Hilarious Homicides: Satirizing Sensational Murders in Late Nineteenth-Century London

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lee Michael-Berger
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Visual Representations ◽  
Cultural Authority ◽  
Social Dimension ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fresh Perspective ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Music Hall ◽  
Central Tool

Abstract Whereas many studies consider the nineteenth-century fascination with murder as synonymous with the contemporary cultural tendency towards sensation and melodrama, this article offers a fresh perspective on the subject. Here, I deal with a corpus of humorous murder representations, which have rarely been addressed before. I examine how murder was comically represented and look at the contemporary discourse on murder, through the investigation of sources including music hall songs, cartoons, and theatrical travesties, with an emphasis on visual representations. In the context of the democratization of culture, the article examines the importance of murder in the elite claim to cultural authority versus its perception of plebian taste. It demonstrates how late nineteenth-century notions of modernity, which were crystallized through the discussion of murder, were classed and gendered. Thus, a hidden discourse is exposed, in which murder serves as a central tool in a mechanism similar to Bourdieu’s theory of distinction, where cultural and artistic ‘taste’ has a social dimension.

John Lloyd Williams (1854–1945): profile of a Snowdonian botanist

2006 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Dewi Jones
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Plant Physiology ◽  
Marine Algae ◽  
Plant Distribution ◽  
The Arctic ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Major Study ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Late Nineteenth

John Lloyd Williams was an authority on the arctic-alpine flora of Snowdonia during the late nineteenth century when plant collecting was at its height, but unlike other botanists and plant collectors he did not fully pursue the fashionable trend of forming a complete herbarium. His diligent plant-hunting in a comparatively little explored part of Snowdonia led to his discovering a new site for the rare Killarney fern (Trichomanes speciosum), a feat which was considered a major achievement at the time. For most part of the nineteenth century plant distribution, classification and forming herbaria, had been paramount in the learning of botany in Britain resulting in little attention being made to other aspects of the subject. However, towards the end of the century many botanists turned their attention to studying plant physiology, a subject which had advanced significantly in German laboratories. Rivalry between botanists working on similar projects became inevitable in the race to be first in print as Lloyd Williams soon realized when undertaking his major study on the cytology of marine algae.

Conflicting obituaries: the Abyssinian ‘outlaw’ Debeb as treacherous bandit and romantic hero in late nineteenth-century Italian imagination

Modern Italy ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 405-419
Author(s):  
Stephen C. Bruner
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Character ◽  
The Other ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Romantic Hero ◽  
Public Persona ◽  
Public Debates ◽  
Folk Hero ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Late Nineteenth

In 1886 the Abyssinian chief Debeb became a public figure in Italy as a rapacious colonial bandit. However, over the next five years he acquired additional public personas, even contradictory ones: as a condottiero ally, a ladies’ man, a traitor, a young Abyssinian aristocrat and pretender to an ancient throne, a chivalrous warrior, and a figure representing the frontier and an Africa mysterious and hidden to Europeans. Upon his 1891 death in combat, he was the subject of conflicting Italian press obituaries. For some commentators, Debeb exemplified treacherous and deceitful African character, an explanation for Italy's colonial disappointments and defeats. However, other commentators clothed him in a romanticised mystique and found in him martial and even chivalrous traits to admire and emulate. To this extent his persona blurred the line demarcating the African ‘other’. Although he first appeared to Italians as a bandit, the notion of the bandit as a folk hero (the ‘noble robber’ or ‘social bandit’, Hobsbawm) does not fit his case. A more fruitful approach is to consider his multi-faceted public persona as reflecting the ongoing Italian debate over ‘national character’ (Patriarca). In the figure of Debeb, public debates over colonialism and ‘national character’ merged, with each contributing to the other.

Scottish Gothic Drama

2017 ◽  
pp. 59-74
Author(s):  
Barbara A. E. Bell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Good Deal ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Visual Effects ◽  
Gothic Revival ◽  
Performance Culture ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Music Hall ◽  
The Way

Scottish theatre, from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, has been characterised by a distinctive performance culture that values anti-illusionist techniques, breaking the fourth wall, music and song, strongly physical acting styles and striking visual effects. These were accepted traits of the Georgian theatre as a whole; however, they endured in Scotland through the music hall and pantomime traditions, when late nineteenth-century Western theatre was focused on realism/naturalism. Their importance to the search for a distinctive Scottish Gothic Drama lies in the way that the conditions of the Scottish theatre during the Gothic Revival valued these skills and effects. That theatre was heavily constricted in what it could play by censorship from London and writers were cautious in their approach to ‘national’ topics. At the same time a good deal of work portraying Scotland as an inherently Gothic setting was imported onto Scottish stages.

Henry Dresser and Victorian Ornithology

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry A. McGhie
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Scientific Information ◽  
Museum Studies ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Bird Conservation ◽  
Conservation Movement ◽  
Leading Role ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This book explores the life of Henry Dresser (1838–1915), one of the most productive British ornithologists of the mid-late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; it is also an exploration of ornithology during a period when the subject changed dramatically. The book is based on previously unpublished letters, diaries and photographs to provide the first detailed biography of any of the independent industrialist–naturalists who dominated nineteenth century British ornithology. Dresser travelled widely in Europe, New Brunswick and to Texas during the American Civil War before settling down to work in London in the timber and iron trades. He built enormous collections of skins and eggs of birds, many of which came from famous travellers and collectors. These collections formed the basis of over 100 publications on birds including some of the finest and some of the last of the great bird books of the late nineteenth century, combining cutting-edge scientific information with masterpieces of bird illustration. Dresser played a leading role in scientific society and in the early bird conservation movement. His correspondence and diaries reveal the inner workings, motivations, personal relationships and rivalries that existed among the leading ornithologists. This book is aimed at anyone interested in birds, history and natural history, and as a textbook for courses relating to history, history of science and museum studies.

scholarly journals Music Hall: Regulations and behaviour in a British cultural institution

Muzikologija ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 61-74
Author(s):  
Derek Scott
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Institution ◽  
Social Anxieties ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Music Hall ◽  
Common Understanding

The music hall in late nineteenth-century Britain offers an example of a cultural institution in which legal measures, in-house regulations, and unscripted codes of behaviour all come into play. At times, the performers or audience were under coercion to act in a certain way, but at other times constraints on behaviour were more indirect, because the music hall created common understanding of what was acceptable or respectable. There is, however, a further complication to consider: sometimes insider notions of what is normative or appropriate come into conflict with outsider concerns about music-hall behaviour. These various pressures are examined in the context of rowdiness, drunkenness, obscenity, and prostitution, and conflicts that result when internal institutional notions of what is normative or appropriate come into conflict with external social anxieties.

Cubes

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Blacklock
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Detailed Account ◽  
Material Object ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Modernist Poetry ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Scientific Principles ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Chapter 4 focuses on the work of Charles Howard Hinton, author of the first Scientific Romances and the least well-known yet most influential theorist of higher space of the late nineteenth century. ‘Hinton was an important mediating figure,’ writes Steven Connor, ‘because, like some of the physical scientists who investigated Spiritualism, his grasp of scientific principles was extensive and subtle.’ Indeed, his work fed into the literature of occult groupings, avant-garde art, Modernist poetry and fiction, and also back into geometry and orthodox science. ‘Cubes’ give a detailed account of Hinton’s work, highlighting his acknowledged and implied sources, Kepler, Kant, and his father, before focusing on his invention of a system of cubes for training the subject in the visualization of higher space. This set of cubes are read as ‘quasi-objects’, things that make fluid the distinction between thinking thing and thing thought on, between mind and material object.

W.B. Yeats, Scholastic Aestheticism and Cultural Authority in Late Nineteenth-Century Ireland

2020 ◽  
pp. 207-222
Author(s):  
Tom Walker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Academic Culture ◽  
Cultural Nationalism ◽  
Cultural Authority ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Field ◽  
Late Nineteenth

W. B. Yeats’s early work ambitiously attempts to reconstitute cultural authority in late nineteenth-century Ireland and Britain. Yet much of the artistic and critical ground that he was attempting to overturn remains somewhat unexplored. This essay places the young poet against the backdrop of a burgeoning and increasingly interconnected critical, aesthetic and academic culture then operating not only in Britain but also in Ireland. More particularly, it examines how Yeats’s early journalism deployed an amalgamation of aesthetic disinterest and cultural nationalism to contest the authority of a Dublin clerisy then bent, in his own terms, on scholasticizing the cultural field. It also relatedly considers how such authority was not only mediated in but also partly constituted by late Victorian British and Irish periodical culture.

Torts

2019 ◽  
pp. 443-462 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lawrence M. Friedman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
English Language ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Tort Law ◽  
Growth Spurt ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Law ◽  
Private Wrongs

This chapter discusses the development of tort law in the second half of the nineteenth century. Tort law experienced its biggest growth spurt in the late nineteenth century. The legal world began to sit up and pay attention. The very first English-language treatise on torts appeared in 1859: Francis Hilliard’s book, The Law of Torts, Or Private Wrongs. Then came Charles G. Addison, Wrongs and Their Remedies in 1860, in England. By 1900, there was an immense literature on the law of torts; Joel Bishop and Thomas M. Cooley had written imposing treatises on the subject; the case law had swollen to heroic proportions. Tort law was a product of the industrial revolution; England here had a head start; problems emerged there first, and so did their tentative legal solutions.

Marie Lloyd (1870–1922) and Biographical Constructions of the Nineteenth-Century Female Superstar

2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-130
Author(s):  
Paul Watt
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Varied Range ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Music Hall ◽  
The Voice ◽  
Alternative Reading

Marie Lloyd (1870–1922) was a vocal superstar of the late nineteenth century. With tens of thousands of ardent followers in Britain and America—and an income that eclipsed even what Adele Patti and Nellie Melba earned—Lloyd was a vocal sensation. Biographers of the prima donna, the female vocal celebrity, are often quick to turn their subjects into heroines through the conferment of appellations such as “The Swedish Nightingale” (for Jenny Lind), “The Queen of Song” (Adelina Patti), and “The Voice of Australia,” in the case of Nellie Melba. Marie Lloyd was also bestowed a heroic title, but in an entirely different milieu: “Queen of the Music Hall.” This article probes the varied reasons—and ambiguities—of this appellation in biographical constructions of Lloyd, especially in relation to the dexterity of her voice that was arguably more varied in its scope than most of her operatic peers. Lloyd's biographers provide disembodied narratives of her career and achievements, since they have virtually nothing to say about the extraordinary range and versatility of her voice. With the aid of historic recordings it is possible to finally make an estimate of Lloyd's technique, and the results are surprising: she was no mere music-hall singer. Lloyd's voice and acting encompassed techniques ranging from eighteenth-century melodrama to nineteenth-century diseuse, allowing for an alternative reading of Lloyd's reputation as Queen of the Music Hall and the varied range of singing found in this institution.

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