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Exhibit, conference showcase Victorian amusements
Andrea Lynn,
Humanities Editor
217-333-2177; andreal@illinois.edu
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Released
4/17/07
CHAMPAIGN,
Ill. —
Despite their reputations for being prudes and their Queen’s
famous comment to the contrary, Victorian folks could be amused. Quite,
in fact.
And to demonstrate their ravenous appetite for fun, an ensemble of
scholars at the University of Illinois has mounted a new exhibition
titled “We
Are Amused.”
The exhibit, which is free and open to the public, runs from Monday
(April 23) to July 20 in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Room
346 of the University Library, 1408 W. Gregory St., Urbana. That library
is open 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday.
All but two of the items for the exhibition are drawn from the U. of
I. Library. A Web version of the exhibit is posted at http://www.library.uiuc.edu/rbx/exhibits.htm.
The occasion for the exhibit is the 31st Conference of the Midwest
Victorian Studies Association, which will hold its 2007 meeting at
the U. of I. Friday through Sunday (April 20 to 22). The theme of the
meeting is
“Entertainment in the Marketplace: How the Victorians Were Amused.”
The association and the Rare Book Library are co-sponsors of the exhibit.
According to Nicholas Temperley, a U. of I. professor emeritus of music and
one of the curators, the items in the exhibit were chosen to “evoke
a relatively unexplored aspect of Victorian life.”
He and his co-curators, Walter Arnstein, professor emeritus of history,
and Christina Bashford, professor of music, and the exhibit coordinator,
Dennis Sears, focused on three categories of entertainment in the Victorian
era: music, theater and sport.
“All three enjoyed a near-universal appeal in the Victorian period,”
Temperley said. “Even the Queen, despite her famous saying, was
amused. She was an enthusiast for opera and horseback riding, and promoted
recreational swimming.”
Temperley said that some of Victoria’s “less exalted subjects”
preferred minstrel shows and dog fighting, while melodrama occupied
those in the middle ground. Golf and hunting were “somewhat exclusive
pastimes,” while skating and cycling were well within reach of
the majority and enjoyed by both sexes – often together.
We discover from the show that Victorians were amused:
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• In their drawing-rooms. “It is almost impossible,”
Bashford wrote in the exhibit catalog, “to exaggerate the importance
of music in the lives of the Victorians.” They flocked to hear
professional musicians, but also “delighted in making music themselves.”
One of the crazes that overtook middle-class Victorians was the Christy’s
Minstrels, a “blackface” comic song and dance troupe whose
performances, which included ballads, comic songs and burlesques, “claimed
to recreate modes of entertainment that were found among American plantation
slaves,” Bashford wrote.
Songs from their shows were arranged for voice and piano and published
in albums. “The simple vocal lines, harmonies and easy
accompaniments would
have made them ideal for amateur performances in the Victorian drawing-room.”
The “Boosey’s Christy’s Minstrels Album” in
the exhibit was published in London in 1859. It contained in two books
and one “elegant volume” the music and lyrics for 24 popular
songs, including some tunes still familiar today – “Gently
Down the Stream” – and some not as well remembered, such
as “Let Me Kiss Him for His Mother.”
Another sing-along book on display was just for men: “Richardson’s
New Modern Minstrel, containing all the most popular comic, sentimental,
and bacchanalian songs for the year.” Published in 1834 with a
hand-colored foldout title page, the book contains lyrics to such classics
as “Give Me the Ruby Grape” and “Mary Had Lovers Two.”
Hard to believe, but even the poetry of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was
grist for the song mill. For three shillings and sixpence – then
equivalent to about 87¢ – a London choral group in 1900 could
buy a copy of “Scenes from the ‘Song of Hiawatha’
“ by H.W. Longfellow set to music for soprano, tenor, and baritone
soli chorus and orchestra by S. Coleridge-Taylor.
Coleridge-Taylor’s Op. 30, No. 1, had three parts: “Hiawatha’s
Wedding Feast,” “The Death of Minnehaha” and “Hiawatha’s
Departure.” The pocket-sized book also included a list of characters
and their identifications and a pronunciation guide to Indian words.
The publisher Novello “enjoyed enormous commercial success selling
cheap editions of choral works such as ‘Hiawatha’ to satisfy
the huge amateur interest in singing, and demand for multiple copies
of music,” Bashford wrote.
• At exhibitions, including London’s big one in 1851. For
the equivalent of about $1.37, visitors could buy an ingenious souvenir,
“Lane’s Telescopic View of the Interior of the Great Industrial
Exhibition.” The accordion-style “peep-hole” book
has nine colored panels, one of them a grand fountain sprinkled
with glitter to mimic its torrent of water.
• In the theaters. “The theater was in a flourishing state
throughout Victoria’s reign,” Temperley wrote in the exhibit
catalog. “Playbills bear witness to the astonishing enthusiasm
of audiences for watching two or even three events on one evening, often
lasting for five or six hours.”
Women in this era, he wrote, enjoyed “full acceptance, if not
equality, as actors, and gradually lived down the moral ambiguity long
attached to that profession.” They often played male parts, he
said.
One woman who built her career largely on “breeches” roles
was Jennie Lee (1858-1930). The show includes a print of her portrayal
as “Jo,” the ragged sweeper boy. Lee first played “Jo”
– a major character in Charles Dickens’ “Bleak House”
– in San Francisco in the 1870s for a play titled “Jo.”
When her husband revived the play at the Globe Theatre in 1876, Lee
was an immense success in the title role.
• In armchairs. The satirical magazine “Punch” was
ruthless entertainment. The April 3, 1875, issue, shown in the exhibit,
depicts an entire orchestra composed of women, the gender that was only
just coming out of the cultural bonds restricting their playing of instruments
– it being considered “unsightly” to see a respectable
woman holding a violin under her chin, and still less, a cello between
her knees.
• On fields and in stadiums – in droves. “Victorians
not only became involved in an enormous variety of participant sports,”
Arnstein wrote, “but by the end of the 19th century two mass spectator
sports had also become part of English life: cricket, with W.C. Grace
as a national hero, and football, that is, soccer.”
• On paths. In its 1887 volume on cycling, the remarkable 24-volume
“Badminton Library of Sports and Pastimes” proclaimed that
riding via tricycle and bicycle by both sexes was “by far the
most recent of all sports. There is none which has developed more rapidly
in the last few years.” With 400 bicycling enthusiasts, “England
may be looked upon as the Home of Cycling,” the book added.
• On the slopes. Beginning in the late 1800s, women were accepted
in the “novel sport” of tobogganing – but their
clothing clearly was an issue. The popular women’s magazine
The Ladies’ Field, lavish with photographs and illustrations,
addressed the problems in its Feb. 20, 1900, issue.
“A sport that perhaps does not very often come within the ken
of the generality of women is tobogganing. Practised as it is, however,
to a large extent at winter resorts in Switzerland, and particularly
in the Engadine, the charms of it, as I can testify from personal experience,
are very considerable.”
After a description of the sport, preferred venues and male attire,
the author launches into a discussion of acceptable postures and attire
for females. While the “sideways” posture was most graceful
for women at St. Moritz, the “flat face downward” position
was too risky, for “unless the dress is very cleverly manipulated
or strapped down, it is apt to blow up to the waist, which, to say the
least, is hardly a pleasing sight.”
Still, armed with enough elastic, hooks and eyes, ”the woman tobogganist
can enjoy her rides to the full; and once she understands how to steer
with judgment and due caution, and knows the pace at which she can travel
with safety, she will scarcely fail to derive as much pleasure as she
can possibly desire from the pursuit of this exhilarating sport.”
