Sunday, 22 December 2013
Georgian Absences
Banking, insurance, sugar, rum : in many respects the long eighteenth century owes all its economic and cultural history to the profits and products of transatlantic slavery.
For an excellent analysis of the shortcomings of the current exhibition Georgians Revealed at the British Library ,
see reviews by Miranda Kaufman
http://lbsatucl.wordpress.com/2013/12/20/georgians-unrevealed/
and Norma Clarke in the TLS 20 December 2013 [link follows]
Thursday, 19 December 2013
Morris vs. Rossetti
'They Never Throve Together' said Burne-Jones about William Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti
for my account of their friendship and rivalry, see:
https://www.academia.edu/5431365/Morris_vs_Rossetti
Sunday, 1 December 2013
Edmonia Lewis in London


Lizzie Siddal : Her Play


The true pitfall of this type of drama is the perceived need to stick to historical fact, which tends to fill the scenes with narrative, unneeded by those who don’t know the story and annoying to those who do. In Siddal’s case the great obstacle is her now too-familiar death from an overdose while suffering from post-natal depression – a truly sad and pathetic end to her young life, but one that does not contain high-tension drama. I wished Jeremy Green had departed more vigorously from historical fact, not perhaps to ignore her death but maybe show it differently, less inevitably, less pathetically. Or to leave the audience guessing as to whether or how far Gabriel was responsible for that fatal dose – a subject on which opinion can still be forceful.
So, a somewhat too faithful re-telling that leaves scope for further episodes
in the romance.
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