-
‘Girls are Wanted More Than Men’: A Gendered Experience of Child Migration in the Mid-Nineteenth Century Journal of Victorian Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-08-16 Jillian Southart
On Christmas Day 1848 the Ramillies left England bound for Port Adelaide, Australia, carrying amongst its passengers a group of girls from London’s ragged schools and Marylebone Workhouse. An incidence of brutal punishment to which some of the girls were subjected on board ship went unreported in the British press at the time but became the subject of a heated debate in Parliament 12 months later.
-
The ‘wilds of Brompton’: Mapping Nineteenth-Century Women Writers’ Early Careers in the Sociable London Suburbs Journal of Victorian Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-07-13 Karen Bourrier, Dan Jacobson, John Brosz
In this paper, we geocode the residences of nineteenth-century Brompton residents to the level of the building in order to argue that literary sociability and propinquity – leading to face-to-face interaction with writers, editors, artists, actors, and publishers – may have played a more important role in the formation of women’s literary careers than scholars have yet recognized. Taking the popular
-
Mechanics Institutes in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Victoria: Racial Difference and Liberalism in the Settler Colony Journal of Victorian Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-07-11 Leigh Boucher
In the second half of the nineteenth century, mechanics institutes proliferated across the Australian colonies at such a rate that, by 1900, they were more widespread, proportional to population, than in Britain. This article examines the first 30 years of their development in colonial Victoria to offer a new interpretation of their deep entanglement with settler colonial liberalism. As in Britain
-
Take me to the River: Sophie Anderson and Elaine of Astolat Journal of Victorian Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-05-07 John McLoughlin
Sophie Gengembre Anderson (1823–1903) is not a painter of considerable critical acclaim; her work has been largely disregarded by art history and criticism, charged on the often-fatal count of sentimentality and lumped in with the kinds of ‘kitsch’ art rejected by modernism and its descendants. Despite this, her work continues to sell – at multi-million-dollar auctions and printed on cheap paraphernalia
-
The Jew in the Jamaican, the Amalgam in the Attic: A New View of Bertha Mason in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre Journal of Victorian Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-01-30 Shanee Stepakoff
In this essay, I extend the existing scholarship on the character of Bertha Mason Rochester by providing historical and textual evidence that Brontë represents Bertha’s ethnocultural background as an amalgam of Jamaican, Jewish, and Creole. In support of this thesis, I examine passages focusing on Bertha’s father and brother, and I describe the cultural meanings of Spanish Town (Jamaica) and Madeira
-
A New Woman Dialogue with Aestheticism and Decadence: Netta Syrett’s Short Stories for The Yellow Book Journal of Victorian Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-01-05 Lucy Ella Rose
Focusing on critically neglected works by prolific writer Netta Syrett (1865–1943), this article reveals her New Woman dialogue with aestheticism and decadence in her early short stories written for the iconic 1890s periodical The Yellow Book: primarily, ‘A Correspondence’ (1895) and ‘Far Above Rubies’ (1897). Together they trace Syrett’s increasingly assertive voice and navigation of the period’s
-
Alienated Heroines in Basil, Lady Audley’s Secret, and East Lynne: A Jaeggian Reading Journal of Victorian Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2024-01-04 Rui Qian
While the term ‘alienation’ is frequently mentioned in criticism of sensation fiction, there is a lack of a stringent definition of this term. This article aims to address this gap with a focused examination of the depiction of alienation in three sensation novels, Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) by M. E. Braddon, East Lynne (1861) by Mrs Henry Wood, and Basil (1852) by Wilkie Collins. Borrowing a critical
-
Amelia B. Edwards and Romantic Egyptology Journal of Victorian Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-11-12 William Bainbridge
Amelia B. Edwards (1831–1892) was renowned for her profound mastery of Egyptology, possessing a knowledge some said surpassed that of her male counterparts. Her archaeological endeavours in Egypt merged with a vivid narrative approach, evident in seminal works such as A Thousand Miles up the Nile (1877) and her captivating lectures across Britain and America. This harmonious blend of meticulous observation
-
Sir John Gardner Wilkinson (1797–1875) in Turkish Dress, at Thebes: The Self-Fashioning of an Antiquarian Egyptologist Journal of Victorian Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-11-06 Robert Frost
In recent years, there has been considerable interest in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cultural practice of Britons wearing indigenous dress, as well as debate as to what motivated people to re-fashion their identity in such radical ways. Typically, these practices have been viewed either as acts of cultural appropriation, or occasionally as acts of solidarity with other cultures. This article
-
“I didn’t know there were so many kinds of people and so many sorts of provincialism in the world’’: Tracking Provincialism Through the Nineteenth-Century Corpus Journal of Victorian Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-11-06 Helen Anne O’Neill
Beginning with a full text search for the term ‘provincialism’ across all entries in the OED Online, this article tracks ‘provincialism’ through the digitized fiction of the nineteenth century, eavesdropping on the ways in which the term was used in a dataset of references drawn from 165 nineteenth-century novels brought together from the British Library 19th Century Collection and the Hathi Trust
-
The Folklore of Evolution in Andrew Lang’s Writings Journal of Victorian Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-10-23 Anna McCullough
This article builds upon Bernard Lightman and Peter Bowler’s works on the non-Darwinian nature of Victorian evolution, arguing that while their arguments helpfully reorient our understanding of evolution’s historiography, they underestimate the diversity of evolutionary theory in the Victorian era. Victorian evolution was highly idiosyncratic, as each individual (scientist, author, or reader) interpreted
-
Erskine Nicol and the representation of national and religious identities in nineteenth-century Ireland Journal of Victorian Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-10-14 Niamh NicGhabhann
This article investigates the visual representation of Irish Catholicism in mid-nineteenth century genre painting through a close analysis of St Patrick’s Day (1856), a picturesque genre painting by the Scottish artist Erskine Nicol. In doing so, it will explore why artists like Nicol, Frederic William Burton and others chose to equate Irish rural Catholicism with romantic ideas of nature and outdoor
-
‘An Industrial Revelation’ – The Political Apocalyptic in Gaskell’s North and South Journal of Victorian Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-09-01 Joseph M Otero
This essay examines the religious contents of Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1854–1855 novel, North and South, within the context of Apocalyptic literary traditions from Antiquity, and in the literary and historical contexts accessible to Victorians. Inviting this comparison is the character Bessy Higgins, a terminally ill factory seamstress who quotes the Book of Revelation and reports prophetic dreams of some
-
‘Be a gen’l’m’n and a Conserwative Sammy’: Political Remediations of the Pickwick Papers in the Provincial Press (1836–1837) Journal of Victorian Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-08-08 Katie Holdway
: Throughout its serial run, Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers (1836–7), was repurposed hundreds of times by the provincial press. From acting as innocuous filler material to making strategic political statements, provincial newspaper editors evoked, excerpted and adapted Pickwick as quickly as Dickens was penning the instalments, showing a keen responsiveness to political topicalities relevant to
-
Trick of the Eye: Prospect Gazing, Illusion, and the University Novel Journal of Victorian Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-08-06 Jordan Lewis Bunzel
Literary critics often cast the English university novel as a traditionalist relic of the nineteenth century, one largely defensive of Oxbridge classics and masculinity. Yet the subgenre was a more subversive cultural nexus of sorts: an attempted reconciliation of novel form with the era’s emerging and optically illusive technologies. These Bildungsromane, largely or exclusively set at universities
-
Florence Nightingale and the Provincial Response to the Crimean War Journal of Victorian Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-08-02 Jonathan Godshaw Memel
Florence Nightingale rose to fame early in 1855 at a time when provincialism was assuming unprecedented importance in Victorian culture. The London papers The Times and the Illustrated London News linked Nightingale to the typically provincial domain of the parish and the home: her public image reflecting the wish to extend domestic comfort to soldiers, adrift on foreign land and neglected by uncaring
-
Middleness: Provincial Fiction and the Aesthetics of Dull Life Journal of Victorian Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-07-27 Ruth Livesey
This article argues that the rise of the provincial novel in Britain during the 1860s set loose a radically democratizing aesthetic of everyday discriminations. The article suggests – through examples from the works of Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot – that provincial fiction embodies an aesthetics of what is termed ‘middleness’: a means of reading in which the social, cultural and geographical
-
Provincialism at Large: Reading Locality, Scale, and Circulation in Nineteenth-Century Britain Journal of Victorian Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-07-26 Ruth Livesey
This introduction situates the contributions to the New Agenda in the context of an apparent resurgence of the term ‘provincial’ and ‘provincialism’ in Britain since the Brexit debates and the 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum. It takes the resurgence of provincial thinking as an invitation to explore the cultural history of provincialism in Victorian Britain and the unexpected
-
Palatable Bugs for the Victorians: Entomophagy, Class and Colonialism in Vincent M. Holt’s Why Not Eat Insects? Journal of Victorian Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-06-20 Elodie Duché
Entomologists and proponents of insect food have often seen in Vincent M. Holt’s Why Not Eat Insects? (London: Field & Tuer, 1885) the work of a precursor. Holt’s plea to consume insects in Victorian Britain, as an aid to address food poverty and diversify Western diets, certainly resonates with the environmental and social predicaments of the twenty-first century. However, the text and the context
-
‘A slashing review is a thing that they like’: Vivisection and Victorian Literary Criticism Journal of Victorian Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-06-12 Asha Hornsby
In nineteenth-century Britain, the antivivisection movement attracted a striking number of authors, poets, and playwrights, who attended meetings, signed petitions, contributed funds, and lent their pens to the cause. However, the language of vivisection extended far beyond literature with a purpose, seeping into the heart of late-Victorian literary debates. This article explores analogies of writing
-
Disraeli and the Bible Journal of Victorian Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-06-08 Megan Dent
Benjamin Disraeli has often been represented as a mercurial self-fashioner who adopted various expedient personae over the course of his public life. The biographical emphasis on his eccentric personality has caused many historians to distance Disraeli from his nineteenth-century intellectual contexts in their analysis of his thought. Disraeli wrote within a literary culture that remained invested
-
‘Meeting Together in an Equal and Friendly Manner’: The Workplace Literary Culture of Lancashire Mutual Improvement Societies Journal of Victorian Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-05-13 Lauren Weiss
This article traces the progress of mutual improvement in the coalfields around Aspull beginning in the 1870s and culminating with the opening of the Garswood Hall Collieries Institute in 1893. It analyses this process in relation to Patrick Joyce’s account of the development of industrial paternalism in Lancashire. It shows how mutual improvement societies were formed primarily on the initiative of
-
‘A great pedestrian’: John Stuart Mill, the Walking Philosopher Journal of Victorian Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-04-29 David Stack
Walking was an essential part of John Stuart Mill’s education, working life, and leisure. As a boy, James Mill schooled his son on daily walks; as an adult, Mill made an 11-mile round trip across London on foot to work and back each day; for recreation he went on walking tours; his passion for botany led him to walk regularly in rural Britain; later in life he undertook walking tours across France
-
Learning ‘The Customs of their Fathers’: Irish Villages in Chicago’s Columbian Exposition, 1893 Journal of Victorian Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-04-12 Shahmima Akhtar
This article examines how a transnational vision of Ireland was created in the United States by two philanthropic women in Chicago’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. Lady Aberdeen and Alice Hart each used accessible images of Ireland and the bodies of white exhibited women to authenticate their narrative of dying rural industries that needed to be revived. Their specific visions of Irish development and
-
The Photographs of A. B. Ovenstone and the Reinvention of the Scottish Amateur Tradition Journal of Victorian Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-04-10 Lindsay Blair
This paper sets out to establish a contextual understanding of the body of work created by the little-researched amateur photographer Andrew Begbie Ovenstone (1851–1935) and to problematize the status of the Victorian amateur photographer in the Scottish Photographic tradition. Whilst acknowledging the generally accepted ‘social documentary’ characteristics of the Scottish photographic tradition, this
-
‘Circumstances Sufficiently Appalling to the Country People’: Suicide Burial in Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Grave by the Handpost’ Journal of Victorian Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-04-08 Jacqueline Dillion
Thomas Hardy’s 1897 short story, ‘The Grave By the Handpost,’ set in early nineteenth-century Dorset, explores the custom of suicide burial at the crossroads before the practice was outlawed in 1823. The story, which draws from family history, local accounts, and articles in the Dorset County Chronicle, tells of a widowed sergeant who feels forsaken by his son, and in a state of despair, takes his
-
Bodily-Material Culture Techniques in the Spaces of the Devotional Revolution Journal of Victorian Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-03-31 Lisa Godson
This essay addresses how new procedural knowledge was promoted during the devotional revolution in nineteenth-century Ireland, particularly in relation to bodily-material culture techniques. It argues that a more orthopraxic physical disposition was a significant aspect of the experience and practice of Catholicism, and suggests ways of thinking about that in relation to religious imagination and space
-
“I have loved, O Lord, the beauty of thy house’: Magnificence and Catholic Architecture in Ireland, 1850–1900 Journal of Victorian Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-03-31 Niamh NicGhabhann
This article explores the deliberate invocation and communication of ideas of ‘magnificence’ by Catholic building projects across Ireland between 1850 and 1900. Through an analysis of the rhetoric and discourse surrounding the construction of three case studies in Tipperary, Limerick, and Armagh, the article identifies shared concerns with articulating architectural magnificence through drawing attention
-
The Best Developed Man in Great Britain and Ireland? Eugen Sandow and the Commercialization of Eugenics in Twentieth-Century Britain Journal of Victorian Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-03-27 Conor Heffernan
In 1901 Eugen Sandow, a strong man performer turned health authority, hosted a competition in the Royal Albert Hall to determine the ‘best developed man in Great Britain and Ireland’. At the contest, members of the public, the military, and the scientific community watched as Sandow and his judges compared men’s physiques. Typically depicted by historians as a pivotal step in the development of bodybuilding
-
Self-Fashioning Illusions: Twinship, Subjectivity, and Neo-Victorianism in Christopher Priest’s The Prestige Journal of Victorian Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-03-04 Elisavet Ioannidou
Examining the conflicting approaches to the fragmentation of the self and the feasibility of self-awareness featured in Christopher Priest’s novel The Prestige (1995), this article reflects on the evaluation, and subsequent reinvention, of the Victorian era in the genre commonly known as neo-Victorian fiction. Alfred Borden, the novel’s Victorian protagonist, fashions himself as a unique and unified
-
Women, Home, and Alcohol: Constructed Façades and Social Norms in Nineteenth-Century Polish and British Representations of Female Drinking Practices Journal of Victorian Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-02-16 Dorota Dias-Lewandowska, Pam Lock
Drinking practices are closely connected to human geography. No matter whether we choose to drink in public, private, or secretly, where we drink is closely connected to how and what we drink. Alcohol-related behaviour by women, enacted at home, can undermine or challenge social norms. However, the transgressive nature of drinking could lead to physical exile or the masking of women’s desire for self-determination
-
Walter Pater and Non-Darwinian Science Journal of Victorian Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-01-14 Jordan Kistler
Walter Pater’s engagement with nineteenth-century science has long been acknowledged, but critics have often characterized it in negative terms. This essay demonstrates that while Pater viewed Darwinian evolutionary theory negatively, insisting that it ‘stealthily withdraws the apparently solid earth itself from beneath one’s feet’ (Plato and Platonism, 1893), he embraced non-Darwinian theories of
-
Religion Pays: The Business of Art Industry Entrepreneurs and Splendour in the Spaces of Nineteenth-Century Irish Catholicism Journal of Victorian Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2023-01-14 Caroline M McGee
During the nineteenth century legislative reforms and religious revival in Ireland brought about significant change in the practice and position of Catholicism. This fostered a consumer revolution in religious art and architecture as architects, religious figures and a Catholic bourgeoisie aspired to recreate the architectural magnificence and status associated with Catholic churches of the medieval
-
Workers’ Responses to Paternalism in British Factory-Based Events (1840–1860) Journal of Victorian Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-12-15 Fabienne Moine
Opportunities to celebrate the success of the firm, its leaders and, by extension, its employees, were numerous in the mid-Victorian period: banquets, dinners and outings, annual gatherings, pleasure trips and excursions, processions around the mills, or ceremonies directly related with the employer’s family. The purpose of this paper is to analyse some of these large communal events organized in textile
-
Locating the Backstage of Victorian Religion: Spaces of Irish Catholicism Journal of Victorian Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-12-14 Sarah Roddy
This introduction to the ‘Spaces of Irish Catholicism’ Roundtable argues that applying the concept of ‘space’ to nineteenth-century Irish Catholicism has the potential to offer significant new insights to our understandings of Irish Catholicism and the lives of ordinary Irish Catholics, but also to Victorian Studies and religious history more generally. In particular, it contends that the nature of
-
Queer for Art: Tennyson’s Poetic Autonomy as Female Same-Sex Desire Journal of Victorian Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-12-01 Margaret Speer
This article argues that in ‘The Lady of Shalott’, and later, to lesser degree, in In Memoriam, Alfred Tennyson expresses artistic autonomy by a Renaissance poetic trope of female same-sex desire. He does so to do away with the aesthetic closure and separation from the world implied by lesbianism in the Renaissance poetic imaginary. Via readings of these two poems, as well as historical and biographical
-
‘[D]onning the Garb of a Pit Girl again’: Imagining the ‘Pit Brow Lassie’ in Late-Victorian Fiction Journal of Victorian Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-11-17 Mike Sanders
This article analyses various representations of the figure of the ‘pit brow lassie’ with a particular emphasis on two novels; Frances Hodgson Burnett’s That Lass O’ Lowrie’s (1877) and John Monk Foster’s A Pit Brow Lassie (1889). It argues that pit brow women provided a focus for discussions of the interplay of class and gender roles in Victorian Britain. The article begins by tracing the history
-
Experiencing Léotard’s Sensational Body: Risk, Morality and Pleasure above the British Stage Journal of Victorian Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-11-03 Kate Holmes
Early 1860s responses to Jules Léotard’s innovative solo flying trapeze performances span pleasure and excitement to provoking claims of immorality related to risk that seem strange today. I examine the relationship between risk, morality and pleasure in Léotard’s celebrity using newspaper reports and imagery, demonstrating how his celebrity reveals changing attitudes to the body. Audiences evaluated
-
Seen through Deep Time: Occult Clairvoyance and Palaeoscientific Imagination Journal of Victorian Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-10-12 Richard Fallon
Dating from the middle of the nineteenth century, prominent paranormal researchers in Britain and the United States began to claim that they could see through time. Using clairvoyant powers, they proposed to solve the mysteries of geology and palaeontology, not least by filling in the missing links in the evolution of life. This article explores the literary outputs of these figures, with an especial
-
Addressing the Machine: Victorian Working-Class Poetry and Industrial Machinery Journal of Victorian Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-10-12 Kirstie Blair
This article explores the representation of machinery by industrial workers in the Victorian period, and argues that their writings have a qualitatively different literary approach to machinery than that found in the work of established Victorian authors. It uses little-known poems by Scottish and Northern working-class writers to investigate how they use language and form to reflect upon the place
-
Pugilism in Petticoats: Women and Prize-Fighting in Victorian Britain Journal of Victorian Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-09-28 Grace Di Méo
Prize-fighting culture in the Victorian period was a male-dominated arena. As such, women’s involvement in pugilism – save for their role as spectators – has been largely overlooked by historians. This article casts light on the neglected experiences of nineteenth-century female prize-fighters, drawing attention to the ways in which women engaged in pugilism as well as the methods used by reporters
-
Remembering Hodson’s Horse: Commemoration and the Indian Uprising of 1857–58 Journal of Victorian Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-09-25 Jim Cheshire
This article presents analysis of the memorial to William Hodson in Lichfield Cathedral, designed by George Edmund Street between 1859 and 1862, focusing on the iconography of the monument and way that it was influenced by Muscular Christianity and ecclesiology. The attitude of Hodson and his brother George Hodson, who commissioned the monument, is examined through analysis of the publication that
-
Immediate Accidents and Lingering Trauma: Railwaymen Poets, Danger, and Emotive Verse Journal of Victorian Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-09-16 Oliver Betts
This paper examines the work of a group of Railwaymen Poets, whose verse has been collected as part of the Piston, Pen and Press project. It explores their writings both as part of an emerging theme of accident and loss poetry surrounding the railways in Victorian culture but also more specifically as interrelated texts produced by workers sharing common experiences. Whilst many wrote about all manner
-
The Imperturbable Seriousness of the Circus Buffoon: The Shakespearean Clown on the Threshold of Modern Comedy Journal of Victorian Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-08-29 Peter K Andersson
Around the middle of the nineteenth century, there arose a type of circus performer in England called ‘Shakespearean clowns’. These clowns constituted a transitory figure between the age of Georgian pantomime clowns and the establishment of the typical circus clown in the later part of the century. One of the more neglected representatives of the genre was James Clement Boswell, who enjoyed a brief
-
Taste in North and South Reconsidered: A Case for Attention to Downward and Lateral Mobility in the Victorian Novel Journal of Victorian Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-08-27 Claudia Carroll
This article argues for attention to downward and lateral vectors of class mobility in the Victorian novel by pointing out how such attention can allow us to rethink conventional readings of the genre’s ideological normativity. A reconsideration of the role of taste in Gaskell’s North and South reveals that the novel represents taste not an inherent sign of Margaret and John Thornton’s superiority
-
‘Buy Cheap, Buy Dear!’: Selling Consumer Activism in the Salvation Army c. 1885–1905 Journal of Victorian Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-08-09 Flore Janssen
This article examines how the late nineteenth-century Salvation Army used consumer activism as a fundraising strategy, an impetus towards social change, and a means of consolidating its visible presence in public and domestic settings. It argues that the Salvation Army was unique in its combination of its own production systems with the creation and capture of an unusually far-reaching activist market
-
Political Censorship on the Late-Victorian Stage: Rereading Oscar Wilde’s Vera; or, the Nihilist[s] Journal of Victorian Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-08-05 Sondeep Kandola
The publication in 2021 of the Oxford English Texts version of Oscar Wilde’s Russian melodrama Vera; or, the Nihilist (1883), based, as it is, on new archival research by its editor Josephine Guy, deepens the mystery surrounding the alleged censorship of Oscar Wilde’s first play. While Wilde himself promoted the idea that the expression of democratic ideals in his Nihilist play had prevented its performance
-
Pox, Prose, and Prostitution: Masculine Anxiety, the Myth of the Male Author, and the Late-Victorian ‘Exchange Economy’ in George Gissing’s New Grub Street Journal of Victorian Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-08-05 Stephen Whiting
George Gissing’s friend and fellow novelist, H. G Wells, would remember the ‘last decade of the nineteenth century’ as ‘an extraordinarily favourable time for new writers’(H. G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries of a Very Ordinary Brain, Volume II (Since 1866) (London: Gollancz, 1934), p. 506.). His experience fits neatly with the myths of the successful Victorian male author that were
-
Sculpture and Faith at St Paul’s Cathedral, c. 1796–1913: Introduction Journal of Victorian Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-07-26 Marjorie Coughlan, Jason Edwards, Greg Sullivan
In our introduction, we establish the original conference context of the 15 following position papers, emphasizing that the papers represent a conversation between participants, each of whom had been allocated a single monument from St Paul’s Cathedral in the period between c. 1796 and 1913, to think about the memorial’s visual and material richness and complexity, as well as its immediate and wider
-
Catherine Helen Spence’s Autobiography: Literary Culture and Associational Life in Nineteenth-Century South Australia Journal of Victorian Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-07-26 Fariha Shaikh
This article examines Catherine Helen Spence’s Autobiography through the lens of settler colonial sociability. It argues that Spence strategically depicts associational life in the Autobiography to showcase for her readers a version of organized settler colonial sociability that envisages a role for White, middle-class urban women in the construction and expansion of settler colonial Australia. Spence’s
-
‘A Library of Our Own Compositions’: The Minervian Library and Children’s Social Authorship in Victorian Orkney Journal of Victorian Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-07-09 Kathryn Gleadle, Beth Rodgers
This article examines the Minervian Library, an extraordinary collection of children’s manuscript stories produced in mid-Victorian Orkney. Established in 1866 by sisters Mary and Clara Cowan and their cousin Isabella Bremner, the collaborative project had ambitions beyond its beginnings as a family literary endeavour: the girls envisaged a working library complete with membership and borrowing records
-
Ecumenism to Ontology: Stoker’s Theology of the Host Journal of Victorian Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-07-07 Madeline Potter
Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula is replete with religious symbolism, from devotional objects to sacred imagery. Despite the novel’s theological richness, little has been written on Stoker’s theology, and most criticism has focused on interpreting the novel as an affirmation of either Anglicanism or Catholicism. Building on Alison Milbank’s argument in God and the Gothic, this essay shows how Stoker’s theology
-
Performing the Self through Orientalizing the Kurds in Isabella Bird’s Journeys in Persia and Kurdistan Journal of Victorian Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-06-05 Farah Ghaderi, Himan Heidari
This article fleshes out the various ways Isabella Bird performs the self in her travel account, Journeys in Persia and Kurdistan (1891), mainly in her engagement with the Kurdish people. Deploying Judith Butler’s theory of performativity of gender, we argue that travel writing is empowering for Bird because it offers her a viable platform to perform a variety of selves through which she can voice
-
‘Medical Popes’ and ‘Vaccination Protestants’: Anti-Catholicism and the Campaign against Compulsory Vaccination in Victorian England Journal of Victorian Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-06-05 Aidan Cottrell-Boyce
The anti-vaccination campaign of the late nineteenth century has attracted the attention of historians in recent decades. The campaign against compulsory vaccination for smallpox gained the support of hundreds of thousands of people in Victorian Britain. Many objected to vaccination on scriptural grounds. Many others claimed that it was contradictory to their belief in mesmerism, Swedenborgianism or
-
Killing the Letter: Alternate Literacies and Orthographic Distortions in Jude the Obscure Journal of Victorian Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-06-01 Louise Creechan
When Jude the Obscure (1895) was published as a single volume novel, Hardy added the biblical epithet ‘the letter killeth’ to the title page. In Jude and across his works, Hardy revels in moments in which literacy seems to undo itself. This article traces Hardy’s attempts to ‘kill the letter’ through non-standard engagements with orthography as part of a larger proto-modernist approach that destabilizes
-
Performing Plainness in Sarah Stickney Ellis’s Friends at Their Own Fireside: Or, Pictures of the Private Life of the People Called Quakers Journal of Victorian Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-06-01 Mona Albassam
While Quaker plainness has encapsulated multiple positive meanings such as piety, worldliness and even human equality, many were attentive to its rootedness in social discipline and surveillance. Drawing on nineteenth-century assessments of Quaker plainness, both in journals and fiction, this article explores the dynamics of self-fashioning and performance that are exposed to be an important part of
-
Humbug and a ‘Welsh Hindoo’: A Small History of Begging, Race and Language in Mid-nineteenth Century Liverpool Journal of Victorian Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-05-31 Martin Johnes
In 1849, a Liverpool newspaper printed a letter about an encounter with a lascar who was selling hymn sheets. The same newspaper had recently reported the arrest of someone similar for drunkenness and the letter writer, a migrant from Wales, confronted the hymn seller angrily in Welsh. To his surprise, the man responded in the same language and eventually confessed to being from Anglesey rather than
-
‘A man greatly beloved’ and Immortalized in opus sectile Powell & Sons, Monument to Robert Claudius Billing (1899) Journal of Victorian Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-05-31 Jasmine Allen
The alabaster wall monument to Robert Claudius Billing, Suffragan Bishop of Bedford, placed in the crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral, commemorates the life and service of a Victorian cleric known for his work in the overcrowded parishes of east London. Supplied by Powell and Sons, a London-based glassmaking firm that made stained glass and mosaics as well as reredoses and tablets, the monument echoes the
-
A Vishnu-Come-Lately: John Bacon’s Monument to William Jones (1799) Journal of Victorian Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-05-17 Sarah Monks
This article considers John Bacon’s marble monument to one of eighteenth-century British colonialism’s most important protagonists, William Jones (1746–1794). A prodigious scholar of Indian languages, religions, and laws, as well as a Supreme Court judge in Bengal, Jones epitomized early orientalism, promoting the study of Indian cultures as a means of facilitating the East India Company’s ‘governmental’
-
Sculpture, Faith, and the Many Worlds of Victorian Sculpture: W. F. Woodington, Genesis (1862) Journal of Victorian Culture (IF 0.2) Pub Date : 2022-05-14 Kate Nichols
This roundtable comment piece raises questions about the significance of materials, subject matter and form, and location and display to interpretations of W. F. Woodington’s 1862 Genesis panel at St Paul’s Cathedral. The panel was commissioned as an adjunct to the Wellington Memorial, and depicts the conclusion of the first military engagement in the Bible, the Battle of the Vale of Siddim. It features