Concert Life in 19th-Century London
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For this project our ‘slice’ years are 1815, 1835, 1855, 1875, and 1895, which were deliberately chosen to ‘stand for’ their respective decades. Different issues emerged in our selection and treatment of the sources for each of these years, however, principally because of the explosion in print culture. So while at the beginning of the century it was possible to index the principal surviving newspapers, by the end of the period, we had to be far more selective and abandon ideas of comprehensive coverage. Sources consulted were as follows:
Definitions of what constituted a concert, and indeed what constituted
London, at each point in the century are somewhat blurred. Some
examples will serve to demonstrate this. Our working definition of
a concert has been:
We also have made a policy only to include performances that were a matter of public record. For more on issues of definition and for a detailed account of the database’s conceptual design click here [link to book article as pdf]. In Phase I we erred on the side of inclusiveness on the grounds that it was easier to capture and discard an event than to attempt to recapture it at a later stage. |
Our
methodology is based on a technique called ‘slice history’,
which was developed by a group of Australian social historians and involves
the deepest possible investigation of one-year slices of history, a generation
apart [
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