by Helen Goodman (Royal Holloway, University of London) and Emma Curry (Birkbeck, University of London) EC: Reinventing the Victorian period in film and literature has become something of a trend in recent years, from the multiple new versions of Sherlock Holmes to Sarah Waters’s fantastic Neo-Victorian novels. In response to this repeated reimagining and reshaping, the Guildhall Art Gallery has put together a wonderful new collection of work inspired by the nineteenth century, entitled, appropriately, ‘Victoriana: The Art of Revival’.
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BAVS 2013: Numbering Numbers
In a memorable scene from Dickens’s Hard Times, Sissy Jupe recounts to Louisa Gradgrind her failure in her lessons to understand the ‘true’ meaning of numbers. She laments: ‘And [Mr M’Choakumchild] said, This schoolroom is an immense town, and in it there are a million of inhabitants, and only five-and-twenty are starved to death in the streets, in the course of a year. What is your remark on that proportion? And my remark was – for I couldn’t think of
Read moreThis Charming Dickens…
Michael Slater’s recent work, The Great Charles Dickens Scandal, brilliantly opens with a selection of the various headlines that Dickens-based news stories have run in recent years. Predictably, they mostly relate to his relationship with Ellen Ternan, and range from the dramatic (‘THE DARK SIDE OF DICKENS AND THE LOVE THAT DESTROYED HIS MARRIAGE’) to the salacious (‘DICKENS’S ROMPS WITH NAUGHTY NELLY’) to the somewhat bizarre and creepy (‘DICKENS KEPT A KEEN EYE ON FALLEN WOMEN’).[1] With the approaching release
Read moreInside the Doll’s House: experiencing Ibsen at the Young Vic
I recently realized that in my ‘Victorian life’, I have been harbouring a rather shameful secret: in my thesis research, seminar preparation, reading group suggestions, and even leisure-time choices, I am guilty of focusing almost solely on nineteenth-century novels. Thinking back to undergraduate days, it was the same in my Victorian modules then: I would almost always choose to read, talk about, or write on a novel, shunning poetry and plays for what I saw as the comparative ‘safety’ and
Read moreDickens in the West End: Great Expectations, adaptations and Dickensian fatigue
by Emma Curry, Birkbeck College Dickens writes in The Old Curiosity Shop of the strange feeling of flatness we experience a short time after an exciting event. He describes Kit Nubbles spending a pleasurable half-holiday off work with his family and friends, drinking tea, eating oysters, and attending a performance at the theatre; only to wake up the next day feeling full of ‘that vague kind of penitence which holidays awaken’.[1] As Dickens’s narrator laments: Oh these holidays! why will
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