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Author: David Waller Publisher: Victorian Secrets ISBN: 1906469253 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 290
Book Description
Eugen Sandow (1867-1925) was a Victorian strongman who was colossally famous in his day and possessed what was deemed to be the most perfect male body. He rose from obscurity in Prussia to become a music-hall sensation in late Victorian London, going on to great success as a performer in North America and throughout the British Empire. He was a friend to King Edward VII and was appointed Professor of Physical Culture to King George V. His physical culture system was adopted by hundreds of thousands around the world. He lost his fortune at the time of the First World War and he ended up being buried in an unmarked grave in Putney Vale Cemetery. There is lively interest in him on the web where his dumbells or chest-extenders sell for hundreds of pounds and an autographed photograph for thousands. Written with humour and insight into the popular culture of late Victorian England, Waller's book argues that Sandow deserves to be resurrected as a significant cultural figure whose life, like that of Oscar Wilde, tells us a great deal about sexuality and celebrity at the fin de siecle.
Author: David Waller Publisher: Victorian Secrets ISBN: 1906469253 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 290
Book Description
Eugen Sandow (1867-1925) was a Victorian strongman who was colossally famous in his day and possessed what was deemed to be the most perfect male body. He rose from obscurity in Prussia to become a music-hall sensation in late Victorian London, going on to great success as a performer in North America and throughout the British Empire. He was a friend to King Edward VII and was appointed Professor of Physical Culture to King George V. His physical culture system was adopted by hundreds of thousands around the world. He lost his fortune at the time of the First World War and he ended up being buried in an unmarked grave in Putney Vale Cemetery. There is lively interest in him on the web where his dumbells or chest-extenders sell for hundreds of pounds and an autographed photograph for thousands. Written with humour and insight into the popular culture of late Victorian England, Waller's book argues that Sandow deserves to be resurrected as a significant cultural figure whose life, like that of Oscar Wilde, tells us a great deal about sexuality and celebrity at the fin de siecle.
Author: John F. Kasson Publisher: Hill and Wang ISBN: 1429930039 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 373
Book Description
A remarkable new work from one of our premier historians In his exciting new book, John F. Kasson examines the signs of crisis in American life a century ago, signs that new forces of modernity were affecting men's sense of who and what they really were. When the Prussian-born Eugene Sandow, an international vaudeville star and bodybuilder, toured the United States in the 1890s, Florenz Ziegfeld cannily presented him as the "Perfect Man," representing both an ancient ideal of manhood and a modern commodity extolling self-development and self-fulfillment. Then, when Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan swung down a vine into the public eye in 1912, the fantasy of a perfect white Anglo-Saxon male was taken further, escaping the confines of civilization but reasserting its values, beating his chest and bellowing his triumph to the world. With Harry Houdini, the dream of escape was literally embodied in spectacular performances in which he triumphed over every kind of threat to masculine integrity -- bondage, imprisonment, insanity, and death. Kasson's liberally illustrated and persuasively argued study analyzes the themes linking these figures and places them in their rich historical and cultural context. Concern with the white male body -- with exhibiting it and with the perils to it --reached a climax in World War I, he suggests, and continues with us today.
Author: David L. Chapman Publisher: University of Illinois Press ISBN: 9780252020339 Category : Bodybuilders Languages : en Pages : 280
Book Description
Before Arnold Schwarzenegger, Steve Reeves, or Charles Atlas, there was Eugen Sandow, a muscular vaudeville strongman who used his good looks, intelligence, and business savvy to forge a fitness empire. The German-born Sandow (1867-1925) established a worldwide string of gyms, published a popular magazine, sold exercise equipment, and pioneered the use of food supplements. He even marketed a patented health corset for his female followers. Among the colorful figures who played a part in Sandow's life are Bernarr Macfadden, Florenz Ziegfeld, Lillian Russell, and others in sports and the theater. Sandow the Magnificent is the story of this first showman to emphasize physique display rather than lifting prowess. Sandow's is also the story of the earliest days of the fitness movement, and Chapman explains the popularity of physical culture in terms of its wider social implications. Sandow was a proponent of exercise to alleviate physical ailments, anticipating the field of physical therapy. By making exercise fashionable, he encouraged the fitness craze that still endures. As the first superstar in his field, Sandow also pried open some surprising cracks in the Victorian wall of prudery. His nude photographs, a kind of soft-core pornography, were anxiously sought by both male and female admirers, and after many of his major public events he gave private "receptions" wearing little more than a G-string.
Author: Edmond Desbonnet Publisher: McFarland ISBN: 1476687242 Category : Sports & Recreation Languages : en Pages : 471
Book Description
More than a century ago, the barrel-chested strongman clad in leopard skins, Roman sandals and carrying an oversized barbell was a common performer in fairs, circuses and vaudeville theaters. In 1911, before this phenomenon had disappeared, French gym owner, journalist and athlete Edmond Desbonnet published a colorful history of these mighty performers. Since he knew and interviewed many of these men (and women), Desbonnet was able to put a human face on the strongmen and strongwomen who made their livings by performing spectacular strength stunts for the entertainment of the public. Among these were super-strong athlete Louis Uni, known as Apollon; Eugen Sandow, the mighty Adonis of the stage; the great strongwoman Kati Sandwina Brumbach and many others who entertained audiences by lifting barbells, automobiles, horses and even elephants. Now translated to English and extensively annotated, The Kings of Strength records and preserves the biographies of more than 200 strength performers and bodybuilders from ancient times up to the early 1900s. The book provides a vital contribution to both theatrical and athletic history, while exploring the universal fascination with strength and muscular physiques.
Author: David Waller Publisher: Yale University Press ISBN: 0300139357 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 317
Book Description
Gertrude Tennant’s life was remarkable for its length (1819-1918), but even more so for the influence she achieved as an unsurpassed London hostess. The salon she established when widowed in her early fifties attracted legions of celebrities, among them William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli, Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain, Thomas Huxley, John Everett Millais, Henry James, and Robert Browning. In her youth she had a fling with Gustave Flaubert, and in her later years she became the redoubtable mother-in-law to the explorer Henry Morton Stanley. But as a woman in a male-dominated world, Mrs. Tennant has been remembered mainly as a footnote in the lives of eminent men. This book recovers the lost life of Gertrude Tennant, drawing on a treasure trove of recently discovered family papers--thousands of letters, including two dozen original letters from Flaubert to Tennant; dozens of diaries; and many other unpublished documents relating to Stanley and other famous figures of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. David Waller presents Gertrude Tennant’s life in colorful detail, placing her not only at the heart of a multigenerational, matriarchal family epic but also at the center of European social, literary, and intellectual life for the best part of a century.
Author: Maurice Leonard Publisher: Victorian Secrets ISBN: 1906469385 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 250
Book Description
Dame Clara Butt (1872-1936) was one of the most celebrated singers of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, a symbol of the glory of a Britain on whose Empire the sun never set. Standing an Amazonian 6'2" tall, Clara had a glorious contralto voice of such power that when she sang in Dover, Sir Thomas Beecham swore she could be heard in Calais. A friend of the royal family, Clara was made a Dame in recognition of her sterling work during the First World War. Her rousing performances of Land of Hope and Glory brought the nation together and raised thousands of pounds for charity. In the first biography since her death, Maurice Leonard tells Dame Clara Butt's remarkable story, from humble beginnings in Sussex, to her dazzling apotheosis by an adoring nation. With humour and insight, Leonard reveals the woman behind the cultural icon.
Author: David Waller
Author: David Waller
Author: David Waller
Author: John F. Kasson
Author: David L. Chapman
Author: Edmond Desbonnet
Author: Eugen Sandow
Author: Eugen Sandow
Author: David Waller
Author: Maurice Leonard
Author: Jessica R. Pliley