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mods: Greece and Rome at the Crystal Palace classical sculpture and modern Britain, 1854-1936 Classical sculpture and modern Britain, 1854-1936 Nichols, Kate creator author. text bibliography Electronic books. History enk 2015 First edition. monographic eng remote 1 online resource (xiii, 305 pages) : illustrations (black and white) This book examines the debates that arose around the presentation of classical plaster casts to a mass audience at the Sydenham Crystal Palace, in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain. It uncovers the social, political, and aesthetic role of ancient Greek and Roman sculpture in Victorian and Edwardian culture, assessing how classical art and architecture figured in debates over design reform, taste, beauty and morality, race and imperialism. A study in classical reception, it draws on diaries, autobiographies, scrapbooks, and pamphlets to analyse audience responses to classical sculpture, and to suggest how these responses figured in contemporary popular and scholarly understandings of the Greek and Roman past. It demonstrates the vital life of classical sculpture for audiences beyond the Royal Academy, high art criticism, the Country House, and the University, and suggests that other less 'academic' locations ought to be taken seriously as chapters in the history of archaeology. Focusing on the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, it provides the first in-depth analysis of this popular entertainment venue in South London. This ephemeral, now vanished edifice offers an alternative history of museums to the received vision of order, chronology, and permanence typified by the British Museum. Foregrounding the close connection between entertainment and education at the Palace demonstrates a much longer history of the commercial 'heritage industry' usually associated with the 1980s. Leisure and learning. A new audience for Greece and Rome ; Showing off archaeological knowledge ; Reproducing Greece and Rome -- Sculpture and the benefits of good t…