Disturbingly Nude Victorian Mermaids March 18, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern , trackback
Nothing like a really beautiful mermaid, right: hair breezing sea blue blonde, scales shining with Brasso, tail whipping like a pike dropped in a bucket of acid? Well, yes, and Beach has previously celebrated the alluring mermaids of Venice: what some of his students would call ‘babes’. But he has been disturbed today by a new species of mermaid. The mermaids in question come from the Book of British Ballads (1842), by the rather unctuous Samuel Carter Hall who was responsible for a series of reprehensible tour guides (with his wife) through the mid century. BoBB was edited by Hall and it would be interesting to know what kind of input he had on the illustrations: did he control the whole project or did the publisher thrust works upon him? The preface gives no clear indication, though he boasts about the quality of the engravings which is suggestive. The illustrations here shown for the poem The Mermaid were the works of ‘Green, Fred. Branston, Nicholls, Walmsley and Armstrong’.
What Beach found most fascinating is the explicitness of the mermaids an almost debilitating quantity of breasts and bottoms, they are also erotically charged: look at the saline three graces above.
It is true that Victorian art frequently showed nude forms tastefully. But that was for the most part for galleries and some limited reproductions for ‘decent’ middle class families. This was a book that, though for adults, could easily have fallen into sweaty adolescent hands where the Mermaid would have been much perused.
In fact, Beach would put a small bet that eight out of ten physical copies will have binding problems at these pages, in the same way that in the 1990s some for-hire-videos had been almost worn out at celebrated nude scenes. How could the Victorians have allowed this ‘filth’ to find its way down from the top shelf and the pornographers of Holywell Street? Chris from Haunted Ohio Books puts it as follows (hope she won’t mind some quoting but she says it so well): ‘These illustrations seem to have crept in under the wire between the gross indelicacies of the Regent and Victoria, who liked a good romp as well as the next girl, but wanted to erase the disgusting spectacle of her wicked Hanoverian uncles trying to be first in the breeding derby.’ This was Beach’s original impression, yet incredibly the engravings, perhaps the book’s main selling point, remained into the 1890s where they appeared not just in the UK but on the more prudish US market, apparently without comment. Any explanations for this incongruous nudity? drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
30 April 2015: Chris from Haunted Ohio Books writes in with a sexualised mermaid picture
A hand-coloured print of a group of men avidly watching naked women bathing in the sea. Bathing machines stand on the shoreline. The men hold telescopes to ther eyes to get a closer view. An angry wife hits her husband with her parasol. Another group of men stand on top of the roof of a Circulating Library also with telescopes as they watch the women.
Inscribed in the plate: 211 / Rowlandson Del / Price one shilling coloured / Pub[lishe]d September 1st 1813 by Thos Tegg No 111 Cheapside
31 may 2015: Chris from Haunted Ohio Books with a new piece of mermaid erotica:
Haven’t looked at the music.
Image from page 124 of “Triplets : comprising, The baby’s opera, The baby’s bouquet, and The baby’s own Æsop” (1899)
Identifier: tripletscomprisi00cran2
Title: Triplets : comprising, The baby’s opera, The baby’s bouquet, and The baby’s own Æsop
Authors: Crane, Walter, 1845-1915 Crane, Lucy, 1842-1882 Evans, Edmund, 1826-1905
