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The Treatment of Disability in 19th and Early 20th Century Children’s Literature
Posted on March 31, 2013 | No CommentsIn many books, disability, where it occurs, and its cure are associated with character. Cure may result directly from a healthier attitude to life, often implying a voluntary relinquishment of the disabled role. -
Charles Dickens’s A Child’s History of England and Spain
Posted on March 30, 2013 | No CommentsTrue to his didactic interests, Dickens’ idea was to allow not only his son to learn the history of his country in the way that his own father wanted him to know it, but to convey a particular authoritative viewpoint as to how English youths should learn the history of their country, that is, with an England-centred bias. Literary criticism has not been kind with Dickens’s incursion into children’s and youngster’s historiography and has not therefore been too generous in terms of appraisal. -
Empty Hands and Precious Pictures: Post-mortem Portrait Photographs of Children
Posted on February 7, 2013 | No CommentsThis essay asks what kinds of comfort might be found in a photograph of a dead child, and in it I seek to place the post-mortem portrait photograph in the context of the Victorian emotional, material and visual culture of death. -
Boys’ Adventure Magazines and the Discourse of Adventure, 1860-1885
Posted on February 7, 2013 | No CommentsRecent cultural critics have cited adventure magazines as tools—of a ruling class frightened of the increasingly powerful underclasses; or of the Imperial establishment; or of a middle class dead set on imposing its narrow racist, patriotic, Evangelical, superior, manly, anti-virtually-everything-not-it attitude on impressionable working- and lower middle-class boys. -
The Development of the English Board Game, 1770 – 1850
Posted on February 4, 2013 | No CommentsIt is known from surviving records, paintings and artifacts that games of the period (and today) are played in a similar way to those of ancient civilisations in the near and far east. There are only a few basic methods of playing games and over the past 250 years many thousands of variations have been created. The basic methods of play come down to four types – race games, strategy games, table games and card games. -
With This Ring, I Surrender: Politics, Religion, and Marriage in Shakespeare and Tudor England
Posted on February 1, 2013 | No CommentsThe ideas I wish to explore are the overarching themes of politics, religion, and marriage in the Turor period under the rule of King Henry VIII from 1509 to 1547. The popular opinion of the period on Henry VIII's behavior can be seen in William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, Measure for Measure, and Henry VIII. -
Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Ermine: Elizabeth I’s Coronation Robes and Mothers’ Legacies in Early Modern England
Posted on January 8, 2013 | No CommentsThe first part of this essay explores how many links between mothers and children were therefore conceived through—even created by—mate- rial goods. -
Victorian Christmas
Posted on December 25, 2012 | No CommentsThe Victorian era has long been associated with an idealized vision of Christmas. Where did this modern notion originate? -
A Victorian Christmas in Hell: Yuletide Ghosts and Necessary Pleasures in the Age of Capital
Posted on December 22, 2012 | No CommentsWhat would a post-Victorian Christmas look like after capitalism? Is it even possible, or desirable, to exorcise our Victorian Christmas ghosts? -
Image versus Text in the Illustrated Novels of William Makepeace Thackeray
Posted on December 7, 2012 | No CommentsThe case of Thackeray is different, more interesting, and ultimately more suggestive. Here is an artist who developed as caricaturist-illustrator and novelist simultaneously. -
Hot Holiday Reads!
Posted on November 23, 2012 | No CommentsGreat reads & holiday ideas! -
LANT STREET, SOUTHWARK, IN THE MID NINETEENTH CENTURY
Posted on October 9, 2012 | No CommentsIn the nineteenth century, the main industries of the Borough included “leather working, printing and bookbinding, hat making, wharves, warehousing, food processing and engineering”.3 Many of the heads of household of Lant Street in 1851 were employed in these industries. -
Infanticide in Victorian England, 1856-1878: Thirty legal cases
Posted on September 15, 2012 | No CommentsTo combat this lack of modern memory of infanticide,it will be the purpose of this work to make a contribution to the understanding of the motives of the men and women who committed the crime in the nineteenth century and of those who commit it today -
“Telling Outrageous Marvels”: Henry Morley’s Baroque Victorian Fairy Tales
Posted on September 3, 2012 | No CommentsA man intensely involved in the issues of his time—already by 1859 having been a physician, schoolmaster, journalist, and college lecturer—Morley brought to his work a keen social conscience balanced by an equally assertive fancy bordering on anarchic glee. The classic tension in children's literature between the urges to delight and to instruct is writ large in his corpus. -
“A Right Sort of Man”: Gender, Class Identity, and Social Reform in Late-Victorian Britain
Posted on September 3, 2012 | No CommentsBecause of a lack of consensus among policymakers on the education issue, school fees were not eliminated until 1891, and compulsory attendance did not become national policy until 1880. -
Gender Equality in Wage Labour Relations: the example of statutory regulation in late medieval and early Tudor England
Posted on September 2, 2012 | No CommentsThe first question, not yet raised in labour historiography, is about the impact of wage labour relations on gender equality. The second question is related to the first one: what role did women play as protagonists of wage labour relations. -
The early modern demographic dynamic : celibates and celibacy in seventeenth-century England
Posted on August 20, 2012 | No CommentsBut by failing to investigate shifts in the nature and extent of celibacy from a more holistic perspective, historians have also failed to appreciate the overall impact of a rise in the proportion of lifelong celibates on the economy, society and culture of Tudor and Stuart England. -
Good Reads for the Dog Days of Summer
Posted on August 18, 2012 | No CommentsSee summer off with these fun reads! -
The Tale of Charles Perrault and Puss in Boots
Posted on August 14, 2012 | No CommentsPerrault’s stories are a high point in a fashion for telling fairy stories that grew up at the court of Versailles and in the literary salons of Paris. -
Little Red Riding-Hood
Posted on August 14, 2012 | No CommentsThe history of the tale of Little Red Riding-Hood from Charles Perrault's manuscript of 1695, via illustrated editions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to the present day. -
Victorian Governesses: A Look at Education and Professionalization
Posted on April 4, 2012 | No CommentsVictorian governesses found themselves central to the debate of ideal womanhood because of their roles as educators and workers. Governesses and others concerned with the conditions of governesses endeavored to professionalize that career by embracing and taking part in the movement for higher female education and the advancement of women in other fields of work. -
Imagining the pain and peril of seventeenth-century childbirth: travail and deliverance in the making of an early modern world
Posted on March 26, 2012 | No CommentsAlice Thornton’s accounts of the pains and perils of childbirth, including this passage on the birth of her fifth child, have attracted the attention of a number of recent historians as particularly detailed and evocative examples of personal testimony to the experience of giving birth in the early modern period. -
The Wife’s Administration of the Earnings’? Working-Class Women and Savings in the Mid-Nineteenth Century
Posted on March 15, 2012 | No CommentsThe late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw a range of proposals for ways to improve the condition of the poor by stimulating savings. Institutions that encouraged and rewarded thrift would, it was argued, reduce dependence in old age on the Poor Law: the industrious would be rewarded for their good habits and the idle and vicious would suffer if required to rely on their own exertions rather than on public assistance. -
The protestant idea of marriage in early modern England
Posted on February 14, 2012 | No CommentsThe English conduct book writers, themselves from the first generation of married pastors, saw it as their task to model the patriarchal family afresh for this new world. -
A Mechanized Society in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times
Posted on February 7, 2012 | No CommentsMy choice of writing about mechanization is not only to describe how this mechanization of the society is but, to show the importance of fancy and fiction in the life of people. -
The importance of Charles Dickens in Victorian social reform
Posted on February 7, 2012 | No Comments...While the likes of Victorian thinkers such as Marx, Mill, Carlyle, and Ruskin to name but a few,formulated the ideas of and laid the groundwork for social reform in the 19th c., it was in reality men like Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy who pointed out through their various novels, the abuses of the Industrial Age in Victorian England. -
Constructions of Infanticide in Early Modern England: Female Deviance During Demographic Crisis
Posted on January 31, 2012 | No CommentsNewborn child murder may have been rare in early modern England, but there is little doubt that it happened. Evidence of it exists in the judicial records, as it was criminalized by the legal code. -
Victorian Governesses : A Look at Education and Professionalization
Posted on January 27, 2012 | No CommentsHistories and fictions explore the lives of Victorian governesses. The governess appeared lonely, depressed, and unwanted, yet thousands of women entered the profession. Victorian governesses experienced changing social and economic conditions. -
Imagining the pain and peril of seventeenth-century childbirth: travail and deliverance in the making of an early modern world
Posted on January 23, 2012 | No CommentsAlice Thornton’s accounts of the pains and perils of childbirth, including this passage on the birth of her fifth child, have attracted the attention of a number of recent historians as particularly detailed and evocative examples of personal testimony to the experience of giving birth in the early modern period. -
An ideal woman : literary, parliamentary, and sexual representations of model femininity in mid-Victorian England
Posted on November 18, 2011 | No CommentsMiddle-class women of the Victorian era experienced isolation from various aspects of society, in favor of removal to the “woman‟s sphere” of hearth and home. -
For ‘the younge and very poore children of Norwich’: A Study of Anguish’s Children’s Hospital
Posted on November 15, 2011 | No CommentsThis dissertation also highlights the often underrated role of the individual in cases of private philanthropy. -
Elfland Revisited: A Comparative Study of Late Twentieth Century Adaptations of Two Traditional Ballads
Posted on October 24, 2011 | No CommentsElfland Revisited: A Comparative Study of Late Twentieth Century Adaptations of Two Traditional Ballads Giebert, Stefanie PhD Dissertation, Philosophy, University of Trier, (2009) Abstract Once upon a time there was... -
The Madonna and the Whore: The Victorian Wife and the Victorian Prostitute, a Collision of Virtue and Vice
Posted on October 4, 2011 | No CommentsThe Madonna and the Whore: The Victorian Wife and the Victorian Prostitute, a Collision of Virtue and Vice Coressel, Patti Lourdes College Online Narrative History Journal, Volume 9 (2011) Abstract... -
The Victorian Child, c. 1837-1901
Posted on October 4, 2011 | No CommentsThe Victorian Child, c. 1837-1901 Gubar, Marah (University of Pittsburgh) The Representing Childhood Project (2005) Abstract In 1799, children’s author and educator Hannah More reacted against the revolutions that had...