Imagine that you are an inhabitant of a nineteenth-century metropolis. You find yourself with a day of leisure, and have been given one free pass to any site of display–an amusement, exhibition, space. How will you spend your free pass?
Describe the nature of the visual experience at this venue, reconstructing the scene from primary source materials. Then, respond to the following questions based upon your knowledge of the cultures of exhibition of the period.
*What compels you to choose this venue or event over others?
*How is it a particularly visual experience?
*What sort of people are you likely to encounter there? How does social class figure in the composition of the audience?
*Do you, as a viewer, participate in the display that you have visited? If so, how?
You may use the first-person if you feel it is the most appropriate way to articulate your response.
Resources
To help you locate a particular venue, you will use the Victorian Popular Culture database, to which the University subscribes. This database contains many thousands of objects, images, and texts pertaining to the vibrant culture of exhibition in this period.
Go to the database, and log in with your UTORid credentials: http://www.victorianpopularculture.amdigital.co.uk.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/Contents/Index.aspx?ks=trueLinks to an external site.
You can search or browse until you find something that seems interesting, strange, beautiful, or repellant.
Using at least one, and no more than three, of these sources, reconstruct the venue that you will visit.
You may combine information about the venue gathered from several different primary sources to build up a fuller picture of that venue.
Rules
You should submit your paper electronically via Quercus. Please do not email it to us, as this tends to overload email inboxes. Use a reasonable typeface and 12-point font size. Target length is 5 pages, double-spaced.
You are not required to cite material outside of the primary sources, but if you choose to, you must do so using one of the standard citation systems.
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