Patrick Bade
Historical Introduction 1848-1914, Part 1

Patrick Bade | Historical Introduction 1848-1914, Part 1 | 07.10.21

- Okay, yeah, match point again for Djokovic. Patrick, whenever you’re ready. I’m going to say good morning to you. Good morning to everybody. For those of you all who have been watching Wimbledon, very, very exciting, it’s almost over, and what I want to say is welcome. Nice to see you again, Patrick. I’m now back in New York, and it’s great to be here. Thank you, Lauren. And I’m going to hand over to you whenever you’re ready.

Visuals displayed throughout the presentation.

• Thank you, thank you, Wendy. Yeah, I’m sort of squeezed between tennis and football tonight, but I’m going to be covering a new period, introducing you to a new period, 1848 to 1914. That’s between the revolutions of 1848 and Karl Marx’s “Communist Manifesto” and the outbreak of the First World War, and that’s a 64-year period. 64 years is a lifetime, but anybody who’d lived through those 64 years would’ve seen incredible changes, more extreme and radical changes than the world had ever seen before in such a short period, ‘cause there is a sense that history is accelerating, and that speed has continued. I feel kind of breathless about the changes in our own lifetime.

But this is really down in this period to the Industrial Revolution, 'cause the Industrial Revolution had started at the end of the previous century, but the effects are really kicking in now. And this is a period where there are an enormous number of inventions and innovations that change people’s lives around the globe, and this is reflected in art as well. We have two works of art from either end of the period, which at the time each of these was cutting-edge of Western art. On the left you have Millet’s “Winnower,” which was at the Salon of 1848. And it was a work which delighted socialists and radicals and progressives. It was hated by reactionaries and conservatives.

And then on the right-hand side, we have an assemblage of Picasso from 1914. Well, the extraordinary and extreme difference between these two works shows, I think is symptomatic of the way the world changed in these years, and a very important change as far as the visual arts is concerned is the invention of photography. This is the world’s first photograph developed from a negative. It’s an interior at Lacock Abbey, and this dates from 1835 and Fox, William Fox Talbot, who on the British side of the channel, invented photography at exactly the same time that the Frenchman Louis Daguerre was inventing a different method of photography, the Daguerreotype.

This, I think, is the world’s first photograph of a street scene. It dates from 1839. It’s, for me, it’s a magical picture. So much of Paris still looks just like this. This is the Boulevard du Temple, although in fact this particular area has changed quite a bit, but it looks like it’s deserted. The only figures in the entire, what would’ve been a thriving bustling street are the man having his shoes cleaned and the shoe shiner. And the only reason they’re there, of course, is because they were more or less motionless apart from, you know, the cleaning of the shoe for a couple of minutes.

The exposure time was necessary so long that everybody else has disappeared from the scene. So we can see the world in a different way once we get to the 1840s and '50s and photographs become common. And one very fascinating thing is that we can now know what the world’s most beautiful woman looked like, where earlier famous beauties, Cleopatra, Helen of Troy, or, you know, royal mistresses or whatever, even if we have portraits, painted portraits, in a way we have to take it on trust. This woman, she’s the Countess of Castiglione. She was universally acclaimed as the most beautiful woman alive.

Everybody was absolutely bowled over by her beauty. And she was sent by the very wily prime minister of Piedmont, Cavour, she was sent as his secret weapon to Paris to seduce the emperor, Louis-Napoleon, and lure him into alliance with Piedmont, and it worked. And you know, the unification of Italy actually owes quite a lot to the actions of this woman. Here are the two women who were rivals for the title of the most beautiful woman in the world in 1900. This the Italian singer Lina Cavalieri and the French dancer Cleo de Merode. Each was, Cleo de Merode, each was declared the world’s most beautiful woman.

In fact, there’s a biographical movie about Lina Cavalieri, where she was played by Sophia Loren, and the title of the movie was “The Most Beautiful Woman in the World.” Now, I don’t want to seem too sexist, so I’m going to show you some beautiful men, too. This guy, I don’t know who he was, but he was one of the conspiracists involved in the assassination of President Lincoln, and this shows him after his imprisonment. You know, he looks a bit like a modern movie star or rockstar. And these are two men who in the middle of the 19th century were famous for their physical beauty.

On the left, we’ve got the young Johannes Brahms, and on the right, the German artist Anselm Feuerbach. So tell me, ladies, would you go out on a date with either of these on a Friday night? Anyway, so what photography, as I said, it gives us a new view of the world. But in some ways, of course, it’s a limited and distorted view in that we look back on the 19th century, we see it either in black and white or in sepia, so we often forget what a brightly coloured world the 19th, so the mid to late 19th century was, and part of that was due to a chance invention in the late 1850s by this man.

He’s called William Henry Perkin, and he was experimenting with waste products of the coal industry, and suddenly in a test tube, he created this wonderful intense colour that he called mauve. And this was the very first chemical or aniline colorfast dye. And it’s said within two years, by the end of the 1850s, all of fashionable London and Paris had gone mauve. There you see a mauve dress on the right-hand side. It’s a very extraordinary story, and I recommend to you, it’s actually on the list that Judy will have sent you, a book called “Mauve.”

It came out in 2000 by Simon Garfield, and he talks about this invention and the consequences of this invention. It had all sorts of knock-on effects that were important for colour photography, that were important for the perfume industry and various chemical industries. And there’s even a direct connection between this invention in 1857 of the first aniline dye and the poisonous gas Zyklon B that was used in the Holocaust. So it’s quite a short book. It’s very readable, very fascinating. I do recommend it to you. So photography also really changed the way we view warfare. For most people, warfare until the middle of the 19th century, it was something glorious. It was something exciting. It was something of course that was, happened somewhere else, and they didn’t really know what it was like.

So I think it’s no coincidence that the first two major wars recorded by photography, the American Civil War and the Crimean War, have such a bad reputation for squalor, incompetence, misery. It’s because we actually know to some extent what wars look like. The man here you see at the top is Roger Fenton. He was a photographer who went off to the Crimean War, and he took this very famous photograph of the Valley of Death.

Now, this may not mean much to, I think probably any Brits my age and older will know about this. This was actually a huge British military cock up, where a whole brigade of calvarymen were ordered into a completely suicidal charge into a valley that was covered by Russian guns from either side, and they were just absolutely slaughtered. And somehow this was changed, turned into some great patriotic, epic story. And of course there’s a very famous, well, as I said, for people of my age and older, but the poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade” by Lord Tennyson, which as a child, at least I knew the first few verses, “Half a league, half a league, half a league onward, all in the Valley of Death rode the 600.”

And this is the American Civil War. This is the battlefield of Gettysburg the day after with the bodies as yet uncollected. And on the bottom right is what the burning of Atlanta actually looked like, 'cause we all know it from its recreation in “Gone with the Wind.” And so photography changes everything. And by the end of the period that I’m talking about, by the 1890s and the first decade of the 20th century, we have moving pictures. So for instance, this is a still at the bottom here from the funeral of Queen Victoria.

Actually, we have plenty of short bits of film of Victoria herself riding about in her carriage. My granny, my much-loved granny, told me she remembered this day. I don’t suppose, I don’t think she was living in the north of England, so it’s highly unlikely that she actually saw the funeral or even the film of it, but she could still remember to the day that she died the hat, that’s typical of my granny, she could remember the hat that she wore on the day of Queen Victoria’s funeral.

Now, you can say that in between 1825 and 1914, the world shrank, and that is the result of new methods of transport. And it’s really down to steam, steam trains and steam ships. So the story of the very first rail, public railway was opened in England, Stockton Darlington in 1825, and by the middle of the century, and certainly in the second half of the century, every major city in the Western world was connected by railways. And I can only really compare this to the internet revolution in our own times in the way that it, you know, interconnected the world and shrank the world. And there are so many consequences of the construction of the railway system, and it was like internet.

It was absolutely, you know, an explosion of wealth, and so many things followed on from it, growth of cities, development of grand hotels, all sorts of things. It’s really a major change of culture. You see a very early steam train on the right-hand side that I presume didn’t go very fast because you can see that the driver is wearing a top hat, and I don’t think that would’ve lasted long at any speed. So this was an incredible effort all over the world. The construction of the railway system involved, you know, the building of huge railway stations, which are often described as the cathedrals of the 19th century.

I always enjoy my Eurostar journeys going to, between two of these great cathedrals, the St Pancras station, which really does look like a cathedral, and the Gare du Nord, which looks more like a classical temple. So this railway travel, initially quite uncomfortable, but soon much more comfortable, carriages were developed. The one on the right-hand side I think was the state carriage for the emperor of Brazil. When Sarah Bernhardt travelled many times across America, backwards and forwards, she travelled in a similarly palatial carriage.

And when I get on to impressionism, and I know I’ve done it briefly last year, but I will come back to it and do it in more detail later this year, I will be telling you how impressionism as an art movement depends hugely on the Paris region railway system. You know, I always think of impressionists, impressionism as being an away-days art. You have your little box of paints in collapsible metal tubes. I’ve already talked to you about that. That was an invention of the 1840s, and you go off from the Gare Saint-Lazare or Gare de l'Est or wherever, and you go to someplace outside of Paris for the day, and you paint your picture, and you come back with it in the evening.

And of course, railway’s very much celebrated by all the impressionist painters, especially Monet, top left here. And leisure travel, that this is a new thing. Thomas Cooks, sadly bankrupt or ceased to trade quite recently, but Thomas Cooks was, you could do trips up the Nile from in the second half of the 19th century in considerable comfort. So travel was no longer this thing for intrepid adventurers. It was something that was within the reach of middle and upper class people. And ocean liners, the first ironclad giant ocean liner was the Great Eastern. You can see it’s construction here. That’s 1857. It was designed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, one of the most famous engineers of the 19th century.

I love these photographs, and it was very interesting, in a photograph like this, you can see the engineers. Of course, they’re educated people, therefore they’re middle class people, so they’re wearing top hats, and the workers are wearing caps. So you never went outside in 19th century without something on your head, and whatever you had on your head identified what class you came from. Bottom right is an ocean liner you don’t want to be on. This shows the maiden and final voyage of the Titanic in 1912. Other methods of transport, bicycles.

This is a military parade, actually, in Edinburgh, bottom right. Those look rather alarmingly wobbly and insecure, sort of penny-farthing bicycles, and top left, ladies wearing these bloomers riding bicycles. Bicycles were, of course, travel altogether did break down many barriers, and travelling in railway carriages, you were thrown together with perfect strangers. So the whole new, you know, rule books about how people interacted really had to be rewritten. And of course wearing, for a woman to ride a bicycle, she, well, you can’t ride a bicycle wearing a crinoline.

You’ve got to wear some kind of divided costume, and so that was incredibly exciting for male voyeurs in the 19th century. Women bicyclists were really a big turn-on, 'cause you had to acknowledge that women had legs and bottoms. And too, again, towards the end of the period, right at the end of the 19th century and into the first decade of the 20th century, you’ve got the internal combustion engine, the motorcar.

This is King Edward VII, who was a big enthusiast of motorcars. And this, ooh, this is a daring, shocking, amazing photograph, a woman at the wheel of a car. Of course, this would’ve only been for a tiny, tiny elite, even in the interwar period. Of course, it was only, would only have been middle and upper class women who ever had a chance to drive a car. But it did, again, bring about a kind of social revolution. Edward VII refused to let his wife, Queen Alexandra, have a car because obviously a car gave a woman a measure of independence.

And this is that, if you are a fashionable woman, of course you were very worried at this time. You didn’t want to get a suntan. You didn’t want to get freckles. You want to protect your complexion. So if you went out in a car, you were going to wear a lot of protective gear. Two of man’s longest-standing ambitions were fulfilled in this period, flying and travelling underwater. There had been, of course, flying, there had been forms of both going back to the 18th century, balloons invented by Montgolfier in the late 18th century.

But mechanised flight really only happens in the first decade of the 20th century, 1903, the Wright Brothers. Bottom image here is of Louis Bleriot, intrepid French aviator, who watched by crowds of amazed spectators crossed the channel. And as yes, engineers, you could say the eight, the 19th century is the heroic age of the engineer. Here is perhaps the most famous, well, certainly the most famous British engineer. This is Isambard Kingdom Brunel, who designed bridges, railway stations, and he’s here with the anchor chain of the Great Eastern, a wonderfully sort of swaggering figure with his cigar.

On the right-hand side, we have the engineers who are working on the Great Exhibition in 1851, the Crystal Palace, and these are the, for the tanks, for the heating of the Great Exhibition in 1851. And I can’t leave the French out of this. Perhaps the most famous engineer of the 19th century is Ferdinand de Lesseps, and he designed and supervised the cutting of the Suez Canal, which took a decade and was completed in 1869. So this was a great French engineering achievement.

But another very wily politician, Disraeli, managed to get ahead of the French and raise the finance, of course, from the Rothschilds, to buy the, to the great outrage of the French. It was the British who actually bought the control of the Suez Canal, which was of vital, vital military importance. That was the lifeline between Britain and its most important colonies in the Indian subcontinent. And of course it was, played a very, very vital role in both world wars. And here you can see the official opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. And certainly when, in the middle of the 20th century, when Victorian and historicist architecture was rather out of fashion, that’s a subject I’m going to be talking about next time, it was engineers’ structures that were the buildings that were most admired from the 19th century.

And this is the Forth Bridge on the left-hand side and the Eiffel Tower in mid-construction at the end of 1888. It was actually opened in April 1889, only intended to be a temporary structure. It’s still there, I can tell you that. I saw it on Friday in the distance, and it looms over Paris. And I think it’s still a very elegant and a very beautiful structure. Medicine, now, this is what, really one of the areas where we see the greatest transformation and improvement. If you were going to have an operation before the middle of the 19th century, you expected to die. Most people did die because of the incredibly filthy and insanitary conditions of hospitals and operating theatres. It’s only the middle of the 19th century that people really understood the connection between hygiene and health.

Again, both French and the British contributed to this, Dr. Lister in Britain and Louis Pasteur in France. So, oh yeah, this is what, ooh, horrible to even think about, an amputation. And that’s pretty well all that they could do for you. You know, if you had a gangrenous limb or something, what they would do is to stuff a handkerchief in your mouth to stifle the screens. If you were lucky, they might give you a double brandy, and then they’d tie you down. And there’s a tourniquet you can see bottom right to stop the blood flow, and then they just have to hack off the limbs and snap the bones as quickly as possible and hope you didn’t die of infection afterwards. So you’ve got anaesthesia, and you’ve got antisepsis, these two things that were introduced in the middle of 19th century.

Oh, this is what a, this is a mock-up of what a pre-mid-19th century operation looked like. But this is what it looked like by the later part of the century with anaesthesia, and doctors had finally been persuaded to wash their hands. It was actually an Austrian doctor who noted quite early in the 19th century that the major cause of death of women in childbirth was infections caused by this puerperal fever that was actually because, passed on in hospitals because doctors didn’t wash their hands in between delivering children. So they just, it was the doctors who were infecting the women. Of course, the medical profession reacted to this discovery with outrage, seen like a smear on the honour of doctors. And it actually took a whole generation or more before the practise was changed and women stopped dying in this way.

The woman who is usually associated with the transformation of British hospitals is Florence Nightingale. It was actually her observations of what was going on in the hospitals in the Crimean War. I said the Crimean War has this reputation for incredible squalor and that the hospitals were very squalid, and Florence Nightingale noticed to her consternation that she was killing off more people than she was saving. So it was really when she came back from this experience that she completely reorganised British hospitals to something like what they are today. One of the most influential scientists and thinkers of the 19th century was Charles Darwin, and his “Origin of the Species” came out in 1857.

Again, it’s a book where it’s hard to overrate its cultural importance. No fault of Charles Darwin, but it’s a book which was exploited and abused. This so-called scientific racism of the 19th century that was particularly used, of course, against the Jews by the Nazis was a perversion of Darwin’s ideas about evolution. And many other medical great advances, advances in the treatment of mental illness. Of course, we all know about Freud, but Freud was building on the achievements of others, like Charcot in Paris. And towards the end of this period, we have the great innovation of X-ray, which can…

One of the greatest, I suppose the two great scourges of the 19th century as far as illness was concerned, well, there were many epidemics, actually, of course, cholera, typhoid. But the two great illnesses that really killed off enormous numbers of people were tuberculosis and syphilis. Syphilis had been introduced, well, had been picked up in America by Columbus’s sailors and brought back to Europe. They were mostly, they had leave in Naples, and syphilis swept through Naples. When French invaded Italy, they took Naples. Of course they raped and pillaged, the usual things that soldiers did.

The entire French army was infected with syphilis, and they spread around the rest of Europe, and that’s why that syphilis was, in 16th century, was often called the French disease. And it’s a very fascinating illness that, and like as we’ve seen with COVID, it’s an illness that evolved, and it went through more and/or less virulent phases. It seems to have been very, very virulent in the 19th century. And enormous numbers of very important creative people, Guy de Maupassant, Baudelaire, who else, Gauguin, Delius, Schumann, and Schubert died of syphilis. It really did cut swathe through the creative life of the 19th century.

This poster on the right-hand side by the Catalan artist Ramon Casas, it offers you a complete radical and absolutely total cure of syphilis. It’s an absolute lie because there wasn’t one until the magic bullet of Doctor, oh, Trudy talks about him. Somebody will tell me in the, the great Jewish doctor who actually saved huge numbers of lives by, and was actually attacked for it by the Catholic church, ‘cause they thought that syphilis was the punishment of God for immoral behaviour. So the 19th century, I think if we went back, we’d find it a very smelly century. As I said, it was in the middle of the century that people, that Christian, the Christian world finally just began to understand the connection between health and cleanliness.

Christians were the dirtiest people on earth up until the 19th century. You know, every other major religion, Judaism, of course, Islam, Hinduism, hygiene is really an integral part of the religion. That was the opposite in a way with Christians. The idea that godliness is next to cleanliness was a new one in the 19th century, and throughout the Middle Ages and beyond, to be clean was to be suspected of being immoral. And so definitely, you know, in the Middle Ages, the dirtier and the smellier you were, the more pious you were thought to be. But so people finally recognise, these huge cities, Paris and London, you got these enormous accumulations of population. You’ve got these cholera and typhoid epidemics, that something needed to be done about sewage.

You know, when you’ve got a city of several million people as you had in Paris and London, that’s a hell of a lot of merde. And so the part of the transformation of Paris by Baron Haussmann in the 1850s and '60s was the construction of the Paris sewers considered to be one of the, again, one of the engineering wonders of the age. Here, actually you can do it now, you could still do it. I’ve never done it. I’m not terribly tempted. But you can actually do a tour of the Paris sewers.

And here are some very elegant ladies in their crinolines who are touring the sewers of Paris. And here are the sewers of London. Again, a great engineering feat by an engineer called Bazalgette. And this shows the opening of the sewers by the then Prince of Wales, future Edward VII. Notice again, all the gentlemen wearing their top hats, so a big change. Here’s disposal of sewage early 19th century and the opening of public toilets in Victorian period. Victorians, you know, they often have a very bad reputation. You know, people tend to use it as a term of abuse. “Oh, that’s so Victorian.”

But actually, I think the Victorians were amazing, and they were really do-gooders, and they wanted to make the world a better place and improve it. This is Birmingham, and Birmingham was the world’s first great industrial renovation. And all descriptions of Birmingham in the first half of the 19th century, in fact, right up to the late part of the century, describe it with absolute horror in it was just an ant-heap of filth and squalor and disease and pollution. It was completely disgusting place. And it was only when, so Joseph Chamberlain became mayor of Birmingham that he undertook a great programme of public works to transform the city into a more civilised place, another very important innovation.

Communications, so this is the rotary press, which was invented, it was patented in the 1840s, and by the 1860s, it had spread around the rest of the Western world. So now you can have mass circulation newspapers, and you can really influence public opinion. So this is, again, a predecessor, I suppose, of the internet, the way the internet has in that you can manipulate public opinion. The most famous story is the William Randolph Hearst telegram to one of his journalist illustrators in Havana just leading up to the US-Spanish War when he messaged this illustrator and said, “You provide the images, I’ll provide the war.”

Newspapers, and I’m going to actually talk quite a lot about the, I won’t actually talk now much about these, 'cause I’m going to do a talk shortly where I’m going to really concentrate on images of people reading in the late 19th century. But what I’ll just point out here is on the left-hand side, this is a Monet. And you can see his folded copy of “Le Figaro” on the breakfast table. He’s been out painting early. The newspaper is untouched. It’s waiting for the master to come and have his breakfast, and he will read the newspaper. And here on the right-hand side, the Caillebotte, where you can see the woman is daydreaming out the window while her husband reads a newspaper.

Telephones, they were invented, they were patented, the telephone, by Alexander Graham Bell in the 1870s. And what, 'cause initially, telephone exchanges were completely run by, that was a young woman who would have to make the connection. The image top left is a photograph of a historic occasion. It’s around 1890, and it’s, the photograph records the first-ever telephone conversation between Chicago and New York. And I think I can tell you, what would’ve been, it would’ve been a totally banal conversation. “This is Fred here.” “This is John here.” “How are you? What’s the weather like in Chicago?” Everybody’s standing around looking fascinated and amazing. And I’m quite sure was a very boring conversation that took place.

Anyway, those of you who know me well know my total weird and hate relationship really with telephones. I absolutely loath them. And I so sympathised with Degas, who somebody said to him, “Why don’t you get one of these wonderful new inventions? It’s a telephone.” And Degas said, “Well, what’s that?” And he said, “Well, it means if you want to, you can talk to somebody on the other side of Paris. He said, "That’s amazing. How does it work?” And the person said, “Well, it’s very simple. You know, a bell rings.” And then Degas said, “Yes, and then what happens?” And they said, “Well, you pick up the phone.” And he said, “Oh, no, I’d be reduced to being a servant.” I feel these days we’re not just servants, we’re slaves of our phones.

This is Marconi, who, again, another very, very important development in communications. Marconi invents the radio right at the end of the 1890s. And this is an invention which is much closer to my heart. This is the photograph. Thomas Edison was the first person to, again, a long-cherished dream. He records, he’s able to record the human voice. He patents the invention in the 1870s, but rather sadly got distracted by the development of electric lighting, and I’ll come to in a minute. So he didn’t really come back to it till the late 1890s. So we have a few recordings even going back to the end of the 1880s, but it’s only really at the beginning of the 20th century that we can hear the great singers.

We’ve got a, this is a self-portrait caricature of Enrico Caruso, the world’s greatest tenor in the early 1900s, and he had his first success, his first great success, at La Scala in the season of 1901 to '02 singing in “L'Elisir d'Amore.” And there was a new company, recording company set up called, which called itself, initially it was Gramophone and Typewriter. It later called itself His Master’s Voice. And the man, their agent, a man called Fred Gaisberg, was sent to Milan to investigate the possibility of recording Italian singers.

So the whole of Milan was absolutely ecstatic about this new tenor, Enrico Caruso, and Gaisberg said to him, “How much would you charge to record 10 arias for HMV?” And he said, “I want a hundred guineas.” So Gaisberg sent a telegram to London, and they said, “Outrageous, no way. Don’t pay him.” But he went ahead, and he recorded him actually in a hotel room in the Grand Hotel in Milan, which you see what’s on left, where in fact, Verdi had just died in another room in that hotel just a few months earlier. So these 10 recordings came out, and they caused an extraordinary sensation.

They were the very, very first serious recordings of a great singer that were commercially successful. And they established really the classical recording industry. Other singers like Melba and Patti and so on, after the success of Caruso, they all queued up to be recorded. So I’m going to play you a little bit of one of these recordings made in a hotel room in 1902. And this is, again, the aria “Una Furtiva Lagrima” from “L'Elisir d'Amore.” This is Caruso in 1902. So just think, you’re hearing somebody singing 119 years ago.

♪ Music plays ♪

So that’s voice actually of, he died in 1921. So he died over 100 years ago. So the radio just, of course, so many of these inventions unfortunately, really came into their own with the First World War. But the possibilities of radio were sensationally demonstrated by the arrest of the notorious wife murderer, Dr. Crippen. He apparently murdered his wife, buried her underneath the cellar in his house in North London, and he scarpered to America with his mistress dressed as a boy.

So while he was on the ship on the way to America, the body was described, discovered, and the captain of the ship noticed something very fishy about Dr. Crippen and that his son, or the young boy, was actually a woman in disguise. And he, by radio, he alerted Scotland Yard to the fact that Dr. Crippen was on the ship. So the detectives of Scotland Yard, they took a faster ship, and they got to New York before Dr. Crippen, and so they arrested him. And this is the moment where he’s being escorted by police officers off the ship. And there is the actual radio message.

Electricity was the big buzzword, of course, in 1900. This is an early electrical generating, electricity generating complex. You can see that the original light bulbs actually had to be hand blown, and electric light, again, is something that transforms everything very, very quickly. It was a problem in that, you know, an electric bulb hanging from the ceiling is a very harsh, very unflattering light, and it is very unaesthetic. So that was a very, very big challenge to designers in the Art Nouveau period. So we’ve got a Galle lamp here and Tiffany lamps on the right-hand side.

So this sudden spread of electrical lighting goes hand in hand, of course, with the Art Nouveau style. This is from a book published in 1900 with all sorts of prophesizing, all sorts of outrageous, amazing, impossible things that will be, that you can do in the future with the help of electricity. You could sit in a train or a bus and have your own personalised music or entertainment. How extraordinary is that? You can use electricity to curl your hair, to shave, all sorts of things they thought might be possible in the future. So the real triumph of electricity was the Paris World Fair of 1900.

And this is the Palace of Electricity, which was, you know, lit up with thousands and thousands of light bulbs and was considered to be absolutely amazing. And one of the biggest stars in Paris, and of that, of the 1900 exhibition was the American dancer, Loie Fuller. She was known as the Electric Fairy. She had a team of electricians. There is film of her. If you go on YouTube, or you can find it. She was a very untalented dancer, really, but she just had this brilliant idea of, she was short with short limbs.

She extended her arms with rods, and she draped herself in a kind of silk tent, and she had these different coloured lights shone on her. And she rolled around waving her arms, creating these lovely kind of Art Nouveau curved forms. So she really hit the spot, 'cause she combined two very current things in 1900, the Art Nouveau style and electricity. She realised that her act was a bit gimmicky, that she needed to update it. And she also resented having to pay for a team of electricians.

So she went to the great scientist Marie Curie and asked her if Marie Curie could make her permanently radioactive and that she would glow in the dark without the need of a team of electricians. And Marie Curie had to advise her rather strongly against this on health grounds. Now the dark side of progress, and that is of course military inventions, the machine gun. French invented a new effective machine gun at the end of the 1860s, but it’s so top secret, and they were so worried about other people getting the idea that it was actually of no use to them in the Franco-Russian War, because nobody actually knew how to use them.

Of course, it’s the Germans who really get ahead, corrupts with the arms industry. And this period is the period of the maximum growth and extent of the European empire, particularly Africa. By the First World War, there was hardly any of Africa that was not owned or exploited by Europeans, the British and the French, of course, in bitter rivalry with one another, the French wanting to make Africa green, that’s the French colour, from the the West coast to the East coast, and the British wanting to make it red from Cairo to Cape Town, which they succeeded in doing very, very briefly, at the end of First World War when they took the German colony of Tanganyika.

For a short time, you could actually travel from Cape Town to Cairo on red. Oh, here you see a rather better image of it. And it’s a great period of immigration, particularly in the middle of the century, in the so-called Hungry Forties. There were economic problems, famines in Europe, and enormous numbers of, I bet many people listening to this lecture today are descended from people who immigrated to Australia, to Canada, to United States, to South Africa. These were brave people. This shows, it’s a Victorian painting, rather sentimental painting, of a man who’s going off to a new life on the other side of the world. He knows he’s never going to see his family. No WhatsApp, no Skyping, that’s it. He’ll never see them again, just the occasional letter that will take months to get back.

And this is the moment that he turns around to look at the house of his family, where he was born for the very last time. Well, I think, you know, cause the great, these people were brave. You know, immigrants are highly motivated people. I feel very, very strongly about this and very despairing about this current horrible resentment or prejudice against immigration on both sides of the Atlantic. It’s terrible, I think, and it was one of the things, of course, that motivated Brexit. Immigration is what made America great. It’s the energy of these people coming and creating a new life for themselves. Immigration is what made Paris great, a cultural capital of the world. It’s what made London great. We’ve got images here of immigration.

This is a rather disconcerted-looking couple on the way to Australia by Ford Madox Brown. And you’ve got this mass immigration to America in the late 19th century. You can see Orthodox Jews in the hold of this picture at bottom right. And empire, now empire, there’s, again, a rather sinister movement, I think, in Britain at the moment to try and rewrite history and try to whitewash the British Empire. I want to say very, very clearly, the British Empire was never a benign exercise. In fact, no empire is a benign exercise. Empires are about subjugation, conquest, and exploitation.

I’ve got this rather embarrassing picture of Queen Victoria handing a Bible to some grateful Native. But I think the advertisement on the left is probably a bit more truthful. What the empire was about, going to these countries, taking their raw materials, using them to manufacturing things and to sell back to the people. And so, and of course empire brought, it was really, that’s what the First World War was about. It was about imperial rivalries. It could very easily have been between Britain and France. In 1898, a French military explorer called Marchand made this epic journey all way across Africa from the west in search of the source of the Nile that he wanted to claim for the French Empire.

And he, you know, he went through deserts and jungles and swamps and so on. It’s this incredible journey, you know, carrying all this stuff, boats and stuff with them. And when they got there, they found that unfortunately the British, who’d already established themselves in Egypt, had just quietly sailed down the Nile, and they got there first, and they raised the Union Jack. And there was a moment where it was touch and go, whether it would be war between France and England. It’s one of those what-if situations. I mean, if France and England had fought in 1898, the whole, well, the alliances as they turned out in the First World War would’ve been completely different. There’s no way that France and England would’ve been fighting together against Germany and Austria.

And just to, we’re running out of time, so I’m here reminding you of the crimes of the British Empire. Brits tend to be very smug. They think they’re better than other people and especially, you know, they think they’re much superior to the Germans and cite the horrors of the Nazi period. Yes, it’s true, the British have never actually committed a crime as huge as the Nazi crimes, Holocaust and so on, in a very short period of time. That was just 12 years. But you know, over 300 years, cumulatively, I think the British Empire, whew.

This is the so-called Indian Mutiny of 1857 when they managed to, the East India Company running India, really just in a purely commercial way just to exploit the subcontinent, managed to provoke both Hindus and Muslims into revolt. And then there is, of course, the Irish potato famine. Shameful, terrible, I mean, I’m so incredibly painfully ashamed of the British attitude towards Ireland that once again is showing itself as I speak, the contempt for the Irish. This terrible famine that killed a million people and drove millions more, which completely scarred Ireland, was absolutely unnecessary. It was just British callousness and greed. And as far as genocides are concerned, probably the only genocide that was totally, totally effective in that there was nobody left at the end to protest was the systematic slaughter of the Natives of Tasmania.

You know, there were posters up offering people a reward for Natives, dead or alive. And it’s of course it’s a relatively small-scale genocide. We’re talking thousands here, not millions. But here is a photograph of some of the last Tasmanians. Awesome, right? Of course, as I said, by the end of the 19th century, there were no Tasmanians left. They were all gone. And British India that, ooh, I better not carry on about this. I think I better stop here, and we will see if there are any, I can see there are some questions, so I’ll go into that.

Q&A and Comments

“Recommend 'Napoleon’s Buttons,’ a book re organic chemistry and the history of Western Civilization including the mauve explosion.” Thank you very much. That does sound an interesting book.

“I guess women did not remove their armpit hair in this period.” I suppose not. You know, the thing is, as I mentioned actually in the Corby lecture, ‘cause the whole question of body hair for women was a kind of a secret. I mean, most men didn’t even know about it. I mean, after all, probably many bourgeois men and women in the 19th century, they never saw each other with their, you know, if they made love, they wouldn’t have been naked, and it would’ve been in the dark. On the other hand, if you read erotic literature, the pornographic literature of the 19th century, it’s actually very interesting. There is actually a lot about women’s body hair in the pornographic literature of the period.

Oh, thank you, yes, yes. You’re quite right, 'cause it’s in Norman Lebrecht’s book. Ignaz Semmelweis, who was Hungarian. Well, he was Austrian if he was Hungarian, 'cause at that period, you were Austrian if you were Hungarian.

“Washing hands seemed such a concept.” Yes, to us, to us, but not then.

This is Denise, she’s saying, “I was in a Red Cross field unit in Rhodesia during the war. All us farmers’ wives were, we had to be. And it was always a dread that I might find myself watching or having to perform some sort of gruesome surgery to save someone.” Yes, dreadful experiences.

Paul Ehrlich, thank you so much. Paul Ehrlich for who is the invention. There was a film about it actually in Hollywood with Edward G. Robinson, who invented the magic bullet, which was the first effective cure for syphilis a generation before penicillin. Somebody else helping out with Paul Ehrlich. Thank you so much.

Somebody’s saying, “There is no evidence that Schumann had or died of syphilis.” Well, I think you’ll find there’s quite a lot of debate about it. I think there is quite a lot of medical clues, but I’m not going to put my head on the black, on the block on that one. People get very upset about it. Did Keats die of syphilis or did he, well, actually probably what Keats died of was the mercury poisoning for, that he took for his syphilis. Did Goya have syphilis? Did Beethoven have syphilis? People get very het up about it. Yeah,

Q: “Was cleanliness considered immoral?” A: Yes, I tell you, you know, when the Savoy Hotel in London was opened in 1880, it was the first hotel in London which had en suite washing facilities, and this was a scandal at the time. In the newspapers, they said, “Why? What’s going on in this hotel? There must be immoral behaviour going on in this hotel. Why would they need, why would people staying in this hotel need to wash themselves so much,” yes.

Can I comment on the period, the development? I could give, I could talk for hours on the development of sound during this period. Would love to do so maybe in a whole talk on a, you know, it’s one of my complete obsessions is historic recordings.

Isn’t that interesting that somebody’s saying here, this is Dennis Glover saying that Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln were born within hours of one another. The one I find really macabre, actually, is that Charlie Chapman and Hitler were born in the same week. And you think, well what does that say about star signs?

Yes, Alexander Fleming, of course, later as penicillin superseded Dr. Erlich. So that became the standard treatment for syphilis, but that was not till the period of the Second World War.

So your, this is Bev Price, “Your description of the first telephone conversation reminds me of witnessing first televisions in South Africa in the 1970s. We had the television on with only the National Broadcasting logo, the colour test signal shown and watched until the day programmes would be presented. Yes, these things were so amazing to start with.”

And more about Paul, Paul Erlich, “When I was a medical student,” this is Ralph Friedman, “a instructor euphemistically called it luetic disease. Separately present, Garfield died of sepsis in 1881 after being shot by assassin, described well by Candice Millard. A surgeon treated him on the stage platform without washing his hands,” yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

The book on Portugal, Neill Lochery, somebody’s enjoying. Yeah, is it Caruso? That’s so beautiful. Do you know that recording, though, funny enough, he recorded that aria I think three or four times, and that’s the first time he recorded it, and I only played you the first verse, because he makes the most amazing mistake in the second verse. He comes in completely wrong, and you just think, “Oh, my goodness,” that, you know, why didn’t they re-do it, another take of that? But of course, it is wonderful.

The beautiful tenor aria is “Una Furtiva Lagrima” from the “L'Elisir d'Amore.” You know, that opera was totally forgotten, and it was just because they had a failure, an opera that had to be, by Mascagni, that had to be cancelled and replaced at the last minute, and Caruso and Toscanini said, “Well, let’s try out "L'Elisir d'Amore”, which was, as I said, a completely forgotten opera, and it became, it was a sensational success, and of course it’s become standard repertoire. And that particular aria is a favourite aria of many, many tenors. Yeah, it’s very beautiful. That early recording of Caruso, the voice is much lighter. You know, later his voice, it’s always beautiful, but it became rather heavy and baritonal later on.

Somebody’s recommending Erik Larson’s book “Thunderstruck.” It tells the story of Crippen. Yeah, I love these kind of books that connect, you know, science and social history.

“First automobile, Siegfried Marcus in Vienna in 1864.” “I heard it in ‘Der Rosenkavalier.’” No, no, I don’t think you could’ve heard it in “Der Rosenkavalier.”

“Edison’s workshop, so to speak, is available to tour in Fort Myers, Florida. Fascinating place,” right?

“First dramatic use of electricity.” Oh, I’m not sure I would agree with you about that. You know, there are earlier, quite dramatic uses of electricity. Savoy Theatre was the first theatre in London. That’s a decade earlier to that that used electricity. Right.

Somebody’s saying, “You’re very motivated to immigrate no matter how much you love your country.” Exactly, I mean, immigrants usually, I mean, obviously there are except exceptions, but, you know, immigration, I see it as a hugely positive thing, especially, of course, in Europe where we have ageing populations. when in, you know, 10, 15 years’ time, I want lots of young people around to look after me and work hard and pay taxes to fund my my dotage. So I’m all in favour of immigration, thank you.

Susan Weinberg agreeing with me about empires and Indigenous peoples in Nova Scotia. Yeah, there were other examples, and of course in California, actually. Tasmania isn’t the only place that conducted a totally effective genocide because there are no Native Californians that survived. Well, one I think survived into the 20th century.

You’re saying, oh, god, this business of Constance who’s saying, “Natives, saying Natives.” Well, I don’t, I’m not going to get into that. It’s too complicated, and I’d go around in circles. Well, yeah, I don’t just say that Australians are horrible. Everybody’s horrible. Look, there is, as I said, that’s the nature of empires. Look at the Belgians. Look at the French. I mean, the Portuguese, the Spanish, they’ve all, Dutch, always think of Dutch as most civilised people on Earth, but they did absolute horrors in their empire as well.

Right, thank you, I think I probably better stop.

“Ibsen’s ‘Ghosts’ dramatises the effects of syphilis.” Of course, yes, that’s very important.

Suffrage, yeah, I’m sorry you missed the suffrage, ‘cause that was coming. I mean, I actually only got about, this lecture is far too long. It’s far too much in it. There is a whole, I had a whole section actually on Jewish assimilation, and maybe we can fit in. I could easily get another hour on what’s left of this lecture, and I’d love to talk about women’s suffrage and so on, but we’ll see.

I think I better probably finish, 'cause this could go on forever. Right, so thank you all very, very much, and I’ll see you or you will see me again on Wednesday for 19th century architecture.

So is there any, I think Wendy’s probably not there, so I think that’s it, bye-bye, everybody.