Harp Making in
Late-Georgian London
At the end of the eighteenth century, after the French Revolution, the centre of pedal-harp making moved from Paris to London. There, building on the work of its Bavarian originators and Parisian developers, mainly immigrant makers elevated the instrument to new musical, technical, and decorative heights, and placed it in the hands and salons of the British upper classes and aristocracy. Until recently, the story of harp making in England has been dominated by the Erard family who built about 7,000 of an estimated 15,000 harps made in London during the nineteenth century; some 20 other makers have been all but forgotten.
This book, the story of harp making in late-Georgian England, assesses the role and consumption of the harp in society whilst describing its decorative and technical development. Forgotten makers and their innovations are identified. Through the lens of newly discovered documents and the reinterpretation of others, Jacob Erat's manufactories are reconstructed. His working methods, illustrative of those used in the wider industry, are rediscovered, and employees and suppliers are revealed anew.
ISBN: 9781527265110
428 pages
Price: £60
Harp Making in
Late-Georgian London
At the end of the eighteenth century, after the French Revolution, the centre of pedal-harp making moved from Paris to London. There, building on the work of its Bavarian originators and Parisian developers, mainly immigrant makers elevated the instrument to new musical, technical, and decorative heights, and placed it in the hands and salons of the British upper classes and aristocracy. Until recently, the story of harp making in England has been dominated by the Erard family who built about 7,000 of an estimated 15,000 harps made in London during the nineteenth century; some 20 other makers have been all but forgotten.
This book, the story of harp making in late-Georgian England, assesses the role and consumption of the harp in society whilst describing its decorative and technical development. Forgotten makers and their innovations are identified. Through the lens of newly discovered documents and the reinterpretation of others, Jacob Erat's manufactories are reconstructed. His working methods, illustrative of those used in the wider industry, are rediscovered, and employees and suppliers are revealed anew.
ISBN: 9781527265110
428 pages
Price: £60
Ghosts of County Cork gathers forty stories once told beside the hearths of the county’s farms, villages, and towns — tales of haunted houses, storm-beaten islands, and the narrow ground where the living and the dead meet, memories of fear passed from one generation to the next.
But this is more than a collection of ghost stories. It is a portrait of a county where landscape and memory are inseparable, and where ghosts are rarely simple figures of terror. More often they are signs of unfinished business: grief that outlived a mourner, an unpaid debt, an unrighted wrong.
Atmospheric and rooted in the voices of ordinary people, Ghosts of County Cork preserves a haunting inheritance from Ireland’s southernmost county — one that still waits at the bend of a road, or in a light across the water.
Ghosts of County Cork gathers forty stories once told beside the hearths of the county’s farms, villages, and towns — tales of haunted houses, storm-beaten islands, and the narrow ground where the living and the dead meet, memories of fear passed from one generation to the next.
But this is more than a collection of ghost stories. It is a portrait of a county where landscape and memory are inseparable, and where ghosts are rarely simple figures of terror. More often they are signs of unfinished business: grief that outlived a mourner, an unpaid debt, an unrighted wrong.
Atmospheric and rooted in the voices of ordinary people, Ghosts of County Cork preserves a haunting inheritance from Ireland’s southernmost county — one that still waits at the bend of a road, or in a light across the water.