21 April 2013
Street scenes from Edwardian England
This video displays vastly better images than conventional archival material, because it has been "motion stabilized" and the speed has been corrected from 18 to 24 frames per second by a computerized "frame interpolation." The music is "Chanson du Soir" and "Arco Noir" from Harvey's Strings of Sorrow album.
I recommend enjoying this in full-screen mode.
Via Metafilter, Nag on the Lake and Neatorama.
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Wonderful to watch people's varied reactions to the camera. The novelty of it is very apparent.
ReplyDeleteVery melancholy - I look at all those faces, particularly of the young men, and wonder how many of them were killed in WWI. Great Britain had a casualty rate (dead and wounded) of ~44% of it's 5 million+ forces (http://europeanhistory.about.com/cs/worldwar1/a/blww1casualties.htm).
ReplyDeleteIf the music had not been so haunting, would it have occurred to me?
I had a similar - though not so morbid - thought when I watched it the second time, pausing the video several times to wonder "what was that person's life like?"
DeleteI had exactly the same feeling. I was also surprised at the number of elderly people shown in the video, as life expectancy back then couldn't have been much out of the fifties.
DeleteLurker111
I think more must have died of the nineteenth century's greatest killer, infectious disease. Cholera, typhus, influenza, and diphtheria were the worst. It was actually not uncommon for people to live into their eighties. If you had a vigorous immune system, did not die in infancy of some horrid "modern" convenience like a pewter pacifier which contained lead, or of falling into the fire, and survived the four horsemen of infectious disease, and neither contracted puerperal fever nor any of the industrial diseases and accidents of the time, you might easily make it well past the Bible's threescore and ten. This is really captivating film.
DeleteI've spent too much time indoors watching the History Channel while all this rain clears out. I feel like I'm growing moss...
ReplyDeleteDid you noticed the rolling billboards between 1:11 and 1:15? There are two of them, being pushed.
ReplyDeleteAt least that is what I think they are. I can't see what other purpose those have.
I wonder why they don't that today?
Wikipedia: "It is important to note that life expectancy is an average. In many cultures, particularly before modern medicine was widely available, the combination of high infant mortality and deaths in young adulthood from accidents, epidemics, plagues, wars, and childbirth, significantly lowers the overall life expectancy. But for someone who survived past these early hazards, living into their sixties or seventies would not be uncommon. For example, a society with a life expectancy of 40 may have very few people dying at age 40: most will die before 30 years of age or after 55."
ReplyDeleteThus, "During the early 1600s in England, life expectancy was only about 35 years, largely because two-thirds of all children died before the age of four."
Thank you, I was just going to say that. Low average life expectancy means lots and lots of infant mortality and other early deaths skewing the average downward, not that people rarely lived past that age.
DeleteFascinating video, thanks for sharing it. It's interesting how normal everyone's body language and patterns of movement look. Modern movies set in the Edwardian era don't capture that, even.
Another factor to consider are both different norms as far as appearance and the factor of living harder lives.
DeleteIn the late Victorian period (Victoria died in 1905 IIRC), the fashion for women skewed towards the elderly and dowdy; and that would not really change until World War One. This means that many dresses from that period looked rather poor on young women, and actually made some of them look older then their actual years, and flattered older women, and far fewer women tended not to wear make-up.
Also, the harder lives that people lived back then, along with poorer medical care both meant that people aged quicker back then, and also looked older then a comparable individual of today.
Victoria died in 1901.
DeleteThis is one of my favorites. It is a fim of Market Street in San Francisco in 1905, just before it was wiped out by the 1906 earthquake.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NINOxRxze9k
It is very similar to the UK video shot above, but taken just a few year later. Same mix of early motorized vehicles, animal powered vehicles, bicycles, and pedestrians.
Strange to think how every single person in these images is dead.
ReplyDeleteI found myself wanting to believe that these were better times (as I am now at the stage of my life when it seems it can be true) but I didn't, I couldn't.
ReplyDeleteI'm discomforted by so many people; I'd thought that a modern affliction, but I was wrong there too.
I saw the English class system, the future promising, the beginnings of modernisation.
But them I saw it a second time, this time without the music, and saw people just like me.
What is the story with the hats - even the kids. Did no one rebel against the societal norm?
ReplyDeleteA horse-drawn bus was something I had never even considered existed.
ReplyDelete