Les Différents Publics de Paris

Stephen J. Gertz, at Booktryst, had an interesting post today about Gustave Doré's Les Différents Publics de Paris (1854), a remarkable set of lithographs depicting the people of Paris in the audience at various public amusements, from a magic show to the library. Through the language of caricature, Doré offers insightful social commentary about audience behavior, from the fawning men in the opera's loge de lions to the casually-refined postures of seated spectators at a wrestling match.

In some ways, the prints remind me of the rich culture of amusements described in Paul Metzner's The Crescendo of the Virtuoso. Metzner points to a significant rise of publicization in France in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, that is, the process by which activities and skills that were previously private (everything from making music to athletics) were commodified and made available to new and ever-larger audiences for the purposes of entertainment. Clearly Doré found the changing city of the 1850s interesting, as well; his repeated emphasis, here, is on different publics (an interesting concept in itself), audiencing the talents of others.

Overall, this kind of imagery, especially from period books, magazines, and other ephemera, represents one of the few historical traces that we have for audience behavior in the 19th century. One of the things I've been trying to do on this blog (and in my own research on fandom) is to start a repository of such images. Is there more work like Duré's out there?

Banking Reading

Two online sites to note about historical research on reading are the Reading Experience Database and the “A Place of Reading” Exhibit.

The Reading Experience Database (RED), begun in 1996, is extraordinary—an accumulated collection of descriptions of reading over centuries, from a variety of English language sources (mostly from autobiographies and literature). It is one of the go-to places for learning more about the changing practices of reading.

“A Place of Reading” is a wide-ranging overview of reading in early America, including an image bank of people reading in various private and public spaces. The bank is less expansive than the RED but nevertheless interesting; while iconographic research has somewhat of a hold in music studies, it has not had wide application in literary studies (Garrett Stewart’s The Look of Reading being a notable exception).

It would be great to see more collections of evidence on listening, dancing, viewing, and other audience behaviors about which we know very little historically.