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Nineteenth century Archive
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Mistresses and marriage: or, a short history of the Mrs
Posted on May 22, 2013 | No CommentsThe word 'mistress' has a multi-layered history. Today, it generally refers either to a woman an illicit sexual relationship, or, more rarely, to someone who is in perfect control of her art. Both the sexual connotation and the inference of complete competencei date back to at least the later middle ages. -
Victorian and Edwardian Sporting Values
Posted on April 23, 2013 | No CommentsIt was understood that a boy's mind might be overtaken, if care were not taken, by one or both of the twin temptations that the cloistered life of the public school could give rise to - masturbation and homosexuality, the two great unmentionables of the Victorian age. -
The role of the laity in the Church of England, c. 1850-1885
Posted on April 7, 2013 | No CommentsThe initial hypothesis which I state and then set out to test and refine here is the hypothesis that lay membership of the Church of England during the Mid and late nineteenth century largely ceased to be an involuntary act and became, instead, a voluntary one. -
Irish journalists and litterateurs in late Victorian London, c. 1870-1910
Posted on April 6, 2013 | No CommentsThe above thesis is an examination of nineteenth century Irish literary emigration to London, with particular reference to the 1880s and 1890s. It begins with an exploration of the political, social, economic and cultural reasons, both in Ireland and Britain, why Irish writers, Catholic and Protestant, flocked to London, and especially Fleet Street, during this period. -
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. -
Dark Side of the Moon: Dickens and the Supernatural
Posted on March 30, 2013 | No CommentsDickens’s initiation into the genre of supernatural fiction may be attributed to his nanny Mary Weller about whom Dickens says ‘Her name was Mary though she had none on me’. -
Victoria’s Sovereign Obedience Portraits of the Queen as Wife and Mother
Posted on March 25, 2013 | No CommentsIn this essay I explore some specific ways in which Victoria's gender and marital status enabled such representations during the early part of her reign, simultaneously creating the appearance of limited female and monarchic power and expanding the monarchy's symbolic power and ideological influence. -
Making Darkness Visible Capturing the Criminal and Observing the Law in Victorian Photography and Detective Fiction
Posted on March 18, 2013 | No CommentsLike another remarkable Victorian visual apparatus, the camera, we might think of Holmes (and the "sharp-eyed" detectives he represents) as the literary embodiment of the elaborate network of visual technologies that revolutionized the art of seeing in the nineteenth century. -
Servants and hands: Representing the working classes in Victorian factory novels
Posted on March 17, 2013 | No CommentsMany of the middle-class readers who would have read Trollope’s novel probably shared the servants’ discomfort at the prospect of a “factory boy” in the midst of a middle-class home. Servants, of course, were an integral part of the familiar world these readers lived in; employing servants, in fact, has often been used by historians as the standard of middle-class status in Victorian England -
Dust Piles and Damp Pavements Excrement, Repression, and the Victorian City in Photography and Literature
Posted on March 11, 2013 | No CommentsAlthough to the Victorian social crusader such behavior was mentionable, it was not so to the novelist or photographer. Both Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend and Thomas Annan's Photographs of Old Closes and Streets of Glasgow brought imagery of human waste dangerously near to the drawing room, but only by employing evasive strategies. Much recent work in Victorian social history reminds us how omnipresent this subject matter must sometimes have seemed. -
“The Right Thing in the Right Place” P. H. Emerson and the Picturesque Photograph
Posted on March 11, 2013 | No CommentsBetween Emerson's theories of photography and his conceptions of landscape, however, that subject vanishes into the picturesque, the laborers themselves reduced to mythical, powerless creatures, faceless models of charming work. -
“Tell me a story, dear, that is not true”: Love, Historicity, and Transience in A. Mary F. Robinson’s An Italian Garden
Posted on March 8, 2013 | No CommentsThrough a poetic voice compelled to recognize that individual desire is often not reciprocated and that love entails great risk that is itself ennobling, Robinson explores the nature of love that is selfless in that one gives oneself to another, yet selfish in that one comes to need a totality of love not possible in a finite context. Paradoxically, then, love evokes both pleasure and pain. -
Reassessing Gilbert and Gubar: Women, Creativity, and Hopkins
Posted on March 5, 2013 | No CommentsGilbert and Gubar’s identification of Hopkins with Victorian sexism has undoubtedly influenced Hopkins studies. Since the publication of The Madwoman in the Attic, several Hopkins critics have speculated that the poet’s wish for ‘masterly execution’ appears to betray his own fear of becoming unmanly or effeminate in his art and life. -
My Secret Life and the Sexual Economy of Fin-de-Siècle England
Posted on March 4, 2013 | No CommentsAlthough in 1969 the memoirs were regarded as an obscene publication, they can be read as an important document of sexual history and will be treated as such in this paper. In doing so, it engages with but challenges earlier readings of My Secret Life. -
Slavery in the British Empire uncovered by new online database
Posted on February 28, 2013 | No CommentsHistorians from University College London have produced the first freely accessible database that showed who owned slaves in the British Empire. -
Excavation set to shed new light on London’s Victorian past
Posted on February 28, 2013 | No CommentsFrom a clay smoking pipe to Neolithic flint, a 19th Century garden has been revealing some of its secrets to an archaeological team from London's Kingston University. -
Paradise Observed: Taxonomic Perspective in Alfred Russel Wallace’s The Malay Archipelago
Posted on February 27, 2013 | No CommentsIn 1869, the Victorian naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace—co-founder with Darwin of the evolutionary theory of natural selection—published an account of the eight years he had spent in the Malay Archipelago. For a scientific travel narrative, the account opens in a surprisingly fairy-tale like manner. -
Re-orienting Victorian Studies: A European Perspective
Posted on February 27, 2013 | No CommentsAt the same time, however, the study of the relationship between the world of Victorian literature and culture and the context of Continental Europe remains firmly Anglocentric, or to be more precise Britocentric: both Continental Victorianists and Continent-conscious Anglophone critics tend to think about the relationship between Victorian Britain and Europe very much from within the context of English literary studies, relating their discoveries and analyses back to the conceptual frame of reference defined firmly in terms of the literary and cultural context of the British Isles, -
University of York to host conference on English physician John Snow
Posted on February 27, 2013 | No CommentsThe University of York is inviting the local community to join a special event commemorating the 200th anniversary of the birth of John Snow. -
Re-familiarizing Victorian Marriage
Posted on February 27, 2013 | No CommentsThis article will define the familiar marriage model, discuss its historical evolution, and explore its presence in Victorian fiction. What I want to suggest here is that the central plot of the Victorian novel, the marriage plot, is about love only inasmuch as love is a problem. As Victorian novels obsessively rehearse the clash between romantic and familiar marriage, we see a culture struggling to come to terms with the event that defined its subjects’ – above all, its female subjects’ – lives. -
All Shut Up: Carlyle and the Pursuit of Domestic Silence
Posted on February 26, 2013 | No CommentsThese two opposing visions of the home – as a form of super secure refuge, and as a mode of dizzying flux and tumult – were contained, however uncomfortably, within the same four walls. -
The Mysterious Miss Austen
Posted on February 25, 2013 | No CommentsFor the past two centuries, historians and literary scholars have attempted to solve the mystery that is Jane Austen’s life. How did a woman from a small village in Hampshire come to write six of the most beloved novels in the English language? -
‘A Hand Prepared to be Red’: Manliness and Violence on Britain’s Colonial Frontiers
Posted on February 25, 2013 | No CommentsOn the frontiers of Queensland and British Columbia in the mid-nineteenth century, a culture of violence prevailed. Frontier men accommodated violence in their lives as a routine and normal part of frontier living. The Victorian ethos of 'manliness' - the possession of essential virtues such as self-restraint, courage and strenuous effort - had within it the potential for violence. On the frontier the practice of manliness often entailed violence and the manly ethos could be distorted to justify and legitimise violent acts. -
The Spanish Ulcer: Napoleon, Britain, and the Siege of Cádiz
Posted on February 20, 2013 | No CommentsWhen the dust settled on the Napoleonic Wars, Cádiz held the distinction of being the only city in continental Europe to survive a siege by Napoleon. -
Trust your senses? An Introduction to the Victorian Sensorium
Posted on February 14, 2013 | No CommentsIt is not surprising to find such a wide divergence of opinion on the value and veracity of sensory experience in the nineteenth century. In an era of rapid industrialization, urbanization and increasing democratization, the Victorian sensorium was under assault as never before. -
Sensate Detection in Wilkie Collins’s The Law and the Lady
Posted on February 14, 2013 | No CommentsMore importantly, however, I want to demonstrate through a close reading of The Law and the Lady how this novel brings the two genres into such close alignment that emotion and imagination, sensate subjective categories, rather than objective analysis and facts, become the unlikely investigative tools by which any particular case is solved. -
Emotional Intertexts: Female Romantic Friendship and the Anguish of Marriage
Posted on February 11, 2013 | No CommentsIn the decades after the path-breaking work of Lillian Faderman and Caroll Smith- Rosenberg, critical energy was largely directed to questions of the compatibility of female romantic friendship with marriage and the contested erotic content of inter- female intimacy. -
Hysteria and Femininity: A Tentative Investigation into a Victorian and Edwardian Myth
Posted on February 10, 2013 | No CommentsBased on the medical narratives of various hysterical women shown in fictional and operatic texts, it meticulously discusses Anglo-American feminist scholars and their French counterparts’ different responses to and interpretative strategies for the same texts, calling for the integration of these two perspectives——a meaningful fusion of humanity and philosophy, essentialisation and romanticisation in ultimately deconstructing the patriarchal myth. -
The Non-Elite Consumer and ‘Wearing Apparel’ in Herefordshire and Worcestershire, 1800-1850
Posted on February 8, 2013 | No CommentsHow clothing was obtained, how supply networks for clothing were used by such consumers, and how consumers perceived their clothing and its relationship with fashion. -
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. -
Taste, Appreciation and the Study of Literature: F.D. Maurice, R.G. Moulton and the Extramural Effect
Posted on February 6, 2013 | No CommentsAspects of what might be termed the pre-history of extramural literary education have been traced by Franklin Court in the lectures delivered by Adam Smith and Hugh Blair at the Universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow in the second half of the eighteenth century. -
Fragments of the Modern City: Material Culture and the Rhythms of Everyday Life in Victorian London
Posted on February 4, 2013 | No CommentsIn this article we explore the potential of material evidence to generate new understandings of everyday life in the Victorian metropolis. -
“The Ablest Man in the British Army” The Life and Career of General Sir John Hope
Posted on February 4, 2013 | No CommentsThousands of books have been written about the England’s war with France during the Napoléonic Era; however, very few of these books highlight the life and career of General Sir John Hope. -
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. -
“The army isn’t all work”: Physical culture in the evolution of the British army, 1860-1920
Posted on February 4, 2013 | No CommentsBetween the Crimean War and the end of WWI the British Army underwent a dramatic change from being an anachronistic and frequently ineffective organization to being perhaps the most professional and highly trained army in the world. -
From the Unusual to the Banal: the Archaeology of Everyday Life in Victorian London
Posted on February 3, 2013 | No CommentsWhat do we know about everyday life in Victorian London? At one level, it would seem we know an awful lot. Few cities have generated such lively interest among historians and there is no shortage of contemporary accounts of the 19th-century metropolis. -
Living in Victorian London: The Clay Pipe Evidence
Posted on February 2, 2013 | No CommentsFour small fragments of clay pipe stem were found in context [5]. Despite attempts to date pipes by their stem bore, this remains an inadequate system at best, and fragments of this kind are almost impossible to date at all closely. Given the associated finds, it is highly likely that they are contemporaneous, unless residual or intrusive. -
Preserving Knowledge Through Popular Victorian Periodicals: An Examination of The Penny Magazine and the Illustrated London News, 1842–1843
Posted on February 1, 2013 | No CommentsThis study is based upon a detailed empirical study of every weekly issue of both of these periodicals for a period of twelve months between May 1842 and May 1843. -
Policy-Making on the Victorian British Empire: British Imperialism 1837-1901
Posted on February 1, 2013 | No CommentsQuestion: “Far from being exceptionally aggressive and masterful, the rulers of Victorian Britain were generally reluctant imperialists.” How justified is this view? -
Pride and Prejudice celebrates 200th anniversary
Posted on January 30, 2013 | No Comments'In retrospect, we can see that Pride and Prejudice marks a beginning for the modern novel, with its domestic focus, its slight plot, and in its flawed heroine, the funny and loyal, opinionated and brave Elizabeth Bennet, a distinct personality.' -
Wellington’s Two-Front War: The Peninsular Campaigns, 1808-1814
Posted on January 30, 2013 | No CommentsIn the spring of 1808, Britain faced a strategic dilemma. Since the beginning of the Revolutionary Wars in 1793, Britain had spent enormous sums of money to subsidize four unsuccessful coalitions against France and had failed in all of their attempts to defeat the French on land. -
Actresses As Working Women In the Victorian Theatre
Posted on January 30, 2013 | No CommentsVictorian performers were an unusual socioeconomic group. Unlike other professionals they were recruited from all classes of society. While some performers demonstrated that hard work and sheer talent could overcomeany class disadvantages, there were others who spent their entire careers in poverty... -
The Power of Desire and the Danger of Pleasure: Victorian Sexuality Reconsidered
Posted on January 20, 2013 | No CommentsThese revisionist accounts provide a much needed corrective in our view of Victorian sexuality. Unfortunately, corrective exercises all too often produce their own simplifications. These revisionist accounts have, I believe, replaced the popular stereotype of the repressed Victorian with an overly sanguine, modem image. -
‘Looking as Little Like Patients as Persons Well Could’: Hypnotism, Medicine and the Problem of the Suggestible Subject in Late Nineteenth-Century Britain
Posted on January 15, 2013 | No CommentsDuring the late nineteenth century, many British physicians rigorously experimented with hypnosis as a therapeutic practice. -
Victorian Fashion: a Middle Class Makeover
Posted on January 14, 2013 | No CommentsThe early era denoted the change from regency fashions, shift dresses gathered in an empire waist below the breast in fabrics such as chiffon, that favored lithe figures for women and extreme tailoring and ornate accessories for men. -
Promoting the Pint: Ale and Advertising in late Victorian and Edwardian England
Posted on January 8, 2013 | No CommentsNineteenth-century brewers displayed more creativity when it came to advertising their wares than they have been given credit for by the trade’s historians. -
Lessons from history: asylum patients’ Christmas experience
Posted on December 24, 2012 | No CommentsWhile it may be claimed that contemporary practice offers drug treatments and a wide range of therapeutic interventions unimaginable 150 years ago, it could also be argued that for all the advances in care and treatment the quality of life that patients experienced in the 19th century was, to some extent, superior. -
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? -
Spectacular Sympathy Visuality and Ideology in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol
Posted on December 21, 2012 | No CommentsA Christmas Carol (1843) is arguably Dickens's most visually evocative text. In its detailed attention to and elaboration of surfaces, its reliance on contrasts between darkness and light, its construction as a series of scenes (a structure reproduced in the images the spirits exhibit to Scrooge), and particularly its engagement with a dynamic of spectatorial desire...