Victorians Smiling is one of Retronaut’s older posts (nearly a year and a half at this point), but I still like it greatly, because it serves as a reminder to me that history is not the cold, sterile thing we often imagine it to be. We do have a tendency to imagine the past as staid – not least, I think, because frozen images connote a certain formality in that part of our monkey brains which equates stillness with seriousness. (In twenty years or so, people are going to start thinking hippies were uptight, just because it’ll all be pictures of dead hippies and the boomers will mostly be dead and won’t be able to say “no, it wasn’t like that at all, we were the generation of love and peace and so on.”)
But I like the post mostly for this picture:
If only because you know that one of them must have farted.
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Given her expression in shot 2 and how he’s grinning in shots 3 and 4, it had to be him. And it was an epic one.
One of my favourite bits of writing was uncovered while writing my History degree dissertation:
‘When a warm heart has received strong impressions, they are not to be effaced. Emotions become sentiments; and the imagination renders even transient sensations permanent, by fondly retracing them. I cannot, without a thrill of delight, recollect views I have seen, nor looks I have felt in every nerve, which I shall never more meet. The grave has closed over a dear friend, the friend of my youth; still she is present with me, and I hear her soft voice warbling as I stray over the heath.’ – Mary Wollstonecraft
That is why history is interesting and important, not that dry obsession with wars, politics and statistics…
Wow. That makes my cold shrunken holiday heart grow at least two sizes.
I don’t think it will be as significant for hippies, because it won’t just be pictures, there will be film with sound as well…
what’s interesting to me, is in that first picture you can see the guy is smiling in his eyes, which is something you don’t often see in older pictures.
That’s not a fart flinch, that’s a “Daguerrotypes are as expensive as diamonds. You know what you’re going to have to do later…”, flinch.
I mean, why else would she have looked down and then away at his crotch?