some guy, thanks for the notes. My copy of volume 1 just arrived yesterday, as it so happens. I’m looking forward to reading it, and I’m glad to hear about what might be left out. Martin, I haven’t seen Kunzle’s history, although I’m vaguely aware of it. I’m getting more into this early stuff and am happy to hear about good things I should read.

yes, this is my academic area

There weren’t many, but there were BOTH comic books and comic strips printed in America before the Civil War. Frank Bellew’s first work for Harper’s (a continuing series of comic strips about the hapless Mr. Slim, published back of the book) was done at the same time he was socializing with Emerson and Thoreau, though Bellew is now primarily known as a political cartoonist.

anyway, Murrell’s tastes are interesting, with lots of Wales and not enough Opper in volume II, and an overemphasis on the overtly political while giving short shrift to the social comics of the 1880s and 90s. alas.

No doubt the search engines that aggregate the best results from lots of different price search engines are on the way, if not already here for some industries.

It’s the nature of fashion that it mixes high and low brow, but the process wouldn’t work unless there were a perceived difference big enough to provide all the energy that drives the whole comedy. Something like the aesthetic “movement” starts with a small privileged coterie striking out in some direction defined mostly by it being in the opposite direction from the common herd. But, of course everyone wants to be unlike the common herd, so soon everyone’s carrying sunflowers (if 0nly notionally and ludicrously to make G&S’s point, and not at all in real life) and it’s no longer hip to be an aesthete. In fact, my use of “hip” in this sense means that I’m so last generation. And I’m sure someone will point out that the young people have moved past such expressions as “so last year”, precisely because even old poops like me are using it now.

So, yes, the content changes, what is considered high fashion today will soon be middle-brow sophisticated, and then even the middle-brows will get hip that this particular thing is so last year that only the clueless drone low brows are still into it. Of course, the day after that happens, all the cool kids will adapt that particular thing as the new, retro, standard of cool, and the process starts all over again. It’s difficult enough keeping track of all the epicycles in this LaBrea Tarpits of fashion when we’re talking about today. Try to figure where in the cycle people were with a particular cultural referrant in 1882, and you’re in deeper trouble. To stick with G&S, they did The Mikado because there was a fashion in Britain for all things Japanese at the time. But The Mikado itself became such a raging mania, that you can’t sort out Britons carrying Japanese fans in the late 19th Century as being because of the original fashion, or because of G&S’s Mikado. I suspect that the original craze was mostly abstruse, high brow, and confined to a fashionable set. G&S making it into the Mikado is how it passed to the lower orders and into a true popular mania. But the more fashionable people could still stick with the trend, because G&S also made it available to them as an ironic comment on the vulgar herd by laundering it through the Mikado.

Even for 1882, this sort of analysis makes my head hurt. Try sorting this sort of thing out for a Platonic dialogue, and you’re in the middle of the deep blue sea, with the nearest dry land thousand of miles away.

What link?

Really all I’m mainly saying is that the way we see low, mid and high as outlaid in the 1940s and 50s in the US may not at all be a good fit for cultural subcurrents in the late Victorian era.

So I certainly wouldn’t claim that my take on matters such as the relative popularity of Wilde and G&S is the only reading possible. I just think that having the Dragoon Guards appear with sunflowers and lillies in hand in Patience works because aestheticism was ludicrously not even in the ballpark of being so popular a craze that even military types would ape its trappings. I see it as the same move a contemporary film makes when it has the football team take up ballet. No, this is not meant to imply that ballet is as much a popular mania as football, quite the opposite.

Wilde may have eventually achieved some low/midbrow popularity, with his later farces and the Picture of Dorian Gray, and then notoriety with his legal trouble, resulting in poetry that the highbrows might see as his best work—but in 1882, when the caricature was published, this was all way in his future. All he had published was some poetry and one clunker melodrama about Russian nihilism. That lecture tour of America in 1882 was paid for by D’Oyly Carte because they feared Wilde and aestheticism was just too unknown in America for Patience to work at the box office.

Talk about life imitating art, or an artistic life imitating un-life-like art, or something. But however you label it, you could make a case that Wilde turned later to the lighter, more accessible, stuff that made him popular, because of his experience of the artistic and financial prospects working as a shill for a G&S operetta that caricatures him.

The moral of the story is, mining towns are more interesting than farm towns, at least in the beginning.

And Wilde’s plays were as popular as Gilbert and Sullivan’s—are they more or less midbrow? I’d say they occupy almost exactly the same cultural tranche—the japanoiserie of Mikado overlaps with its bleed into the decorative arts (again, simplicity and accessibility trumping heavy hand-me-down parochialism…)