The Histrionic Art

2020 ◽  
pp. 63-83
Author(s):  
Rohan McWilliam
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Spoken Word ◽  
The West ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Drury Lane ◽  
Edmund Kean

This chapter is a study of West End theatre in the age of Romanticism. It explains the importance of the patent theatres (particularly those in Drury Lane and Covent Garden) and their attempts to retain a monopoly over the performance of the spoken word. This is then contrasted with the emergence of so-called ‘minor’ theatres in the West End such as the Lyceum, the Adelphi, and the Olympic. They became associated with new theatrical forms including melodrama and burletta. The chapter explores the theatre-going experience in the early nineteenth-century West End and the varied styles of acting in the age of Edmund Kean. It explains why demands emerged for reform of the patent theatre system leading to the 1843 Theatre Regulation Act. This chapter links the early nineteenth century West End to the confessional state which explains why the nature of theatre had to change in the age of reform.

Drury Lane, 1800

2020 ◽  
pp. 13-20
Author(s):  
Rohan McWilliam
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Spoken Word ◽  
The West ◽  
George Iii ◽  
Drury Lane

This chapter sets the scene for the transformation of the West End in the nineteenth century. It commences with the attempted assassination of George III at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane. This event is employed to look more closely at the theatre in 1800 and then broadens out to look at the wider world of the West End at the time. It argues that the modern notion of the West End as a distinct pleasure district barely existed at the start of the nineteenth century (only taking in the areas of the Strand and Covent Garden). The reader then discovers how this embryonic pleasure district emerged during the period from 1660 to 1800. The construction of Mayfair and St James’s in the eighteenth century was pivotal because it reveals how the West End existed to service the aristocracy, creating elite aristocratic shopping areas such as Bond Street. The peculiar arrangements for the provision of theatre are explained: Drury Lane and Covent Garden enjoyed royal patents which in theory prevented anyone else from performing the spoken word on stage. It also shows how this exclusive world was beginning to change at the end of the eighteenth century as more vulgar entertainments arose on the Strand and in Leicester Square.

The Theatrical Life and Death of Wych Street

2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 160-172 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victor Emeljanow
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Short Story ◽  
The West ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Eastern Periphery ◽  
Drury Lane

In London’s Lost Theatres of the Nineteenth Century (1925), Errol Sherson describes Wych Street, located on the eastern periphery of the West End and within 200 metres of Drury Lane Theatre, as ‘one of the narrowest, dingiest and most disreputable thoroughfares the West End has ever known.’ By this time Wych Street had long disappeared, although its memory lingered. In a short story entitled ‘Where was Wych Street’ ( Strand Magazine, 1921), Stacy Aumonier attempted to recall the street’s existence and its significance. In the course of the story the street is identified in relation to two theatres – the Gaiety and the Globe – only the latter of which was connected to the street. Surprisingly, no reference is made to the Olympic Theatre with which Wych Street had been identified since the early nineteenth century or to the Opera Comique immediately adjacent to the Globe, highlighting the problematic role of memory in mapping historical space. This article examines the historical, theatrical and geographical mapping of Wych Street, bringing out contrasts, contradictions and paradoxes, and considering its role as part of the theatrical and extra-theatrical milieu of London.

The Crimea between East and West according to Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century British Travelogues

2020 ◽  
pp. 81-97
Author(s):  
Nikita I. Khrapunov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Well Being ◽  
The West ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Negative Stereotypes ◽  
Grand Tour ◽  
Archaeological Heritage ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Crimea

Following its annexation by Russia in 1783, the Crimea became a stage on the Western grand tour. Foreign travelogues informed their readers about the country, previously almost unknown in Europe. This paper addresses the British travelogues that played an important role in shaping notions of the Crimea and Russia's role in its history, many of which still exist today. The travellers created works of different kinds: unedited letters and journals, encyclopaedic descriptions, imagined journeys, and pseudo-correspondences. Their authors had varied levels of intelligence, motivations, and passions, intricately entwining empirical observations with stereotypes. Geographically located in Europe, the Crimea was understood as a country featuring distinctive features of the East. Its image possessed traits of paradisiacal nature, inhabited by naïve and lazy persons resembling Rousseau's utopia, with an extraordinarily rich archaeological heritage, the romantic culture of Islam, and various ethnic and religious types. The British offered plans for the establishment of Western colonists in the Crimea, as well as the development of communications, trade, agriculture, and industry. William Eton and Matthew Guthrie considered the Russian occupation of the Crimea historically progres-sive, which would bring prosperity and well-being to the country and its residents. However, Edward Clarke interpreted the Russians as the avatar of barbarism and developed a plan to return the peninsula to the Ottomans. Some negative stereotypes originating from his book continue nowadays and are restated in periods of aggravated relations between Russia and the West.

Bureaucratic- or Self-Government: The Early Nineteenth Century Russian City

Slavic Review ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-255 ◽  
Author(s):  
Boris Mironov
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Local Government ◽  
A Priori ◽  
The West ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Narrow Class

While the topic of local government in Russia before the reforms of the 1860s was popular in prerevolutionary historiography, it did not attract much attention from Soviet historians; historians in the west have shown greater interest in the problem. The necessity of using a narrow, class approach forced Soviet historians to interpret the problems of local government in a simplistic and one-sided fashion. The a priori assumption that an independent local government was impossible, especially under absolutism, and the importunate desire to interpret each reform, each action of the crown as a realization of class goals by an exploiting gentry have, in my opinion hampered investigation of the correlation between crown rule and estate self-government in the local government system.

scholarly journals Sospeso tra due mondi: il velo di San Giusto tra Bisanzio e Trieste

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 39-65
Author(s):  
Livia Bevilacqua
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Medieval Art ◽  
The West ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Date ◽  
Careful Observation ◽  
Visual Evidence ◽  
The Many ◽  
General Studies

This article aims to a preliminary reassessment of the silk veil preserved in the Treasury of Trieste cathedral. The cloth is unparalleled in Byzantine as well in western medieval art, in that it is painted with tempera on both sides. It depicts a youthful martyr in a court costume, and bears an inscription that identifies the saint as St. Just. Since its alleged recovery from a reliquary in the early nineteenth century, the cloth has been often addressed by the scholars, who ascribed it either to a Byzantine or to a local master and dated it between the eleventh and the fourteenth century. Despite being referred to in several more general studies, it has been rarely considered individually. In this paper I address the many questions that the Trieste veil raises, including problems of chronology, provenance, function, and iconography. After careful observation and based on both primary sources and visual evidence, I argue that it was produced in Byzantium, possibly at an early date, to serve as a liturgical implement; later, it was brought to the West, where the saint was given a new identity and the cloth was reused as a banner after being painted on the reverse.

Tirumala Nayaka's “New Hall” and the European Study of the South Indian Temple

2001 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-217 ◽  
Author(s):  
Crispin Branfoot
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Final Section ◽  
European Study ◽  
The South ◽  
The West ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Temple Complex ◽  
South Indian ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Architectural Sculpture

AbstractThe Pudu Mandapa (‘New Hall’) in Madurai is one of the best-known monuments from the Nayaka period of Tamilnadu (c. 1550–1700). It was built around 1630 under the patronage of Tirumala Nayaka as a major addition to the Minaksi-Sundaresvara temple complex that dominates the centre of this major Tamil town and Hindu pilgrimage centre. The Pudu Mandapa is well known in the West from the aquatint produced by Thomas and William Daniell, but this is only one of numerous other illustrations by Western and Indian artists in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century of this single Tamil temple structure. A discussion of the Pudu Mandapa as an example of a major architectural type, the festival mandapa, is followed by an examination of the structure's architectural sculpture. The final section discusses the Royal Asiatic Society's collection of drawings of this mandapa and the European documentation of the south Indian temple more generally.

The White Town of Calcutta Under the Rule of the East India Company

2000 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 307-331 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. J. Marshall
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
East India Company ◽  
The West ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Elite Group ◽  
European Culture ◽  
Literature History ◽  
Bengal Renaissance ◽  
The City ◽  
Narrow Base

Late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Calcutta was the setting for the first sustained encounter between Asian intellectuals and the west. An Indian intelligentsia living in Calcutta responded in a most creative way to aspects of European culture that became available to them in the city. Much about this response is now contentious. If the term Bengal Renaissance is still generally applied to it, the implications of that term are disputed. It is no longer necessarily assumed that ‘modern’ India was born in early nineteenth-century Calcutta by a fusing of what was western and what was ‘traditional’. Assumptions that Indian cultures in general and that of Hindu Bengal in particular lacked a capacity to change and to develop on their own internal dynamics, whatever the input from the west, now look more than a little ‘orientalist’. Furthermore, even if the Bengal Renaissance can be shown to have had its roots in its own culture, to some recent critics it was still a movement whose impact was severely limited by the very narrow base on which it rested: an elite group enclosed in a colonial situation. Yet, however the Renaissance may be reassessed, there can still be no doubt that Calcutta under the East India Company contained Indian intellectuals of exceptional talent, who absorbed much from the west. ‘The excitement over the literature, history and philosophy of Europe as well as the less familiar scientific knowledge was deep and abiding’, Professor Raychaudhuri has recently written.

Entrepreneurship and Western Development: The Case of Micajah T. Williams

1963 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 345-368 ◽  
Author(s):  
Harry N. Scheiber
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
Business Leaders ◽  
Public Works ◽  
The West ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Economic Interests ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Western Development

As an important business figure in the development of the West, Micajah Williams' career well illustrates the interlocking character of public and private economic interests during the early nineteenth century. This article suggests comparable functions of entrepreneurs such as Williams in public-works agencies and profit-oriented firms, and argues that the state canal enterprises served to recruit and train a significant number of western business leaders.

Arcadia

2020 ◽  
pp. 21-40
Author(s):  
Rohan McWilliam
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Department Store ◽  
The West ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Intellectual Networks

This chapter explores the little-studied world of early nineteenth century consumerism. It argues that the West End became productive of new forms of shopping aimed principally at an elite market but one that was increasingly colonized by the growing middle classes. It looks at the development of Regent Street, at the construction of shopping arcades (including the Burlington Arcade on Piccadilly) and bazaars that, it argues, anticipated the department store. The chapter also looks at the development of elite tailoring (Savile Row) and the importance of West End bookshops such as Hatchard’s in the construction of intellectual networks.

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