.

The Transatlantic 1790s, the project of six Grinnell College students: "This site is devoted to the literature and culture of the 1790s, primarily in Britain and the United States" (via Early Modern Notes).

The British Library asks scholars what 19thc newspapers they would like to see digitalized (also via Early Modern Notes).

The Reformed Librarie-Keeper (1650) by John Dury at Project Gutenberg (via wood s lot). A taste:

The Schooles of the Prophets, the Universities[,] must be setled, purged and reformed with wholsom constitutions, for the education of the sonnes of the Prophets, and the government of their lives and with the soundnes and purity of spirituall learning, that they may speak the true language of Canaan, and that the gibberidge of Scholastical Divinity may be banished out of their society. (48)

The Alchemy Web Site:

Over 90 megabytes online of information on alchemy in all its facets. Divided into over 1300 sections and providing tens of thousands of pages of text, over 2000 images, over 200 complete alchemical texts, extensive bibliographical material on the printed books and manuscripts, numerous articles, introductory and general reference material on alchemy.

(link from Life in the Present). Now please excuse me while I go to the kitchen and try to make some lunch money.

February 28, 2005

And speaking of archival work

CatalogueAnnie has posted a useful link: Palaeography: reading old handwriting 1500 — 1800: a practical online tutorial."

Court of Chancery: extract from Alexander Selkirk's deposition to the Examiners' Office, dated 1712.

Here is one of a number of "practice documents" posted on the site. Hey, good luck, eh?

February 27, 2005

Streetprint

The Flowers of Maiden Lane, Pub. John Pitts, London, c1818 (Click on image for more information and a typscript of the text)

Jim Chevalier just posted the following to C18-L:

... this site has a variety of 'street literature' — including ballads, newspapers, etc. — much around our period.

It also uses a tool — the Streetprint engine — especially designed for this sort of thing that might interest anyone looking to put a collection of documents on-line.

Streetprint is open source:

A collection of British street literature needed an online home, a place where students and researchers could interact with these fragile texts as though they were sitting down with the original artifacts. The technological complexity of this task soon became a problem; specialists in centuries-old popular print are rarely internet wizards.

In search of an ideal solution, our team in the CRC Studio developed the Streetprint Engine, free software that gives researchers and collectors (like YOU!) easy-to-use tools to create powerful digital archives and share them on the web.

We broadened our focus along the way, creating a system which can now showcase much more than "street print." We like to think, however, that the ideals which underlie our first collection — finding value in the popular and the importance of public circulation, among others — remain at the core of the Streetprint Engine's mission.

What a wonderful idea. And a beautiful dovetailing of the web and print culture. Of all the texts that need to be digitalized, it seems to me that ephemera is close to the top of the list. It's certainly convenient to have canonical texts online, particularly for teaching, but the various projects, large and small, that digitalize street literature and other ephemera are invaluable. The Revolution and Romanticism collection at U of A contains a broadside about William Corder that I hadn't seen, quite possibly the only copy extant, and I probably would not have visited the collection and so might never have known of it.

February 22, 2005

George Washington Gets Extreme Makeover

Jim Chevalier posted to the C-18-L listserv with a link to this story: in essence,

a team of scientists is creating a trio of action figures of [George] Washington as part of a larger [US]$95 million educational effort to reintroduce the first president to America, hoping to illustrate who he was better than those countless portraits.

Jim adds to his post:

I don't know if it ever occured to anyone to do this in Washington's lifetime, but the idea wasn't entirely unknown in our period [c18th]. When Simon-Henri Linguet was still a celebrated lawyer, in addition to the hats, etc. sold as Linguet souvenirs, there were apparently little Linguet dolls. Why not Washington dolls?

I think we Canadians are missing the boat here. How about a Sir John A. Macdonald action figure, complete with glass of gin for those two-day filibusters?

A few minutes of googling later: Good god, there already is one! And, he seems to be holding something, and it looks like a glass. That is so much more fun than wooden dentures.

Bonus link:

A Social History of Drinking in Canada.

February 16, 2005

Asylum art

Untitled, c.1940, Ink on card, by Madge Gill. Henry Boxer Gallery

Boing Boing points towards an article about Outsider Art in France which is, as it turns out, also about Outsider Art in Britain. Or perhaps that would be "insider art," as one of the collections discussed is held at the Royal Bethlam Hospital. Yes, Bedlam. And apparently there are hundreds of pieces of art by inmates, the vast majority of which have never been displayed.

February 09, 2005

Henry Fielding's advice to bloggers?

Came across an interersting new blog via referrer stats: Pratie Place: Reflections and news, primarily from the previous millennium. Because I can't keep up. "Pratie" is Gaelic for "potato" (and I've just got used to "tatties." And I don't even like the things). Of particular interest to me is one series of posts, "Fielding's Advice to Bloggers" (#1, #2, #3):

In the first excerpt, Fielding compares an author to a publican rather than a private host, the distinction being whether or not one pays for the meal. That being the case, I am not sure that bloggers are not more like private hosts (i.e. they can serve whatever they please, however well- or ill-prepared). Though of course there is an economy of blogging, even without ads, sponsorships, etc. etc. Bloggers — some bloggers, anyway — work for hits, links, and "googlejuice." I suppose, then, that we are publicans after all. In my case, of a kind of wine bar—gin joint—ice cream parlour fusion place.

In the second, he promises to write only when he has something of interest to write about.

Oops. Zero for two.

In the last, we are warned against being "morose snarling critics." Oh, like he should talk.

January 28, 2005

The performing arts

Garrick as Richard III [inside a gourd??]

Bibi points towards a guided tour of music halls, part of a larger site about performance in the U.K. called PeoplePlay UK: Theatre History Online. Nice pages on Restoration and c18th theatre: lots of graphics and goodies.

Too much of a yawn? Perhaps you'd like to check out buffology: "Every Buffy character, episode, cast member, writer and director and every word of every show, in a searchable database" (via BoingBoing).

WWW Virtual Library: Theatre and Drama.

Theatre History on the Web.

International Theatre Resources from Artslynx.

Kabuki for Everyone.

Ford's Theatre.

Thai Elephant Orchestra (from Mirabilis).

January 24, 2005

Representations

From the Bottom Up: popular reading and writing in the Michael Zinman Collection of early American imprints (via Bostonia). A lot of these items are reprints of, or are very like, texts printed in the U.K.

At the same site, another exhibit: Picturing Women explores how women are figured, fashioned, turned into portraits, and told about in words and pictorial narrative.

January 16, 2005

Midwives

Natalie at Phiobiblon has a couple of posts about midwifery and illegitimacy in 18thc France (in the latter post she mentions the mind-boggling possibility that upwards of 40% of infants born in France in the period were illegitimate ended up in foundling hospitals).

Attaining Legitimacy: Eighteenth-Century Man-midwives and the Rhetoric of their Texts by Candice Dahl in Gateway: an academic journal on the web.

Sites and Margins of the Public Sphere, special number of Eighteenth-Century Studies, 32.4 (Summer 1999), has a number of great articles available through Project Muse.

Sex, Gender and the Female Body, special number of Women's Writing 11.2 (2004). Articles not free yet but will be twelve months after publication.

Childbirth, midwifery, and science: The life and work of the French royal midwife Louise Bourgeois (1563 — 1636) by Bridgette Ann Majella Sheridan (Diss., Boston College, 2002).

Sharon's bibliography, Pregnancy and Childbirth.

Books/chapters and articles about midwifery history, a bibliography at Nursing and Midwifery History UK.

The History of Women and Science, Health, and Technology: a bibliographic guide to the professions and the disciplines: Midwifery.

Martha Ballard and a Man-Midwife: a time of transition in midwifery: an interactive exploration of the famouse illustration by Isaac Cruikshank. An an annotation from the Literature, Arts, and Medicine Database (links from Caricatures of Nurses and Midwives through history).

Ask the Quack: post and get diagnosed. Be sure to check out the literary endorsements.

Update (17/1/05) In the comments, Sharon links to Elain Hobby's "Secrets of the Female Sex: Jane Sharp, the reproductive female body, and early modern midwifery manuals." Women's Writing 8.2 (2001): 201-212.

January 14, 2005

It's payday

(Click for larger image)

and I just ordered this. For half price, my fellow dix-huitiémistes! I got very excited when I read that it was edited by William Smellie, but it was not the William Smellie I was thinking of.

Though they were both Scottish.

According to Robbie Burns,

SHREWD Willie Smellie to Crochallan came;
The old cock’d hat, the grey surtout the same;
His bristling beard just rising in its might,
’Twas four long nights and days to shaving night:
His uncomb’d grizzly locks, wild staring, thatch’d
A head for thought profound and clear, unmatch’d;
Yet tho’ his caustic wit was biting-rude,
His heart was warm, benevolent, and good.

Bonus links on the first Smellie:

William Smellie, A sett of anatomical tables, with explanations, and an abridgment, of the practice of midwifery (1754)
Of the Management of new-born Children, with the Diseases to which they are subject; A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Midwifery (1762)
Smellie lived for a time with William Hunter, author of Anatomia uteri humani gravidi tabulis illustrata [The anatomy of the human gravid uterus exhibited in figures] (1774), and of whom I have written.
Collection of obstetrical and gynecological instruments in the Historical Library, Cushing/Whitney Medical Library.
Obstetric Literature and the Changing Character of Childbirth.
The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists Collection.

And the second:

Major Topics of the Encycopedia Britannica, First Edition (1768–1771)
Buffon's Natural History: General and Particular translated by William Smellie (8 volumes, 1781).
A Romantic Natural History Bibliography
Elegy on the death of Smellie's son (facsimile from the wonderful The Word on the Street).
"Romanticism and the Triumph of Life Science: Prospects for Study."
The Scottish Printing Archival Trust. See particularly Links to printing historical resources. Also of interest: First Scottish Books.
The Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire Raisonné des Sciences, des Arts et des Métiers.

January 12, 2005

Something old

The Scrap Album: Victorian Greeting Cards, Valentines, and Scraps (via Plep).

Check for the History Carnival tomorrow.

There is a thread at C18-L about monstrous births.

Watercolours of Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522-1605) (featured at Giornale Nuovo).

Misteraitch has started a new weblog at which he is reproducing the essays of Isaac D’Israeli from his Curiosities of Literature, a wide-ranging work full of excellent advice, such as the following:

AMONG the Jesuits it was a standing rule of the order, that after an application to study for two hours, the mind of the student should be unbent by some relaxation, however trifling.

He also warns,

THE literary treasures of antiquity have suffered from the malice of men, as well as that of time. It is remarkable that conquerors, in the moment of victory, or in the unsparing devastation of their rage, have not been satisfied with destroying men, but have even carried their vengeance to books.

Though Misteraitch has rescued him from such a fate.

This is quite an inspiring project. I wonder if I have anything that is otherwise unavailable; one or two things, I think. Think how much we could add to the common pool if we all followed Misteraitch's lead.

December 09, 2004

Dream Anatomy

Dream Anatomy, an online exhibit by the U.S. National Library of Medicine about the history of anatomical imagery, from 1500 to the present:

The interior of our bodies is hidden to us. What happens beneath the skin is mysterious, fearful, amazing. In antiquity, the body's internal structure was the subject of speculation, fantasy, and some study, but there were few efforts to represent it in pictures. The invention of the printing press in the 15th century-and the cascade of print technologies that followed-helped to inspire a new spectacular science of anatomy, and new spectacular visions of the body. Anatomical imagery proliferated, detailed and informative but also whimsical, surreal, beautiful, and grotesque — a dream anatomy that reveals as much about the outer world as it does the inner self.

Over the centuries anatomy has become a visual vocabulary of realism. We regard the anatomical body as our inner reality, a medium through which we imagine society, culture and the human condition.

Here is the gallery.

(Via Boing Boing).

December 07, 2004

Marking, but

I had to share. One of my first year students just wrote, of "The Gentleman's Study," "This poem is just a regurgitation of Swift's poem."

And thus do we get our little rewards.

December 06, 2004

The Thomas Gray Archive

Alexander Huber just announced, on C18-L, that the Thomas Gray Archive, a free interactive hypermedia archive, has launched a UK mirror.

December 05, 2004

Crime and punishment

More great links from Sharon, including one to a piece about murder ballads, a descriptive essay with several good links from a student of Michael Hancher's from what looks to be a great course on street literature. Of particular interest to me is the mention of two "murderous sweetheart" ballads, in one of which, "The Horrid Murder Committed by Mary Wilson," the murder was committed by a woman upon a man. Unfortunately that one is not reproduced, though the author does provide the reference. Very exciting to hear about; directly relates to a project I'm doing. But mum's the word.

Art below stairs

Claire points towards the webpage for a show, now closed, called Below Stairs: 400 Years of Servants' Portraits, and Sharon, in the comments, recommends Erddig Hall, "famous for its portraits of the servants of the house from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. (There is also a book, The Servants' Hall. Lots of pictures.)," while Natalie writes about Gwen John, sister of Augustus, one of whose earliest oils was of her cleaning woman, Mrs. Atkinson.

[The painting is "Heads of Six of Hogarth's Servants" by William Hogarth, c 1750-5, part of the Below Stairs exhibit. I've always liked this painting: the range of ages and faces, particularly the young boy at the top; the woman in the bottom right, the only one looking at the viewer; the old man, looking away from everyone else.]

November 29, 2004

How C18th texts are rated

In a recent post, the other Miriam looked at how Victorian texts rate with librarians. Looking at the same list, I searched for C18th texts. Hooo Nelly!

Gulliver's Travels is the highest on the list, coming in at #20 (two below Garfield). Robinson Crusoe is #22, and Pilgrim's Progress is #28. Goethe's Faust is #32, just ahead of Austen's Pride and Prejudice at #33. Grimms' Fairy Tales are #49, Mozart's Don Giovanni is #87, Tom Jones is #92, Emma is #94, The Magic Flute is #107, and Boswell's Life of Johnson is #119. As Miriam found with the Victorians, heavy on the children's texts — well, texts thought of as children's texts — plus lots of music from the period, mainly from Mozart. Heavy on the Austen but no other texts by women except Shelley's Frankenstein at #44 (I did say the looong 18thc, right?). Light on the usual "heavy hitters" of the survey courses: Johnson is only represented by Boswell, and Pope's Essay on Man, at #733, is edged out by Benjamin Bunny at #730. Not much in terms of philosophy, with the exception of Rousseau, who is much in evidence. Kant with a bullet at #284, while Hobbes's Leviathan wades in at #396. Otherwise, nada.

The real question is, why does this surprise me?

November 28, 2004

17th Century British Porn to Be Auctioned

Jack Kolb on C18-L points towards the story:

The world's first known piece of printed pornography, described as the "quintessence of debauchery," is expected to reach up to 35,000 pounds ($65,040) when it is auctioned next month.

"Sodom," penned in the mid-1670s, has been attributed to John Wilmot, the second Earl of Rochester and is described by auction house Sotheby's as a "closet drama rather than for the stage" with pornography "in almost every line."

"We believe this is the first printed pornography in English literature, a unique copy of the quintessence of debauchery," Peter Beal, Sotheby's book specialist said.

"It is one of the most notorious publications in literature and makes most pornography written 300 years later seem tame."

The book centers on the decision made by a lustful King to "set the nation free" by allowing "buggary" to be "used thro' all the land" and then details the dire consequences.

The book, the only surviving copy, will be auctioned on December 16.

The conversation on the list has been fast and furious. Jim Chevalier offers some interesting links and quotes Richard Norton:

It should be noted that this play is not a defence of bisexuality or
libertinage in general, but of homosexuality in particular: clearly the author
and his audience had a concept of "the homosexual" in mind long before that
category was supposedly "invented" in the late nineteenth century.

Robert Dawson takes exception to the work being categorized as "The world's first known piece of printed pornography," and Rictor Norton links to Sotheby's cataloque description.

Here are the opening lines of the play:

Thus, in the Zenith of my last I reign,
I eat to swive, and swive to eat again;
Let other Monarchs, who their Scepters bear,
To Keep their subjects less in Awe than Fear,
Be Slaves to Crowns, my Nation shall be free,
My Prick only shall my Scepter be;
My Laws shall act more Pleasure then Command,
And with my Prick, I'll govern all the Land.

This sounds most promising. I echo Jim Chevalier's expressed hope that someone, somewhere, has scanned this text.

Romantic women

The British Women Romantic Poets, 1789–1832: a digital initiative of the U.C. Davis General Library (via Plep).

Not always what you might expect.

November 19, 2004

Newton

Victoria Harding posts the following to C18-L:

... the NY Public Library has an exhibition that may be of interest, The Newtonian Moment: Science and the Making of Modern Culture, a version of which is available on line. A review of both the exhibition and catalogue by Anthony Grafton in the current NYRB is temporarily available free on line here [no longer, alas; now it costs $4].

The online material is good, but even more happily (for me, at least), the show, which opened on October 8, is to run through February 5, 2005. We will be down there in December, over the holidays, so I should be able to see it.

Here's hoping that the Jinker Boy doesn't knock over an astrolabe.

Bonus links:

Isaac Newton's Gravity: How a major new exhibition gets the scientist wrong: Newton biographer James Gleick's article in Slate.
David Collins, a former student, did a nice page on Newton. See in particular his version of the apple story.
Some other links from Collins.
Bio/links
The Newton Project: ambitious project to publish all his works electronically
Page o' links
Sir Isaac Newton: links, texts.
Isaac Newton's Hidden Agenda of Mysticism and Alchemy. This is an aspect of Newton played up by Neal Stephenson in Quicksilver (here is an earlier post about the novel), and it is the absense of such in the NYC Public Library exhibition that Gleick (above) criticises.

Stephenson's Newton really was a piece of work.

November 16, 2004

Hogarth

The Jones Family Conversation Piece by Hogarth, held at the National Museum & Gallery Cardiff. Long-lost ancestors, no doubt.

The Rake posted, a few days back, on William Hogarth (1697-1764), and pointed towards the very useful page about Hogarth on Artcyclopedia, a comphrehensive site that links to online resources on particular artists: "Great art online, from over 8,000 famous painters, sculptors and photographers, at art museum sites & image archives worldwide."

Bonus links:

A previous post on print culture and Hogarth.
William Hogarth's Realm, Or, an XVIII Century Artist's Magazine: nice setup, like a period newspaper.
The Site for Research on William Hogarth
HOGARTH: "Helpful Online Gateway to Art History"

November 14, 2004

UK history resource

A Vision of Britain Through Time: "A vision of Britain between 1801 and 2001. Including maps, statistical trends and historical descriptions." There is some earlier material, however; of particular interest to me is the section on Travellers' Tales ("Journeys around Britain, from the 12th to the 19th centuries"), which includes Daniel Defoe's A Tour through England and Wales divided into circuits or journeys (here's vol. 2). Though curiously, the sections about Wales have been left out. Who on earth would leave out Wales? (Though Sharon, to whom I owe the link, allows that "there are some doubts about how many of the places in Wales [Defoe] actually visited anyway").

Anyway, other travellers supply the lack. Here is George Borrow from Wild Wales (1854):

I departed for Swansea, distant about thirteen miles. Gutter Vawr consists of one street, extending for some little way along the Swansea road, the foundry, and a number of huts and houses scattered here and there. The population is composed almost entirely of miners, the workers at the foundry, and their families. For the first two or three miles the country through which I passed did not at all prepossess me in favour of Glamorganshire: it consisted of low, sullen, peaty hills. Subsequently, however, it improved rapidly, becoming bold, wild, and pleasantly wooded. The aspect of the day improved, also, with the appearance of the country. When I first started the morning was wretched and drizzly, but in less than an hour it cleared up wonderfully, and the sun began to flash out. As I looked on the bright luminary I thought of Ab Gwilym's ode to the sun and Glamorgan, and with breast heaving and with eyes full of tears, I began to repeat parts of it, or rather of a translation made in my happy boyish years:-

Each morn, benign of countenance,
Upon Glamorgan's pennon glance!
Afternoon in beauty clear
Above my own dear bounds appear!
Bright outline of a blessed clime,
Again, though sunk, arise sublime -
etc.

This reminds me of a joke — no, don't go — I heard one old fellow telling another in a pub in Bishopston, Gower, some years back:

An English tourist is walking about the hills of Wales, comes upon a local man, and greets him:

"I say! Do you suppose that we are going to see the sun today?"
"Oh, I hope so, sir. Not for me; I've seen the sun. But for my children."

And many more in this vein. I can tell you, after a few lagers and lime my breast was heaving and my eyes were full of tears.

November 09, 2004

Abbotsford

Film planned on life of Sir Walter Scott (thanks, Ed).

Other films based on Scott's works.

Bonus links on Scott:

The Walter Scott Digital Archive at Edinburgh U Library.
The Millgate Union Catalogue of Walter Scott Correspondence.
A web guide to Sir Walter Scott from literaryhistory.com, including critical articles and links.
Sir Walter Scott on the Victorian Web.
The Literary Gothic and Scott.

The Sir Walter Scott Way a 151 kilometre cross-country walk.
Splendour of Scott Country — A Full Day Tour.
The Scott Monument virtual tour.
Sir Walter Scott and Robert Burns Monuments in the Virtual Park, Central Park.

The Life of Sir Walter Scott by J.G. Lockhart (1848) (Also here).
Sir Walter Scott by Richard H. Hutton (1888).
The Life Of Sir Walter Scott by S. Fowler Wright (1932).
Sir Walter Scott and the Border Minstrelsy by Andrew Lang.
Listed as a "Famous Freemason."

Links: etexts, articles.
Lotsa links, including etexts.
Letitia Elizabeth Landon's Female Portrait Gallery" of Scott's heroines.
Bibliography of Scottish literature.

Scott is listed on Fantastic Fiction for his ghost stories.
Scott's Letters on Demonology and Witchcraft.

Why do I care? Because I wrote a chapter on Scott's Heart of Mid-Lothian and while I was doing the research I developed a real affection for the old spendthrift.

November 07, 2004

Beautiful books

Have you seen the British Libraries Turning the Pages, digitalized books that you can "read" by, well, turning the pages? They have Jane Austen's History of England (thanks, Catalogue Blog) and Elizabeth Blackwell's A Curious Herbal, George III's copy, no less.

And this rather shockingly titled book, Goodbye Gutenberg, does indeed look beautiful (link via Matt Kirschenbaum, apparently no relation). Perhaps I will ask for it for the holidays, along with this, which was supposed to be on sale — according to a poster to C18-L — but no longer seems to be.

Rare Books Exhibition — The Restoration 1660-1700 (via Plep).

Albrecht Dürer woodcuts and engravings (via Plep).

November 06, 2004

And here's a parting shot

from Giornale Nuovo which brings to mind the U.S. election. And not just because most everything brings to mind the U.S. election these past couple of days (I worked it into a lecture on Pilgrim's Progress yesterday. Which I suppose is not really that much of a stretch).

October 26, 2004

Book exhibits

Plep highlights a series of wonderful virtual exhibits on the Monash University Library site (Australia): sf magazines and comics, yellowbacks (popular books from the second half of the 19th century, simply bound in boards, with highly-coloured graphics on the covers), and English Literature to 1800, including Poems by the most deservedly admired Mrs. Katherine Philips, the matchless Orinda: to which is added Monsieur Corneille's Pompey & Horace, tragedies, with several other translations out of French. (London : Printed by J.M. for H. Herringman, at the sign of the Blew Anchor in the Lower Walk of the New Exchange, 1667).

October 15, 2004

Dust-free archives

Bookninja posts a link that might interest any archivists out there (and you know who you are): the British Library is planning to archive the email "of the nation's top authors and scientists," though there is the ongoing problem of technological obsolescence. The BL is appealing to the general public for access to old computers; maybe I should tell them about those two Performas in the basement.

Bookbindings at the the University of Glasgow (link from Plep) and the British Library.

Women's Travel Writing, 1830–1930 (also from Plep).

Amanda writes, "There really is an archive for everything" as she points towards the Deliberately Concealed Garments Project: Clothing found hidden in buildings: "A research project based at the Textile Conservation Centre, University of Southampton exploring instances of and the practice of concealing garments in the fabric of buildings." This is so cool! Link from Household Opera.

October 05, 2004

c18th costumes and textiles

Jim Chevallier points towards a "tiny but sumptuous" exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Luxury Textiles East and West, many items of which can be viewed online (from C18-L). Browse the Museum's 18th-century holdings.

September 25, 2004

Tristram Shandy

UK director Michael Winterbottom is planning to adapt Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy to film.

I'm having trouble imagining this, but would love to see it. Maybe it will make my students feel more charitably towards the book. As long as he avoids the money shots.

(Link from Stephany at Maud's).

August 28, 2004

Travel literature

From a discussion on C18-L: Jim Chevallier offers Répertoires bibliographiques des guides et récits de voyage de Français en Grande-Bretagne et de Britanniques en France (en Français but includes some links to texts in English).

Check the C18-L archives for lots of print references.

August 27, 2004

Who, me morbid?

My Blair Witch photo of the cemetary at Bury St. Edmunds (July 2004). Click image for larger view.

Afterlife: the four seasons in Streatham Cemetery: lovely in a the opening of Six Feet Under sort of way (from web zen).

Thanatos.net: death mask gallery (from web zen).

The Body Revealed: Renaissance and Baroque Anatomical Illustration (from Plep).

Obituary Central (from Plep).

Cemetery art and photography (from Plep).

Death and Dying, part of the Victorian Dictionary (from Plep).

William Corder's death mask, the Moyses Hall Museum, Bury St. Edmunds

Illustrations

Seeing Is Believing: 700 years of scientific and medical illustration: an exhibition from the New York Public Library (2000). Nice site which allows you to look at some of the illustrations in detail (from Mirabilis).

Drolleries and two posts about Andrea Mantegnaat Giornale Nuovo.

August 16, 2004

Dangerous Liaisons

There is currently an interesting conversation on the C18 listserv about Dangerous Liaisons: Fashion and Furniture in the 18th Century at the Met. The show is apparently a series of tableaux, some of which, like the one above, are generating discussion (i.e. Just exactly how does a lady sit with a harp?).

July 25, 2004

Women on the go

Made a quick visit to the National Portrait Gallery yesterday (and did you know that there is also one in the U.S.? Most confusing for googlers) and saw Off the Beaten Track: Three Centuries of Women Travellers. Aphra Behn and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu were featured, but I didn't buy the book because the exhibition was skewed towards the 19th and 20th centuries. While interesting, not my patch.

Had upscale Italian last night. That brings the tally of London meals to one Chinese, one Portuguese, one Thai, one Indian, and one Italian. Had English cooking elsewhere, mind — mainly at the conference, and with my relatives — though I did have an excellent Indian meal in Bury St. Edmunds.

This will probably be my last entry for a few days; am flying back to NYC this afternoon and will no doubt be prevented from having any keyboard time by the Jinker Boy. And quite rightly.

And, am about to eat my last pain chocolat and drink my last latte for awhile; back to low carbs. And not a moment too soon.

Yesterday's conversation with a just-woken Jinker Boy:

Me: Good morning, sweetie!
JB: Mummy.
Me: Did you have a nice sleep?
JB: [beat] Yiss.
Me: Mummy's coming home tomorrow!
JB: Why?

July 18, 2004

The British Museum

Went to the British Museum today; the last time I was there I worked in the Reading Room but only visited one exhibit, of early books. Today I spent a good few hours and saw three exhibits:

Living and dying, an exhibition that "looks at how people around the world deal with the tough realities of life, averting or confronting trouble, sorrow, need and sickness" (online tour). Not as drippy as they make it sound. The bulk of the exhibit consists of artifacts from different cultures. Cradle to Grave, an installation piece, was very cool. And moving:

Cradle to Grave explores our approach to health in Britain today. The piece incorporates a lifetime supply of prescribed drugs knitted into two lengths of fabric, illustrating the medical stories of one woman and one man.

Each length contains over 14,000 drugs, the estimated average prescribed to every person in Britain in their lifetime. This does not include pills we might buy over the counter, which would require about 40,000 pills each.

Sobering to see all those tiny pills laid out in neat rows, covering so much space.

I also saw Matisse to Freud: A Critic's Choice, Alexander Walker's bequest of his fabulous collection of more than 200 twentieth-century prints and drawings, including Jim Dine's "Five Paintbrushes (Sixth State)" (1973), which I particularly liked:

Finally, I saw Enlightenment,¹ "a rich new exhibition using thousands of objects from the Museum's collection to show how people understood their world in the Age of Enlightenment" (online tour). The focus here is on eighteenth-century approaches to various developing branches of science. The exhibits are displayed much as they might have been at the time, in various glass-topped cases, and the refurbished King's Library is the perfect setting for showcasing an approach to artifacts rather than the artifacts themselves. An interestingly self-conscious move, as the British Museum was itself founded in 1753.

Before I left I popped my head in the former Reading Room where I spent many contented hours doing dissertation research, but was unable to stay. Of course the new library site was needed and I was relieved to hear that the BM was going to maintain the Reading Room, but in fact it is not the Reading Room any more; even though it is the actual physical space, apparently unchanged, it has become a model gesturing to its own past, no different from any other exhibit despite its much-touted function as information hub for the museum. When I was there last it was a working library; the only people there were librarians or readers. Now it is filled with the same crowds who stand in front of all the other displays. The Great Court, in which the Reading Room is centred, is grand and airy, a beautiful space. But still, I am sad.

¹ Beware the pulsing icons.

July 03, 2004

What about Starbucks?

Picking up from Laura's comparision of the blogosphere to a town hall meeting, Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber wonders if it is perhaps more like eighteenth-century coffeehouses in its diversity. Relative diversity, for as Henry points out, the rubbing of shoulders was limited to the male bourgeoise.

Last year Brian Micklethwait reproduced an article from The Economist which links coffeehouses to the internet.
My student's page on coffeehouses.

c18th resources

Three from Early Modern Resources from a couple of weeks ago: Dynamic Directory: 18th century, Glossary of 18th Century Costume Terminology, and 18th Century English Music.

July 01, 2004

Some beautiful things

[Click illustration for larger view]

Wonderbound: centuries-old natural history books at the Smithsonian (via Plep).

A Case of Curiousities: the artist writes, "Taxidermy and assemblage inspired by 18th & 19th century French, German and Russian fairy tales, the curiosity cabinets (_wunderkammer_) of the 16th-19th centurys, Victorian grotesque taxidermy, Surrealism and a touch of the circus sideshow" (via Plep).

Jacob Cats' emblem-book, Proteus Ofte Minne-Beelden Verandert In Sinne-Beelden (1627) (at Giornale Nuovo).

Spring Surprises: Popular, Literary and Scientific Pop-up Books (via Plep).

Henry Purcell 1659-1695, "The Glory of the Temple and the Stage." With sound (via Plep).

Hamster Opera (via Mirabilis).

[Click illustration for full view]

June 27, 2004

Getting about

Trading Places: The East India Company and Asia, 1600–1843 (via Plep).

Visit 18th-century Italy at three Getty exhibitions.

Transportation Inventions & Events of the Enlightenment Period.

Hudson's Bay Company Digital Collection.

Digital maps of Scotland, 1560-1892.

South Sea Bubble Playing Cards, 1720.

Outlaws and Highwaymen.

Fantastic Voyages Quiz: "Over the years, many authors have written stories of journeys to the Moon. But which were really possible?"

June 25, 2004

Gender links

The Dominion posts a link to Kate Bornstein’s Gender Aptitude Test. Something for my Gender Studies class in Sept.

Check out Christine's posts at ms.musings about the HUGE class action suit against Wal-Mart.

Sarah Bakewell reviews Norma Clarke’s The Rise and Fall of the Woman of Letters (via Cup of Chicha). I will order this for our library, pronto; at first glance it seems to be an updated, indepth analysis of some of the same dynamics Gayle Tuchman and Nina Fortin looked at years ago with regards to the 19th-century, but with earlier writers.

June 23, 2004

Misc. links

[click for larger view]

"Young Feminists Take on the Family," the newest edition of webjournal The Scholar & Feminist Online published by the Barnard Center for Research on Women, came out today (via Feministing).

The June issue of The Internet Review of Science Fiction is also posted. Highlights: "Feminist SF: Futures for Humankind" by Cynthia Ward, "Science Fiction and the Paradox of Genre" by Matthew Cheney, and an interview about SETI (registration required; free until the end of the month).

SETI@Home has released new client software (via Slashdot). No gui interface for the Mac OS yet, though.

Space Art Through the Ages, including the graphic, above (via Plep). I suspect that some of these artists might be bemused by their company.

American Needlework in the 18th Century and Coffee, Tea, and Chocolate in Colonial America, both at the Met (via Plep).

Kelly Culture: reconstructing Ned Kelly (also via Plep): of particular interest to readers of The True History of the Kelly Gang (mentioned here, here, and here).

Stuff found in used books (via Bookslut; also noted by Household Opera).

June 22, 2004

Caxon, Shakespeare, and Children's lit.

Priceless Caxton book goes on show for first time. Book written by Benedictine monk in 1360 and printed by William Caxton in 1482 (via Mirabilis).

William Caxton stamps commemorating the 500th anniversary of printing in 1976.

Printing in England from William Caxton to Christopher Barker — An Exhibition: University of Glasgow, November 1976 — April 1977.

Caxton's Chaucer: compare the 1476 and 1483 editions held in the British Library.

18th and 19th Century Shakespearean Illustrations (via Plep).

Shakespeare Illustrated "explores nineteenth-century paintings, criticism and productions of Shakespeare's plays and their influences on one another."

How Shakespeare Prepared Manuscripts.

Intermingling illustration and text: hyper-illuminated criticism of Shakespeare's Works.

Alice and Beyond: English Children's Books (via Plep).

The Children's Literature Web Guide.

Authors & Illustrators on the Web.

Fairrosa Cyber Library of Children's Literature.

June 20, 2004

Ken McGoogan's Ancient Mariner

Have just begun Ken McGoogan's Ancient Mariner: The Amazing Adventures of Samuel Hearne, the Sailor Who Walked to the Arctic Ocean (2003). He read here at the university last year; he was a real storyteller and looked quite the frontiersman in his fringed buckskin.

Now maybe I should stop mucking about with this blog and go and actually read.

Requisite links:

HarperCollins.
McGoogan answers the critics.

June 14, 2004

Spare the rod

Years ago I visited the Osborne Collection, when it was still on University Ave., with my 18thc women writers graduate seminar. I won't soon forget the story of the little girl who wanted the pretty coloured vase instead of sensible shoes: her mother bought her the vase, which turned out to be plain glass filled with coloured water, and she wore her too-small shoes, full of holes, all through that winter. Bet she learnt her lesson. Surprised Gorey missed it.

moleskinerie links to a wonderful website, Victorian Children's Activities: a digital collection of pieces from the Osborne Collection that showcases pop-ups, theatres, and other movable books.

June 13, 2004

RISM Music Manuscripts Database

First phase of the UK and Ireland Repertoire International des Sources Musicales (RISM) Music Manuscripts Database has been launched:

A new free-to-access database giving details of 17th- and 18th-century music manuscripts held in libraries and archives across the UK and in Dublin has just been launched by Royal Holloway, University of London. Containing details of more than 29,000 pieces of music, it is the result of a three-year project undertaken by the Music Department at Royal Holloway in collaboration with the Repertoire International des Sources Musicales (RISM) UK Trust and the British Library, with funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Board (AHRB).

News via Andrew Pink on the C18-Listserv.

June 12, 2004

c18th collections

The Wallace Collection of 17th and 18th-century art promises to "delight, amaze and bemuse" (via The Little Professor).

The Assembly Rooms and Museum of Costume, Bath.

The Geffrye Museum, London: the English domestic interior from 1600 to the present day.

Enlightenment, a new gallery at the British Museum.

The Grand Tour: Landscape & Veduta Paintings Venice & Rome in the 18th Century.

Ca' Rezzonico: Museum of the 18th Century, Venice.

Pretty Prints, Clever Cottons: 18th Century Fabrics.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art: 18th century textiles.

18th Century Architecture.

And, in case you thought it was all tea and country walks:

Women's Lives in the British Civil Wars (via new group blog, 17th century).

The Diary of Martha Ballard, a late eighteenth-century midwife and healer in Massachusetts (via 17th century).

An 18th Century Cipher Device Exhibit.

The Olive Branch Petition.

An Early Information Society: News and Media in Eighteenth-century Paris. According to 17th century,

This is the first electronic article to be published by the American Historical Review, this is an 'enhanced' version of a presidential address in the print journal, by Robert Darnton, the distinguished cultural historian. As well as the text, it has maps and (translated) police reports corresponding to the places shown, images, songs (texts and translations, as well as performances), an online discussion, and a 'bonus' essay by Darnton.

And the everpopular The Proceedings of the Old Bailey London 1674 to 1834 (I'm sure I linked to them before, but the more links the better, I always say).

June 05, 2004

Bedlam II

Recently finished reading Greg Hollingshead's forthcoming novel, Bedlam (previously mentioned here). I enjoyed it immensely.

Am deciding about whether or not to put it on my prose narrative before 1800 course next fall. On the plus side: it's a compelling read, but more importantly, Hollingshead is giving a reading in Saint John and the class could attend. On the negative side: the reading is early in October so I will have had little time to develop a context; the students will have read Bedlam before they have read much from the period itself; and reading a contemporary novel might throw off their reading of 18th-century texts. On balance, though, I think that the chance to hear — and possibly interact with — a living, breathing author overrides other considerations. And I will have a month to set the stage.

Links:

Artist Rod Dickinson's construction of James Tilly Matthews' Air Loom

Mike Jay's The Air Loom Gang (Bantam Press, 2003)

John Haslam's Illustrations of Madness:  Exhibiting a Singular Case of Insanity, and a No Less Remarkable Difference in Medical Opinion:  Developing the Nature of Assailment, and the Manner of Working Events; with a Description of the Tortures Experienced by Bomb-bursting, Lobster-cracking, and Lengthening the Brain (London: Rivingtons, 1810) (facsimile.)

Roy Porter's facsimile edition, with introduction, of Haslan's text.

June 04, 2004

Eliza Haywood

I'm working on an entry about Eliza Haywood for an encyclopedia of erotic literature.

I love Haywood. I even named my desktop computer after her, and greater love hath no woman. Her career spanned four decades, from the vogue of amatory fiction in the 1720s, of which she was a pioneer, to the novels of education of the 1740s and 50s. Some critics have described this trajectory in terms of repentance or conversion, but I prefer the argument that she was particularly adept at gauging the literary marketplace.

And, as you can see from the portrait, she was a major babe.

Some Haywood links:

A resuscitated reputation: the case of Eliza Haywood, Andrew Ball, Oxford English Dictionary.

Eliza Haywood's Feigning Femmes Fatale: Desirous and Deceptive Women in Fantomina, Love in Excess, and The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (PDF), Emily Kathryn Booth (MA thesis, English, East Tennessee State University, 2001).

The Fortunate Foundlings, Being the Genuine History of Colonel M — — Rs, And His Sister, Eliza Haywood (e-text).

Catherine Ingrassia's page: bibliography and chronology.

"Texts, Lies and the Marketplace: Eliza Haywood and the Literary Marketplace at Mid-Century": Catherine Ingrassi.

"The Language of Feminised Sexuality: gendered voice in Eliza Haywood's Love in Excess and Fantomina" (PDF), Tiffany Potter, Women's Writing 10.1 (2003).

"The Debt to Pleasure: Eliza Haywood's Love in Excess and women's fiction of the 1720s" (PDF), Sarah Prescott, Women's Writing 7.3 (2000).

Selected Bibliography: Jessica Smith and Paula Backscheider.

The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood, George Frisbie Whicher (1915).

The textual architecture of Eliza Haywood's Adventures of Eovaai, Earla A. Wilputte, Essays in Literature (March 22, 1995).

May 27, 2004

More on Gillray

Giornale Nuovo continues the story of 18thc satirist James Gillray, begun here. A wonderful post with the combination of narrative and visuals that the Giornale does so well.

(See my earlier post for a sample drawing and some other links).

May 26, 2004

Some links

Feministing has a post about Cindy Sherman, Photographer extraordinaire, and links to some other feminist artists (Yay Guerrilla Girls!).

The Ex-Classics Web Site takes on the needful task of reproducing texts formerly influential, now out of print, such as the Newgate Calendar with its tales of crime and depravity.

Million Book Project (via Maud).

Two very funny links from Boing Boing: Donald and Mickey insinuated into various canonical works of art, and famous nudes with clothing on.

This is doing the rounds. Reminds me of those little videos of Dave Pogue on the Macworld CDs. Do those guys go to some speech school somewhere?

Common Errors in English and How to Recognize Plagiarism (both via Palimpsest).

The Power of Woe, The Power of Life. Images of women in prints from the Renaissance to the present (from Plep).

Amnesty International’s annual report for 2004 now out (via Crooked Timber):

Around the world, more than a billion people's lives were ruined by extreme poverty and social injustice while governments continued to spend freely on arms.

May 24, 2004

James Gillray

Giornale Nuovo has an informative post about James Gillray (1756-1815), caricaturist. And, more is promised.

Some other links:
William Hogarth
William Hogarth and 18th-Century Print Culture
Jack Lynch's Eighteenth-Century Resources — Art
University of Wales, Lampeter Hogarth Archive, and, to round things off,
A Speedy 18th Century Corset

May 22, 2004

Gender resources

Mary Robinson's "A Letter to the Women of England, on the Injustice of Mental Subordination": A Hypertext Edition (via wood s lot).

African American Women Writers of the 19th-Century.

The History of Rape: A Bibliography compiled by Stefan Blaschke (via wood s lot).

E-books by Women Writers, from Louisa May Alcott to Zitkala-S.

Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility: Women and Computing.

Renaissance Women Online.

The Center for Women and Change: Women's Resources.

Women Online Worldwide.

"Trashing the Hallmark card mom" by Katy Read at Salon, with links to various mothers' organizations (via feministing.com).

May 19, 2004

Bedlam

I was lucky enough to be given bound proofs of Greg Hollingshead's forthcoming novel, Bedlam. Isn't it a marvellous cover? Hollingshead is coming to Saint John in the fall as part of our annual Lorenzo Society Reading Series, and I am wondering whether or not to put the novel on my "Prose Narrative Before 1800" course. It might be interesting to discuss a contemporary text that seeks to represent the period we are studying, and it would be wonderful for them to be able to attend a reading and ask questions of a real, live author.

Here is what he writes about the novel:

Bedlam is a novel based on the true story of James Tilly Matthews, an inmate of Bethlem Hospital at Moorfields in London during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Although delusional, Matthews is in for political reasons, and his wife Margaret spends ten years trying to get him out. Her primary opponent, the author of an eloquent description of his condition (the first extended account of a paranoid system in English), is the author and apothecary John Haslam, a man compromised by defending an imprisonment he has been given no reason for, of a patient who he knows would be better off released. Bedlam is told in the voices of these three characters.

The British social historian Roy Porter has told this story most thoroughly in his 1988 edition of Haslam's book concerning Matthews, Illustrations of Madness (1810). While exercising some fictional licence, I am doing my best to be faithful to the characters, their voices, their experiences, and the times.

Homepage.
HarperCollins Interview on Bedlam.
Working the Airloom: on writing historical fiction.
Interview (Nov. 03).
Audio of Hollingshead reading from The Roaring Girl, winner of the 1995 Governor General's Award for Fiction.

May 07, 2004

c18th links

Mathematicians of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.

Clandestine E-Texts From the Eighteenth Century.

Homosexuality in Eighteenth-Century England.

Eighteenth-Century England: "A Site Created by and for Literature Students at the University of Michigan."

The Samuel Johnson Sound Bite Page, Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson by Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi, and Jack Lynch's comprehensive Samual Johnson page.

BBC Four has a Samual Johnson prize for best non-fiction.

April 17, 2004

English Pattern Books

Plep points towards eighteenth-century English pattern books at the Met. The context is American but the books are British.

April 16, 2004

What would Richardson think?

Stephany Aulenback points towards Eric Brown's Digital Epistolary Novel, Intimacies (beware seizure-inducing intro). The plot:

Two young professionals "meet" through a mis-sent e-mail. They become "attracted" in cyber-space and tentatively agree to a "real" meeting. A brutal assault follows. The obvious suspect is the e-mail partner, but one person is unconvinced. A series of surprises and revelations follows — all delivered in digital form, all entirely possible, and all representing ways we now learn of events in our world where virtual reality constantly fights its counterpart.

Brown, "a former English professor who teaches executives how to write," says in a NYTimes interview that the plot is based on Pamela, but it sounds more like a modern-day, hyper violent Clarissa, at least from the description above. Not to mention the photograph of the mascara-stained woman on the site.

April 06, 2004

According to Bainbridge

Just finished According to Queeney (2001) by Beryl Bainbridge, a retelling of the relationship between Samuel Johnson and Hester Thrale Piozzi. The novel is framed by a series of letters from Piozzi's daughter, Hester (Queeney) when adult, so her point of view dominates, but she is not alone: the bulk is told with a variety of shifting perspectives, though mainly Piozzi's and Johnson's. It is a cold, sad book. Piozzi is presented as selfish and violent with her children. Johnson's complicated relations with women and his physical decline are described in detail. One feels sympathy for the young Queeney, but the older Queeney of the framing letters is bitter and self-righteous. Bainbridge's writing is economical, and she rarely missteps, but I would agree with one (forgotten, sorry) reviewer who advised that only those already familiar with the Streatham circle should read the novel: in other words, that one should not judge Piozzi et al. by Bainbridge's portraits. A beautifully written but bleak, at times even macabre, set-piece, from the opening dissection to the final funeral. And remarkable for its reproduction of the turns of phrase, the modes of thought, of the period.

Addendum: Here is the Henry and Hester Thrale page of a comprehensive website about things Thrale, run by one David Thrale.

March 27, 2004

Wonder women

Posted by George H. Williams: "From Catherine Rodriguez, who organized the SHARP panels at this year's ASECS, I learned that eighteenth-century authors Fanny Burney and Hannah More made appearances in Wonder Woman comics as 'wonder women of history.'"

I would LOVE to see those issues.

Cross-posted to writingwomen.

March 16, 2004

Jonathan Swift, ahead of his time

Mirabilis links to an article in the Globe and Mail which begins, "In February 1708, Jonathan Swift assumed one identity in order to effectively assassinate another." It goes on to describe how Swift effectively skewered the career of "astrologer and rascal" John Partridge. (The bulk of the article is about contemporary identity theft, which needn't concern us. The important thing to remember is that anything interesting was invented in the eighteenth century.)

March 15, 2004

Two c18th links

from Plep:

1. Eighteenth-Century European dress at the Metropolitan Museum in NY. Lovely photographs and commentary that makes the palms itch to stroke some silk.

2. The Poems of Ossian, the hugely successful literary forgery by James Macpherson, published in 1773 as a translation of an ancient Celtic poem cycle.

February 21, 2004

Tristram Shandy; print

wood s lot links to a memorable post in maisonneuve about moveable type (the printing technology, not the weblog programme). I like the paragraph on Tristram Shandy, quoted in the referring post. I'll be teaching it next Sept., and will remember this:

The professor envies his students one thing: that this is their first reading of Tristram Shandy. The professor admits then to pitying himself and his students one thing: that the book is not being read in its original: meaning, the black, blank and marbled pages are all reproductions of the idea of the page, but never the actual page its significance begs it to be: meaning, Tristram Shandy no longer exists, and the only way to prolong its life was to transfer its significance into a simulacrum’s life.

February 09, 2004

Latest overdue reviews

Ellen Brinks, Gothic Masculinity: effeminacy and the supernatural in English and German Romanticism (Bucknell, 2003), and

Peter K. Garrett, Gothic Reflections: narrative force in nineteenth-century fiction (Cornell, 2003).

February 04, 2004

Carrie, eat your heart out.

Here, via the amazing Plep, is a blog about shoes. All about shoes.

I visited the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto the last time I was there. They have some lovely 18thc shoes,

and I was delighted to find a magnet with a picture of them in the giftshop. (If they set up a shoe shop, they would make a killing!)

Joe and I visited the Ellis Island Museum shortly after it reopened—a few years back now—and the thing I remember most strongly is a single, tiny leather bootie, lost by someone (and where are they now?), sitting in a glass display case.

What is it about shoes?

November 26, 2003

What's that in dollars?

Students of ENGL3204: Apropos of our discussion about Frances Burney's Evelina: here is a site that links to various resources to help determine, as its title says, the "Current Value of Old Money." And here, from Dalhousie, is the site of the Bubble Project, "a collaborative and interdisciplinary research initiative on the subject of the South Sea Bubble (SSB), the 1720 English episode in what might be called the first great international financial crisis."

September 28, 2003

More on Pope

To add to the discussion of Pope mentioned below: I owe to him the title of this blog, as he was grinding his teeth about scribbling women long before Hawthorne made his famous comment in 1855 that "America is now wholly given over to a d—ned mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash — and should be ashamed of myself if I did succeed."

Pope's infamous attack on Eliza Haywood in The Dunciad
(published in 1728 and expanded in 1744)

See in the circle next, Eliza placed,
Two babes of love close clinging
To her waist.

was supplemented by a note, in case anyone missed the point: "In this game, is expos'd in the most contemptuous manner, the profligate licentiousness of those Shameless Scribblers (for the most part of that Sex, which ought least to be capable of such malice or imprudence) who in libellous Memoirs and Novels reveal the faults and misfortune of both sexes, to the ruin or disturbance, of public fame or private happiness." Haywood is offered as the prize in a urinating competition: ‘Who best can send on high/ The salient spout, fairstreaming to the sky,’ (II, 15.3-5). The second prize was a chamber pot. Jonathan Swift used similar language when he wrote, "I have heard of [her] as a stupid, infamous scribbling woman, but have not seen any of her productions."

Alas, I cannot claim to the be first (or even the fiftieth, I am sure) to attempt to reclaim this slur and refashion it into a badge of honour, for there is Scribbling Women, a project of the Public Media Foundation which dramatizes stories by American women writers for national radio broadcast in the U.S.A.; Scribbling Women: Short Stories by 19th-Century American Women (1997), a book edited by Elaine Showalter; Style and the "Scribbling Women": An Empirical Analysis of Nineteenth-Century American Fiction by Mary P. Hiatt; Domestic Goddess, a.k.a. "scribbling mobs of women," a moderated E-journal, devoted to women writers, beginning in the 19th century, who wrote domestic fiction; a proposed collection called Scribbling Women: The Form of the Short Story, 1850-present; and many individual references. Clearly I cannot claim originality, though I would point out that all these other references are without exception to American women writers via the Hawthorne quote, while I of course, as an eighteenth–centuryist and a reader of British literature, prefer to be insulted by Swift and Pope.

September 23, 2003

On Pope

Here is a link to a blog entry on Alexander Pope posted on Aaron Haspel's godofthemachine.com (culling his readers to a select few since June 2002). Not a fan, but he has some insights. Not a fan of the c18th at all, I would suspect, and since Pope was such a self–conscious spokesperson of "the age" (if we can use the inclusive term for such a vital and changing period), he is damned by definition.

At any rate, my students in English 3204 just read Pope's "An Essay on Criticism" and "An Essay on Man," and may be in the mood for a little Pope–trashing. They liked the former, but he lost most of them with the latter.

July 02, 2003

Here are the two entries of my abortive blogger blog

Tuesday, July 01, 2003: An inauspicious beginning to this blog 

Have posted nothing for June. Spent the time tinkering with my web site instead, and still am not happy with it.

Have not continued to read Ryman's Was; got sidetracked by Roy Porter's Enlightenment: Britain and the creation of the modern world, which is proving very helpful in my thinking about English 3204: c18th Prose and Poetry, which I have taught for a couple of years now but am in the process of revamping. He is such a deft, persuasive writer, and Enlightenment is just the kind of intellectual history of the period to provide a useful context for students. I will not ask them to read the whole book, of course, or we would never get to the literary texts. But I plan to reproduce some passages in their kit (through CanCopy of course; all legal and aboveboard).

See Porter's obituary in The Guardian (March 5, 2002).

Monday, May 19, 2003: Reading Ryman 

I've just started reading Geoff Ryman's Was. I've had it on my shelf for awhile but have been reluctant to read it; my friend Glenn told me some time ago that he found it a difficult novel to read. Ryman is coming to a sf conference in Guelph that I was thinking of going to—won't be, but that's by the by—so I decided to finally read it. Glenn was right; it is very difficult. I can't seem to read more than a few chapters at a time; not my usual practice. The novel, as far as I can tell—I'm not very far into it—is a layering of the story of an ill man in the 1980s (probably AIDS) with a retelling of the story of Dorothy of The Wizard of Oz. It is the latter strain that is discomfiting; Dorothy is an unloved orphan, foisted onto her harsh Aunt and taciturn uncle in the ironically named Manhattan, Kansas. The kicker, for me, is that Auntie Em is cruel to Toto. So, small doses.

Here is an interesting article by Steffen Hantke: "There's no place like home": Geoff Ryman's Was and Turner's Myth of National Childhood."