Paper Monument : The Paradoxical Space in the English Paper Peepshow of the Thames Tunnel, 1825–1843

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shijia Yu
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Technological Advancement ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Ambivalent Attitude ◽  
Under Construction

A nineteenth-century optical toy, the paper peepshow is often considered to be the perfect medium to represent the Thames Tunnel. Yet, this perception overlooks the contradictory sentiments evoked by using the paper peepshow. This chapter, focusing on the period when the tunnel was under construction, seeks to analyze these paradoxes. Admittedly, various features of the paper peepshow can indeed render it a fitting medium to represent the tunnel. Yet, the expanded paper peepshow constitutes a space that is ephemeral, because of its brief existence and its fragility. While the ephemeral quality appears to contradict the monumental impression of the tunnel, this contrast would speak to the nineteenth-century English middle classes’ ambivalent attitude towards technological advancement, embodied in the tunnel.

Officers’ commitment to the anti-slavery cause

2019 ◽  
pp. 69-96
Author(s):  
Mary Wills
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
West Africa ◽  
Religious Belief ◽  
Popular Politics ◽  
The West ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
The Press ◽  
Naval Officers

The chapter examines how naval officers engaged with the cornerstones of the British abolitionist agenda: religion, humanitarianism, morality and concepts of national identity. As most nineteenth-century naval officers came from the middle or upper-middle classes, they were exposed to a culture of anti-slavery sentiment in popular politics, literature and the press. These ideas had a significant impact on how they conceived the nature of their duty as naval personnel and their identity as Britons. Many testimonies of naval suppression offer emotion, insight and conviction regarding the anti-slavery cause, often driven by religious belief, and particularly the rise of evangelicalism in the navy. Yet there was no obligation for naval officers serving on the West Africa squadron to be committed abolitionists. Others held more ambiguous views, particularly as attitudes regarding slavery and race evolved and hardened as the century progressed.

Art Nouveau

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sharon Jordan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Consumer Goods ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Art Nouveau ◽  
William Morris ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Cultural Climate ◽  
Architecture And Design ◽  
Applied Arts

From the 1880s until the mid-1910s, Art Nouveau was the dominant style in art, architecture, and design in Europe, with innovative and thoroughly modern production in graphics, furniture, and applied arts. Though it incorporated elements from a range of diverse sources, the most characteristic forms of Art Nouveau were those inspired by nature, but nature that had been adapted, stylized, and aestheticized to reflect the cultural climate of the turn of the century. The origins of Art Nouveau developed out of the ideas of several leading figures during the mid-nineteenth century in their efforts to reconcile art with the increasingly industrialized methods of production dominating in the applied arts. In Britain, William Morris advocated for a unity among art, design, and applied arts that valued handcraftsmanship in well-made objects made available to the middle classes. The Arts & Crafts movement sought to counter the array of poorly designed consumer goods seen at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851, in which individual objects were frequently overwhelmed by ornamentation.

Uncertain New Middle Classes: Changing Consumption Practices and State Policies in Russia

2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 464-484
Author(s):  
Volha Biziukova
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Import Substitution ◽  
State Policies ◽  
The State ◽  
Productive Capacity ◽  
Technological Advancement ◽  
Significant Extent ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Consumption Practices ◽  
New Policies

This article explores the reactions of Russia’s new middle classes to the embargo and import substitution and their changing consumption practices against the background of the economic crisis. It serves as an entry point to look at the interplay of the new middle classes’ socio-economic positionalities and affiliations with the state within a particular political economy. Drawing on fieldwork data collected in 2015–2018, the article traces the subjectivities and orientations that enable the new middle classes’ coping strategies. It demonstrates how their responses are mediated by their imagination of the state and the global hierarchies in which they feel situated to a significant extent through their state membership. The analysis examines how the arrangements of Russia’s political economy come into conflict with the image of a “proper” state, which the new middle classes associate with productive capacity and technological advancement. It invites us to revisit the idea of the eclipse of “production” by “consumption” in assessing the performance of a nation-state, which, as the article shows, is reversed in Russia’s context. Furthermore, it highlights how the reactions to these new policies become a medium to criticize Russia’s post-socialist development and to articulate aspirations for its repositioning in the global system, which is translated into negotiations of the new middle classes’ relatively privileged positions.

scholarly journals Savings banks as an institutional import: the case of nineteenth-century Ireland

2003 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
CORMAC Ó GRÁDA
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Aggregate Data ◽  
Early History ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Savings Banks ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Savings Bank ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Performance

The article examines the early history of provident institutions or trustee savings banks in Ireland. Combining aggregate data and an archive-based study of one savings bank, it describes the growth and performance of this ‘institutional import’. By and large, Irish savings banks catered for the lower-middle and middle classes, not the poor as intended by the founders of the movement. The article also explains how the collapse of three savings banks in 1848 dealt savings banks in Ireland as a whole a blow from which they never really recovered.

scholarly journals The Meat City: urban space and provision in industrial Copenhagen, 1880–1914

Urban History ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-252
Author(s):  
MIKKEL THELLE
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
The Other ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Public ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Ambivalent Attitude ◽  
The One ◽  
The City

ABSTRACT:This article investigates the emergence of the Copenhagen slaughterhouse, called the Meat City, during the late nineteenth century. This slaughterhouse was a product of a number of heterogeneous components: industrialization and new infrastructures were important, but hygiene and the significance of Danish bacon exports also played a key role. In the Meat City, this created a distinction between rising production and consumption on the one hand, and the isolation and closure of the slaughtering facility on the other. This friction mirrored an ambivalent attitude towards meat in the urban space: one where consumers demanded more meat than ever before, while animals were being removed from the public eye. These contradictions, it is argued, illustrate and underline the change of the city towards a ‘post-domestic’ culture. The article employs a variety of sources, but primarily the Copenhagen Municipal Archives for regulation of meat provision.

Return of the repressed: The prima donna from Hoffmann's Tales to Offenbach's Contes

1994 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 221-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heather Hadlock
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Women Performers ◽  
Don Juan ◽  
The World ◽  
Ambivalent Attitude ◽  
Female Singers

The operatic diva, a singer of strange songs, and too often a turbulent, unkind girl, haunted the nineteenth-century imagination, as evidenced by the musical tales of E. T. A. Hoffmann and numerous retellings of those tales in theatre, ballet and opera. Each adaptation of Hoffmann's ‘Rat Krespel’, ‘Der Sandmann’ and ‘Don Juan’ reflects an ambivalent attitude towards women performers, whose potent voices make them simultaneously desirable and fearsome. How do these stories about female singers contrive to contain and manage the singing woman’s authority? And how does the prima donna's voice repeatedly make itself heard, eluding and overcoming narrative attempts to shape or contain its turbulent noise?Let me begin with an excerpt from ‘Rat Krespel’ (1818), which might serve as a parable for relationships between female singers and male music lovers in the Romantic imagination. Krespel, a young German musician, travelled in Italy and was fortunate enough to win the heart of a celebrated diva, Angela, whose name seemed only appropriate to her heavenly voice. Unfortunately, her personality was less than heavenly, and when she was not actually singing he found her violent whims and demands for attention very trying. One day, as he stood playing his violin:[Angela] embraced her husband, overwhelmed him with sweet and languishing glances, and rested her pretty head on his shoulder. But Krespel, carried away into the world of music, continued to play on until the walls echoed again; thus he chanced to touch the Signora somewhat ungently with his arm and the fiddle bow.

Interior decorating in nineteenth-century France

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anca I. Lasc
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Interior Design ◽  
Professional Group ◽  
Department Stores ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
The World ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
The Ideal

This book analyzes the early stages of the interior design profession as articulated within the circles involved in the decoration of the private home in the second half of nineteenth-century France. It argues that the increased presence of the modern, domestic interior in the visual culture of the nineteenth century enabled the profession to take shape. Upholsterers, cabinet-makers, architects, stage designers, department stores, taste advisors, collectors, and illustrators, came together to “sell” the idea of the unified interior as an image and a total work of art. The ideal domestic interior took several media as its outlet, including taste manuals, pattern books, illustrated magazines, art and architectural exhibitions, and department store catalogs. The chapters outline the terms of reception within which the work of each professional group involved in the appearance and design of the nineteenth-century French domestic interior emerged and focus on specific works by members of each group. If Chapter 1 concentrates on collectors and taste advisors, outlining the new definitions of the modern interior they developed, Chapter 2 focuses on the response of upholsterers, architects, and cabinet-makers to the same new conceptions of the ideal private interior. Chapter 3 considers the contribution of the world of entertainment to the field of interior design while Chapter 4 moves into the world of commerce to study how department stores popularized the modern interior with the middle classes. Chapter 5 returns to architects to understand how their engagement with popular journals shaped new interior decorating styles.

Between Text and Cultural Performance: Staging Greek Tragedies in Germany

1999 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-29
Author(s):  
Erika Fischer-Lichte
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
Aesthetic Education ◽  
Careful Study ◽  
Cultural Performance ◽  
Human Species ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Greek Culture ◽  
The Aesthetic

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, a consensus existed among the German educated middle classes that Greek culture represented an ideal and that Greek fine arts and literature were to be regarded as the epitome of perfection. From Schiller's Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man) to Hegel's Lectures on Aesthetics, the message was the same: Greek culture was unique in that it allowed and encouraged its members to develop their potential to the full so that any individual was able to represent the human species as a whole. The model it provided was, however, inimitable and its standards unattainable, but both were invaluable as objects of careful study. Thus, it is small wonder that all surviving tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides were translated into German, some even several times over. Despite this, they were never staged during the eighteenth century.

scholarly journals Reshaping the Gift Relationship

1991 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 201-231 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. J. D. Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Urban Society ◽  
Poor Relief ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Religious Ideology ◽  
Personal Concern ◽  
The Gift ◽  
Economic Ideology ◽  
Charity Organization

SUMMARYAs English urban society overhauled its systems of policing, poor relief and labour discipline in the early nineteenth century, one form of interaction between classes to become problematical was the act of giving to beggars. While economic ideology endorsed a more calculating approach to the relief of distress, social and religious ideology preached the necessity of expanded personal concern for the distressed. Among the commercial and professional middle classes a variety of volunteer activists attempted a solution to this dilemma by professionalizing relations between giver and receiver, thus anticipating the methods of later Victorian “charity organization” by a full half-century.

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