The summer issue of Journal of Victorian Culture includes an important roundtable on Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Music that exemplifies the interdisciplinary strengths of JVC. Our music collection boasts work in art history, literary history, musicology and music history. Music as an aspect of Victorian culture has been less celebrated, and certainly less fully researched, than the so-called ‘sister arts’ of poetry and painting. Essays by Michael Allis, George Kennaway, Elizabeth Helsinger and Marte Stinis in issue 27:2 find new ways of triangulating these forms, and placing music, music practice and music performance back into the mise en scène of nineteenth-century cultural experience.
As a companion to these pieces, we offer readers a ‘pop-up anthology’ of musical research: a free access selection from JVC’s distinguished track-record of publications on Victorian music. We begin with two ‘perspective pieces’ setting out some of the parameters of the field. We then offer four pieces on musical life in the nineteenth century, concentrating on the various sites and scenes of musical production and consumption. Finally we offer a selection of work on music in literature in prose and poetry, from the canonical to the popular, and from the sixties to the nineties. We hope you’ll enjoy our pop-up anthology, and circulate it among your Victorianist – and musical – networks.