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In Pygmalion (the source for My Fair Lady), George Bernard Shaw called Britain and America "Two nations separated by a common language." I laughed when I first heard it, but as a Brit living over here for more than 50 years, I find myself increasingly fascinated by the differences—and yet the similarities—between our two countries. So I thought it would be fun to look for evidence on how they came about.

I originally called this course "Our First Century Apart," referring to the Nineteenth Century, albeit with a prologue beginning in 1776. This is still my time-frame, but I am a cultural historian not a political one; my fields are art, literature, and music. So rather than attempting a linear history of either country, let alone both, I intend to focus on various aspects of National Identity, dipping in here and there to enquire how each country's self-image is reflected through its arts and artifacts. Topics to be considered include Nature, Religion, Equality, Technology, and Mass Culture. And of course Slavery and Empire, defining isues for much of the century in America and Britain, respectively. Yet not exclusively so; both topics gain a new dimension when viewed from the perspective of the other country.

The Declaration of Independence was intended as a pragmatic document, setting out the various complaints that led the Founding Fathers to break their allegiance to the English Crown. But Jefferson's first two paragraphs are also a philosophical statement, a public answer to the personal question: "Who Are We?", whether as citizens or as individual human beings. It strikes me that much of American intellectual life, certainly through the 19th century and perhaps to the present day, has been centered around similar questions of identity. A new country built on ideas must not only assert its values but also continue to examine them.

Britain, by contrast, is an old country; but two things happened around 1800 to make the definition of identity a burning issue there too. Braitain was one of the epicenters of Romanticism, an artistic movement that viewed human beings as individuals, in direct relation to the forces of nature rather than as cogs in a social machine. Paradoxically, it was also the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, which over time would reshape society at the risk of turning many of the workers back into cogs. The Victorian era was also the zenith of the British Empire, whose moral justification was the idea of bringing enlightened values to the darker parts of the earth. This may have been a myth, but it explains the Victorian preoccupation with what those values ought to be.

The topics in the syllabus below are mostly very general as yet. As I work on each class, however, I will aim to focus in on specific case-studies that I can present through concrete examples rather than words. Many of these will be comparisons—perhaps a pair of paintings, or poems, or posters, or songs, or some other artifacts that carry a history—and invite you to discuss them, as we tease out what that history might be, and the different societies that created them. Some of these comparisons are included in the listing below; click on them (or any other image in the entire course with a star in the corner) to enlarge each work in turn.

So log on in September, prepared to talk, engage with friends, and explore ideas! rb.

1. The Declaration	September 20
Two politicians, c.1780	RESOURCES

1. The Declaration	September 20
Ralph Earl (American): Roger Sherman (c.1777, Yale)		RESOURCES

1. The Declaration	September 20
Nathaniel Dance (British): Lord North (c.1774, National Portrait Gallery)		RESOURCES

Nothing could be more different than the portraits of these two men: Roger Sherman (one of only two delegates to sign the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution) and Lord North (the British Prime Minister during the Revolutionary War). It is more, surely, than the difference between a journeyman artist in Connecticut and a society portraitist in London; this was how the two men wished to present themselves to posterity. By looking at such portraits and then at depictions of the ensuing war, we shall consider the sense of national identity in the two countries and how it would shape the century ahead. Was the thinking of the best minds in Britain really so different from that in America, and if not, why did it show itself in such a different manner? The class will also serve as a preview of some of the major themes of the course. [top]

2. Nature and Nature's God	September 27
Two landscapes, 1830s	RESOURCES

2. Nature and Nature's God	September 27
John Constable (British): Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows (1831, Tate)	RESOURCES

2. Nature and Nature's God	September 27
Thomas Cole (American): The Oxbow (1836, NY Met)	RESOURCES

John Constable was friends with the Bishop of Salisbury, and painted several pictures of the Cathedral; this one, though, may have been in part an elegy on the death of his wife. Any religious overtones in the conjunction of storm clouds, church spire, and rainbow put in company with Thomas Cole's piece, which has the word "NOAH" in Hebrew clear-cut into the distant woods, making the entire landscape (The Connecticut River from Mount Holyoake, Mass) into an allegory of God's goodness to the American people, and their future in clearing the wilderness and expanding West. Such views of God-in-Nature had been presaged at the start of the century by English Romantic poets such as Wordworth and Coleridge, and would be developed later by the American Transcendentalists such as Emerson and Thoreau. [top]

3. Aiming at Eternity	October 4
The US Capitol and British Houses of Parliament	RESOURCES

3. Aiming at Eternity	October 4
William Thornton (American) and others: The US Capitol (begun 1791)	RESOURCES

3. Aiming at Eternity	October 4
Charles Barry & Augustus Pugin (British): The Palace of Westminster (begun 1840)	RESOURCES

Sir Christopher Wren, architect of the rebuilding of London, said: "Architecture has its political Use; publick Buildings being the Ornament of a Country; it establishes a Nation, draws People and Commerce; makes the People love their native Country, which Passion is the Original of all great Actions in a Commonwealth. Architecture aims at Eternity." Although Wren was writing two centuries earlier, you could hardly find a more appropriate description of official architecture in the 19th Century, which sought to express the majesty of government, the reach of science, and sanctity of knowledge. [top]

4. Industrial Impacts	October 11
Two paintings of the British Industrial Revolution	RESOURCES

4. Industrial Impacts	October 11
Anonymous (British): A Pit Head (early 1800s, Liverpool)	RESOURCES

4. Industrial Impacts	October 11
William Bell Scott (British): Iron and Coal (1855–60, Wallington UK)	RESOURCES

Both these pictures are British, contrasting in time rather than geography. Between them, they show the rapid progress of the Industrial Revolution, from small pits set amid green fields to huge industrial cities like Sheffield or Bolton. Similar views could be shown of America, though shifted slightly later and with a different emphasis. After the Civil War, though, a surge in technological invention made America the leader in what has been called the Second Industrial Revolution, forever transforming her economy and position as a global power. It was a century of immense change. We shall look primarily at its cultural effects: how it was seen as a wonder or a threat, and how it transformed people's lives. [top]

5. Dickens in America	October 18
Charles Dickens and some of the writers he met in 1842	RESOURCES

5. Dickens in America	October 18
Francis Alexander (American): Charles Dickens (1842, UMass Amherst)	RESOURCES

5. Dickens in America	October 18
Longfellow (top left), Cooper (bottom left), Poe, and Irving	RESOURCES

Charles Dickens made the first of his two visits to America in 1842. His trip took him to Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Richmond, Saint Louis, and into Canada. He visited hospitals, factories, and prisons, met with President Tyler, and also the American writers Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Washington Irving, and Edgar Allan Poe. Already famous for Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby as well as a fearless social commentator, he was lionised wherever he went. At first thrilled, he found that many aspects of the new republic—especially in the South—failed to live up to his expectations. Parts of American Notes, his published account of the trip, are as negative as American novelist James Fenimore Cooper had been a few years earlier reporting his own trip to Britain. I hope to use the occasion to compare how each country saw the other at the time, and also to look at the considerable differences between British literature and that of the Americans. [top]

6. Purchased Lives	October 25
Two paintings by Eastman Johnson, 1859 and 1866	RESOURCES

6. Purchased Lives	October 25
Eastman Johnson (American): Negro Life at the South (1859, NY Historical Scy.)	RESOURCES

6. Purchased Lives	October 25
Eastman Johnson (American): Fiddling his Way (1866, Chrysler Museum, Norfolk VA)	RESOURCES

Both these paintings are American, indeed by the same artist, exactly straddling the Civil War. They are interesting in that, at a time when Slavery, Emancipation, and Reconstruction were fighting issues, they show a more intimate and less fraught relationship between Black and White. What are they: sentimental, idealistic, or true to common experience? Jefferson called slavery "An alarm bell in the night"; for Lincoln, it was "A Moral, Social, and Political Evil." It is obviously far too big an issue to even come close to covering in a single class, but I am focusing on the pieces that can be studied mainly through artifacts. These include abolitionism in Britain and America, the impact of Uncle Tom's Cabin, the Civil War and its representations in visual media and verse, and the twisted story of Reconstruction and Jim Crow. [top]

7. Empire	November 1
Images of Empire, later 19th century	RESOURCES

7. Empire	November 1
Map of the British Empire, 1886	RESOURCES

7. Empire	November 1
Emanuel Leutze (American): Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way (1861, US Capitol)	RESOURCES

The extent of the British Empire (which included Canada, Australia, South Africa, and India) was a source of pride to Victorians. This map, in the Mercator projection with Greenwich at its center, not only shows its extent but is also crammed with iconography testifying to its goals and successes. Empire was a defining quality of Britain, so long as she maintained her position as a world power. Yet Americans used the term also. This vast painting in the US Capitol by Emanuel Leutze (more famous for Washington Crossing the Delaware) is titled Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way—Manifest Destiny expressed in paint. Nowadays, "Empire" is a dirty word, but we will put it back into context by looking at aspects of Empire in both countries, and how they are reflected in art, literature, and music. [top]

8. Family Values	November 8
Fallen Women: Holman Hunt and Hugues Merle	RESOURCES

8. Family Values	November 8
William Holman Hunt (British): The Awakening Conscience (1855, Tate)	RESOURCES

8. Family Values	November 8
Hugues Merle (French): The Scarlet Letter (1861, Walters)	RESOURCES

Two "fallen women": Holman Hunt's rich man's mistress and Hawthorne's Hester Prynne from The Scarlet Letter. When I proposed this course, I knew I would have to address the Victorian obsession with morality, something I know from both art history and my knowledge of my Victorian grandparents. Hunt's painting, crammed with telling details, is among the first of a steady stream of morally-improving pictures by many artists that would continue to the end of the century. In the first half of the class, I shall suggest some possible reasons. But the painter of the other picture is French; try as I might, I cannot find parallel examples in American art. In literature, yes; both Hawthorne and Melville were much concerned with morality, as was Walt Whitman, but their approach was altogether more elemental, transcending etiquette and ethics. In a country that has been so shaped by its religious values from Puritan times to the present, I cannot understand why morality as a subject should crop up in one medium but not in others; perhaps we can explore this together? [top]

9. The Sound of a Nation's Soul	November 15
Musical portraits of America, 1890s	RESOURCES

9. The Sound of a Nation's Soul	November 15
Antonin Dvorak (Czech): Symphony 9, From the New World (1893)	RESOURCES

9. The Sound of a Nation's Soul	November 15
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (British): Hiawatha (1898–1900)	RESOURCES

This class will be about 19th-century music in the two countries, and the comparisons will be in sound rather than images. I put up these two works, however, to demonstrate how complex the situation is. Neither Britain nor America produced a classical composer of world stature until the end of the century; both turned to continental Europe to set standards. Taking over a Manhattan conservatory in the 1890s, Dvorak saw the need for a music that would call upon native American sources, which he mistakenly saw in the negro spiritual. Meanwhile in Britain, a Black English composer, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, expressed his conception of native American music in three cantatas based on the made-up story of Hiawatha as told by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. While we will listen to these and some other works in the classical vein, we must also recognize that a more genuine national music may have arisen on a more popular level such as the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan, vaudeville music in both countries, and the beginnings of jazz. [top]

10. Created Equal? Women in the Ninteteenth Century	November 29
Florence Nightingale and Susan B. Anthony	RESOURCES

10. Created Equal? Women in the Ninteteenth Century	November 29
Henrietta Rae (British): The Lady with the Lamp (1891, inset); Jerry Barrett (British): Florence Nightingale Receiving the Wounded at Scutari (London NPG)	RESOURCES

10. Created Equal? Women in the Ninteteenth Century	November 29
Carl Gutherz (American): Susan Brownell Anthony (1895); Elizabeth Krumpke (American): Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1889, top); Anon: Amelia Jenks Bloomer (1853, bottom)—all Smithsonian NPG	RESOURCES

The word "men" in the Declaration of Independence must be taken literally; women did not gain the right to vote until 1920 in the US and 1928 in the UK (though partially granted in 1918). Nonetheless, there were remarkable women activists in both countries. Mary Wollstonecraft (the mother of Mary Shelley) published A Vindication of the Rights of Women in 1792. Florence Nightingale drastically improved battlefield survival rates through her work in the Crimean War, and in training her nurses created a new professional career for women. Susan B. Anthony, with her colleague Elizabeth Cady Stanton and mentor Amelia Bloomer, was active in the US Anti-Slavery Movement as a young woman, and a leader in the fight for Women's Suffrage and Temperance to the end of her life. This class will tell their stories, and also look at the depiction of women in the arts during the 19th Century and women's roles as creators in their own right. [top]

11. The Fabric of Self: Leisure in the Ninteteenth Century	December 6
Beach scenes, 1860, 1879, and 1908	RESOURCES

11. The Fabric of Self: Leisure in the Ninteteenth Century	December 6
Charles Wynne Nicholls: Victorian Family at the Seaside (1860s, Wolverhampton)	RESOURCES

11. The Fabric of Self: Leisure in the Ninteteenth Century	December 6
Samuel S. Carr (British-American): The Beach at Coney Island (1879)	RESOURCES

11. The Fabric of Self: Leisure in the Ninteteenth Century	December 6
George Bellows (American): The Beach at Coney Island (1908)	RESOURCES

My title comes from the late 19th-century American writer Agnes Repplier: "It is in his pleasure that a man really lives; it is from his leisure that he constructs the true fabric of self." Hence these three pictures of people at the beach, spanning 40 years, one a British subject by a British artist, one an American subject by a British immigrant, and the third American through and through. We will also look at the emergence of a mass culture, the move to the cities, theaters both serious and popular, department stores and shopping for pleasure, public parks, and sports—anything, in fact, that has to do with how people lived and spent their leisure time. [top]

12. Taking Stock: on the Cusp of a New Century	December 13
To the Victor the Spoils. Paintings by Eakins and Dicksee	RESOURCES

12. Taking Stock: on the Cusp of a New Century	December 13
Sir Frank Dicksee (British): The Two Crowns (1900, Tate)	RESOURCES

12. Taking Stock: on the Cusp of a New Century	December 13
Thomas Eakins (American): Salutat (1898, Andover)	RESOURCES

Believe it or not, these two paintings have much in common: both were painted around 1900, and both represent the acclamation of a victor in battle. But in other respects they are utterly different: Eakins paints a realistic depiction of an inner-city boxing club; Dicksee basks in the panoply of the late Victorian twilight, with a moral lesson thrown in for good measure—the second crown of the title is the Crown of Thorns on the crucifix to the right. Looking through a list of artworks produced in both countries around 1900, I expected to see some early stirrings of Modernism. But I don't; that would have to wait another five or ten years. Indeed, I see little or nothing in Britain to presage the new century; the Edwardian era in general luxuriates in the glories of the past. You get this in America also, but in the paintings of Thomas Eakins, Robert Henri, and George Bellows, and the novels of Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser, you do find a gritty realism that is especially American.

 
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