Papers by peter gilderdale
Back Story Journal of New Zealand Art, Media & Design History
I have previously explored the beginnings of the New Zealand Christmas card prior to 1883, and th... more I have previously explored the beginnings of the New Zealand Christmas card prior to 1883, and the ways that the designers of these cards negotiated the colonial experience of a summer Christmas.1 This paper examines the development, over the decade following 1883, of the chromolithographic work of A. D. Willis, whose production not only continued the work of creating a niche for New Zealand Christmas cards, but also tried to compete with the large overseas ‘art publishers’ who were flooding the New Zealand market with northern hemisphere iconography. Willis’s Christmas cards are frequently used to illustrate books looking at the 1880s, but there has been no detailed study done of them. The paper therefore documents the cards, their production and reception, explores how they record Willis’s understanding of the art publishing business and the market he was working into, and situates them in relation to broader print culture. Understanding this overlooked chapter in ‘commercial art’...
Back Story, 2017
In October 1883, just as New Zealanders began the annual ritual of buying seasonal tokens of este... more In October 1883, just as New Zealanders began the annual ritual of buying seasonal tokens of esteem to post overseas, Dunedin’s Evening Star, quoting local photographers the Burton Brothers, posed a question that had exercised immigrants for some years. “Does it not seem folly,” the paper asked “to send back to the Old Country Christmas cards which were manufactured there and exported hither?” This was a rhetorical question and the Evening Star went on to respond that “a few years since we should have replied ‘No’; but in view of the experiences of the last two years we say most decidedly, ‘Yes, it is folly.’” The newspaper, clearly, saw the period of 1881 and 1882 as pivotal in the establishment of a small but important industry, the New Zealand Christmas card business. My paper examines why these years are significant and what lies behind the debate, identifying a number of early cards and documenting the accompanying developments, primarily via the lens of newspaper advertising. The 1880s Christmas card may not have been an industry on the scale of lamb, but what it lacked in bulk it made up for in symbolism, providing a discrete window into the web of entangled emotional, commercial and design imperatives that attended the way immigrants imagined and constructed this important cultural celebration.
Early Popular Visual Culture, 2015
Early Popular Visual Culture, 2015
Journal of New Zealand Studies, 2016
For both Edwardian migrants and First World War soldiers, communicating home involved a choice as... more For both Edwardian migrants and First World War soldiers, communicating home involved a choice as to the appropriate emotional regimes to use. Should they display stoic reserve, or communicate sentimental feeling? Research on correspondence has normally focused on letters, but this paper examines how emotion was dealt with through the multimodal medium of the greetings postcard. It argues that whilst handwritten texts on postcards remained primarily stoic, the prepackaged visual vocabulary on greetings postcards allowed users to send strongly emotional arguments for the maintenance of their relationships without ever having to put these into their own words. Postcards, it seems, gave the Edwardians the option of being both stoic and sentimental.
PhD Thesis, 2013
Note: the full thesis can be downloaded from http://hdl.handle.net/10292/7175
"The Edwardian pos... more Note: the full thesis can be downloaded from http://hdl.handle.net/10292/7175
"The Edwardian postcard has been described as the Twitter of its age. Earlier regarded as an insignificant pop-cultural trifle, it has, over the last two decades, begun to receive serious academic attention. This attention has, however, been unevenly spread, and often relies on a forty-year-old narrative of the postcard’s history that locates the postcard as the product of a set of discrete occurrences within postal history.
This thesis argues that the lack of a contemporary, broadly contextualised history distorts our understanding of the postcard’s place within Edwardian society. It centres its critique around a genre of greetings postcard that is disadvantaged by the current approach: Hands Across The Sea (HATS). These multimodal cards’ designs normally contain the clasped hands symbol and utilise imagery and verse that is ostensibly old-fashioned, nostalgic and sentimental – qualities that sit uncomfortably within the academic tendency to frame the postcard as a quintessentially modern medium. Yet advertisements show that Edwardians within the British diaspora were prepared to pay up to six times more for these cards than for normal tourist views. This discrepancy between contemporary and Edwardian estimation of the card, it is argued, is itself significant.
To explain how the HATS card could be valued thus, the study fundamentally re-situates the history of the postcard, using a wide-ranging, contextualist approach that is both interdisciplinary and multi-methodological. It initially uses the heuristic of exploring the HATS phrase and symbolism to negotiate nineteenth century culture and to identify the connotations HATS carried for postcard users. Over the course of a century HATS would develop out of Anglo-Saxonist liberal discourse to be adopted by trade unions, and to rhetorically exemplify both Anglo-American and Colonial relationships. Culturally, however, its use in such areas as melodrama and the trade union emblem is shown to be of unexpected significance for postcard study.
Located primarily at the intersect between design history and history, the thesis draws on business history, sociology and anthropology to connect or reframe the postcard’s relationship to discourses such as taste, gift-giving, consumerism, collecting, anonymity, design, printing and material culture. The transnational Victorian print culture of lithographic ‘Art Publishing’, its business networks and its customers’ collecting practices, it turns out, all prefigured major aspects of the postcard’s development, most significantly via the Christmas card. The thesis then re-examines the history of the postcard, using new evidence from postcard retailing to posit three distinct historical waves of postcard fashion. Following view and actress card phases, the HATS card is shown to be a central element in a revitalisation of the greetings genre which occurred as Edwardians sought ‘better’ cards. A detailed study of six hundred HATS cards collected in New Zealand then examines the dynamics of a genre that played a key role in the transnational maintenance of family and friendship networks among immigrants. It explores how this popular cultural item evolved with no clear initiator, and challenges the middle-class attitudes to authorship, originality and the commonplace that have prevented recognition of HATS’ significance.
Ultimately, the thesis’s richly contextualised account of the trajectory of this entangled phenomenon aims to provide an improved historical underpinning for future postcard studies. In addition to showing that ‘Hands across the Sea’ represents a paradigmatic aspect of late Victorian and Edwardian culture, it concludes that the postcard’s history is emblematic of contradictory progressive and nostalgic currents that co-existed in Edwardian society, but that there is far more continuity with earlier practices and visual culture than the current postcard literature acknowledges.
"
Letter arts review, Jan 1, 2006
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Papers by peter gilderdale
"The Edwardian postcard has been described as the Twitter of its age. Earlier regarded as an insignificant pop-cultural trifle, it has, over the last two decades, begun to receive serious academic attention. This attention has, however, been unevenly spread, and often relies on a forty-year-old narrative of the postcard’s history that locates the postcard as the product of a set of discrete occurrences within postal history.
This thesis argues that the lack of a contemporary, broadly contextualised history distorts our understanding of the postcard’s place within Edwardian society. It centres its critique around a genre of greetings postcard that is disadvantaged by the current approach: Hands Across The Sea (HATS). These multimodal cards’ designs normally contain the clasped hands symbol and utilise imagery and verse that is ostensibly old-fashioned, nostalgic and sentimental – qualities that sit uncomfortably within the academic tendency to frame the postcard as a quintessentially modern medium. Yet advertisements show that Edwardians within the British diaspora were prepared to pay up to six times more for these cards than for normal tourist views. This discrepancy between contemporary and Edwardian estimation of the card, it is argued, is itself significant.
To explain how the HATS card could be valued thus, the study fundamentally re-situates the history of the postcard, using a wide-ranging, contextualist approach that is both interdisciplinary and multi-methodological. It initially uses the heuristic of exploring the HATS phrase and symbolism to negotiate nineteenth century culture and to identify the connotations HATS carried for postcard users. Over the course of a century HATS would develop out of Anglo-Saxonist liberal discourse to be adopted by trade unions, and to rhetorically exemplify both Anglo-American and Colonial relationships. Culturally, however, its use in such areas as melodrama and the trade union emblem is shown to be of unexpected significance for postcard study.
Located primarily at the intersect between design history and history, the thesis draws on business history, sociology and anthropology to connect or reframe the postcard’s relationship to discourses such as taste, gift-giving, consumerism, collecting, anonymity, design, printing and material culture. The transnational Victorian print culture of lithographic ‘Art Publishing’, its business networks and its customers’ collecting practices, it turns out, all prefigured major aspects of the postcard’s development, most significantly via the Christmas card. The thesis then re-examines the history of the postcard, using new evidence from postcard retailing to posit three distinct historical waves of postcard fashion. Following view and actress card phases, the HATS card is shown to be a central element in a revitalisation of the greetings genre which occurred as Edwardians sought ‘better’ cards. A detailed study of six hundred HATS cards collected in New Zealand then examines the dynamics of a genre that played a key role in the transnational maintenance of family and friendship networks among immigrants. It explores how this popular cultural item evolved with no clear initiator, and challenges the middle-class attitudes to authorship, originality and the commonplace that have prevented recognition of HATS’ significance.
Ultimately, the thesis’s richly contextualised account of the trajectory of this entangled phenomenon aims to provide an improved historical underpinning for future postcard studies. In addition to showing that ‘Hands across the Sea’ represents a paradigmatic aspect of late Victorian and Edwardian culture, it concludes that the postcard’s history is emblematic of contradictory progressive and nostalgic currents that co-existed in Edwardian society, but that there is far more continuity with earlier practices and visual culture than the current postcard literature acknowledges.
"
"The Edwardian postcard has been described as the Twitter of its age. Earlier regarded as an insignificant pop-cultural trifle, it has, over the last two decades, begun to receive serious academic attention. This attention has, however, been unevenly spread, and often relies on a forty-year-old narrative of the postcard’s history that locates the postcard as the product of a set of discrete occurrences within postal history.
This thesis argues that the lack of a contemporary, broadly contextualised history distorts our understanding of the postcard’s place within Edwardian society. It centres its critique around a genre of greetings postcard that is disadvantaged by the current approach: Hands Across The Sea (HATS). These multimodal cards’ designs normally contain the clasped hands symbol and utilise imagery and verse that is ostensibly old-fashioned, nostalgic and sentimental – qualities that sit uncomfortably within the academic tendency to frame the postcard as a quintessentially modern medium. Yet advertisements show that Edwardians within the British diaspora were prepared to pay up to six times more for these cards than for normal tourist views. This discrepancy between contemporary and Edwardian estimation of the card, it is argued, is itself significant.
To explain how the HATS card could be valued thus, the study fundamentally re-situates the history of the postcard, using a wide-ranging, contextualist approach that is both interdisciplinary and multi-methodological. It initially uses the heuristic of exploring the HATS phrase and symbolism to negotiate nineteenth century culture and to identify the connotations HATS carried for postcard users. Over the course of a century HATS would develop out of Anglo-Saxonist liberal discourse to be adopted by trade unions, and to rhetorically exemplify both Anglo-American and Colonial relationships. Culturally, however, its use in such areas as melodrama and the trade union emblem is shown to be of unexpected significance for postcard study.
Located primarily at the intersect between design history and history, the thesis draws on business history, sociology and anthropology to connect or reframe the postcard’s relationship to discourses such as taste, gift-giving, consumerism, collecting, anonymity, design, printing and material culture. The transnational Victorian print culture of lithographic ‘Art Publishing’, its business networks and its customers’ collecting practices, it turns out, all prefigured major aspects of the postcard’s development, most significantly via the Christmas card. The thesis then re-examines the history of the postcard, using new evidence from postcard retailing to posit three distinct historical waves of postcard fashion. Following view and actress card phases, the HATS card is shown to be a central element in a revitalisation of the greetings genre which occurred as Edwardians sought ‘better’ cards. A detailed study of six hundred HATS cards collected in New Zealand then examines the dynamics of a genre that played a key role in the transnational maintenance of family and friendship networks among immigrants. It explores how this popular cultural item evolved with no clear initiator, and challenges the middle-class attitudes to authorship, originality and the commonplace that have prevented recognition of HATS’ significance.
Ultimately, the thesis’s richly contextualised account of the trajectory of this entangled phenomenon aims to provide an improved historical underpinning for future postcard studies. In addition to showing that ‘Hands across the Sea’ represents a paradigmatic aspect of late Victorian and Edwardian culture, it concludes that the postcard’s history is emblematic of contradictory progressive and nostalgic currents that co-existed in Edwardian society, but that there is far more continuity with earlier practices and visual culture than the current postcard literature acknowledges.
"