Pottery Tales and Readings

In Bourbonnais, IL a reading of Jane Eyre:

Thursday, Jan. 18
"Jane Eyre" Book Club, 6 p.m., Bourbonnais Public Library, Cardinal Conference Room. Reading chapters 1-15 of "Jane Eyre" by Charlotte Bronte and discussing them. Info. thebigbookproject.wordpress.com. (Via Kankakee Daily Journal)
March 2018: Chapters 16-27
May 2018: Chapters 28-38

And an alert from the New York Ceramics & Glass Fair 2018 (Bohemian National Hall, New York):

Thursday, January 18
12 noon
“Pot(tery) Tales in Victorian Painting and Literature”—Dr. Rachel Gotlieb, Adjunct Curator, Gardiner Museum in Toronto.
There is a wealth of information to be gleaned by deciphering ceramics in Victorian art and literature. This richly illustrated presentation shows how English Genre, Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic artists, as well as novelists Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Anthony Trollope charged their pottery and porcelain with deep metaphorical meanings to heighten the narrative for the public to interpret. Crockery in the cupboard, on the mantel, the table or the floor represented popular motifs, exemplifying topical issues that touched on hygiene, faith, temperance and etiquette. Broken and empty vessels stood for despair and neglect, and personified “fallen” women. Alternatively, platters and cups filled with food, drink and flowers signified happiness and domesticity. Specific objects, especially jugs, were coded by color, size, form, and location to demarcate gender and virtue, whereas the ubiquitous blue willow plate ignited the social divisions of the time: on the one hand serving as a lightening rod of bad taste and lower class and on the other hand embodying national pride of English manufacturing, nostalgia and domesticity, only to be embraced and adopted in the mania for blue-and-white china. This talk explains how depictions of ceramics played a central role moralizing and decorating Victorian society.
Dr. Gotlieb is the 2017 Theodore Randall International Chair in Art and Design at Alfred University in Alfred, New York, and was previously the Gardiner’s chief curator and interim executive director. She is currently writing a book titled Ceramics in Victorian Literature and Painting: Meanings and Metaphors.