GLASS PAINTINGThe Chamber of Horrors: Victorian Literature and

Ornament

Handicraft Workshop, Week 7

EDMO N D AN D J ULES DE GO NCO URT (1822 – 1896 ) , ( 1830 1870 )

“We must ask pardon of the public for offering it this book, and give it due warning of what it will find therein. The public loves fictitious novels. This is a true novel.

It loves books which make a pretence of introducing their readers to fashionable society: this book deals with the life of the street.

[…]

 The public loves to read pleasant, soothing stories, adventures

that end happily, imaginative works that disturb neither its digestion

nor its peace of mind: this book furnishes entertainment of a

melancholy, violent sort calculated to disarrange the habits and injure

the health of the public. At this day, when the sphere of the Novel is broadening and expanding, when it is beginning to be the serious, impassioned, living form of literary study and social investigation, when it is becoming, by virtue of analysis and psychological research, the true History of contemporary morals, when the novel has taken its place among the necessary elements of knowledge, it may properly demand its liberty and freedom of speech.”

Preface to Germinie Lacerteux, 1865

“In Thérèse Raquin I have sought to study temperaments and not characters. In that lies the entire book. I have selected personages sovereignly dominated by their nerves and their blood, destitute of free will, led at each act of their life by the fatalities of their flesh. [These characters] are human brutes, nothing more. I have sought to follow, step by step, throughout the career of these brutes, the secret working of their passions, the promptings of their instinct, the cerebral disorders following a nervous crisis.”

ÉMILE ZOLA (1840 - 1902)

THE RO UGO N-MACQ UARTS :1871 - 1893

TH E SE COND E MPIRE AND THE “HA USSMANISAT IO N” O F PARIS

THE PARISIAN DEPARTMENT STORE: AU BON MARCHÉ AND

LES GRANDS MAGASINS DU LOUVRE

Z O L A ' S “ P O E M O F M O D E R N A C T I V I T Y ”

THE SHOPGI

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James Tissot, The Shopgirl, 1883 - 1885

THE DANGERS OF SHOPPING

Félix Vallotton, Le Bon Marché , 1898

Félix Vallotton, Le Bon Marché , 1898