Friday Video: A Moving Panorama of the Mississippi Valley

Loretta reports:

Many of the 1830s magazines I peruse include reviews of recently installed panoramas (please scroll down for the review about Niagara Falls). The moving panorama is also a large painting, but where the panorama requires the viewer to move around a room, the moving panorama is an early "moving picture." Using spools, it scrolls across a stage, creating the illusion of traveling along a scenic route.

Before photography and movies, both the still and the moving paintings offered Londoners as well as Americans views of distant locales. Since the Londoners seem to have been especially curious about the U.S. and its wildernesses, I’m sure they would have enjoyed John J. Egan’s “Panorama of the Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi Valley”—all 348 feet of it, and a very rare survivor.


Video: John J. Egan's "Panorama of the Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi Valley"

Credits Animation: Paul Caro Photography: Saint Louis Art Museum © 2015 The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image is a still from the video.
Readers who receive our blog via email might see a rectangle, square, or nothing where the video ought to be. To watch the video, please click on the title to this post or the title of the video.

Meanwhile in Albania...

Loretta reports:

I'm on the road, with terrific internet connections but little time for posting. There's been so much to see and do. Here are some things I've seen during my too brief time here. I plan to post in more detail after I'm home.

Castle of Gjirokaster.

Ancient city of Butrint. (This is just one tiny section of the excavation.)

Doorway of second school in which Albanians were finally educated in their own language. This is in Pogradec. 

Archaeology Museum in  Durres.

A little gorgeous scenery.

All images: Photo copyright © 2017 Walter M. Henritze III

A German Lady Travels to Matlock in Jane Austen's Time

Matlock Tor by Moonlight

Loretta reports:

Those familiar with Pride & Prejudice will remember Elizabeth Bennett’s trip to Derbyshire, when she fell in love with Mr. Darcy’s house.

Johanna Schopenhauer (mother of the philosopher) traveled to Derbyshire early in the first decade of the 1800s. Her account of her travels was published in German, but not translated into English until the 1980s. If you understand German, you might want to listen to the audio version here.

The following excerpt is from Ruth Michaelis-Jena and Willy Merson’s A Lady Travels: The Diaries of Johanna Schopenhauer, the translation that helped me time travel as I wrote Miss Wonderful.

~~~

This lovely valley, friendly yet vast, lonely yet full of life, is one of the most beautiful in Britain.  It may be that Matlock’s springs are not very effective, but this is not necessary to the finding of new energy and vitality in this heavenly place ...

The actual spa consists of three large inns and two lodging-houses, with the village of Matlock about a mile and a half away. It is impossible to describe the charm of this valley in mere words: it is so peaceful, so intimate, with the Derwent flowing through it, surrounded by high cliffs which stand rugged and bare against the sky, yet usually looking friendly, as their summits are crowned with beautiful trees.

We took a boat on the Derwent as far as it is navigable, which is only a short stretch. After that it becomes a wild torrent, full of rapids and whirlpools ... Opposite us was the highest cliff in the neighbor hood, which the local people call the High Tor. We climbed it easily, up a shaded path, and from the top we could see on one side the narrow valley in all the glory of its rich vegetation, with the river running through the center. ON the wooded rocks opposite were the fine buildings of the spa, providing a friendly picture of pleasant social life ... On the other side we saw a second valley, looking as if no human foot had ever trod there, so remote and silent was it, enclosed by green hills ... Nowhere else had we seen the wild, simple beauty of nature more happily combined with civilization than here on the banks of the Derwent.

~~~

Image above: Joseph Wright of Derby, Matlock Tor by Moonlight (1777-80), courtesy Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. Note: This work is part of the splendid exhibition, The Critique of Reason: Romantic Art 1760-1860, very well worth seeing.

Image below: Joseph Wright of Derby, Matlock Tor by Daylight, ca 1785, from the collection of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK, via Wikipedia.

Clicking on the image will enlarge it.  Clicking on the caption will allow you to read at the source, where you can learn more and enlarge images as needed.

Talking About Climate Change in 1827

Mail Coach in snow

Loretta reports:

Talking about climate change in the early 1800s?  This was something of a surprise to me at first.  Then I realized that this piece was written only a decade after the Year Without a Summer, during what is known as the Little Ice Age. 
In that context, the theories become quite interesting.

In the discussion of cold weather in North America and Europe, you’ll notice no mention of a volcanic eruption.  And can you imagine 19th century naval vessels trying to move glaciers?* 

Climate change

Climate change

15 January entry from William Hone, The Every-day Book Vol II (1827-28).










*The asterisk in the article refers to a Morning Chronicle piece I’m unable to access.  Undoubtedly another publication—probably several—will have stolen it, but which one(s) and where will take some tracking down and may elude me altogether.



Image:  James Pollard, The Mail Coach in a Drift of Snow (1825).

Clicking on the image will enlarge it.  Clicking on the caption will allow you to read at the source, where you can learn more and enlarge images as needed.

Friday Video: Flowers in Bloom

Isabella reporting,

No history today - only beautiful flowers, fit for a mid-summer day. Madrid-based nature photographer David de los Santos Gil took over 50,000 photographs of flowers to create this time-lapse sequence of blossoms bursting into bloom. There's an entire garden of flowers here: lillium, hibiscus, carnations, orchids, dandelions, lilies, daisies, alstroemeria, peonies, and nigella damask. The accompanying music is by Roger Subirana. Truly breathtaking!

Seasonal Foods in November 1811

View online here

Loretta reports:

Because we live in the era of supermarkets and refrigeration, we need to stop and think—look it up, actually—when we’re giving dinner parties in our books—if, that is, we want to talk about the food  as well as what the hero and heroine say and do during the meal.

A recent trip to the local farmers’ market showed me what the non-supermarket food choices are in New England at this time of year.  And of course it awakened my Nerdy History Girl curiosity about what would be available to eat in England during an early 19th century November.

Read online here

—The Female Instructor; Or, Young Woman's Companion, 1811

Snow and Ice in 1814

William Collins, British Frost Scene, 1827

Loretta reports:

January 1814 brought serious winter weather to England.  Accounts occupy several pages in the Chronicle section of the 1814 Annual Register, continuing into February.  You can follow the story starting here.






 












Illustration: William Collins, British Frost Scene, 1827, courtesy Yale Center for British Art.

Please click on illustrations to enlarge.

Scurrying Away from Hurricane Sandy (and Colonial Williamsburg)

Isabella/Susan reporting:

Alas, I must bow to Mother Nature, bearing down on the east coast in the form of Hurricane Sandy. I'm cutting my Colonial Williamsburg sojourn short, and on Friday I'll be scurrying northward back home. But I still have lots of photos and stories to share from this week, and I'll continue to post them in the coming days. Stay tuned!

Above: Governor's Palace Garden, Colonial Williamsburg. Photograph by Susan Holloway Scott.

Signs of Autumn, Then & Now

Isabella/Susan reporting:

I live on the edge of a large bird and wildlife sanctuary, with my overgrown back yard merging seamlessly into what my family always call "the woods." I don't need the back-to-school TV advertisements or the internet to tell me that summer is winding down and fall is just around the corner. There are dozens of other little signs all around to let me know one season is sliding into the next.

The first flowering plants - the bleeding hearts and astilbes - are beginning to turn brown and die back for the year. The midsummer glory-flowers - the black-eyed Susans and marigolds - are making a last screaming bid for attention, while the cone flowers are fading and toppled, but filled with greedy yellow goldfinches. The first green acorns are beginning to drop: thump, thump (on the driveway), ping (on the car.)

Americans in the mid-19th c would have known that August was the time for harvest, not sales on school supplies and computers. The majority of Americans were still bound to the seasonal cycles of nature, and even if they had left the country to live in a city or work in a factory, most could remember the farm worked by parents or grandparents.

The Farmers' Almanac was first published in 1818, and has remained in continuous publication ever since. This short poem in honor of August (embodied in the illustration above) from the 1842 edition has both an undeniable charm and and a respect for the land that's still worth considering today.

                                       AUGUST hath 31 days.
                                 Blossoms to fruit are ripening fast,
                                 And fields, so lately green,
                                 Assume a rich and yellow cast,
                                 And golden ears are seen.
                                 Thus Heaven bestows, with liberal hand,
                                 All that our needful wants demand.

Read more from the Farmers' Almanac of the 1840s here via Google books.