Journal of Victorian Culture Online
The blog and online platform of the Journal of Victorian Culture
by Duncan McLaren I’ve just been the inaugural writer-in-residence at Hospitalfield near Arbroath. The place is a great resource in respect of Victorian art and literature, as Patrick-Allan Fraser – who left the house to artists of the future when he died in 1890 – had personal links with Dickens as well as Augustus Egg, William Powell Frith and many other artists. I’ve put together a website www.patisback.co.uk which is ongoing. Here is a page-by- page guide to what’s there
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By Sarah Olwen Jones My recent article, ‘Staging the Interior: The Public and Private Intimacies of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle’s Domestic Lives,’ has it roots in a seemingly chance and brief conversation. Several years ago, I found myself in a University of Sydney elevator being quizzed by Associate Professor Richard White about why so many great men and women — great literary figures, prominent intellectuals, and other persons of ‘note’ — frequented Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyles’ London residence.
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By Barbara Franchi, University of Kent The city of Venice is a labyrinth where the most different cultures and civilizations have met for centuries. So, no location could be better for the first NAVSA/BAVS/AVSA supernumerary conference. During June 3-6, 2013, Victorianists from every corner of the globe gathered on the Island of San Servolo for this unique opportunity to exchange and discuss ideas around the Global and the Local in the 19th century and beyond. With over one hundred participants
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By Michael Roberts Personal diaries are generally welcomed as a godsend by historians but their publication can raise complicated questions for editors and publishers. Most Victorianists, given a few seconds’ reflection, will be able to find illustrations to fit: the publisher John Murray, for example, burning Byron’s Journals before witnesses rather than risk scandal; Gladstone’s sons entrusting the great man’s diaries to the Archbishop of Canterbury until enough time might pass to dissipate scandal. One famous nineteenth-century diary to go
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In the following days, JVC Online will feature a week of posts devoted to the connections between Neo-Victorian studies and digital humanities. The goal of this week is to consider the ways in which we are mobilizing the tools, concepts, and methodologies of digital humanities research and pedagogy to re-contextualize, revise, and re-envision Victorian culture in terms of our age. Just as JVC Online’s digital form enables it to have broad reach, so too do the digital and technological elements
Read moreBy Roger Whitson, Washington State University Paolo Bacigalupi’s steampunk novel The Wind-Up Girl imagines a world where the loss of fossil fuels and electricity has completely transformed the politics of our planet and brought about a second industrial age.[i] The strange new Victorian-styled machines populating this world rely on human and animal caloric expenditure enhanced by a complicated system of springs to maximize the output. Technology is completely redesigned to function appropriately, with combustion-engines reserved for the extremely rich. Bacigalupi’s
Read moreBy Shawna Ross, Arizona State University Are you a Victorianist for the texture? For the alterity of antiquation, the distance from cell phones and computer screens, the grainy look of moveable type, the strange dimensionality of lithographs? If the charm of analog transfixes you, it may seem that the the digital may be not just alien but positively antagonistic to the values and preferences that drew you to the field. Or you may also draw back from the digital humanities
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By Amanda Lastoria, Simon Fraser University Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) endures as one of ‘the most popular children’s classics in the English language’[i], thanks to the creative vision and commercial savvy of Lewis Carroll and his contemporary publishers. Carroll created not just the Alice text, but the Alice books. Carroll was an art director. He oversaw the illustration, design and production of the first edition of Alice, and he (re)published the text in multiple editions that strategically segmented the
Read moreBy Kate Holterhoff, Carnegie Mellon University Over the past fifteen years, digitization has completely revised archival work. Digital texts introduce novel means of encountering the past because they simultaneously exist materially and ideally; everywhere and nowhere; in the past and the present. As NINEs and BRANCH founder Dino Felluga argues, ‘our current postmodern age tends toward dematerialization’ (308), or what Alan Liu of RoSE and Transliteracies calls ‘unit-detail atomism’ (84), suggesting that online archives are postmodern by virtue of their
Read moreBy Kirsten Harris, University of Nottingham The University of Sheffield’s one day conference ‘Rethinking the Nineteenth Century’, held on 24th August, centred on the timely question ‘what constitutes nineteenth century studies today?’. This stimulated a thought-provoking and broad set of responses, with some papers offering rethinkings of specific texts, ideas or historical assumptions while others focused on considerations of the changing field itself. The day began with Mark Llewellyn’s interrogation of contemporary engagement with Victorian culture in his keynote paper,
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