How Long is the “Long Nineteenth Century”?

Abstract

Michael D. Hurley (St Catherine’s, Cambridge) and Marcus Waithe (Magdalene, Cambridge) have put together a collection of twenty essays on (mostly) Non-fiction Prose of the Long Nineteenth Century—as the subtitle has it—by distinguished British scholars from Oxford, Cambridge, York, Durham, Liverpool, London, and St Andrews, with one lone ‘Yank’ from Harvard. The main title, it is stressed on the dustjacket, is “Thinking through Style.” The cover photo on the dustjacket shows Palladio’s sunlit classical Renaissance basilica on the island of San Giorgio, in sunlight, shot from the shadows of the gallery of the Doge’s Palace in Piazza San Marco, through the Venetian Gothic arches. The contrasts of the cover—shadow/light, medieval Gothic/classical Renaissance—apparently are meant to contrast style and thought or thought and language. How the landscape and architectural styles of Venice relate to the overall theme of the book is another question altogether since the essay on Ruskin doesn’t address Ruskin’s pertinent thoughts on architecture or Venice.