London Season Research Articles

“[H]is Castle was her Proper Habitation”: Homes and Dwelling Places in Sarah Fielding’s The History of the Countess of Dellwyn (1759)

ABSTRACT Sarah Fielding’s The Countess of Dellwyn tells Charlotte Lucum’s story. Seventeen, beautiful, raised in rural seclusion, her father manipulates her into marrying sixty-five year old Lord Dellwyn, a decrepit, gout-ridden and wealthy peer whose political influence Mr. Lucum hopes to secure in order to revive his own career. Eschewing the potential for the sentimental approach more obvious in some of Fielding’s other work and in near-contemporary novels such as Frances Sheridan’s Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (1761) and others, the narrative voice of The Countess of Dellwyn maintains a distinctly critical distance from its heroine, remorselessly identifying her manifold errors in choices and conduct and resisting casting her as a victim, despite the parts played in her story by both her father and Lord Dellwyn himself. Key to the Countess’s downfall is her seduction by fashionable society, a seduction whose effects become most evident when the recently-married couple retire to Lord Dellwyn’s country seat at the London season’s end. In discussing the use to which the narrative puts Lord Dellwyn’s “noble ancient Castle,” swiftly and fashionably redecorated by the young Countess, this article considers how the novel employs houses as a counterpoint to the prevailing critique of its young heroine.

Assortative Matching at the Top of the Distribution: Evidence from the World's Most Exclusive Marriage Market

Using novel data on peerage marriages in Britain, I find that low search costs and marriage-market segregation can generate sorting. Peers courted in the London Season, a matching technology introducing aristocratic bachelors to debutantes. When Queen Victoria went into mourning for her husband, the Season was interrupted (1861–1863), raising search costs and reducing market segregation. I exploit exogenous variation in women's probability to marry during the interruption from their age in 1861. The interruption increased peer–commoner intermarriage by 40 percent and reduced sorting along landed wealth by 30 percent. Eventually, this reduced peers' political power and affected public policy in late nineteenth-century England. (JEL C78, D83, J12, J16, N33)

“These People in This House”: Intermedial Approaches to Decentring the Domestic in Harold Pinter’s A Slight Ache and The Homecoming

This article explores the effects of moving two of Pinter’s earlier plays outside their original domestic settings by focusing on two productions staged in 2019: A Slight Ache (1958), directed by Jamie Lloyd for the “Pinter at the Pinter” season in London’s West End, and De Thuiskomst/ The Homecoming (1964), directed by Nanouk Leopold for Internationaal Theater Amsterdam (ITA). In relocating each play from its prescribed domestic interior, both productions explicitly drew on and incorporated the conventions of different media, specifically radio and film, in markedly different ways. Rather than transposing the country home of Pinter’s original radio play onto the stage in an analogous setting, Lloyd’s Slight Ache featured two performers appearing in a radio studio to voice their characters, thereby complicating the identities and motivations of the play’s characters by evoking a place of work, not a place of domestic retreat. In Leopold’s starkly minimalist Homecoming, video projections and visualizations of the human body as a kind of digital automaton replaced the trappings of domesticity, inviting audiences to focus instead on the live and mediatized bodies of the characters. Through their different means of representation, these productions demonstrate two different approaches to decentring domestic space in Pinter’s early plays via distinct intermedial strategies. In doing so, they offer a renewed focus on the embodied presence of the actors, thereby inviting new insights into how Pinter’s early characters can transcend the confines of their interior spaces on stage and underscoring the writer’s own inherently intermedial praxis.

“It Must Be Preserved”: Adolph Bolm's Revival of Le Coq d'Or

“It Must Be Preserved”: Adolph Bolm's Revival of <i>Le Coq d'Or</i>

Introduction: Special Issue on Eliza Haywood

Introduction:Special Issue on Eliza Haywood Manushag N. Powell The inspiration for this special issue was a remarkably joyous academic experience. Just over one year ago, on 5-6 April 2019, 40 international scholars gathered in Indianapolis, inside a hotel that had once been Union Station—atop which some trains still ran, punctuating the keynote lecture with particular oomph—to exchange their work on Eliza Fowler Haywood in recognition of the 300th anniversary of the work of amorous prose fiction that launched her career. Supported in part by Purdue University as well as Restoration, 300 Years of Love in Excess crackled with excitement and collegiality; the essays in this issue were in some form presented there or inspired by the conference project. 300 Years was notable, too, for the presenters' range of backgrounds and career stages. Many author societies today struggle to attract young members, but Haywood inspires them; this was a multigenerational gathering full of mentorship, anchored by the deep work of scholars who have spent decades with Haywood, and the bracing, cutting-edge ventures of early career researchers who, like all new authors, often see farther than the rest of us. The final compilation of this issue, however, happened under circumstances almost entirely the opposite of those I have described. Revisions and edits have been done under lonely conditions; we labor during shelter-in-place orders, away from our offices, our archives, our students. An author as prolific as Haywood produced a text for every circumstance, but this is perhaps especially so for the present long moment, as Haywood's characters are often quite familiar with the constraint of being trapped; easy freedom of movement was not very available to many eighteenth-century women. Perhaps one perfect kindred soul calls to us from The British Recluse, or, the Secret History of Cleomira, Suppos'd Dead: A Novel (1722). Explaining how she came to be so amorously susceptible [End Page 3] while under strict orders that she abstain from an active social life, Cleomira confesses that "this sudden Change from all the Liberties in the World, to the most strict Confinement, is all the Excuse I can make for my ill Conduct." Originally forced into social distancing, Cleomira comes, much later, to prefer its safety, particularly when she is able to share it with an intimate female friend. Haywood may be a great many things, but she is never naïve: not about the consolations of solitude, or much anything else, really. The final words of the text taunt us with an important distinction: "where a solitary Life is the Effect of Choice, it certainly yields more solid Comfort than all the publick Diversions which those who are the greatest Pursuers of them can find." (Of course, Cleomira's problem isn't a virus, but rather gendered predations attendant on patriarchy; Haywood's women flee to the countryside not to escape the biological kind of plague witnessed by Daniel Defoe's H.F., but to elude ruinous passion and gossip.) Cleomira's claim that retreat from society can be delightful when undertaken voluntarily and temporarily may have been a conviction of Haywood's. Decades later, in the thirteenth of Haywood's Epistles to the Ladies (1749), Mira—the wise matron of the Female Spectator gang—writes that she prefers winter in the countryside rather than the fashionable London season, for although "The Country is almost as desolate of Inhabitants as the Trees in my Forest are of Leaves.—All my Acquaintance in these Parts have left me, for what they call Delights more agreeable to the Season; yet I am still here,—and what seems most strange to you, am here by my own Choice." Mira, somewhat atypically for Haywood's writing, is a confident woman in a happy marriage who enjoys her investment in the education of her healthy children. Elsewhere, as Kathryn King argues in this issue, Haywood's Epistles are strongly conscious of loss, of the death of family and how to cope, and even to some extent the strange unknowability of the universe. All of these are themes suitable, of course, not only to pandemic writing, but (we contend) Restoration's scholarship. While Eliza...

Getting and spending in London and Yorkshire: a young musician’s account book for 1799–1800

AbstractIn March 1799 John White was 20 years old and already an experienced professional violinist and cellist. He kept a detailed account book between March 1799 and March 1800 that provides much information about the economic and professional life of a young musician at the very end of the eighteenth century. White had showed early musical promise, and when he was 15 he attracted the patronage of the future Lord Harewood, who enabled him to take lessons from leading musical figures and appointed him as his director of music. White lived at Harewood House, near Leeds, but he spent some months of the London season each year with the Harewood family in their house in Hanover Square. The accounts show how White earned money in London by playing at private and public concerts and deputising at almost every place of musical entertainment in the capital. In Yorkshire he led orchestras in concerts and oratorio performances, took on pupils and visited Scarborough. White’s meticulous lists of his income and expenditure, from an expensive violin, a harp and harp lessons to silk stockings, waistcoats and hair ribbon, paint a fascinating picture of a young man making his way in the musical profession.

Coming Home to Roost in London

Coming Home to Roost in London Jay Rogoff (bio) In 1961, Frederick Ashton, founder choreographer of Britain's Royal Ballet, created a charming two-act narrative work called Les Deux Pigeons, a title Anglicized the following year to The Two Pigeons. I watched it for the first time during the Royal's winter 2019 London season, and at first glance the ballet can look trivial, drawing on timeworn devices such as gypsy characters and their dances to tell its story of love spurned and redeemed. But it also weaves into this narrative some virtuosic dancing, and in expressing the ups and downs of young love, it exudes an enormous charm. It strikes me as an important work for Ashton, coming at a pivotal point in his career. In the postwar years and through the 1950s, Ashton chiefly created star vehicles for the Royal's prima ballerina, Margot Fonteyn. Narrative dominated these works, which included Cinderella, Daphnis et Chloé, Tiresias, Sylvia, Romeo and Juliet, La Péri, and Ondine. Casting Fonteyn in these romantic myths and fairy tales reflected her magical sway over the company and its repertory, and in the later 1950s, Ashton made steps that helped disguise her fading technique. Some of the lead roles in Ashton's occasional non-story works, like Symphonic Variations and Birthday Offering, went to her as well. As Fonteyn's career appeared to wind down in the early 1960s—she turned 42 in 1961—Ashton began to make roles on some of the company's younger dancers, such as Antoinette Sibley and Anthony Dowell, who danced Titania and Oberon in The Dream, his 1964 Mendelssohn ballet. He also devoted time once again to non-narrative dance and experimented with more modernist movement, as in the sublime Monotones, his 1965 ballet to Satie. These new directions revitalized Ashton's choreography, and although Fonteyn's career unexpectedly revived when Russian defector Rudolf Nureyev joined the Royal as guest artist in 1962 and partnered her for another decade and beyond, Ashton made only one [End Page 446] ballet for the two of them, a version of the Dame aux Camélias/Traviata story, Marguerite and Armand, in 1963. The Two Pigeons derives from an 1886 Paris Opéra Ballet work by Louis Mérante, to serviceable music by André Messager, inspired by La Fontaine's fable of a male pigeon who goes off to explore the world but returns happily to his mate. Mérante made the characters human, sent the male off to explore the gypsy life, and had his love pursue him in gypsy disguise. Ashton simplified the story, turning the Young Man (as he is called) into a painter living in a huge Parisian garret, and the Young Girl into his rather restless model. The gypsies visit the garret, and, taken with a beautiful Gypsy Girl, he follows them to their camp, where, after a dance contest with the gypsy's Lover, he receives a beating and returns home to the Young Girl, who accepts him with love. At his departure, just before intermission, one of two live doves has flown offstage, abandoning the other; when he returns, so does the bird, first alighting on his shoulder, then joining its mate perched on the oval back of a white, cast-iron chair. Throughout The Two Pigeons you can feel Ashton's delight in seizing the chance to work with dancers just starting out, their youth lending poignancy to the lovers' problems and affection. The premiere, on Valentine's Day, 1961, featured two 21-year old dancers, Lynn Seymour and Christopher Gable. In this performance, the lead roles went to principal Akane Takada and first soloist James Hay. While both are somewhat older, they convincingly embody the moodiness and foolishness of young lovers from the very start. Hay dances while brandishing his palette, with graceful high kicks, while Takada, posing for him on the white chair, fidgets, scratches an itch, and stamps out a cockroach, things a ballerina simply shouldn't do. The juxtaposition of the Young Man's absorption in his art with the Young Girl's resistance admits a dose of realism into the ballet, hinting that all its foolish 19th...

Just One of the Boys: Female-to-Male Cross-Dressing on the American Variety Stage by Gilliam M. Rodger

Reviewed by: Just One of the Boys: Female-to-Male Cross-Dressing on the American Variety Stage by Gilliam M. Rodger Franklin J. Lasik Just One of the Boys: Female-to-Male Cross-Dressing on the American Variety Stage. By Gilliam M. Rodger. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018. pp. 275. $28.00 paper. In Gillian M. Rodger's first book, Champagne Charlie and Pretty Jemima (2010), the author traced the development of variety entertainment from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. Exploring the class dynamics of the form's evolution, Rodger centered her study on Annie Hindle and Ella Wesner, two male impersonators whose careers brought into focus the changing relationship between class and gender, with implications regarding sexuality on the American stage. Her latest book, Just One of the Boys, is an extension of this text, looking specifically at male impersonation in American variety. While Rodger again focuses on Hindle and Wesner, she introduces a number of other male impersonators, examining their performance styles, repertoires, and audience receptions to illustrate changes in variety as a whole. Rodger also expands her investigation [End Page 225] to include male impersonators from English music hall, many of whom would also come to the United States. Chapter 1, "Female Hamlets and Romeos," begins with an introduction to female cross-dressing on the nineteenth-century American stage. While noting that some women were performing male roles in legitimate drama, Rodger emphasizes the different attitudes audiences took toward cross-dressing in variety. Where cross-dressing on the legitimate stage was tolerated as a novelty justified by the actresses' skill, variety's perceived "low-class" status rendered it more flexible, as women were not constrained by propriety from performing cross-gendered comedy. Hindle and Wesner make their first appearance in the second chapter, which discusses the emergence of the first male impersonators in variety. Rodger, who focuses on these two women "because together they established the performance ideal for American male impersonation that lasted until the end of the nineteenth century" (32), goes into detail about both performers' early public and private lives. While the author's description of their performance styles is interesting, it is her exploration of their private lives that I found most fascinating, especially when she teases Hindle's multiple marriages to women. Both chapters 3 and 4 look at male impersonation in the 1870s by introducing the reader to two performers, using them to examine challenges male impersonators faced in variety. In chapter 3, Rodger focuses on the economic impact of the Panic of 1873 by presenting Augusta Lamareaux and Blanche Selwyn, who along with Hindle and Wesner found it difficult to sustain bookings in the wake of the financial crisis. Chapter 4 continues to explore the impact of the Long Depression, using male impersonators Maggie Weston and Minnie Hall to investigate the changing audience tastes. Rodger notes that while male impersonation helped Weston and Hall get their starts, they were able to sustain careers "by being flexible and by moving away from the specialization of Annie Hindle and Ella Wesner" (89). Wesner's debut London season in 1876 serves as Rodger's entrée into an overview of male impersonation in English music halls, which are the focus of chapter 5. Citing the more established tradition of women playing male roles in English theatre, Rodger speculates that this conditioned audiences and "may have been responsible for their more feminine performance style" (106). This enhanced Wesner's popularity, as English audiences found her more masculine performance to be both novel and exotic. Chapter 6 marks a significant shift in variety entertainment in the 1880s, as financial concerns and audience shifts drove a growing concern with "decency." [End Page 226] This shift led variety managers to adopt "industrial models of entertainment" (115), which would eventually lead to the subspecialization of variety into vaudeville, burlesque, and other forms. While chapter 6 describes this increasing specialization, chapter 7 focuses specifically on male impersonation, returning again to Hindle and Wesner. Although both women persisted in their chosen specialty, neither was especially successful during this period, as both struggled to adapt to the new landscape. As Rodger notes, "There had never been...

A Short Article on a Lively Subject: Geltruda Rossi, Sarah Siddons, and Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth à la Fuseli

In the 1784–85 London season, there was a conjunction between Shakespeare's Macbeth and three of the most thrilling artists of the eighteenth century: the dancer Geltruda Rossi, the actress Sarah Siddons, and the artist Henry Fuseli. They were thrown into figurative proximity when a commentator on Rossi's performance wrote in the Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser: “Madame Rossi, in Lady Macbeth, impresses one more with the recollection of Fusili’s [sic] painting, than of Mrs Siddons’s representation—indeed comparison would be doing an injustice to our critical and admired English performer.” While we know much about the art of Siddons and Fuseli, we know little about Rossi's performances, which makes the Morning Herald’s parallel worth exploring as an example of eighteenth-century London ballet d'action.

Opera: Rossini leads the way to Verdi.

Rossini (1792–1868) seems indelibly associated with fun; many people’s first opera experience is his fizzy Il barbieri di Siviglia (The Barber of Seville , 1816), a rom-com for its time, a brilliant piece of propulsive theatrical and musical construction, composed early in his career. Or, we know the theme tune of The Lone Ranger — again with propulsive energy as a deep, characteristic part of the William Tell Overture , Rossini’s operatic swansong. For many, this is all they know of the composer who shook up 18th century operatic form, and prepared the way for the great Verdi. Recent times have allowed us to enjoy and understand more of his work; the 2014–2015 season has been particularly rich, and there is a glorious opportunity in the middle of March, at a cinema near you — read on ... In September 2014, The Barber opened the season in London and Paris. Meanwhile, The Welsh National Opera had a double bill of Guillaume Tell (William Tell) and his …

Influenza vaccination, inverse care and homelessness: cross-sectional survey of eligibility and uptake during the 2011/12 season in London

BackgroundInfluenza vaccination eligibility and uptake among homeless adults has not been previously assessed in the UK. This cross-sectional survey aimed to measure the proportion of homeless people visited by an NHS outreach service (Find and Treat) who were eligible for and had received vaccination during 2011/12.MethodsA cross-sectional survey was carried out in 27 separate homeless hostels, day centres and drug services in London between July and August in 2012. Eligibility for the survey was by virtue of being in attendance at one of 27 venues visited by Find and Treat. No specific exclusion criteria were used.Results455 clients took part in the survey out of 592 approached (76.9%). A total of 190 homeless people (41.8%; 95% CI: 34.5,50.5) were eligible for influenza vaccination. In those aged 16–64, eligibility due to clinical risk factors was 38.9% (95% CI: 31.5,48.2). Uptake of vaccination in homeless 16–64 year olds with a clinical risk factor during the 2011/12 influenza season was 23.7% (95% CI: 19.8,28.3) compared to national levels of 53.2% (excluding pregnant women). In those aged over 65, uptake was 42.9% (95% CI: 16.7,100.0) compared with 74.0% nationally.ConclusionsThis study demonstrates that the homeless population have high levels of chronic health problems predisposing them to severe complications of influenza, but vaccine uptake levels that are less than half those seen among eligible GP patient groups in England. It provides a clear example of the health inequalities and inverse care law that impact this population. The results of this study provide strong justification for intensifying efforts to ensure homeless people have access to influenza vaccination.

“The most exclusive village in the world”: The Utilization of Space by the Victorian Aristocracy during the London Season

On 18 May 1859, after a “smutty journey,”&lt;renvoi id="re1no2" idref="no2" typeref="note"&gt;2&lt;/renvoi&gt; Lucy Lyttelton stepped from a Britschka carriage onto the pavement of Stratton Street, Piccadilly, in the heart of the West End of London. Accompanied by her politician father, and her elder sister Meriel, Lucy had migrated from Hagley Hall, the family’s country estate in Worcestershire. Four weeks later, Lucy travelled to St. James’s Palace with “awestruck anticipation,”&lt;renvoi id="re1no3" idref="no3" typeref="note"&gt;3&lt;/renvoi&gt; to be presented to Queen Victoria; she was officially “out” in Society. For the three months that followed, Lucy was engaged in a whirl of socializing that characterised the West End during the period. She attended concerts and dinner parties dressed in expensive gowns, and danced with eligible suitors in crowded ballrooms. During the day, she rode along Rotten Row in Hyde Park in the family’s carriage, accompanied by her Aunt Catherine, the wife of Prime Minister William Gladstone. In the afternoon she gossiped with her equally aristocratic and titled friends, plotting the capture of a suitable husband at the next ball or private party. Lucy’s life in London was mirrored by thousands of other debutantes and their families, each a constituent part of the “London Season.” The social whirl that occurred in this corner of the capital during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had significant implications for the nature of the West End at the time. The character and meaning of individual houses and streets, and entire neighbourhoods, were altered by the activities of elite families such as Lucy’s to the extent that the London Season can be understood to have been of fundamental importance in shaping space in this corner of London. This paper analyzes in depth this relationship between space and the London Season, identifying specifically the impact elites had on the West End. In so doing, the research moves beyond previous literature regarding the Season to understand the part-time nature of space, the way in which gated communities were created, the influence of elite fashion on residential spaces, and the close relationship between space and status formed during this period. These analyses make important contributions to a critical understanding of the location of the Season in the West End, and the importance of this space to the elite in the nineteenth century.

Camille Silvy’s Repertory: The Carte‐de‐Visite and the London Theatre

The craze for sitting for, buying, exchanging and collecting carte-de-visites was a major development in the history of photography’s widening cultural currency. The commercial exploitation of this miniature portrait format in Paris at the hands of A. A. E. Disderi has been the subject of an extensive study but the scholarship that attends the carte phenomenon in Britain seems content with to credit J. J. E. Mayall’s portraits of royalty for its success. This paper takes the most extensive single carte studio archive preserved in the UK, that comprised by the daybooks of Camille Silvy (dating from c. 1860 to 1868), in order to examine the question to how this studio became known as one of the most fashionable in London even before many in the metropolis would have heard of a carte-de-visite. A previously undocumented performer series made during Silvy’s fi rst season in London provides the basis for a re-reading of his portrait venture in relation to West End comic theatre.

The Peeresses and the Prostitutes: The Founding of the London Pantheon, 1772

The event of the London season of 1771–72 was the opening of the Pantheon assembly rooms in Oxford Street. According to reports of the much‐anticipated opening night on January 27 1772, as “a strik...

Artaud's Jet de Sang: a Critical Post-Production Analysis

Artaud's Jet de Sang is a text of merely eight pages, published in 1925. This work has acquired a reputation of being ‘unperformable’, partly because of the ‘impossible’ scenic actions asked for in the stage directions (e.g. ‘two stars crash into each other, and we see a number of live pieces of human bodies falling down: hands, feet, scalps… with a maddening, vomit-inducing slowness’), partly because the only professional production, by Peter Brook in the London Season of Cruelty in 1964, was judged to have been a total flop (Hunt & Reeve 77). Over the past ten years, I have scrutinized this text time and time again, related it to the theatrical ideas Artaud was professing in the 1920s, and have never quite understood why the play should be considered unperformable. It is a challenging text, yes, but when not interpreted literally it could act as a springboard for an exploration of Artaud's mind and of our own responses to the topics addressed in the play. A group of students with whom I had worked before on a Dada project convinced me that a production of Jet de Sang, despite its reputation, could be contemplated. Nevertheless, at our first group meeting I expressed the view that the alliance between Surrealism and the theatre profession had been a failure in the past and that it was unlikely to succeed today without compromising either the fundamental intentions behind Surrealist art or the no less axiomatic notions of ‘quality’ in our contemporary theatre world. To explore Artaud's concept of Surrealist theatre would by necessity force us into taking a decision on whether to be faithful to Artaud's ideas or to produce ‘théâtre-bien-fait’.

Clean Energy - Preparing Today for Tomorrow's Challenges

Published in Oil &amp; Gas Executive Report, Volume 2, Number 2, 1999, pages 18-22. Imagine a damp morning during Christmas season in London. The city awakes to see streets swirling with a thick, gray mist. But this is no ordinary London fog. As the clouds roll through the streets and seep into the houses, men, women, and children are gasping for breath. Within hours, hospital emergency rooms are crammed with people complaining of stinging lungs. When the fog finally lifts 5 days later, thousands are dead. It sounds incredible doesn't it? A dooms-day scenario dreamt up by a Hollywood writer, and something that - we hope - never could happen. But, it already did, in 1952. In fact, that scene was simply the worst of the so-called "killer fogs" or "pea-soupers" that repeatedly struck London, Liverpool, and other areas of England and Wales after World War II. They were caused when warm masses of air trapped smoke and fumes, primarily generated by coal heating. The1952 fog, which killed more than 4,000 people and contributed to the subsequent deaths of another 8,000, ultimately prompted the British Parliament to pass the Clean Air Act in 1956. If the killer fog of the winter of 1952 was an environmental "wake-up" call for Britain and the West, perhaps the burning of the Indonesian rain forests in1997 and 1998 will prove to be the alarm that awakens the developing world to the importance of environmental conservation. Literally hundreds of blazes across the sprawling nation of islands contributed to a choking smoke haze that blanketed parts of Southeast Asia. The health and safety of millions of people in Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei, southern Thailand, and parts of the Philippines were threatened by the consequences of slash-and-burn fires aimed at clearing land. That disaster put the dilemma of the developing world into stark relief. If you have been to Beijing, Bangkok, or Mexico City recently, you know how bad air quality can get. Visibility is so poor that some days it's hard to see across the street. More importantly, public health is endangered. Like Londoners in the early 1950's, thousands of people today are dying prematurely, and the health and productivity of countless others are impaired. Now imagine these cities with more automobiles and with each person using more and more energy. This is precisely what will happen as a result of rising income levels and urbanization. The world now has almost 6 billion people. Two billion more will be added by 2025. Primary energy usage is likely to grow by more than 50% by that time as the children of the billions of people now without commercial energy services are added to electricity grids and acquire automobiles, trucks, or motorcycles.

Silver Fork Writers and Readers: Social Contexts of a Best Seller

The original romances-arguably the first best sellers in the modern sense of the term and the remote ancestors of our perennial drugstore paperbacks-were the so-called silver fork or fashionable novels, which invaded the literary marketplace during the socially and politically volatile interim of the 1820s and 30s. While England witnessed the death of the last of the four Georges and debated the Reform Bill, such highly spiced titles as Th e Exclusives, The Divorced, The Victims of Society and The Diary of a Disennuyde poured from the presses, most of them under the imprint of a single enterprising promoter by the name of Henry Colburn.' Their fictional territory was the exclusive and self-enclosed world of aristocratic high society during the Regency and its prolonged aftermath. Their typical characters were the dandies, rakes and women of the world who populated the town houses and the country estates, congregating in Almack's assembly rooms on Wednesday evenings during the London Season, retreating to the select men's clubs that lined St. James's Street or to the Regent's private enclave at Carlton House. Their treatment of this specialized subject matter was appropriately mercurial, by turns supercilious or witty, disenchanted or exuberant. Benjamin Disraeli, who began his varied career under Colburn's aegis, encapsulates the patented ingredients of the vogue in his playfully self-reflexive receipt for writing a novel from The Young Duke (1829):

The Transformation of London “Society” at the End of Victoria's Reign: Evidence from the Court Presentation Records

To its late-Victorian participants, London “Society” was one of those abstractions, like “the young,” that deteriorated with each passing generation. For decades chroniclers of Britain's clannish ruling circles had lamented the diminishing refinement, morals, and breeding of those highest sections of elite society that migrated to the capital each spring for the parliamentary and social “season.” Thus, when the press, with many contributors from the aristocracy itself, launched a new campaign against London Society in the last years of Victoria's reign, the charges had a familiar ring. Society was expanding alarmingly, abandoning its standards, worshipping notoriety and opulence, and abdicating serious responsibilities in the pursuit of frivolous amusement. If the criticisms contained few surprises, the intensity of the alarm was unprecedented. Beginning in 1874, with The Way We Live Now, Anthony Trollope's novel of a greedy and credulous beau monde, and continuing through a series of journal articles bearing titles such as “The New Society,” “The Deterioration of English Society,” “The Sins of Society,” and “The Enlargement of London Society,” critics subjected the aristocratic elites and the informal institutions of the London season to fierce scrutiny and nearly universal diagnosis of advanced illness.

The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, Volume 6: 1920-1925 , and: The Unknown Thomas Hardy: Lesser-Known Aspects of Hardy's Life and Career (review)

Reviewed by: The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, Volume 6: 1920-1925, and: The Unknown Thomas Hardy: Lesser-Known Aspects of Hardy's Life and Career John Halperin Thomas Hardy . The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, Volume 6: 1920-1925. Eds. Richard Little Purdy and Michael Millgate. New York: Oxford UP, 1987. 379 pp. $52.00. Harold Orel . The Unknown Thomas Hardy: Lesser-Known Aspects of Hardy's Life and Career. New York: St. Martin's, 1987. 194 pp. $32.50. "The whole time of the next generation will be occupied in reading the old letters of this," Hardy wrote, with some bitterness, to Harley Granville Barker in 1923. Letters from Hardy to Granville Barker had got into the hands of an unscrupulous collector and were being offered for public sale. That Hardy should find himself in such a situation was a result of his long life (he was now eighty-three) and of the high standing his reputation had reached in the thirty years since he stopped writing fiction. These dangerous incursions into his private life, growing more bold as time went on, stimulated anew Hardy's passion for biographical anonymity and immunity—which passion coexisted, of course, despite his constant protestations to the contrary, with his actively seeking to attain and finally being able to enjoy a cultural pinnacle: he was now the Grand Old Man of English letters, famous the world over. As Somerset Maugham once remarked, anyone can become respectable if he lives long enough. During the years covered by the present volume—the penultimate one of this series—Hardy was preoccupied chiefly with two volumes of poems and two plays, one new and one old. Late Lyrics and Earlier (1922) and Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs, and Trifles (1925) were, respectively, his sixth and seventh volumes of poetry. The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall was published in 1923 and performed several times in various parts of the country. The dramatic version of Tess of the d'Urbervilles that Hardy had composed in the Nineties was now unearthed and became briefly a hit of the 1925 season in London, running for several months first in suburban Barnes and later at the Garrick Theatre in the West End. Hardy was bemused and excited by his sudden and unexpected entrance, at age eighty-five, into the playwriting profession, remarking (to Granville Barker) at the same time that in his opinion "to attempt to put a novel on the stage is hopeless, and altogether a mistake in art." Still, he did it, and enthusiastically too, for there was a good deal of money to be made out of the venture, and by money the once-poor Hardy was always dazzled. During these years (ages seventy-nine to eighty-five) Hardy spent a good deal of time fending off would-be biographers and other seekers of information while attempting to control what was written about him by tossing at them, simultaneously, autobiographical fragments, mostly trumped up, and blinding cinders. Refusing to tell the truth about himself was a settled habit. And, as always, he pretended not to care whether his work got sold and into print, at the same time pursuing publishers, editors, and agents shrewdly and relentlessly to be sure that it did. He managed to make his own signature worth a great deal by withholding it as often as he could. He received honors; he grew rich. Foreign translations of his works, into languages as distant as Polish, Russian, Czech, Norwegian, and Danish, now appeared. He was offered, and accepted (always [End Page 672] in absentia), a quiverful of honorary degrees. The film rights to his novels were optioned, and optioned again. And he was now beginning to scour the rich American market, the copyright act of 1891 requiring U.S. royalties to be paid on all volumes published since that year. Americans, Hardy quotes someone (perhaps mythical) as saying, "are like children, and . . . read whatever is put before them without much judgment of their own." The first printing of Late Lyrics went through three impressions; the entire first printing of Human Shows (five thousand copies) was sold out in just a few days. The British...

Post-Modernism and the Multi-Media Sensibility: Heiner Müller's Hamletmachine and the Art of Robert Wilson

Robert Wilson's adaption — or transmutation — of the East German playwright Heiner Müller's Hamletmachine typifies both the relatively staid, monodimensional quality ofMüller's Post-Modernity, and the more dynamic, multi-media vision of its producer. Hamletmachine' s London season opened at the Almeida Theatre; a theatre which could well have been renamed the "All-Media" for this occasion. Mixing almost every theatrical and extra-theatrical trick in the Post-Modem book, it combined classical declamation, parodic classical declamation, autistic anti-declamation, colloquial declamation, cry, whisper, laugh, whimper, tape-recorded screech and mutter, tape-recorded noise, mime, acrobatics, sculptural immobility, videoesque choreography, virtuoso lighting, projected slide-imagery, black and white and coloured film-imagery, digitally deconstructed video-image, and an array of musical sound-tracks ranging from the nostalgic tango accompanying the cast's final bow, to the echoing tones of a piano piece by Lieber and Stoller (composers of Elvis Presley's Hound Dog).