As the exhibition, which is curated by Trumble, prepares to enter its last week at the Yale Center for British Art, we look back at the installation of Lady Curzon’s white satin ‘orchid gown’. In this extract from his personal blog, Angus Trumble takes readers behind the curtain to illuminate the delicacy, care, and commitment which goes into producing an exhibition of this kind.

On Feburary 21st we installed Lady Curzon’s spectacular white satin ‘orchid’ gown, one of a number that were created for her by the House of Worth. We know she wore it on state occasions in Delhi when she was Vicereine of India. The train is fourteen feet long, and, together with the bodice and skirt the entire ensemble was richly embroidered by Indian craftsmen and women with gold and silver threads and further augmented with faceted crystal beading that with the bullion shimmer under the lights. This indigenous technique is known as zardozi. Watching our colleague from the Fashion Museum at Bath perform the operation of dressing the dress was slightly eerie, as this sequence of photos will demonstrate, because one gradually began to sense more and more Mary Curzon’s ghostly presence, while also witnessing something of what it must have been like for a skilled lady’s maid to help her to get dressed. It would be impossible to do this without assistance. Naturally we began with a customized dummy on a stand.  

The dummy and its precious cargo migrated from place to place throughout this procedure, which added to a vague but growing sense of imminence, but it was in the beginning dressed with a long calico petticoat to give some support the very fragile skirt.

Naturally Lady Curzon wore additional foundation garments, including an up-to-the-minute boned and laced ‘s’ corset, so this impression of the size of her waist (when so constricted) is actually quite conservative.

The skirt came first, fastened with hooks to innumerable hand-stitched eyelets. Lady Curzon presumably stepped into it, but we had to very carefully lower it over her head.

Then came the bodice, very tight fitting and, like the skirt, extraordinarily heavy for its size (because of the bullion-work)…

Here she is, making a graceful turn. Lady Curzon must have had at least one page to assist her with the train, possibly two, and it was only worn for the most formal ceremonies. The pungent Indian iconography of sprays of orchids dominates the decoration of the skirt and bodice, but the train adds to this the more squarely English clusters of oak leaves and other British vice-regal heraldic devices, and fuses both in a sequence of classicizing wreaths around the edges that culminate in three very large ones at the end of the train. It is a truly remarkable hybrid. Very few exercises in art museum display have taught me as much or given me as much pleasure and fascination over three or four magical hours as did this gradual re-animation of Mary Curzon’s spectacular white satin ‘orchid’ gown. Do please come and see it for yourselves.

In this extract, McHam outlines the foundations of Pliny’s unexpected visual influence and explains why this is still part of Western culture. Pliny and the Artistic Culture of the Italian Renaissance is available now from Yale University Press, and a full gallery of images can be seen on our Facebook page.

More than a millennium after Pliny the Elder (c. 23 – 79 AD) wrote his monumental Natural History, it became Italy’s primary window into the world of antiquity. The book’s unparalleled scope – the entire realm of nature – and its memorable 160 anecdotes enlivened the art and culture of classical Greece and Rome for eager Renaissance readers. The Natural History told them what materials and techniques to use, what subjects to portray, what styles to emulate.It showed them how to comport themselves as artists, collectors, and viewers, and explained how to judge works of art. From the comfort of their armchairs powerful figures such as Ferdinando I, King of Naples, could peruse manuscripts like this late fifteenth-century translation that was personalized, not just with emblems of coats-of-arms but with a frontispiece commemorating Pliny’s death in his territory (Fig. 1). Pliny had fallen victim to the noxious fumes of Vesuvius, to his own conscientious sense of responsibility to his day job as executive commander of the Roman fleet in the Bay of Naples, and to his after-hours passion for studying and recording everything of note for his encyclopedia. His curiosity extended to the Greek objects brought to Rome and their Roman installations, which made the Natural History an indispensable help to Renaissance readers intent on deciphering anew the fragments and ruins of the ancient civilization that surrounded them.

Renaissance readers put Pliny’s text to new purposes for which we rely on it today. They recognized that it provided the only extant history of Greek painting and sculpture. Never superseded, Pliny’s schema and characterizations undergird the entire historiography of Greek art.

The Natural History had been consulted all through Roman and medieval times because it was the sole surviving Roman encyclopedia, and Pliny had synthesized scores of lost erudite Greed and Latin specialized sources. This accident of history made Pliny’s volume indispensable. Distinguished figures like the Venerable Bede relied on it for his scientific and historical writings. Unlike Bede, however, most consulted the Natural History for specific purposes because of its length and multifarious contents, rather than reading it from cover to cover. 

In order to facilitate that sort of specialized consultation, Roman and medieval scholars made summaries, or epitomes, of certain sections of the encyclopaedia, a decision encouraged as well by the daunting task of copying the whole text. The three most common types condensed Pliny’s discussion of the exotic peoples who inhabited territories outside of the civilizing embrace of Rome’s empire, his accounts of medicinal cures derived from plants and animals, and his treatment of semiprecious and precious gemstones.

The sections on humanoid foreign races were excerpted in the early third century by the Roman Solinus. His extremely popular epitome may have been illustrated, although the Natural History itself never was during the Roman and medieval periods. The legacy of Pliny’s ethnographic chapters led to the representation of the fantastic peoples he described, which are today known as the “Plinian peoples,” appearing  in contexts as different as bestiaries, the lunette at Vézekat depicting the apostles’ mission, and the illuminations accompanying Marco Polo’s travel accounts. Those illustrations in turn influenced the miniature paintings beginning the ethnographic chapters in the manuscripts of the Natural History that first appeared in the late fourteenth century, here with Roman ethnographers cataloguing the strage humanoids. Even today when the world outside of the Roman Empire is well-tred territory, these creatures infiltrate our imaginations beginning in childhood, as attested by the dufflepuds in C.S. Lewis’s Narnia Chronicles.

- from ‘The Art History of a Book on Science’, the first Chapter of Pliny and the Artistic Culture of the Italian Renaissance by Sarah Blake McHam

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Yale University Press’ Little Histories collection is a family of books that takes a closer look at some of the most significant events, ideas, discoveries and people throughout history. As part of our ongoing coverage of the collection, here’s an excerpt from William Bynum’s A Little History of Science, a book that examines the scientific discoveries that radically altered our understanding of the world.

The modern ‘atom’ was the brainchild of a thoroughly respectable Quaker, John Dalton (1766 – 1844). A weaver’s son, he went to a good school near where he was born, in the English Lake District. He was especially skilled in mathematics and science, and a famous blind mathematician encouraged his scientific ambitions. Dalton settled in nearby Manchester, a thriving and rapidly growing town during the early Industrial Revolution, when factories began to dominate the making of all kinds of goods. Here he worked as a lecturer and private tutor. He was the first person to give talks on colour-blindness, based on his own affliction. For many years, colour-blindness was called ‘Daltonism’. If you know someone who is colour-blind, it is probably a boy, since girls rarely suffer from it.

[...]

Dalton was a leading light in Manchester’s scientific life, and his work was gradually appreciated throughout Europe and North America. He did some important experimental work in chemistry, but his reputation then and now rested on his idea of the chemical atom. Earlier chemists had shown that when chemicals react with each other, they do so in predictable ways. When hydrogen ‘burns’ in ordinary air (part of which is oxygen) the product is always water, and if you measure things carefully, you can see that the proportions of the two gases that combine to form water are always the same. (Don’t try this at home, because hydrogen is very easily burned, and can explode.) The same kind of regularity also happened n other chemical experiments with gases, liquids and solids. Why?

For Lavoisier, in the previous century, this was because elements were the basic units of matter and simply couldn’t be broken down into smaller parts. Dalton called the smallest unit of matter the ‘atom’. He insisted that the atoms of one element are all the same, but different from the atoms of other elements. He thought of atoms as extremely small, solid bits of matter, surrounded by heat. The heat around the atom served to help him explain how his atoms, and the compounds they make when joined with other atoms could exist in various states. For example, atoms of hydrogen and oxygen could exist as solid ice (when they had the least heat), as a liquid water, or as water vapour (when they had the most heat).

Dalton made models with little cut-outs to stand for his atoms. He marked his cardboard cut-outs with symbols, to save space (and time) when writing the names of compounds and their reactions (just as if he were sending a modern text message). At first his system was far too awkward to be used easily, but it was the right idea, so gradually chemists decided to use initials as the symbols for elements (and therefore Dalton’s atoms). So hydrogen became ‘H’, oxygen ‘O’, and carbon ‘C’. Another letter sometimes had to be added to avoid confusion: for example, when helium was discovered later, it couldn’t be H so became ‘He’.

The beauty of Dalton’s atomic theory was that it allowed chemists to know things about these bits of matter that they could never actually see. If all the atoms in an element are the same, then they must weigh the same, so chemists could measure how much one weighed compared to another. In a compound made of different kinds of atoms, they could measure how much of each atom there was in the compound, by relative weight. (Dalton couldn’t actually measure how much an individual atom weighed, so atomic weights were merely compared with the weights of other atoms.) Dalton led the way here, and he didn’t always get it right. For instance, when oxygen and hydrogen combine to form water, he assumed that one atom of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen were involved. Based on his careful weighing, he gave the atomic weight of hydrogen as 1 (hydrogen was the lightest known element), and the atomic weight of oxygen as 7, so he said that they had a weight ratio of 1 to 7, or 1:7. He always rounded his atomic weights to whole numbers and the comparative weights he was working with suggested he was right. In fact, the weight rations in water are more like 1:8. We also now know that there are two atoms of hydrogen in each molecule of water, so the ratio of atomic weights is actually 1:16 – one of hydrogen to sixteen of oxygen. The current atomic weight of oxygen in 16. Hydrogen has retained the magical weight of 1, which Dalton gave it. Hydrogen is not only the lightest atom, it is also the most common one in the universe.

Dalton’s atomic theory made sense of chemical reactions, by showing how elements or atoms combine in definite proportions. So, hydrogen and oxygen do this when they form water, and carbon and oxygen when they make carbon dioxide, and nitrogen and hydrogen when they make ammonium. Such regularity and consistency, as well as increasingly accurate tools for measurement, made chemistry a cutting-edge science in the early nineteenth century. Dalton’s atomic theory provided its foundation.

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Yale University Press’ Little Histories collection is a family of books that takes a closer look at some of the most significant events, ideas, discoveries and people throughout history. As part of our ongoing coverage of the collection, here’s an excerpt from Nigel Warburton’s A Little History of Philosophy, a book that presents the grand sweep of humanity’s search for philosophical understanding from Socrates to Peter Singer.

‘Russell’s main interests as a teenager were,’ Warburton writes, ‘sex, religion and mathematics—all at a theoretical level. In his very long life (he died in 1970, aged 97) he ended up being controversial about the first, attacking the second, and making important contributions to the third.’

To put it very briefly, Russell got into trouble for his views on sex because he didn’t think it was all that important to be faithful to your partner. This naturally didn’t go down well with many people at the time. With religion, he was just as provocative—he believed that people only turned to it because they feared death. Finally, because of his keen interest in logic, a subject which straddles both philosophy and mathematics, he ended up making many important contributions to both fields.

Russell was deeply influenced by his godfather, John Stuart Mill, even though he never had a chance to speak to Mill properly since Mill died when Russell was still a toddler. ‘Reading Mill’s Autobiography (1873),’ Warburton explains, ‘was what led Russell to reject God’. And, like Mill, Russell had ‘an unusual and not particularly happy childhood’. His parents died when he was young, which meant he was cared for by his strict and rather distant grandmother. So he ‘threw himself into his studies and became a brilliant mathematician, going on to lecture at Cambridge University’.

One of the many things that Russell was interested in was the logical analysis of language. He wanted to scrutinise how our words actually relate to the world, and pinpoint what exactly made a statement true or false. With this goal in mind, Russell went on to develop his Theory of Descriptions. Warburton explains the theory as follows:

‘Take the rather odd sentence (one of Russell’s favourites) ‘The present king of France is bald.’ Even in the early twentieth century when Russell was writing there was no king of France. France got rid of all her kings and queens during the French Revolution. So how could he make sense of that sentence? Russell’s answer was that, like most sentences in ordinary language, it wasn’t quite what it seemed.

Here’s the problem. If we want to say that the sentence ‘The present king of France is bald’ is false, this seems to be committing us to saying that there is a present king of France who isn’t bald. But that surely isn’t what we mean at all. We don’t believe there is a present king of France. Russell’s analysis was this. A statement like ‘The present king of France is bald’ is actually a kind of hidden description. When we speak about ‘the present king of France’ the underlying logical shape of our idea is this:

(a) There exists something that is the present king of France.

(b) There is only one thing that is the present king of France.

(c) Anything that is the present king of France is bald.

[...] For Russell the sentence ‘the present king of France is bald’ is false because the present king of France doesn’t exist. The sentence suggests that he does; so the sentence is false rather than true. The sentence ‘The present king of France is not bald’ is also false for the same reason’.’

Sufficiently confused yet? This was simply one of many befuddling—yet profound—puzzles that Bertrand Russell devised in his lifetime to force us to re-examine what we think we know about language. He managed to do what every good philosopher does: take a good, hard look at our beliefs and ask ourselves why we believe the things we do.

In this extract from the Afterword of The Great Agnostic, Susan Jacoby addresses the ‘new atheists’ directly, enquiring as to why the contribution of Ingersoll is often omitted from the modern discussion of American philosophical history.

Afterword: A Letter to the New Atheists 

There is no such thing as a new atheist. You know this of course, and are usually careful to give ample credit to your predecessors. They made you possible, by waging the battle for reason and freedom of conscience at considerable risk to their own lives and liberty — whether by speaking out against the received opinion of their times or by the scientific investigation that led to a natural rather than a supernatural explanation of how our entire universe, including human beings, came to be. The names of Copernicus, Galileo, Giordano Bruno, Spinoza, Voltaire, Paine, Humboldt, and, of course, Darwin are frequently on your lips and in your books, as well they should be. Upon the shoulders of these giants rest the efforts of all whose aim is to make gentle the life of this world rather than to seek paradise in some hidden world beyond nature. So why is Robert Green Ingersoll usually absent from your honor role?

I would not expect you to mention Ingersoll if you were promoting the idea that America is, after all, a Christian nation founded by Christians who intended to establish a Christian government. But you are all dedicated to the advancement of the same secular values that Ingersoll advocated in a much more religious era. Had there been no Ingersoll to continue Paine’s work of laying the foundation for future, unassured, yet eminently possible ages of American reason, there would be a much smaller audience today not only for you but for liberal religious believers who, instead of caving in to right-wing myths about America having been established as a quasi-theocracy, have fought and are still fighting efforts to impose parochial religious dogma on public policy.

Sometimes I suspect that Ingersoll’s nineteenth-century designation as the Great Agnostic — not the Great Atheist — is the real reason why so many prominent twenty-first century atheists have placed scant emphasis on his role in American history. A neutral descriptive term in Europe today, atheist remains a pejorative to many religious Americans. I would not be surprised if some of you imagine that Ingersoll was trying to fudge his real beliefs to attain greater public respectability, as some American agnostics do today. Not so. When offered the opportunity many times by journalists to distinguish his agnosticism from atheism, Ingersoll never took the bait and always replied that there was no difference between the two. Whether one called oneself an atheist or an agnostic, Ingersoll emphasized, it was impossible to “prove” a negative such as the nonexistance of God. Ingersoll would cheerfully accept being called an atheist by those who considered the word a worse epithet than agnostic. That ought to be good enough for any outspoken atheist today — especially since there are still so many Americans who embrace the misapprehension that all atheists claim to “know” that God does not exist. Such people will often state, with an air of moral superiority, that they are agnostic because they do not subscribe to “atheist fundamentalism.” They do not understand that fundamentalism (if what is meant by fundamentalism is belief in the literal truth and divine authorship of ancient books) has nothing to do with atheism, and that the atheist, like the self-described agnostic, regards proofs of the existence of God in the same light that David Hume regarded proofs of miracles. With Hume, the atheist say, “No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish.”

Many of you (including those, like Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens, born and educated in England) have devoted a good deal of your proselytizing energy to the United States because this is the only developed country whose inhabitants still cling, in significant numbers, to the idea that their nation and their way of life was ordained by God. What these particular Americans mean by God is not some vague, overarching providence but a particular god who shed his divinity to walk the earth some two thousand years ago and died on a cross to redeem us (including you heretics) from the original sin committed in the Garden of Eden. And so, you rightly emphasize one of the great paradoxes of American history — the founding of the world’s first secular government at a time when the American people were even more overwhelmingly Christian, specifically Protestant, than they are today. In the pantheon of American freethinkers, you rarely fail to mention, at some point, the role played in the establishment of our secular government by the many Enlightenment rationalists among the founders. You always single out Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison not only as the founders of the new nation but also as the progenitors of an American tradition that enshrines no religion — unless intellectual liberty is considered religion. Again I ask: Where is Ingersoll in your accounts of subsequent chapters in the story of American secularism?

The nineteenth-century media identification of Ingersoll with agnosticism is not the only reason for his obscure standing in the atheist pantheon today. Another explanation can be traced to the criticism of Ingersoll, both before and after his death, on grounds that he was not an “original thinker” but merely a synthesizer and popularizer of other people’s ideas. He was certainly not a scientist, a philosopher, or a historian recognized by scholarly institutions. But that was precisely Ingersoll’s strength: He believed that reason was available to and attainable by the many and not restricted to the educated few. He saw the writings of Shakespeare, Spinoza, Voltaire, Paine, Jefferson, and Humboldt as comprehensible to all; a degree in the natural sciences, philosophy, or literature was not required to enter Ingersoll’s house of reason. This is hardly a moot argument today, given that a continuing feature of our political culture is the denigration of reason itself as an “ivory tower” phenomenon that could not possibly be important to anyone but a professor in his or her study. There is no “merely” about Ingersoll’s role as a popularizer of freethought, because when the cause is reason itself, and the capacity of reason to alter human lives for the better nothing can be accomplished without widespread dissemination among members of the public from diverse educational backgrounds and social classes. Ingersoll left a priceless legacy not only to committed atheists but to secularists who — like many of the American founders — may believe in some form of Providence but are concerned that any universal spirit has left it up to humans to solve earthly problems through our own reason.

Ingersoll labored mightily to cut through the layers of religious treacle that separated Americans of his country’s second century, for all their more advanced technology, from the Enlightenment rationalists who wrote a founding document beginning with the words “We The People” rather than with acknowledgment of gratitude and servitude to some divinity. He was the missing link between the revolutionary generation and millions of late nineteenth-century Americans, whether born in the New World or the Old, who had forgotten or never knew that their nation was built on the premise of human, not divine, authority.

None of this history is far removed from the task of twenty-first-century atheists and secularists. The audience for the new-old atheists includes a good many Americans in their thirties whose great-grandparents might well have heard Ingersoll invite them to join him and other freethinkers in “laying the foundations of the grand temple of the future — not the temple of all the gods, but of all the people.” My own grandfather, born in 1872, attended many of Ingersoll’s lectures. Does his interest in one of the two greatest freethinkers in American history have anything to do with the fact that I, and my two nieces in their twenties, are atheists? I cannot be certain, but I do know that doubt, like faith, is generally transmitted over generations; there is rarely a single moment, the equivalent of Saul falling off his horse on the road to Damascus, in which people slap their heads and say, “Eureka, Christ is the Lord!” or “Eureka, there is no all-powerful, loving God!” Faith and reason are always in the air we breathe: Ingersoll was one of the grand doubters who labored to clear the environment of poisonous certitude for future generations.

First, he explained the true meaning and value of science as a system of inquiry whose tentative conclusions were always open to modification by new evidence. He explained this in a more understandable fashion than any scientist, even the brilliant popularizer Thomas Henry Huxley, did at the time and in more lucid fashion than any scientist, with the possible exception of Dawkins, is doing right now. It may even have been better that Ingersoll was not a scientist, because the notion that there is some vast divide between the “mysteries” of science and ordinary human intelligence, that science and the humanities, must occupy “separate magisteria” was one of the most pernicious intellectual fashions of the second half of the twentieth century. In Ingersoll’s time, specialization had not yet triumphed, and the idea that one had to be a scientist to understand the scientific method, or to talk about it, was considered highly suspect by most Americans. Science is not a mystery, Ingersoll told his audience, and scientists are not priests, bishops, or popes. the latter half of the proposition was arguably as important as the former, because some in his generation were led by their passion for science into pseudosciences that took on some of the characteristics of religious orthodoxy. These late nineteenth-century scientific-seeming byways ranged from the prevailing social Darwinism of many Gilded Age intellectuals and business leaders to the arrogance of the vivisectionists, whose claims that they had a perfect right to torture lower animals in the name of science were not all that far removed from the biblical assertion that God had created man with dominion over the birds of the air and the beasts of the field.

Second, Ingersoll made the connection between repressive religion and everyday burdens and injustices as no one had before him. The Enlightenment rationalists, especially Paine and Voltaire, understood and excoriated the role of religion, coupled with state power, in large issues that included slavery, torture, and capital punishment. Ingersoll spoke out on the same issues but moved farther and deeper into the most intimate injustices sanctioned by society. As far as he was concerned, there were no social injustices in which religion did not play a major role — from the prevalent belief, well into the nineteenth century, that God had created the poor for a reason and that only those who could pay deserved to be educated, to the religiously based laws and customs that sanctioned marital violence, deemed it a moral disgrace for a woman to leave her husband for any reason, and denied women access to education and the means of making a living. Debtor’s prisons, cruelty to children and animals, inhumane treatment both of the insane and of criminals: All were justified by biblical precepts that formed the original basis for mistreatment of the powerless by the powerful. Ingersoll did not live to see twentieth-century totalitarianism, but there is little doubt, given his contempt for the idea that “tooth and claw” should be the rule for man in a state of civilization, that he would have had equal contempt for secular ideologies that took on the anti-rational, anti-evidentiary characteristics of orthodox theology.

Finally, Ingersoll’s primary civic aim was the restoration of the historical memory of a founding generation that had explicitly rejected theocracy as the basis for a national government. His American patriotism was inseparable from his valorization of the separation of church and state. To him, the glory of the founding generation was that it did not establish a Christian nation. There is no establishment figure who says anything of the kind in America today. Even though Ingersoll was denied the opportunity for public office because of his antireligious beliefs, he was nevertheless very much a part of the social and political establishment. Yet he placed his principles, and his determination that Americans not forget the secular side of their own history, above his considerable political ambitions — something that no aspirant to high office has been willing to do in the United States since… well, since Ingersoll himself. There ought to be some sort of Atheist Hall of Fame — it would not be large — for those who refuse to engage in religious hypocrisy to further their political ambitions.

Ingersoll belongs there. Eliminate a few Victorianisms, and everything he had to say in his time is just as relevant to a nation in which religious censors are still trying to eliminate the very idea of the separation of church and state from school history tests and a world in which radical Islamist theocrats still want blasphemers to die for their “crimes.”

Like atheists of this generation, Ingersoll was constantly charged by his religiously orthodox contemporaries with the crime of attempting to destroy comforting beliefs in divine guidance while replacing them with nothing, leaving forlorn men and women to roam the earth in a state of fear because nothing can make this life worthwhile in the absence of faith in an afterlife. To this Ingersoll replied, as atheists do today, that nothing in a putative eternity could possibly justify suffering in this world and that the reduction of suffering in one, finite lifetime is a high goal for any human being. Given the existence of evils long attributed to gods, Ingersoll saw no reason for humans to be intimidated by the idea that they were on their own in the task of building a better future. “Man through his intelligence must protect himself,” Ingersoll said equably. “He gets no help from any other world.”  What would be left when the men and women banished the ghosts of gods who destroyed or ennobled humans on the basis of divine whim? “The world remains,” Ingersoll replied, “with… homes and firesides, where grow and bloom the virtues of our race… Let the ghosts go. We will worship them no more. Let them cover their eyeless sockets with their fleshless hands and fade forever from the imaginations of men.”

You “new” atheists should consider it your special duty and privilege to work tenaciously for the restoration of the memory of this old American freethinker. You owe him. So does every American, religious or nonreligious, who enjoys and takes for granted that liberty of conscience is meant for thee as well as for me — the greatest secular idea of all.

- from The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought, by Susan Jacoby, published by Yale University Press. Copyright 2013 by Susan Jacoby.

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Read an extract from The Mechanical Smile,  available now from Yale University Press, and see a full gallery of images on our Facebook page.

The Mechanical Smile

The history of the early fashion shows in the United States of America and France from about the 1880s to 1929 identifies their relationship to modernism. It argues that the Fordist aesthetics of the fashion show produced a modernist and rationalised body in which commerce and culture converged. By asserting that the show translated what one journalist called the ‘arithmetic of fashion’ into visual seduction, the book brings economic and design history together in a new formation. Indeed, the fashion show is a nodal point for the convergence of several different histories rarely written about together: those of business, international trade, consumption, women, work and fashion, as well as cinema, revue theatre and visual art. The research for the book has led me to new sources, in particular film of the silent period, and new ways of thinking about theory as both historical and contingent. It has spurred me to think about new methods for writing about the history of the body, and to investigate how its ephemeral and intangible t—s linger in fashionable ways of walking, moving and posing. As a result, the book makes the case for understanding fashion in a wider context than those of material culture and design history alone. It suggests that fashion is also an embodied, four-dimensional practise that exists in both space and time and, therefore, that it is an important, if often overlooked, part of the history of sensibilities as well as of commerce and culture.

The book falls into two parts consisting of six chapters of each. Part I, a history of the fashion shows  from 1900, including a chapter on their nineteenth-century prehistory, introduces the key themes of the book: modernism, gender, class, the rationalisation of the body, and the commercial and cultural relations between America and France, both in the international garment trade and in the wider culture. It thus contains both synchronic and diachronic accounts, linking the history of the show to other aspects of the visual culture of the period. Part II develops and explores some contradictions that emerged in Part I, by focusing on the contradictory figure of the mannequin, as the fashion model was called. These include: her ambiguous status as both object and subject; her physical malleability that mirrored the psychological malleability of the ‘New Woman’; and her embodiment (highly disturbing to her contemporaries) of future sensibilities.

As a history of the first fashion shows, the book brings much new knowledge into the public domain and revises aspects of the existing literature that are either incomplete or erroneous. It shows how, from the nineteenth century, French haute couture was a global export industry, rather than a luxury trade catering only to rich individual clients, as is suggested in many older histories of couture. It argues that this was the reason for the emergence of fashion shows, to sell the biannual collections to international buyers coming twice a year to Paris. The Paris trade was, however, an unusual one, in that it exported not goods but ideas, in the form of model dresses and the right to reproduce them. These were bought by overseas manufacturers to recreate them in simplified form on a mass scale for their domestic markets. Buyers from all over the world converged on Paris twice a tear from the biannual collections but the most powerful were the North Americans, with their vast domestic markets and larger manufacturing capacity. That is why the book focuses on France and America alone, as respectively, the most important exporter and the most important imported of the international fashion trade. The coverage of the early twentieth-century fashion show foregrounds an aspect of fashion rarely covered by historians, the crucial interface between the craft-based French fashion system and the mass production of the American garment industry.

Even so, this is not a complete history of fashion shows in both France and America over thirty years, as it leaves many gaps. Rather, it is the history of the relationship between the two countries, plated out in the interaction of the fashion industries of each, a relationship which was therefore commercial, cultural and ideological at once. I have focused on the important periods of the Franco-American relationship as it developed over thirty years, rather than on the parallel developments of the fashion show in each country. That is why, for example, although all six chapters of Part I emphasise the importance of the idea of French fashion to the Americans, only one, Chapter 4, is devoted to American fashion shows. Chapters 5 and 6 nevertheless show how the idea of ‘American-ness’ (américanisme) dominated French fashion in the 1920s, a shift due largely to economic factors, namely the impoverishment of France due to the First World War and changed in the relative  values of the franc and the dollar in the post-war years.

Beyond the claims of individual designers, I looked to structures rather than narrative to think about this relationship. Certainly, there is no narrative to the fashion show: some women come into a room, they walk up and down and they exit. Other women, and a few men, look at them. This does on for decades. The story of fashion modelling is far from exiting. On the contrary, it is stupefying monotonous. What gives it meaning are its commercial and cultural structures. These encompass the history of garment trade relations between France and America; the ideas of F. W. Taylor, published in 1911, on ‘the scientific management of the workplace’; the development of mass production and the invention of Henry Ford’s moving automotive assembly line in 113; the emancipation of women; the development of cinema, variety theatre and the chorus line as modern forms of popular entertainment; and, in visual culture and art, the move towards abstraction, simultaneity and machine aesthetics.

- Extract from the Introduction to The Mechanical Smile by Caroline Evans.

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In this extract from the first Chapter of How to Read Literature, author, critic and philosopher Terry Eagleton discusses the mechanics of openings and why the narrator of A Passage to India seems so bored.

How to Read Literature

Learning how to be a literary critic is, among other things, a matter of learning how to deploy certain techniques. Like a lot of techniques – scuba-diving, for example, or playing the trombone – these are more easily picked up in practice than in theory. All of them involve a closer attention to language than one would usually lavish ona recipe or a laundry list. In this chapter then, I aim to provide some practical exercises in literary analysis, taking as my texts the first lines or sentences of various well-known literary works.

A word first of all about literary beginnings. Endings in art are absolute, in the sense that once a figure like Prospero vanishes he vanishes forever. We cannot ask whether he ever really made it back to his dukedom, since he does not survive the play’s final line. There is a sense in which literary openings are absolute too. This is clearly not true in every sense. Almost all literary works begin by using words that have been used countless times before, though not necessarily in this particular combination. We can grasp the meaning of these opening sentences only because we come to them with a frame of cultural reference which allows us to do so. We also approach them with some conception of what a literary work is, what is meant by a beginning, and so on. In this sense, no literary opening is ever really absolute. All reading involves a fair amount of stage setting. A lot of things must already be in place simply for a text to be intelligible. One of them is previous works of literature. Every literary work harks back, if only unconsciously, to other works. Yet the opening of a poem or novel also seems to spring out of a kind of silence, since it inaugurates a fictional world that did not exist before.Perhaps it is the closest thing we have to the act of divine Creation, as some Romantic artists believed. The difference is that we are stuck with the Creation, whereas we can always discard our copy of Catherine Cookson.

Let us begin with the opening sentences of one of the most celebrated of twentieth-century novels, E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India:

Except for the Marabar Caves—and they are twenty miles off —the city of Chandrapore presents nothing extraordinary. Edged rather than washed by the river Ganges, it trails for a couple of miles along the bank, scarcely distinguishable from the rubbish it deposits so freely. There are no bathing-steps on the river front, as the Ganges happens not to be holy here; indeed there is no river front, and bazaars shut out the wide and shifting panorama of the stream. The streets are mean, the temples ineffective, and though a few fine houses exist they are hidden away in gardens or down alleys whose filth deters all but the invited guest…

As with the opening of a lot of novels, there is something of a setpiece feel to this, as the author clears his throat and formally sets the scene. A writer tends to be on his or her best behaviour at the beginning of Chapter 1, eager to impress, keen to catch the fickle reader’s eye, and occasionally intent on pulling out all the stops. Even so, he must beware of overdoing it, not least if he is a civilised middle-class Englishman like E. M. Forster who values reticence and indirectness. Perhaps this is one reason why the passage opens with a throwaway qualification (‘Except for the Marabar Caves’) rather than with a blare of verbal trumpets. It sidles into its subject-matter sideways, rather than confronting it head on. ‘The  city of Chandrapore presents nothing extraordinary, except for the Marabar Caves, and they are twenty miles off’ would be far to ungraceful. It would spoil the poise of the syntax, which is elegant in an unshowy kind of way. It is deftly managed and manipulated, but with quiet good manners refuses to rub this in one’s face. There is no suggestion of ‘fine writing’, or what is sometimes called ‘purple’ (excessively ornate) prose. The author’s eye is too closely on the object for any such self-indulgence. The first two clauses of the novel hold off the subject of the sentence (‘the city of Chandrapore’) twice over, so that the reader experiences a slight quickening of expectations before finally arriving at this phrase. One’s expectations, however, are aroused only to be deflated, since we are told that the city contains nothing remarkable. More exactly, we are told rather oddly that there is nothing remarkable about the city except for the Caves, but that the Caves are not in the city. We are also informed that there are no bathing steps on the river front, but that there is no river front.

The four phrases of the first sentence are almost metrical in their rhythm and balance. In fact, it is possible to read them as trimeters, or lines of verse with three stresses each:

Except for the Marabar Caves

And they are twenty miles off

The city of Chandrapore

Presents nothing extraordinary 

The same delicate equipoise crops up in the phrase ‘Edged rather than washed’, which is perhaps a touch too fastidious. This is a writer with a keenly discriminating eye, but also a  coolly distancing one. In traditional English, style, he refuses to get excited or enthusiastic (the city ‘presents nothing extraordinary’). The word ‘presents’ is significant. It makes Chandrapore sound like a show put on for the sake of the spectator, rather than a place to be lived in. ‘Presents nothing extraordinary’ to whom? The answer is surely to the tourist. The tone of the passage – disenchanted, slightly supercilious, a touch overbred – is that of a rather snooty guidebook. It sails as close as it dares to suggesting that the city is literally a heap of garbage.

The importance of tone as an indication of attitude is made clear in the novel itself. Mrs Moore, an Englishwoman who has just arrived in colonial India and is unaware of British cultural habits there, tells her imperial-minded son Ronny about her encounter with a young Indian doctor in a temple. Ronny does not initially realise that she is talking about a ‘native’, and when he does so becomes instantly irritable and suspicious. ‘Why hadn’t she indicated by the tone of her voice that she was talking about an Indian?’ he thinks to himself.

As far as the tone of this passage goes, we may note among other things the triple alliteration of the phrase ‘happens not to be holy here’, which trots somewhat too glibly off the tongue. It represents a wry poke at Hindu beliefs on the part of a sceptical, sophisticated outsider. The alliteration suggest a ‘cleverness’, a discreet delight in verbal artifice, which puts a distance between the narrator and the poverty-stricken city. The same is true of the lines ‘The streets are mean, the temples ineffective, and though a few fine houses exist…’ The syntax of this is a little too self-consciously contrived, too obviously intent on a ‘literary’ effect.

So far, the passage has managed to keep this shabby Indian city at arm’s length without sounding too offensively superior, but the word ‘ineffective’ to describe the temples almost deliberately gives the game away. though the syntax tucks it unobtrusively away in a sub-clause, it strikes the reader like a mild smack in the face. The term assumes that the temples are there not for the inhabitants to worship in, but for the observer to take pleasure in. They are ineffective in the sense that they do nothing for the artistically-minded tourist. The adjective makes them sound like flat tyres or broken radios. In face, it does this so calculatedly that one wonders, perhaps a little too charitably, whether it is meant to be ironic. Is the narrator sending up his own high-handed manner?

- From How to Read Literature by Terry Eagleton

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Read an extract from Imperial Gothic, available now from Yale University Press, and see a full gallery of images on our Facebook page.

But no! a different history of His Church was traced by the finger of God at Calvary. As is the Head, such the members must be. It is not by the easy unsacrificing multiplication of copies of the written word, but by self-sacrificing labour, it is not by the written word only, but through the Word of God, living in and quickening His chosen temples, sanctifying them, and testifying His own presence by the holy awe of habitation wherein He dwells, that so great a work must be accomplished.

 - E. B. Pusey, The Church the Converter of the Heathen (1838)

The Church of England was late into the mission field. Moreover, it was lax in extending its privileges - a constitutional right, according to some – to those who arrived to live and work in the far-flung corners of Britain’s colonial empire. To make matters worse, European Protestant churches and Nonconformist sects had been operating with vigour throughout Britain’s overseas territories since the mid-eighteenth century. This only made the established Church look more negligent with regard to its responsibilities. It was even said that Roman Catholics had done more. At first glance this seems odd, given that the Church of England had not one but three affiliate missionary organisations by 1800. These were the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK, 1699), the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (SPG, 1701) and the Church Missionary Society (CMS, 1799). These organisations, although founded with the best of intentions, were not particularly dynamic in executing their directives; nor were especially discriminatory in their neglect, forsaking Europeans and non-Europeans alike. To be sure, this had much to do with the frustrations met by the SPG in its attempts to establish proper ecclesiastical governance abroad during the eighteenth century. But even when this had been rectified to a degree, the SPG continued to focus what energy and resources it had on servicing the souls of expatriate settler communities. This was despite the fact that its mandate included from the beginning the ‘conversion of natives’. The SPCK, on the other hand, considered itself more a facilitator of missionary activity, focusing its attention on education, funding and publicity. It too had made modest attempts at launching missions to the heathen, especially in India (Tirunelveli), but devolved this responsibility to the SPG during the course of the eighteenth century.

Although much later on the scene, the CMS had arguable done more than the SPCK and SPG put together by 1840. This was partly owing to its Evangelical composition and partly to its ecumenical attitude towards recruiting missionaries (it was willing to accept German Lutherans, for example). Not hindered by an insistence on episcopal oversight, the CMS was able to go direct into the mission field. Its missionaries were sent to the farthest reaches of the British empire (and beyond), bringing the gospel to indigenous peoples, learning their languages and translating their scriptures. But the largely voluntary organisational structure of the CMS during the nineteenth century led to disciplinary problems with local Anglican bishops. Ths, although it was more enthusiastic than its SPG conterpart, the success of the CMS up to the time of Henry Veen (Secretary, 1841 – 72) was both patchy and controversial.

Going Global: Founding the Colonial Bishoprics’ Fund

If the 1830s were a difficult time for the Church of England generally, then the year 1840 offered new promise. This marked the moment at which the hierarchy of the Church suddenly awoke from its ‘fat slumbers’, as Gibbon once put it, regarding its imperial responsibilities. This perceived duty was something that had been smouldering in the background but was now suddenly enflamed. The initiative was headed by Charles Blomfield (1786-1857), bishop of London, in an open letter to the archbishop of Canterbury, William Howley (1766-1848). In this letter Blomfield highlighted what was generally considered to be the half-hearted attempt by Britain to make ‘provision for the spiritual wants of the colonies’. which ‘at no time [had] been completely and effectually carried out’. To Blomfield, who, as bishop of London, had nominal jurisdiction over Anglican clergy in the colonies, such provision was considered the ‘sacred duty’ of a Christian country. He argued this point not on spiritual grounds alone, as if that were not enough, but on temporal premises too; that the English Church was the established Church and therefore an inextricable component of the nation’s constitutional settlement. Although the SPG had laboured against indifference  to supply this provision to the best of its ability, Blomfield observed, it had done so inadequately. The time had now arrived to force the issue and make amends.

- From ‘Anglicanism and the British Colonial World: Transplanting the Faith’, the Introduction to Imperial Gothic by G. A. Bremner

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This guide has been written by Kevin Mulligan, an architectural historian  living in County Monaghan. Find out more | Buy the book

The starting point for Kurlantzick’s remarkable new book, Democracy in Retreat, is the breakdown of democracy in Thailand, once a role model for emerging democracies in South East Asia. As Kurlantzick points out, rather than being an isolated case this deterioration of democratic values is actually evidence of a wider trend. Indeed, an international survey carried out by Freedom House, an independent organisation dedicated to the expansion of freedom around the world, found that in 2010 global freedom fell for the fifth year in a row, the longest continuous decline for nearly forty years. More shockingly perhaps, twenty-five nations went backward, in terms of freedom in 2010 alone. Interestingly, it is not just the failure of democratization in developing countries which seems to have resulted in these ‘gloomy conclusions’, but rather the wholesale deterioration of existing democratic systems and even the complete reversal in some countries to military rule or autocracy.

 From this rather dramatic appraisal of the current state of democracy in the world today, Kurlantzick quickly goes on to trace the many reasons for this decline. Perhaps most striking amongst these is his assertion that at the heart of many of the world’s struggling or failed democracies lies an increasingly hostile middle class, one which far from being a ‘linchpin to successful democratization’ is in fact a new threat to reform in many developing nations. Development theorists such as Samuel Huntington have long linked economic change with political change, with economic growth seen as bringing about a more sizeable middle class and the development of education, political institutions and cultural values and ultimately democratic change. For a while this certainly seemed to be the case, with urban middle class men and women playing a major role in the democratization of countries like Chile, Taiwan and South Korea.

 However, with the onset of a fourth wave of democratization at the end of the 1990s, Kurlantzick claims a worrying trend has begun to emerge. These countries, frequently isolated, poor and conflict ridden, often suffered weak growth in the initial years of democracy and, coupled with the high expectations of increasing prosperity for all, led many to feel increasing dissatisfaction with democracy. With high levels of corruption and political instability, the reality for many emerging democracies, large numbers of former advocates of democracy have begun to distrust the system they had previously fought so hard to put in place. In his detailed analysis of this phenomenon Kurlantzick offers up some startling examples of this trend. In particular, his examination of the revolt of the middle classes in the Philippines is fascinating, not least in his comparison with Singapore, essentially a one-party state, which enjoys a GDP per capita more than ten times that of the Philippines, prompting its leader, Lee Kuan Yew to deliver up his own views on development strategy thus; ‘I do not believe that democracy necessarily leads to development… The exuberance of democracy leads to undisciplined and disorderly conditions’.

 Such stark assessments of the failures of democracy not only illustrate Kurlantzick’s theoretical arguments, but also offer an interesting insight into the declining state of democracy in the modern world, something which is too often overlooked as a glitch in democracy’s onward march towards worldwide triumph. Given his authoritative knowledge of the subject, Kurlantzick makes for an articulate and engaging guide to this complex, and at times difficult, subject. However, Democracy in Retreat is ultimately much more than a rigorous analysis of democracy’s recent decline; it is an important book which raises questions about the future of our most treasured political institution, with Kurlantzick offering up his own thoughts and concerns on a trend which could have severe ‘international consequences’. The result is a though-provoking and at times alarming book, a must-read for all those interested in political theory and international relations, and for anyone concerned about the long-term future of democracy.    

- by Alice Winborn 

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