Journal of Victorian Culture Online
The blog and online platform of the Journal of Victorian Culture
By Susan E. Cook (Southern New Hampshire University, Manchester, NH) and Elizabeth Coggin Womack (Penn State Brandywine) You can read part one here. Reading Discussion 4 (Serial Parts VII, VIII, and IX): In America (Can We Go Home Now?) Susan: Well, this section was a downer. To summarize, Dickens does not like America or Americans. Between Chapters 16 and 23, we learn that Americans: sustain a totally corrupt press, which regularly engages in forgery (Ch. 16); are either slave owners
Read more
By Susan E. Cook (Southern New Hampshire University, Manchester, NH) and Elizabeth Coggin Womack (Penn State Brandywine) A book club can be an opportunity to share the joys of a literary experience with others. It can provide communal pathos, collective insight, and (depending on the group) tasty baked goods. a Our book club was not of that nature. a This fall, we decided to form a Martin Chuzzlewit reading support group, a virtual book club organized for the sole purpose
Read moreBy Susan Cook (Southern New Hampshire University, Manchester, NH) On October 1, 2013, close to two weeks ago as I write this, the United States Congress failed to agree on a spending bill. This triggered a government shutdown, the eighteenth in this country since the creation of a new congressional budgetary procedure in 1976. The eighteenth shutdown in less than 40 years. This number would indicate that we’ve been there, done that. Except, as some journalists and political pundits inform
Read moreBy Susan Cook (Southern New Hampshire University, Manchester, NH) Roller derby was not a Victorian sport. But it should have been. Today roller skating is typically thought of as a twentieth-century fad, but historians trace its origins back to the eighteenth century. Although the Dutch began using roller skates in the early 1700s, the Belgian inventor Joseph Merlin made the most memorable early impression on the new sport by skating into a masquerade party in 1760 whilst playing the violin.
Read moreBy Susan Cook (Southern New Hampshire University, Manchester, NH) Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, The Thomas Hardy Association “The Ring at Casterbridge was merely the local name of one of the finest Roman Amphitheatres, if not the very finest, remaining in Britain. “Casterbridge announced old Rome in every street, alley, and precinct. It looked Roman, bespoke the art of Rome, concealed dead men of Rome. It was impossible to dig more than a foot or two deep about the town fields and
Read moreRecently I’ve been contemplating motherhood as it is represented in Victorian hidden mother portraits and Victorian breastfeeding portraits, two fascinating photographic trends. A little over a year ago, I stumbled upon Chelsea Nichols’ post about hidden mothers in Victorian photographs on her blog, The Museum of Ridiculously Interesting Things. These images typically depict a shrouded woman holding or standing behind a baby or child, ostensibly to keep the child still for the camera while remaining out of the image. The
Read moreBy Susan Cook (Southern New Hampshire University, Manchester, NH) In the fall of 2012, I taught a version of my department’s Major Author Studies course on Charles Dickens. As this was my second time teaching a course dedicated to Dickens (and my fourth time teaching Bleak House), I knew I had to pull out all the stops to convince my students—many of whom were non-majors or students who otherwise had no familiarity with Victorian literature—to care about three tomes of
Read moreBy Susan Cook (Southern New Hampshire University, Manchester, NH) Dickens was famously mobile throughout his life, walking miles each day, moving households repeatedly, and traveling often. “If I could not walk far and fast,” he once wrote, “I think I should just explode and perish.”[1] This quote describes an obsession with walking, a physical need to walk not only long distances but quickly at that. Dickens saw walking as essential, writes Rosemary Bodenheimer. Walking allowed The Inimitable “to bring his
Read moreBy Susan Cook (Southern New Hampshire University, Manchester, NH) As a photographic image, Charles Dickens circulated far and wide. The man was photographed in excess of 120 times during his life [1], and was among all Victorians, as Joss Marsh recently put it, “the most photographically famous person in Britain outside the royal family” [2]. Ironically, however, Dickens disliked having his photographic image taken. Not only was he concerned that these images gave viewers a lie—a false sense of possessing
Read moreBy Susan Cook (Southern New Hampshire University, Manchester, NH) As a Victorianist and a collector with an interest in photography, I decided, about a year ago, to begin amassing my own Victorian photography collection. I soon acquired three daguerreotypes, two tintypes, and eleven cartes-de-visite—all portraits, save two. I know very little about the images—no names, no dates, no locations beyond the photography studio imprinted on the cartes-de-visite. I have become transfixed by how little I know about these images. Two
Read more