http://www.nypl.org/press/beforevictoria.cfm
Women Who Rattled the Gilded Cage
Before Victoria: Extraordinary Women of the British Romantic Era Opens
April 8 at The New York Public Library
New York, March 17, 2005 -- While the image of the woman as angel of the
house, sexless and selfless, was already an ideal by 1789, there lived
throngs of flesh and blood women who variously bent, broke, ignored,
circumvented, and changed the rules of British (and sometimes world)
culture during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The
lives, works, pluck, and influence of the most formidable, famous, and
infamous among them are the focus of Before Victoria: Extraordinary
Women of the British Romantic Era, an eye-opening exhibition of rare
manuscripts, letters, prints, paintings, memoirs, and other artifacts of
the time, opening April 8, 2005 at The New York Public Library. The
exhibition, co-curated by Stephen Wagner and Elizabeth Campbell
Denlinger, is drawn from the Library’s Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of
Shelley and His Circle; the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art,
Prints and Photographs; the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of
English and American Literature; the Spencer Collection; the Rare Books
Division; and the General Research Division. Before Victoria will be on
view April 8 through July 30, 2005 in the D. Samuel and Jeane H.
Gottesman Exhibition Hall on the first floor of The New York Public
Library, Humanities and Social Sciences Library, Fifth Avenue and 42nd
Street. Admission is free.
Who Were These Unusual Women?
Everyone knows Mary Shelley as the teen-aged author of Frankenstein.
Fewer remember Shelley’s more radical mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, whose
1792 Vindication of the Rights of Woman reverberated through British
culture for generations and whose egalitarian child-rearing theories
were followed by the likes of Aaron Burr. And how well-known today is
Lord Byron’s daughter, Ada, whose keen mathematical mind devised an
early computer programming language? Even less familiar are names such
as: Mary Robinson, who lived as wife, actress, novelist, poet, and
mistress to the Prince of Wales; Princess Charlotte, whose popularity
equaled, and wisdom apparently surpassed that of the Windsors’ Diana
when she went on the lam from the royal but loveless match made for her
by her father, the future George IV; best-selling poet Felicia Hemans;
and the cross-dressing Levantine exile, Lady Hester Stanhope.
Caroline Norton’s impassioned writings and political machinations
resulted in the passage of the first law enabling maternal custody of
young children. Anna Atkins was a marine biologist and photographic
pioneer. The era’s most important stage comedienne, Dora Jordan, was
also the mother of ten children sired by the Duke of Clarence, later
King William IV. These are just a few of the women who sought
self-knowledge and expression along improbable paths. While many are
notable for their achievements, others are exemplary for their vices,
desires, preferences, and dissent: gamblers, adulterers, “female
husbands,” and prostitutes among them. And there are the women whose
renown has never faded, including Jane Austen, Sarah Siddons, Mary Lamb,
and Emma Hamilton.
Exhibition Materials
Before Victoria: Extraordinary Women of the British Romantic Era
presents a wealth of materials from its subjects’ own hands: first
editions of Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus and Pride and
Prejudice, of course, but also of Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho,
a much more popular novel in its time than Austen’s work. There is much
of the writing of Wollstonecraft and examples of the moralizing books of
her conservative counterpart, the abolitionist Hannah More. There is
artwork by Caroline Watson, one of a very few female engravers, and by
the painters Angelica Kauffmann and Maria Cosway. Representing the
sciences are Anna Atkins’s Photographs of British Algae; polymath Mary
Somerville’s On Molecular and Microscopic Science; a letter from the
astronomer (and discoverer of eight comets) Caroline Herschel; and
examples of science and mathematical textbooks written especially for
girls. Also on display is the suicide note left behind by the poet Percy
Shelley’s first wife, Harriet Westbrook Shelley, just before drowning
herself in London’s Hyde Park; the serialized memoirs of courtesan (and
blackmailer) Harriette Wilson; the prophecies of millenarian Joanna
Southcott, who thought she was pregnant with a new messiah; and a letter
to George III from Margaret Nicholson, who attacked the King with a
dessert knife in 1786.
The exhibition also includes ample contextual materials from the
Romantic era, much of it in response to these extraordinary women. As
this was the golden age of British visual satire, a number of the
subjects are seen pilloried in prints by Thomas Rowlandson, the
Cruikshanks, and James Gillray (whose own publisher was a woman). There
is Harris’s List of Covent-Garden Ladies, a veritable Zagat’s guide to
the prostitutes of London; issues of the Crim. Con. Gazette,which
published libelous gossip on criminal conversation (i.e., adultery)
cases real and imagined; and a rare example of a private Act of
Parliament for a divorce—the only means of obtaining one. And from the
sympathetic Irish Economist William Thompson, there is Appeal of One
Half the Human Race, Women, Against the Pretension of the Other Half,
Men, to Retain Them in Political, and Thence in Civil and Domestic Slavery.
Co-curator Elizabeth Campbell Denlinger has written a vividly
illustrated companion volume to Before Victoria: Extraordinary Women of
the British Romantic Era. Published by Columbia University Press, Before
Victoria features a foreword by Lundall Gordon and is available in
paperback ($29.50) and hard cover ($39.50) at The Library Shop
(www.thelibraryshop.org) and in bookstores nationwide.
Tours
Public tours of Before Victoria are conducted Tuesday through Saturday
at 12:30 and 2:30 p.m. and Sunday at 3:30 p.m. (April 10 – May 22).
Groups of ten or more people must make reserved group tour arrangements;
call 212-930-0501. Group tour fees are $7 per person for adults and $5
for senior citizens; there is no charge for full-time students.
Before Victoria: Extraordinary Women of the British Romantic Era will be
on view from April 8 through July 30, 2005 in the D. Samuel and Jeane H.
Gottesman Exhibition Hall of The New York Public Library, Humanities and
Social Sciences Library, Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. Exhibition hours
are Tuesday and Wednesday, 11 a.m. to 7:30 p.m.; Thursday through
Saturday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Sunday, 1 p.m. to 6 p.m.; closed Mondays,
and national holidays. (The Library will be closed on Sundays after May
22, 2005, through the summer; and on the Saturdays, May 28 and July 2,
2005). Admission is free. For further information about exhibitions at
The New York Public Library, the public may call 212-869-8089 or visit
the Library’s website at www.nypl.org.
Before Victoria: Extraordinary Women of the British Romantic Era was
made possible in part by The Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation, Inc.,
and The New York Public Library’s Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of
Shelley and His Circle. Support for The New York Public Library’s
Exhibitions Program has been provided by Pinewood Foundation and by Sue
and Edgar Wachenheim III.
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