Exploding the Hearth

Considering Victorian Aging

Authors

  • Lauren Palmor University of Washington

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.7146/ageculturehumanities.v2i.130743

Keywords:

---

Abstract

The image of the aged parent or grandparent sitting contentedly before the hearth is a canonical trope in Victorian visual culture. The freside was, at that time, a signifcant center of the home and family, and older members of the household were viewed as principal organizing forces around this central gathering place. This article examines the archetypal image of the senescent hearthside fgure in order to better evaluate the larger context in which Victorian aging was visually interpreted and generally understood. By examining depictions of this theme by the popular British painters Walter Dendy Sadler and Frederick Daniel Hardy, this study demonstrates some ways in which art history may proft from age studies in formulating expanded readings of such material.

Author Biography

Lauren Palmor, University of Washington

Lauren Palmor is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at the University of Washington in Seattle. She holds a BA from Sarah Lawrence College and an MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art. Her graduate work has been dedicated to illuminating neglected narratives in nineteenth-century British and American art, and her dissertation research concerns the status and depiction of aging in Anglo-American genre painting. She lives in San Francisco, where she works in the American Art department at the de Young Museum. Readers may write to Lauren Palmor at palmor@uw.edu.

References

Ballenger, Jesse F. Self, Senility, and Alzheimer’s Disease in Modern America: A History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2006.

Botelho, Lynn, and Pat Thane, eds. Women and Ageing in British Society Since 1500. Harlow: Longman, 2001.

Casteras, Susan P. “The Unsettled Hearth: P.H. Calderon’s Lord! Thy Will be Done and the Problematics of Women in Victorian Interiors.” Reframing the Pre-Raphaelites: Historical and Theoretical Essays. Ed. Ellen Harding. Aldershot: Scolar P, 1996. 149-72.

Chase, Karen. The Victorians and Old Age. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009.

Chivers, Sally. From Old Woman to Older Women: Contemporary Culture and Women’s Narratives. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2003.

Dafforne, James. “The Works of Frederick Daniel Hardy.” The Art Journal 37 (1875): 73-76.

Flanders, Judith. Inside the Victorian Home: A Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England. New York: Norton, 2004.

Fletcher, Richard. “A Painter of the Quiet Life.” Good Housekeeping 54.2 (1912), 171-78.

Godfrey, Esther. The January-May Marriage in Nineteenth-Century British Literature. New York: Palgrave, 2009.

Graves, Algernon. The Royal Academy of Arts: A Complete Dictionary of Contributors and Their Work from Its Foundation in 1769 to 1904. London: Henry Graves, 1905.

Greg, Andrew. “The Cranbrook Colony.” The Grove Dictionary of Art, From Renaissance to Impressionism: Styles and Movements in Western Art, 1400–1900. Ed. Jane Turner. New York: St. Martin’s P, 2000.

Hepworth, Mike. “Framing Old Age: Sociological Perspectives on Ageing in Victorian Painting.” The Sociology of Art: Ways of Seeing. Eds. David Inglis and John Hughson. New York: Palgrave, 2005.

Jalland, Pat. Death in the Victorian Family. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996.

Logan, Thad. The Victorian Parlour: A Cultural Study. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006.

McKee, Patrick, and Heta Kauppinen. The Art of Aging: A Celebration of Old Age in Western Art. New York: Insight, 1987.

Orrinsmith, Lucy. The Drawing Room: Its Decorations and Furniture. London: Macmillan, 1878.

Quadagno, Jill. Aging in Early Industrial Society: Work, Family, and Social Policy in Nineteenth-Century England. New York: Academic P, 1982.

Shepp, Daniel B. Shepp’s Library of History and Art. Philadelphia: Globe Bible Publishing, 1905.

Sherwood, Mary Elizabeth Wilson. The Amenities of Home. New York: D. Appleton, 1881.

Walvin, James. Victorian Values. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1987.

Waxman, Barbara Frey. From the Hearth to the Open Road: A Feminist Study of Aging in Contemporary Literature. New York: Greenwood P, 1990.

West, Mary Allen. Childhood: Its Care and Culture. Chicago: Women’s Temperance Publications, 1887.

Woodroffe, W.L. “W. Dendy Sadler.” The Magazine of Art. 1896: 265-73

Downloads

Published

2015-01-01

How to Cite

Palmor, L. . “Exploding the Hearth: Considering Victorian Aging”. Age, Culture, Humanities: An Interdisciplinary Journal, vol. 2, Jan. 2015, pp. 185-01, doi:10.7146/ageculturehumanities.v2i.130743.

Issue

Vol. 2 (2015): Age, Culture, Humanities (Forum: Age and/as Disability; Position Papers)

Section

Research Article

License

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

From issue 6 (2022) onward, the journal uses the CC Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 license. The authors retain their copyright. For articles published in previous issues (1,2,3,4 and 5) the authors retain their copyright to their articles. Readers can download, read, and link to the articles published in issues 1-5, but they cannot republish these articles. Authors can upload them in their institutional repositories.