Tea at Trianon: The Selling of the American Dwelling

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, February 28, 2014

The Selling of the American Dwelling

From The New Yorker:

The evolution of the American home, from those days to contemporary times, is the focus of a fascinating exhibition called “Selling the Dwelling: The Books that Built America’s Houses, 1775-2000,” on display and open to the public in New York’s Grolier Club, a private establishment for book collectors and scholars.

The collection of domestic architectural pattern and plan books, pamphlets, and shelter magazines is not only splendid to peruse; it also tells the story of the American housing boom that set the stage for the real-estate crisis from which the United States is still recovering. Eric J. Holzenberg, the Grolier Club’s director, and the exhibit’s curator, Richard Cheek, spent more than a decade putting the exhibit together, tracking down more than three hundred items of architectural ephemera at flea markets, in garage sales, on eBay, and from antiquarian book dealers. (Read more.)