GLASS PAINTING

The Chamber of Horrors: Victorian Literature

and Ornament

Handicraft Workshop, Week 7

EDMOND AND JULES DE GONCOURT (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 ROUGON-MACQUARTS :1871 - 1893

THE S EC OND EMPIRE AN D T HE “HAUSS MANIS ATIO 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

RL

James Tissot, The

Shopgirl, 1883 - 1885

THE DANGERS OF SHOPPING

Félix Vallotton, Le Bon

Marché , 1898

Félix Vallotton, Le

Bon Marché , 1898