By Rohan McWilliam To King’s College London on 23 February for the launch of Ruth Richardson’s new book, Dickens and the Workhouse, produced in an extremely handsome edition by Oxford University Press (don’t even think of reading it on a Kindle). The Anatomy Theatre at Kings is packed out for the party and Ruth delivers a wonderful speech making clear that the book is the product of her lifelong love of Dickens. Dickens and the Workhouse (I’ve now read the
Read moreAuthor: lisa hager
Matrimonial Advertising: A Very Brief Madness?
By Jennifer Phegley Mrs. Punch: “A man ought to be punished for writing such idiotic love-letters.” Mr. Punch: “Logical as ever, my adored . . . but it is in the fitness of things that a love letter should be idiotic. Love is a brief (very brief) madness.” “On Love Letters.” Punch (December 11, 1869): 236. As Mr. and Mrs. Punch’s conversation indicates, love letters were a central part of courtship that could easily go awry. In this scene, Mr.
Read moreAndrea Rehn, ‘White Rajas, Native Princes and Savage Pirates: Lord Jim and the Cult of White Sovereignty’
Andrea Rehn’s article “White Rajas, Native Princes and Savage Pirates: Lord Jim and the Cult of White Sovereignty” reads Conrad’s Lord Jim as an ironic but also nostalgic re-imagining of the first of the white rajas, James Brooke. This figurehead of informal imperial expansion was idolized in England, as archival documents reveal, for his charismatic bestowal of the rule of law in Borneo. Ironically, Brooke achieved sovereignty through his personal suspension of law, an example of what Carl Schmitt terms
Read moreHilary M. Carey, ”The Secret of England’s Greatness’: Medievalism, Ornithology, and Anglican Imperialism in the Aboriginal Gospel Book of Sir George Grey’
Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries holds many treasures, but one of the more remarkable is the Aboriginal Gospel Book (Grey MS 82). This is work of unique importance because it contains the only manuscript copy of the first translation of the gospel into any Australian Aboriginal language. The translation was completed by the missionary Lancelot Threlkeld and presented to the bibliophile and statesman Sir George Grey on 26 June 1858. But this was not the end of the
Read moreMegan A. Norcia, ”Come Buy, Come Buy’: Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market’ and the Cries of London’
A blazingly sunny summer day in 2009 found me camped out at the Baldwin Collection of Historical Children’s Literature at the University of Florida. I was there researching nineteenth-century children’s guides to London (or so I thought), when in the midst of this study, the happy serendipity of archival work led me to Andrew Tuer’s nineteenth-century collection of London cries. As I read through Tuer’s guide and then rapidly searched for and consumed several others, I kept scrawling in my
Read moreLuisa Villa, ‘A ‘Political Education’: Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, the Arabs, and the Egyptian Revolution (1881-82)’
Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (1840-1922) represents an interesting case of Victorian internationalism, and a significant figure in the history of the critique of modern imperialism. His name is not one that is likely to pop up in surveys of the late Victorian age, and even in substantial books on the literature and culture of the period it is hard to come by.Villa came across him while researching her book on the representations of the Sudan military campaigns, as the author of
Read moreSteampunk and the Academy; or it really is a clockwork universe, my dear Victorianists
Every year, just before my fall term starts here in Wisconsin, I, your intrepid JVC Online editor, make a trip to Atlanta, Georgia to attend and participate in one of the largest fan-run science-fiction and fantasy conventions, Dragon*Con. I go to Dragon*Con every year to indulge in the geekiest part of myself, along with 40,000 fans, dealers, exhibitors, artists, guests, and volunteers from all over the world. For four days, we all pack into 3,500 hours of panels, workshops, contests,
Read moreCFP: Special Issue Journal Call for Essay Submissions – Poetic Optimism and the Post-Enlightenment Social Identity, 1794-1878
To complement the upcoming Paranoia and Pain conference (2-4 April 2012) at the University of Liverpool (http://paranoiapain.liv.ac.uk), we are developing a collection of articles for a special issue journal of Studies in the Literary Imagination entitled ‘Poetic Optimism and the Post-Enlightenment Social Identity, 1794-1878’. This collection will explore the meaning and application of poetic optimism in relation to the question of social identity from 1794 to 1878. How is optimism shared through versification during this period? What allusive forms did
Read moreRobert Burroughs, ‘Sailors and Slaves: The ‘Poor Enslaved Tar’ in Naval Reform and Nautical Melodrama’
Recent studies have demonstrated how, far from being confined to the theatre, ‘the melodramatic mode’ permeated various fields of nineteenth-century discourse, including politics and the law. Whereas most of the research in this area to date has concentrated upon domestic melodrama, in this article Robert Burroughs extends the discussion to the ‘tar drama’, or nautical melodrama. Burroughs examines how one example of this sub-genre, J.T. Haines’s My Poll and My Partner Joe (first performed 1835), engages in the political, legal
Read more‘The line, the mark, the blot and the scribble’: exploring Pre-Raphaelite drawing
The Poetry of Drawing: Pre-Raphaelite Designs, Studies & Watercolours, Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, 29 January–15 May 2011; The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 17 June–4 September 2011. http://www.bmag.org.uk/events?id=1038 Pre-Raphaelite Drawing [Catalogue], by Colin Cruise, London: Thames & Hudson, 2011, 248 pp., illustrated, £29.95 (hardback), ISBN 9780500238813, £19.95 (paperback), ISBN 9780709302643 The Poetry of Drawing: Pre-Raphaelite Designs, Studies & Watercolours, on display at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (BMAG), provides the most comprehensive survey of Pre-Raphaelite works on
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