60s memorabilia: Culture decades # 1

Not those 60s - the 1860s!

I've been reading Anna Karenina and realise that Tolstoy was writing at an interesting time. This picture shows a few of the things that were going on in the 1860s.

Photography was in its infancy - dry plate photography was only invented in the 1850s but it spread almost as rapidly as digital photography has done in the last 15 years. Women photographers like Julia Margaret Cameron were able to take up the new technology and produce wonderful results.

Painters were pursuing new directions: the Impressionists and Symbolists in France, the Pre-Raphaelites and Arts and Crafts pioneers in England took new - often controversial - steps away from classical teaching, laying the foundations for modernism. Many artists and writers expressed their individualism through unconventional lifestyles.

Political thinking was developing: Volume 1 of Das Capital came out in 1867, and the spark of conscience ignited by Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) was fanned to a blaze with the American Civil War (1861-1865). Other books of the decade included socially-aware Great Expectations, Les Miserables, Silas Marner and Wives and Daughters. Meanwhile, great harm was done to people around the world in the name of Empire. Native Americans were being brutally subdued, Australian Aborigines exterminated, and the second opium war in China (1856 - 1860) ended with Britain and France holding all the aces, allowing us to trade opium through Chinese ports.

When Melville wrote Moby Dick (1851) no-one was fully aware of the speed with which the whaling industry would wipe itself out. People had no idea that it is possible to hunt something to extinction. The buffalo was so numerous in North America at the start of the century that it was impossible to conceive that by 1890 it would be almost extinct. The passenger pigeon (bottom right in the photo) was still seen in vast flocks of numberless thousands in the 1860s but the last wild bird in existence was shot in 1900.

I could go on, but perhaps that's more than enough.