JVC Online Blog

Itinerants and Travellers in the Nineteenth Century

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1841 was the year of the second national British census. It was also the year that Charles Dickens completed the serial publication of The Old Curiosity Shop and published it in book form. Less famously, 1841 saw the appearance of a two-volume travelogue called The Zincali: An Account of the Gypsies of Spain. The author was the little-known George Borrow (1803-1881). In the 1820s and 1830s, Borrow traveled extensively through England, France, Germany, Spain, Morocco, and Russia. His official business,

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Resource: the Charles Dickens Illustrated Gallery

Digitizing the Victorians

Available at CharlesDickensIllustration.org, the Gallery contains over 2000 free-to-use illustrations for teachers, educators or creatives to do whatever they like with, taken from the most significant illustrated editions of Dickens’s works up to 1912 (the centenary of his birth). The project launched about 18 months ago now, with just the original illustrations (about 700 images), and now also features the illustrations from the Household Edition, Library Edition, and the ‘Pears’ Centenary Edition of the Christmas Books.

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“Willows whiten, aspens shiver”: A Reading of Affects in Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shalott”

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Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shalott’1 creates an anachronistic medieval ambience by borrowing the mythical figures of Dame Elaine of Astolat and Lancelot, the feudal settings of Camelot, and the manorial island of Shalott. As a complex blend of medieval and Victorian motifs, it also creates an interesting intersection between medieval and Victorian affects. This essay brings to the fore the constructedness of affects as social artefacts in the poem, which become embedded in a network of material or

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A Royal Seal of Approval: P. T. Barnum in Europe

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On a cold February day in 1844, a small group of travellers disembarked their ship at the port of Liverpool in England. There was no welcoming party, no bands nor banners, and the visitors slipped silently away to their hotel. Amongst them were the American showman P. T. Barnum and his protégé Charles S. Stratton, known as General Tom Thumb. Both were little-known in England at that time, but this would mark the beginning of a three-year-long tour of the

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Conflict as a Means of Emancipation: Female Agency and Resistance in ‘North and South’

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‘North and South’ by Elizabeth Gaskell uses the Industrial Revolution as a catalyst to delve into questions about female agency and the themes of female resistance. Indeed, class conflict and gender dynamics are intertwined throughout the novel in order to reveal how women negotiate the oppressive structures of their society. Gaskell reveals, through the experiences of the key female characters – Margaret Hale, Bessy Higgins, and Mrs. Thornton – that, quite often, emancipation comes through conflict, where women can assert

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‘I wear men’s lives’: The Maternal Femme Fatale in R. Murray Gilchrist’s ‘The Crimson Weaver’

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Robert Murray Gilchrist (1868-1917) was a prolific writer who, over the course of his career, produced 22 novels and nearly 100 short stories. His fiction is notable for the way in which he blends together Gothic and Decadent influences to create uniquely strange stories that, according to critic and Gilchrist editor Dan Pieterson, anteceded the Cosmic Weird of Lovecraft.[1] He was certainly recognised and praised to a certain degree by his literary contemporaries. H.G. Wells ranked him among such successful

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Mary Barton and the Politics of Translation in Maoist China

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Mary Barton occupies a special place in the history of English author Elizabeth Gaskell’s Chinese reception. It was the only Gaskell work to be translated into Chinese in Maoist China, and one of the most valued pieces of British literature at that time because of its direct engagement with sociopolitical themes of class conflict and labor struggles. The Chinese translation of Mary Barton was printed three times by different publishing houses during the Mao years and was included in the

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Commemorating the Crimean War: The Provenance and Symbolism of a British Medal of 1856

Exhibitions, Other, Victorians on Display

With the exception of the Great Exhibition of 1851, and its long ‘afterlife’ following the relocation at Sydenham of the glass-and-iron Crystal Palace which housed it, perhaps no other event during the Victorian era engendered such an extensive and varied material culture as the Crimean War (1854-6).[1] Medallists, ceramists, artists, and others commemorated the age-defining conflict fought by the allies – Britain, France, the Ottoman Empire, and Piedmont-Sardinia – against Russia in a cornucopia of objects, many of which survive

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Symbolism and Censorship in Aubrey Beardsley’s ‘Portrait of Himself in Bed’

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At 22 years old, Aubrey Beardsley was in the midst of one of the most prosperous periods of his short life, thanks to regular employment with the quarterly artistic and literary periodical The Yellow Book (fig. 1). For the journal’s third volume, published in October 1894, Beardsley created an illustration entitled Portrait of Himself in Bed (fig. 2).[1] This drawing was printed using the line block technique, which necessitated his use of only black and white, with no middle tones.

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