File talk:18th-century-anti-sex-education.jpg
Dating[edit]
User:Churchh seems to think that this engraving dates from the 18th century. I have corrected it to early 19th, but he has reverted the change. I was following the librarians of Congress who date it as
- CREATED/PUBLISHED: [1802?]
and classify it under:
- Women--Social life--England--London--1800-1810.
- Women--Education--England--London--1800-1810.
- Wax figures--1800-1810.
- Galleries & museums--England--London--1800-1810.
- Human life cycle--1800-1810.
FORMAT:
- Satires (Visual works) British 1800-1810.
- Etchings 1800-1810.
I didn't dispute the dating for the fashion depicted since I don't really know and it seems probable that early-19th people might dress in the fashion of the earlier decade. I only changed the dating of the work. It may well be that Churchh is right and the LoC is wrong, but they should provide their arguments before questioning well-meaning contributions. --84.20.17.84 13:17, 30 August 2007 (UTC)
The Library of Congress people know much more than I ever will about technical details of bibliography, early publishing practices, and categorization and classification to fit within the categories of a pre-specified cataloging standard. However, they're hardly infallible, and they seem to follow a kind of production-line schedule, with limited time allocated for the individual consideration of any one particular image -- and it's by no means the case that the LoC employee who deals with an image is any kind of expert in the particular subject matter portrayed in that specific image. I started the female sections of the en:1750-1795 in fashion and en:1795-1820 in fashion Wikipedia articles, and it has been said on my user page for over a year that "Many images I've uploaded are listed in Category:1790s fashion, in Category:1800s fashion (decade), and in Category:1810s fashion." So if there's one thing I know, it's the difference between early 19th-century and what is not early 19th-century -- and this image (18th-century-anti-sex-education.jpg) is not early 19th century. I would swear in a court of law with one hand on the Bible that the clothing styles in this image date from before 1790, at the least (probably more than a decade earlier, in fact). And if a woman had walked in an English city of the "early 19th-century" wearing the same clothes as are worn by the leftmost woman in this image (the one looking at the side-table), then a crowd of jeering small boys would have followed her wherever she went in the streets, while many adults would have considered her a suitable candidate for a lunatic asylum.
The suggestion that this image was first published in the early 19th century, but depicted the clothing styles of 20, 30, or 40 years earlier (which were radically different from the then-current styles) really doesn't make too much sense -- the whole idea of the image is to satirize contemporary decadence, so the point would have been lost if archaic styles were shown. In any case, early 19th-century caricaturists weren't always very accurate when attempting to depict pre-1790 18th-century clothing styles, as you can see at Image:1807-pseudo1740_Fashion-contrast_Bombazine-pun.jpg . Also, early 19th-century caricatures almost always had publisher information near the bottom, while this one doesn't seem to. The only possible relevance that the year 1802 could have to this image was if the 18th-century metal plate had survived unmelted-down as late as 1802, and someone had printed out a new copy of the print from the metal plate. However, this was not at all commonly done for old engravings without any special historical or artistic value, and I very much doubt that any shrewd publisher of 1802 would have thought that a 30-year old caricature would have been able to turn a significant profit in 1802... Churchh 21:41, 30 August 2007 (UTC)
