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showing 269 library results for 'victorian'

Oriental visions : exhibitions, travel, and collecting in the Victorian age /Nicky Levell. "A richly illustrated and unique contribution to the fields of critical museology, the history of collecting, and cultural studies, in general. Through the biography of Frederick John Horniman (1835-1906), a Victorian traveller, collector, and Museum founder, this work critically reconstructs and explores the dynamic cultural network of individuals and institutions; touristic and collecting practices; textual and exhibitionary media, which interacted and generated images of the exotic Orient. Starting in the leafy suburbs of south London, this study begins by examining the afterlife of the world renowned Crystal Palace, which had housed the world's first Great Exhibition. Following its move from Hyde Park to Sydenham in the mid-1850s, this immense glass structure soon became a popular tourist destination, attracting more than a million visitors every year and transforming its once isolated rural surrounds into fashionable residential areas. Levell specifically focuses on the powerful, though selective, representations of the distant Orient at the People's Palace, which enchanted Victorian sightseers, artists, collectors, and travellers. She then looks in detail at the spectacular displays of the British Empire's 'Eastern Possessions' at the hugely popular Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886 in South Kensington. Together these two exhibitionary complexes, with their visually striking images of the Orient, guided Frederick Horniman's travels and also influenced the type of material that he acquired for his private Museum, which was located in Forest Hill, a short distance from the Crystal Palace. From exhibitions and collections, this monograph then moves on to explore travel and collecting. Drawing on the journal that Frederick Horniman kept during his world tours, a fascinating and richly illustrated account is given of the Victorian tourist's travels in India, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Japan, China, Burma (Union of Myanmar), and Egypt, describing the places he visited, the peoples he encountered, and the objects he collected. Finally, attention is turned to the extensive oriental collections, which were assembled by Horniman over a forty-year period, and placed on public display in his twenty-four room Museum. In their museal setting, these exhibits, which had been acquired from dealers, auction houses, international exhibitions, missionaries, travellers, and colonial officials, both at home and abroad, conjured up striking and alluring visions of the Orient."--Provided by the publisher. 2000. • BOOK • 1 copy available. 7.074"18/19"
'I was transformed' : Frederick Douglass: an American slave in victorian Britain /Laurence Fenton "In the summer of 1845, Frederick Douglass, the young runaway slave catapulted to fame by his incendiary autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, arrived in Liverpool for the start of a near-two-year tour of Britain and Ireland he always called one of the most transformative periods of his life. Laurence Fenton draws on a wide array of sources from both sides of the Atlantic and combines a unique insight into the early years of one of the great figures of the nineteenth-century world with rich profiles of the enormous personalities at the heart of the transatlantic anti-slavery movement. This vivid portrait of life in Victorian Britain is the first to fully explore the 'liberating sojourn' that ended with Douglass gaining his freedom - paid for by British supporters - before returning to America as a celebrity and icon of international standing. It also follows his later life, through the American Civil War and afterwards. Douglass has been described as 'the most influential African American of the nineteenth century'. He spoke and wrote on behalf of a variety of reform causes: women's rights, temperance, peace, land reform, free public education and the abolition of capital punishment. But he devoted most of his time, immense talent and boundless energy to ending slavery. On April 14, 1876, Douglass would deliver the keynote speech at the unveiling of the Emancipation Memorial in Washington's Lincoln Park."--Provided by the publisher. 2018. • BOOK • 1 copy available. 92DOUGLASS, FREDERICK