Thirty-five years after witnessing the last public hanging of a woman in Dorset, Thomas Hardy set out to show how an innocent soul can be so let down by the cruelties and hypocrisies of our society as to end up on the gallows. Tess herself may well be more a representation of an ideal than …
Thomas Hardy – Tess of the d’Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented Read More »
Firsts: Basketball, The London—Paris telephone system, the removable pneumatic bicycle tire, New Scotland Yard, the Tesla coil, the Swiss Army Knife and Stanford University. Carnegie Hall has its grand opening and first public performance, with Tchaikovsky as guest conductor. Disasters: The Springhill Mining Disaster. The SS Utopia, carrying Italian migrants to New York, sinks in …
MP3 download | Patreon | Apple | Mixcloud | Spotify | Castbox | Stitcher | RSS One of the main problems with making this Centuries of Sound thing is representation. The 1890s are the birthplace of ragtime and the blues, Buddy Bolden was playing proto-Jazz down in New Orleans, and over in Europe figures like …
James McNeill Whistler is mainly known these days as a painter, albeit one sometimes found in books of witty quotations reprimanding Oscar Wilde for plagiarism, but at the time of his death he was arguably better known for this scandalous book in which he recounts in biting, sarcastic detail his libel case against John Ruskin …
James McNeill Whistler – The Gentle Art of Making Enemies Read More »
Morris & Co – Adoration of the Magi Henri Rousseau – Self-portrait Vincent Van Gogh – Wheatfield With Crows Claude Monet – Boating on the River Epte Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec – At the Moulin Rouge
1890 is very much a landmark year in the psychological development of fictional characters. So specious is the dramatist, so subtle is his skill in misrepresentations, so fatal is his power of persuasion that for a moment we believe Hedda Gabler is a noble heroine, and not a fiend, and that Lovborg is deserving of …
I first read The Picture of Dorian Gray aged 18 and found it to be life-changing. Not for the witticisms which Wilde is so famous for, but for the philosophy of art and morality which it expressed. When I got to university I enlarged the preface and put it up on the wall of my …
Better known these days for his artistic contributions to the Arts & Crafts movement, William Morris was also a prolific author and prominent socialist thinker. News From Nowhere is a glimpse at a utopian future – or rather it is a novel-length thesis on how things should be, presented in novel format, with the convenient …
“”The Great God Pan” is, I have no hesitation in saying, a perfectly abominable story”… …Why should he be allowed, for the sake of a few miserable pounds, to cast into our midst these monstrous creations of his diseased brain?” – Harry Quilter “No one could begin to describe the cumulative suspense and ultimate horror …
