The London magazine, Punch, made fun of everything, including the everyday irritations of life in London, This illustration is from a piece about how the gate of Temple Bar is too low to accommodate the large vehicles that are increasingly common. (Punch, 1847, p. 254)
Not only do we have a wagon with a giant advertising sign, but it is advertising a giant masked ball.
In nineteenth century the word monstre seemed to indicate something outsized or something gigantic.
In Mrs. Gore's description of Paris in 1841 she says, "It is on the occasion of the larger balls, or bals monstres, as they are facetiously called by the more exclusive aristocrats of the faubourg, that the throne of the citizen-king appears arrayed in its most appropriate splendours." (Gore, Mrs., Paris in 1841, with twenty-one highly-finished engravings from original drawings, by Thomas Allom, esq., London, Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans; 1842. p. 36)
The Strauss brothers also used the term for huge concerts or balls.
"In the carnival season of 1860 they held their first 'Monster Ball' in the Sophienbad hall; they performed fifty dances, including the first performance of a piece they had composed together - called, just to remind the 3,000 dancers who are said to have been present of the scale of the event, the Monstre-Quadrille. A year later, on 5 February 1861, they repeated the event and were in fact able to go one better: this time, as the advertisements proclaimed, there would be 'For the first time in Vienna: Three balls on one evening'. " (Bailey, Leigh, Eduard Strauss - The Third Man of the Strauss Family, Vienna, Hollitzer Wissenschaftsverlag, 2017, chapter 3.)
No comments:
Post a Comment