Spectacle of Deformity: Freak Shows and Modern British Culture. By Nadja Durbach.Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. Pp. xiv+273. $39.95.Science and Eccentricity: Collecting, Writing and Performing Science for Early Nineteenth-Century Audiences. By Victoria Carroll. Science and Culture in the Nineteenth Century, volume 4. Edited by, Bernard Lightman.London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008. Pp. x+254. £60.00.

2011 ◽  
Vol 83 (3) ◽  
pp. 647-650
Author(s):  
Lori Loeb
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
University Of California ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Freak Shows ◽  
Science And Culture ◽  
British Culture

scholarly journals Miscellany and Collegiality in the British Periodical Press: TheHarmonicon(1823–1833)

2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 255-293
Author(s):  
Erin Johnson-Hill
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Shared Knowledge ◽  
Periodical Press ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
School Of Music ◽  
The Status ◽  
Musical Knowledge ◽  
The Many ◽  
British Culture ◽  
National Styles

The Harmonicon was, in its day, London's premiere music periodical, gaining a wide and loyal readership at home and abroad. Perhaps the most the distinctive feature of the journal was its deliberate imperative to raise what it considered to be the ‘lamentable’ level of musical knowledge held by the British reading public. The journal's editor, William Ayrton, was deeply concerned that there was a lack of a national school of music in his own country that could ever match that which his rival French and German critics called their own. In this light, I argue that the journal's appeal and economic success was due to a didactic philosophy of ‘collegiality’ and ‘miscellany’ – to borrow William Weber's terms – as a means of disseminating musical knowledge to the broadest readership possible. Through reviewing, critiquing and publishing a remarkably assorted array of national styles and genres of music, the Harmonicon attempted to create a very general type of musical knowledge in Britain in the early nineteenth century, one which looked necessarily beyond national borders in an effort to build up a shared knowledge of music. Data drawn from musical examples spanning all 11 years of the journal's print run is analysed, assessing in particular the high number of international composers featured in the journal. The many miscellaneous strands interwoven throughout the Harmonicon reflect a mode of thinking about music that was integral to a valiant effort to raise the status and awareness of music in early nineteenth-century British culture.

Courting the Cerebellum: Early Organological and Phrenological Views of Sexuality

1987 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-199 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Shortland
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Science ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Moment ◽  
First Time ◽  
To Receive ◽  
British Culture ◽  
Valuable Function

Although phrenology has begun to receive serious attention as a doctrine of mind, as popular science, as part of medical history, as a vehicle for social and ideological interests, and as an important component of American and European (especially British) culture in the early nineteenth century, there is one aspect of it which has evaded the eye of contemporary historians.’ This is the place within phrenology of the understanding of human sexuality. This is a subject of manifest general historical interest, and one whose neglect by scholars seems all the more striking once it is recognized that phrenologists themselves often judged it the most crucial, the best evidenced, and the most impressive part of their system of beliefs. In turning for the first time to phrenological attitudes to sex, my objective in what follows is not to offer an exhaustive treatment but rather to set down the broad lines of development followed by organological and phrenological doctrines. It is hoped that this will encourage and enable historians to consider the subject in further detail and from other perspectives. Other topics of research may also be suggested by the material that is presented here. For example, if phrenology was as important in the early decades of the nineteenth century as is now widely accepted, and if the views of sexual instinct within the theory and practice of phrenology were of the kind which I shall suggest, then it may be that our general attitudes to sexuality during the period under consideration stand in need of reassessment. This is an issue to which I hope to devote a further article; for the moment, a presentation of materials within a mainly expository framework may serve a valuable function.

Beachcombers: Vagrancy, Empire, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Ebb-Tide

2019 ◽  
Vol 70 (297) ◽  
pp. 930-949
Author(s):  
Alistair Robinson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Pacific Islands ◽  
Pacific Islanders ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Periodical Press ◽  
The South ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
First Contact ◽  
British Culture

Abstract Runaways, castaways and renegades, the beachcombers lived in the Pacific Islands, and were the vagrants of the South Seas. Historically, they were most prominent in the early nineteenth century, and belonged to the medial phase between the Pacific Islanders’ first contact with Europeans, and the formal colonization that followed. Roaming from one island to another, trading skills and goods with their inhabitants, the beachcombers were driven further and further afield as Western powers began to annex the Pacific Islands. By the 1880s and 1890s they had been thoroughly displaced by the missionaries and merchants who settled there; however, in spite of this, or rather because of it, the beachcomber became an increasingly prominent figure in British culture during this period. This article examines the importance of the beachcomber in the imperial imagination. It explores how the beachcomber was ambiguously presented as both an imperial pathfinder and a degraded buccaneer in popular novels and the periodical press, and how these portrayals were key to the public’s understanding of the Pacific Islands. This cultural and historical discussion then provides the context for a close reading of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Ebb-Tide (1894). Here the beachcomber, a vagrant figure who captivated Stevenson’s imagination, is shown to be essential to his construction and critique of empire in the Pacific.

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