1886 and more years
Recently I've had a look at the years 1910 and 1922 and their importance to Modernism. What's happening here is I've been thinking about a time period for a story.
Originally it was set in 1907 to 1910, which made sense for the place and theme and other elements. However, moving it to London (ie, making it English, which I am doing for my sanity) and changing other things, means 1907 to 1910 might no longer make sense. The right things might not be happening. Who knows, I might end up going back but right now I'm exploring options. What I'm looking for is lots of stuff going on in literature and art, and the edge of change.
So I thought I would post my little summaries of various potential years.
1848
Politically there were revolutions across Europe in France, Italy, Germany, and Austria. The Communist Manifesto is published. The Chartist were on it. In literature there's Anne Brontë's Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Elizabeth Gaskell's first book, Mary Barton.
Artistically, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood formed - artists like Millais and Rossetti influenced by Romanticism, taking aim at the Royal Academy and Sir 'Sloshua' Reynolds. I love some Victorian smack talk.
1863
I covered some of the Salons in 1910. In 1863 two third of the applicants were rejected by the main Paris Salon, people like Manet, Courbet, and Pisarro. Permission was granted for an 'exhibition of the rejects' rebelling against the monopolistic conversative official academy and its patronage.
Obviously, this is very French. But it was beginning to hit Britain and it's not like rich people weren't always back and forth.
Also French, but the first of Jules Verne's Voyages Extraordinaires books was published. Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope founded The Arts Club, a private members' club in Mayfair. George Eliot published Romola.
Anne Thackeray Ritchie, daughter of WM who died this year, published her first book, The Story of Elizabeth, and was a very popular author in her own right. She was the first to do 'give a man a fish / teach a man to fish' and her sister was Virginia Woolf's father's first wife. She herself married her cousin, who was seventeen years younger than her. Fascinating.
1877
The Aesthetic Movement's slogan was "art for art's sake." Just to be beautiful. Embodied by Oscar Wilde. In a tale as old as time, the artists rebelled against the conservative art establishment and the Grosvenor Gallery hosted renegades like James McNeill Whistler who had previously been shown at the Salon des Refusés and this year had a fun libel trial with John Ruskin, who compared Whistler's style to 'flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.'
Literature-wise Tolstoy's Anna Karenina wrapped up its serialisation in Russia. Robert Louis Stevenson was first published. Émile Zola was a sensation, his latest novel sold 50,000 copies in the year. Henry James published The American.
1886
Rumbling on since the 1850s and arguably peaking in the 80s was the 'rational dress' movement, part of dress reform - the controversial idea women should be allowed to wear clothes they can move and breathe in. Hand in hand with the adoption of the bicycle.
In literature, early in January, the sensation that was Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Later in the year his Kidnapped first appeared in serialisation. Madame Bovary by Flaubert was published in an English translation, by Eleanor Marx. There's Thomas Hardy's Mayor of Casterbridge, Henry James' The Bostonians, new work from Zola, Verne, all the good stuff.
In art the New English Art Club was formed, once again, to challenge the conservative Royal Academy and held their first exhibition. They'd been in France, they were coming over all Impressionist, and included Gwen John, Augustus John, Auguste Rodin, and lots of women.
Artists were interested in getting out of the studio en plein air such as the Newlyn School in Newlyn, Cornwall where there were apparently so many artists going up and down to the Royal Academy in London they had to add extra train carriages.
1895
There's an element of doom and threat hanging over the last years of Victoria's reign. Oscar Wilde, darling of Aestheticism was convicted of gross indecency and jailed for two years and would die in 1900. Thomas Hardy published Jude the Obscure, dubbed Jude the Obscene. It was Hardy's last novel, some say because of the harsh reception, even though he lived for another thirty years.
Cinema enters the chat: the Lumière brothers showed the first projected film (it was forty-six seconds long) and, separately, held the first commercial public screening. There's earlier film but this is the birth of cinema and I like to imagine how artists and writers felt about it - Virginia Woolf was certainly conflicted.
Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius described the greenhouse effect and talked about global warming. Climate change awareness is one of those 'much older than you think' things, starting in 1824.