A Cool Web Site

I was looking for the list of websites we had discussed earlier in the semester and I couldn’t find it, so I began looking for some sites myself. I found this one that is a little ridiculous, it’s just incredibly frilly, but it does have a great deal of information about the Victorian era. It tends to be more focused around America during the Victorian era but it does have some information on England as well and some cross over facts.

The site is: http://www.victoriaspast.com/

It has tons of links to different aspects of Victorian living. There are descriptions and pictures of different rooms a house may have, including the ‘music room,’ it has links to music of the time, a song book, some Gilbert and Sullivan operas, a commentary on Jenny Lind, etc… The site even includes some midi files.
I spent probably around 45 minutes looking through this site. Each link you click on gives you a variety of other links related to that topic. For example, by clicking on the link for the ‘ball room,’ you are given links about dancing, etiquette, dress, when to arrive, reasons not to dance and so on.

I’m not sure if this site is particularly reputable, it does include a number of citations and quotes but I’m guessing this particular site shouldn’t be featured in anyone’s bibliography for their research paper. However, it is an extremely well organized web site with lovely pictures and great basic information on life in the Victorian era. Whoever put this site together took a great deal of pride in what they were doing.

I think I’ve been doing so much research on Victorian music I forgot to think about the culture, although the two really are related. I think Victorian music reflects the culture of the time in which it is written, and music often influences culture. This is even true today, I think part of the reason opera isn’t particularly ‘main-stream’ is because people have a hard time relating to it; Mozart, Rossini, Verdi, and Puccini operas don’t necessarily represent our current culture, but they were popular back when they were originally produced. But in looking a ‘Pop’ music of today, Britney Spears for example, was able to set trends in music and fashion and influence tons of middle schoolers, myself included, when she appeared on the scene.

Anyways…it’s a cool site to check out.