De Moderne Tijd - Volume 3, Issue 2, 2019

The representation and reception of power at the inauguration of William iii after the constitutional reform of 1848

In recent years, historians have shown how royal rituals were a major site for legitimating and contesting power in Europe’s long nineteenth century. This article calls for attention to cases with a more ambiguous political meaning and function. It analyses how the Dutch King William III’s 1849 inauguration ceremony represented the new political order following the far-reaching 1848 constitutional reform. The ceremony was planned surprisingly hastily without much attention to political events and lacked symbolical value, especially compared to other countries. Although the tradition of inauguration was organized and perceived as a ritual of political transition, it ultimately had little long-term political impact.

The Amsterdam wax museum as a competitor of the illustrated newspaper, 1882-1919

The nineteenth-century wax museum can be viewed as a contemporary mass medium that showed people scenes from the news. The Nederlandsch Panopticum was the first of its kind in the Netherlands, located in Amsterdam between 1882 and 1919. As an informative visual medium, the Panopticum had to compete with other media, like the illustrated newspaper, for the attention of the public. At the same time, the wax museum also depended on photographs published in these same papers: wax models were often, and in the course of time almost exclusively, modelled after photos. This reciprocal relationship can be seen as an example of ‘intermediality’. In the end, the wax museum lost ground, foremost, to the new mass medium of the time, cinema, which took over both as an urban attraction and as a popular visual medium.

In Dutch literary culture of the first half of the twentieth century, intellectual elite and general public were not only separate, but even opposite categories. ‘Highbrow’ and ‘middlebrow’ held polarized positions in matters of cultural hierarchy and literary taste, which led to fierce debates. Strikingly, one author was able to bridge this gap: Arthur van Schendel (1874-1946) appealed both ends of the spectrum and thus had an exceptional, connecting role in the cultural divides of the interwar period. This article analyses the responses to Van Schendels so-called ‘Dutch novels’ in order to find out what made Arthur van Schendel highly valued by leading professionals as well as loved by the reading audience.