Ryan D. Fong Kalamazoo College For most of our readership across the United States and in the UK, April is proving to be a very cruel month indeed—with severe weather patterns and cold fronts marching across the North America and Atlantic. In these frigid days and dank nights, in which we grow ever wearier of these lingering and intemperate climes, what is a good Victorianist to do? The options would seem (at least to this Victorianist) to either sink into
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Are You a Believer Now?
Someone at the University of California, Davis was clearly taken with Steven Moffat’s second season of Sherlock. So much so that they took to participating in the #ibelieveinsherlockholmes meme, which Jeanette Laredo wrote about here for JVC Online about a month ago and which has taken to actions of world-wide street graffiti, like the ones at UC Davis pictured below and recorded on this tumblr. Now that the second season has aired in the United States as well as in
Read moreHappy Birthday, Dear Edward
by Victoria Ford Smith Rice University As celebrations of Charles Dickens’s bicentenary continue past the great author’s February 7th birthday, I find myself turning from the parties and panels, the symposia and biographies, to find Edward Lear. He’s 200 this year, too, after all. Today, in fact. I suspect that he is not a man to make a fuss about his birthday, but surely I’ll find him somewhere at the edge of the crowd, sketching a parrot on a spare
Read moreThe Cult of Beauty: The Victorian Avant-Garde 1860-1900
by Pearl Chaozon-Bauer University of California, Davis Upon entering “The Cult of Beauty: The Victorian Avant-Garde 1860-1900,” an exhibit at the Legion of Honor that features art work and pieces from poets, painters, sculptors, designers and architects who produced art for the sake of art, I expected to be intoxicated and affected by the beauty that the exhibit promised to deliver. Since these artists championed the axiom that the only purpose of art is to be beautiful, I anticipated losing
Read moreMrs. Beeton’s Valentine’s Day Bake-Off: Ryan’s Savoy Cake
The Challenge || Lisa’s Half-Pay Pudding || Lucie’s Brandy Pudding || Ryan’s Savoy Cake Like Lucie, the idea of the Valentine’s Day Bake-Off was one that was incredibly appealing to me. For though the particularities of food competitions differ slightly between Britain and the U.S., we here in the States have also embraced the format with aplomb. I count myself among that “we” and can admit that my weekend veg-outs and semi-frequent bouts with insomnia have made me well-versed in
Read moreCharles Dickens at the Morgan Library
Jessica DeCoux City University of New York There are a few things you might want to keep in mind when visiting the Morgan Library and Museum’sM exhibit “Dickens at 200.” The first, and perhaps most important, is that the operative word in the institution’s name is “library.” While the Morgan owns an extensive collection of drawings, paintings and art objects, it is primarily an archive of written and printed materials: manuscripts, first editions, rare books and pamphlets, and printed music,
Read moreVictorian Game Night
Susan E. Cook Southern New Hampshire University If I take out a loan now, I’ll have enough money to build a coal mine. The coal I produce will enable me to build rail to my cotton mill and eventually sell the cotton I produce to the distant market. Or I can build a foundry, use the iron I produce to build another cotton mill, and then produce and sell cotton through other people’s ports, capitalizing on their infrastructure. It’s Friday
Read moreElisha Cohn, ”One single ivory cell’: Oscar Wilde and the Brain’
Recent studies have demonstrated how new theories of materiality in the late nineteenth century shaped conceptions of everyday objects—top-hats, teapots, green carnations—yet have not extended this research to the burgeoning late-Victorian field of the neurosciences, and its conception of the mind as material. In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde traces ‘the thoughts and passions of men to some pearly cell in the brain’ (280). As his notebooks from his undergraduate days at Oxford show, Wilde was fascinated by
Read moreMuddy, Foggy Papers: SCOTUS and/as Chancery?
Ryan D. Fong University of California, Davis Despite her untimely passing in 2007, Anna Nicole Smith is still making headlines. But then again, so is Charles Dickens. In a decision against her estate’s case against the family of her late husband, the Supreme Court ruled against her claim and announced its decision yesterday. When Chief Justice John Roberts read his majority decision aloud, he alluded to the past, but reached back much further than four years. In fact, it was
Read moreA Tale of Two Book Club Selections: Oprah Reads Dickens
by Ryan D. Fong University of California, Davis For many years now, at the beginning of the Dickens Universe conference held each year at UC Santa Cruz, eminent Victorian scholar and Universe director John O. Jordan affectionately introduces the weeklong proceedings by asserting that “Charles Dickens is the train station through which all things in the nineteenth century pass.” Indeed, it is difficult, if not impossible, to think of any Victorian topic not represented or considered in Dickens’ novels and
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