Scottish Nationality in the Nineteenth Century

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
James J. Coleman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Gallery ◽  
National Museum ◽  
Focal Points ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
National Institutions ◽  
National Monuments ◽  
National Architecture

Measured in terms of the symbols of nationality common across the rest of nineteenth-century Europe, there can be no doubt that the Scots held an assertive sense of themselves as a distinct nation. Rather than giving up their nationality in favour of British-national institutions, the Scots surrounded themselves with all the signs and symbols of a culturally and historically coherent nation. The Scots had a national museum and national gallery, national monuments, a national poet, national dress and national architecture, as well as a pantheon of national heroes, past and present. Indeed, Scotland in the nineteenth century suffered not so much from a lack of focal points for its nationality than from a surfeit. In the Victorian era there existed a collective pride bordering on collective egotism, an imperial arrogance bound up with landscape, industry, education and Presbyterianism.

A nineteenth-century glyptic collection in the National Museum in Krakow

2014 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-96
Author(s):  
Paweł Gołyźniak ◽  
Lucyna Natkaniec-Nowak ◽  
Magdalena Dumańska-Słowik
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Museum

The line of reason: Hugh Blair, spatiality and the progressive structure of language

2011 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew D. Eddy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Graphic Representation ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
Hugh Blair ◽  
Early Humans ◽  
Power Of Language ◽  
The Relationship

At the dawn of the nineteenth century, words were seen as artefacts that afforded insights into the mental capacities of the early humans. In this article I address the late Enlightenment foundations of this model by focusing on Professor Hugh Blair, a leading voice on the relationship between language, progressivism and culture. Whereas the writings of grammarians and educators such as Blair have received little attention in histories of nascent palaeoarchaeology and palaeoanthropology, I show that he addressed a number of conceptual themes that were of central relevance to the ‘primitive’, ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’ typology that guided the construction of ‘prehistoric minds’ during the early decades of the Victorian era. Although I address the referential power of language to a certain extent, my main point is that the rectilinear spatiality afforded by Western forms of graphic representation created an implicitly progressivist framework of disordered, ordered and reordered minds.

Defaming and Defining ‘Bloody Mary’ in Nineteenth-Century England

2014 ◽  
Vol 90 (1) ◽  
pp. 287-303 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith Richards
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
History Textbooks ◽  
Victorian England ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
John Foxe ◽  
High Profile ◽  
Catholic Faith ◽  
Papal Authority ◽  
Mary Tudor

Although the reputation of Englands first queen regnant, Mary Tudor (died 1558) had remained substantially unchanged in the intervening centuries, there were always some defenders of that Catholic queen among the historians of Victorian England. It is worth noting, however, that such revisionism made little if any impact on the schoolroom history textbooks, where Marys reputation remained much as John Foxe had defined it. Such anxiety as there was about attempts to restore something of Marys reputation were made more problematic by the increasing number and increasingly visible presence of a comprehensive Catholic hierarchy in the nineteenth century, and by high-profile converts to the Catholic faith and papal authority. The pre-eminent historians of the later Victorian era consistently remained more favourable to the reign of Elizabeth, seen as the destroyer,of an effective Catholic church in England.

Collected Letters of Sir George and Lady Beaumont to the Wordsworth Family, 1803-1829

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Critical Study ◽  
National Gallery ◽  
Artistic Development ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
British Art ◽  
Personal Significance ◽  
Familial Relationship ◽  
History Of

This edition presents and contextualizes an archive of letters -- belonging to the Wordsworth Trust -- that reveal the creative and personal significance of the friendship between William Wordsworth and Sir George Beaumont. Beaumont is a key figure in the history of British Art. As well as being a respected amateur landscape painter, he was a prominent patron, collector, and co-founder of the National Gallery. Wordsworth described Beaumont’s friendship as one of the chief blessings of his life, and the letters reveal that the two men became collaborators as well as companions. In addition to documenting unique perspectives on social, political, and cultural events of the early nineteenth century (providing new contexts for reading Wordsworth’s mature poetry) the letters chart the progress of an increasingly intimate inter-familial relationship that included Lady Beaumont and Dorothy and Mary Wordsworth. The picture that emerges is of a coterie that—in influence, creativity, and affection—rivals Wordsworth’s more famous exchange with Coleridge in the 1790s. The edition includes an extended critical study of how Wordsworth and Beaumont helped shape one another’s work, tracing processes of mutual artistic development that involved not only a meeting of aristocratic refinement and rural simplicity, of a socialite and a lover of retirement, of a painter and a poet, but also an aesthetic rapprochement between neoclassical and romantic values, between the impulse to idealize and the desire to particularize.

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 189-200
Author(s):  
Alan Montgomery
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Early History ◽  
Roman Period ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
Dead End

The Conclusion of Classical Caledonia looks at nineteenth century attitudes towards Roman Scotland, also comparing these to Victorian attitudes towards England’s Roman heritage. It reveals striking differences, with the Roman period being viewed as a pivotal moment in the formation of modern England, but the exploits of the Romans in Scotland largely dismissed as an inconsequential footnote. During the Victorian era, the Scottish fascination with the Romans and the Caledonians would be replaced by more romanticised visions of the nation’s early history. This final section categorises the eighteenth-century obsession with Scotland’s Roman past as a historical and patriotic ‘dead end’ and discusses why it failed to become a lasting element of Scotland’s popular history and national identity.

Creating a Community

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Niall Sharples
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Family Member ◽  
Bronze Age ◽  
Field Work ◽  
Late Bronze Age ◽  
National Museum ◽  
Metal Detector ◽  
Direct Relevance ◽  
Television Programme

In the summer of 1979, when I was working on my undergraduate dissertation in the National Museum, I became involved in an interesting piece of field-work that has direct relevance to the material that we are going to examine in this chapter. A Mrs MacDonald came into the museum to enquire whether some objects she had in her possession were of any archaeological significance. She had been encouraged to make this visit by a recent television programme where the presenter discussed and exhibited objects that were similar to those in her possession. She explained to the curator that the objects had been found by a family member during ploughing and had been kept in the kitchen drawer for the last two decades, though they were often brought out for the children to play with. She then removed, from her shopping bag, a gold bracelet and a gold ‘dress fastener’ of distinctive Late Bronze Age type. This had the immediate effect of rendering the museum curator speechless—these were in the days before metal detecting had become a popular hobby, and new finds of this significance were seldom made. The most recent discovery of comparable objects was in the nineteenth century. Further discussion of the nature of the discovery revealed that the location of the find was still remembered; it was just behind the farmhouse. It was also thought that other objects were discovered at the time, but these were discarded, as they were not so interesting. As there was a possibility that objects were still present in the field it was decided that a team would be sent by the museum to explore the finds location. I was dispatched, with two other students then working in the museum, and a metal detector, purchased specially for the occasion, to see what we could find. I have to say that metal detecting must be one of the most boring pastimes ever invented. In our youthful enthusiasm, we decided to be thorough and systematic. We set out a grid that covered the area where the gold had been discovered and began work.

The Adventure of the Stradivarius: Violins in the Work of Arthur Conan Doyle and William Crawford Honeyman

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachael Durkin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Sherlock Holmes ◽  
Detective Story ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Arthur Conan Doyle

Abstract The violin, despite its fleeting appearances in the stories of Sherlock Holmes, has become prominently associated with the character of Sherlock in modern TV and film adaptions. While the violin is never investigated by Holmes in the stories, it is represented in more depth in a precursory detective story by William Crawford Honeyman: a Scottish author-musician, whose work appears to have influenced Arthur Conan Doyle’s tales of Sherlock Holmes. Honeyman’s short story ‘The Romance of a Real Cremona’ (1884) follows detective James McGovan as he traces and returns a stolen Stradivari violin and unravels its complex provenance. The importance of the violin’s inclusion in fictional works has been little discussed in scholarship. Here, the texts of Doyle and Honeyman serve as a lens through which to analyse the meaning of the violin during the Victorian era. By analysing the violin from an organological perspective, this article examines the violin’s prominence in nineteenth-century British domestic music-making, both as a fiscally and culturally valuable object. The final section of the article explores the meaning attached to, and created by, the violin in the stories of Doyle and Honeyman.

scholarly journals Curing the Vampire Disease with Transfusion: The Narrative Structure of Bram Stoker’s Dracula

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Anthony Salazar
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Blood Transfusion ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Narrative Structure ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
Vital Component

Blood transfusion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula serves as a vital component to life for characters who have been bitten by vampires. But blood transfusion can mean much more when comparing it to the narrative’s structure. While characters contribute to the narrative, parallels between blood transfusion and narrative assembly emerge, which thus grants characters within the novel immortality as their writing lives on while they slowly die from the vampire disease. Although transitioning into a vampire can also grant these characters immortality, vampires and other supernatural creatures during the Victorian Era were frowned upon by nineteenth century values and religious beliefs. Therefore, seeking immortality through narration allows these characters to abide to Victorian values while also living eternally.

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