JVC Online Blog

The JVC Graduate Student Essay Prize 2023

Other

We are pleased to announce the next JVC Essay Prize competition. The aim of the prize is to promote scholarship among postgraduate research students working on the Victorian period in any discipline in the UK and abroad.  The Journal inaugurated the prize in 2007, and our past winners include Louise Lee, Tiffany Watt-Smith, Bob Nicholson, Tom Scriven, Roisín Laing, Lucy Whitehead, and Catherine Healy whose essays appear in issues 13.1 (2008), 15.1 (2010), 17.3 (2012), 19.1 (2014), 21.4 (2016) and 24.4

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Disability and Narrative Voice in Dinah Mulock Craik’s ‘John Halifax, Gentleman’

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Dinah Mulock Craik’s novel John Halifax, Gentleman (1856) is a fictional biographical account of John Halifax’s development as a self-made man, told by his best friend, the physically disabled Phineas Fletcher. Throughout the novel, Phineas is very much preoccupied with bodies and physicality, often expressing his deep admiration for John’s physical strength and health. From the very beginning, John’s masculinity is highlighted when Phineas introduces John and admires his able-bodiedness, even before mentioning his name, which provides the readers with

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New issue: JVC 28.1 is now available!

Published in JVC, Roundtables

Our latest issue, 28.1, features an extended Round Table entitled ‘Sculpture and Faith at St Paul’s Cathedral, c. 1796—1914‘. Lavishly illustrated, the collection boasts fifteen mini-essays, each devoted to one of the cathedral’s important monuments from our period. Many of these are free access. The Round Table is fuelled by the energies of multiple disciplines and approaches: art history, theology, history, ecclesiology, biography, empire- and queer studies, to name a few. As the introduction by Marjorie Coughlan, Jason Edwards and

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Victorian literature as a subject of computer games of the 80s and early 90s

Other, Victorians Beyond the Academy

The detective who prowls through the billowing fog on the Thames, the adventurer who sets off in fantastic machines on journeys into the vastness of space and the depths of the ocean, or the brilliantly plotted intrigue in an aristocratic country estate: the popular literature of the Victorian era offers many themes that can still be found in contemporary media. Computer and video games are no exception to this rule. Passionate gamers can, for example, roam through the London of

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“The Lady is Ugly!”: The Imposition of Gender Binaries Upon Marian Halcombe

Other

Marian Halcombe is a complex woman. Unlike many other female characters, both within and outside Victorian fiction, she stands outside the gender binary. She is often attributed male characteristics, both in mind and appearance. Her appearance is complex, juxtaposing her feminine and sexualized body with her masculine and ‘ugly’ face: The lady is dark. […] The lady is young. […] The lady is ugly! Never has the old conventional maxim, that Nature cannot err, more flatly contradicted – never was

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The Shadow of Mal: Gothic Romance and Victorian Ghosts in ‘Inception’

Other, Victorians Beyond the Academy, Victorians in Film

Christopher Nolan is acclaimed for his cinematic hybridization of multiple genres, ranging from thriller and science fiction to heist drama and superhero narratives. His use of literary themes in movie-making is especially prominent given that Nolan often writes character-driven stories with psychological depth and moral complexity. In his 2010 heist film, Inception, Nolan experiments with the narrative mechanics of Gothic romance through the story of Dom Cobb, a professional thief who extracts information by infiltrating his subjects’ dreams. Cobb’s inability

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The Socialist Utopia as Child’s Play: The Games of H. G. Wells and E. Nesbit

Other, Teaching the Victorians

The first edition of H. G. Wells’s 1911 publication Floor Games, a manual for a worldbuilding game for children, opens with a declaration: [On a floor] may be made an infinitude of imaginative games, not only keeping boys and girls happy for days together, but building up a framework of spacious and inspiring ideas in them for after life. The British Empire will gain new strength from nursery floors.[1] The concept that child’s play could alter the child’s future —

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The Architecture of Victorian Christendom (book review)

Book Reviews, Other

English Victorian Churches: Architecture, Faith & Revival (John Hudson Publishing) by the eminent architectural historian James Stevens Curl is a book that can be read in more than one way and appeal to more than one kind of audience. It can be read as a work of scholarship; one that spans two distinct but related disciplines, namely Victorian church architecture and nineteenth-century ecclesiology. As an authoritative survey and critique of the finest examples of nineteenth-century English church building, it would

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Pregnancy and Childbirth in the Age of Victoria

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Under the direction of Lisa Surridge and with the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, a group of scholars have created the peer-reviewed “Pregnancy and Childbirth in the Age of Victoria,” which can be found at  https://www.victorianweb.org/science/maternity/uvic/index.html   Thus far the project consists of the following, with more to come: “Pregnancy Testing,” by Isabel Davis “Pregnancy and Venereal Disease,” by Anne Hanley “Birth Control,” by Lesley Hall “Abortion,” by Lesley Hall “Breastfeeding, Wet Nursing, and Feeding ‘by

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False Teeth and Dishonesty in William Makepeace Thackeray’s ‘The Virginians’ (1859)

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Header image: A full upper vulcanite denture with porcelain teeth (1880-1920) from Sir Henry Wellcome’s Museum Collection at the Science Museum. In the mid-nineteenth century, the show of teeth in ordinary life began to mean something new. While many edentulous – or toothless – Victorians experienced shame due to widespread tooth loss, with the increasing proliferation of dentists and dental treatments came the lessened desire to conceal broken teeth behind handkerchiefs and fans. Arguably more than ever before, an emerging

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