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W riting of the Midway at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, contemporary observer Julian Ralph declared: will be ajumble of foreignness ... bit of Fez and Nuremberg, of Sahara and Dahomey and Holland, Japan and Rome and Coney Island. It will be gorgeous with color, pulsating with excitement, riotous with the strivings of battalion of bands, and peculiar to the last degree (qtd. in Hinsley 351).' What sort of aesthetic governs a bit of Fez and Nuremberg ... Rome and Coney Island? What is meant by the combination of the adjectives gorgeous, pulsating, riotous, and peculiar? Why the desire to have these sensations stirred by fragments of the exotic and familiar? Thackeray's Mr. Molony expresses sensations similar to Ralph's when viewing the sublime musayum of London's Great Exhibition of 1851:
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Meg Armstrong (1992) studied this question.
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