Sun-Strokes E-Book

Schuyler Conway

• Herausgeber: Full Well Ventures
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

This article, "Sun-Strokes," from the January 1862 issue of The Knickerbocker magazine, describes early reaction to the invention of photography. 

Leseprobe

Sun-Strokes

© 2020 Full Well Ventures

Originally published in January 1862 issue of “The Knickerbocker” magazine

KNICKERBOCKER

‘Sun-Strokes’

by Schuyler Conway

NOW FOR a stroll through the rooms of the daguerreotypists of the town; through the ambitious ‘saloons’ of the Bowery, and the more pretentious galleries in Broadway, where the irrepressible itch for self-portraiture or sun-portraiture breaks out on the awning-posts, and on the fences, and along the halls, and at the doorways, and on the walls of every second or third house one meets; in the most extraordinary and truly surprising blotches and pustules and pimples; sometimes in the virulent form of a prodigious ‘full-length,’ more often in the less aggravated and less expensive, but equally eye-starting and malignant shape of a magnified ‘half-size,’ but commonly in the slightly exaggerated, or the really mild and comparatively diminutive miniature pimply type. This last modification of this peculiar disease or affection is not, it can be fairly and honestly and candidly assumed, owing to a lack of constitutional predisposition, or diathesis, as the doctors say, to the worst and most extravagant species of it; but to that chronic and generally incurable flaccidity and impecuniosity of the pockets, which, by some immutable and inflexible law of nature, or of social or political economy, seems bound to torture the greater part of mankind perpetually, although in this case, it must be admitted, that by a sort of compensatory or betterment law, which does not conflict with the one we have before alluded to, it acts as a powerful prophylactic, where a serious attack is threatened.

That we all have a tendency to this eruption, which no administration of sulphur and molasses, or any such diablerie or atrocity will eradicate, is as indisputable as the theological, orthodox dogma of our proneness to peccability. Like the whooping cough, the mumps, the measles, and other inevitable juvenile ills, which flesh and the rebel soldiers down at Manassas became heir to, in consequence of our grandparent’s pomological propensities to forbidden pippins, we are sure to have at least one attack of the complaint in our lives; and like the exceedingly disagreeable, inconvenient and sometimes noisy afflictions before mentioned, it usually, though not by any means invariably, comes on us in the happy, unalloyed and unamalgamated days of our precious youth and innocence, when our ideas of our inestimable selves particularly arc alarmingly original, fresh and altitudinous.