Ann Gagné is College Instructor at Seneca College in Toronto, Canada. Her current research explores how touch and ethics relate to education as well as the spatial framing of learning in the nineteenth century which is an extension of themes found in her doctoral dissertation. She is very active on Twitter @AnnGagne and also writes a blog that relates to teaching and pedagogical strategies at www.allthingspedagogical.blogspot.ca The end of the term at Ontario colleges and universities usually means instructors spending quality time with essays
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Emily Bowles, A Brief History of Dickens Bashing
Emily Bowles is a PhD candidate at the University of York. Her research focuses on Charles Dickens’s self-representation 1857-1870, and representations by Dickens’s friends and family 1870-1939. She is also a postgraduate representative for the Northern Nineteenth Century Network, and you can find her on Twitter @EmilyBowles_. She will be speaking about Charles Dickens and the Dickens family writings at ‘Writing Lives’ at the University of Leicester. The recent publication of Death and Mr. Pickwick by Stephen Jarvis has sparked
Read moreRuth Mason, Odd Objects from Victorian Britain
Ruth is a PhD student in the Geography Department at University College London. Her research focuses on the designed spaces and material culture of Wesleyan Methodism in London between 1851 and 1932 and what they can reveal about contemporary congregational experiences of Methodism. Alongside other graduates from the Royal College of Art and Victoria & Albert Museum’s History of Design MA, Ruth is a founding member of the Fig.9 experimental History of Design Collective (www.fig9collective.com). She is also a co-editor
Read moreOliver Betts, Review: Homes of the Homeless: Seeking Shelter in Victorian London Exhibition
The Geffrye Museum, London, 24th March – 12th July 2015 Dr. Oliver Betts is an early-career researcher based at the University of York, where he completed a PhD on working-class domestic space before the First World War. You can follow him on twitter and he has an academia.edu profile which can be found here. Domestic spaces, and the experiences of home, in the nineteenth century have, in recent years, finally achieved critical attention. The work of historians such as Judith
Read moreJohn Marriott, Streets Paved with Gold
John Marriott is a professor and senior associate at Pembroke College, Oxford. Among recent publications is Beyond the Tower: a History of East London, published by Yale University Press in 2012. Dirty Old London. The Victorian Fight Against Filth, by Lee Jackson, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014, 293 pages, illustrated (hardback), £20, ISBN: 978-0-300-19205-6. That London streets are paved with gold is surely one of the most enduring of myths. It was, of course, never to be
Read moreRosemary Mitchell, The Stories of My Life: Disraeli in Politics and Prose
Rosemary Mitchell is Associate Principal Lecturer in History and Reader in Victorian Studies at Leeds Trinity University, where she is also Director of the Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies. She is currently working on a monograph on gender roles and domesticity in Victorian historical cultures. Disraeli: The Romance of Politics, by Robert O’Kell, Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2013. x + 595 pages, illustrated, £66.99 (hardback), ISBN 978-4426-4459-5. This literary life of Benjamin Disraeli is the most
Read moreReview: The London Victorian Studies Colloquium 2015, Royal Holloway (University of London), by Lauren Padgett
By Lauren Padgett, Leeds Trinity University Post-graduate students, early career researchers and scholars gathered at the Royal Holloway, University of London, for a three day colloquium (Friday 10 – Sunday 12 April). The London Victorian Studies Colloquium promised to be an informal, lively weekend of papers, panels and discussions, and it did not disappoint! Friday Proceedings started with a reading group session on extracts from John Henry Newman’s The Idea of a University. Newman’s series of lectures, which conceptualised (and
Read moreMarieke Hendriksen, ‘Consumer culture, self-prescription and status: Nineteenth-century medicine chests in the Royal Navy’
This post accompanies Marieke Hendriksen’s Journal of Victorian Culture article ‘Consumer Culture, Self-Prescription, and Status: Nineteenth-Century Medicine Chests in the Royal Navy’ (2015), which can be downloaded here. In early September 2012, with my PhD thesis under review and a postdoctoral fellowship lined up for October, I arrived at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, London, for a five-week research project on the medicine chests in the museum’s collections. From the online collection database I had gathered that there were
Read moreEmily Bowles, ‘Boz, Tibbs, and the Sparkler of Albion: The Many Names of Charles Dickens’
Emily Bowles is a PhD student at the University of York. Her research focuses on Charles Dickens’s self-representation 1857-1870, and representations by Dickens’s friends and family 1870-1939. You can find her on Twitter @EmilyBowles. Charles Dickens knew the power of a name. From the immortally disgruntled Scrooge to the oft-imitated Pickwick Club, everyone is familiar with a Dickens character or two. It is unsurprising, then, that he also experimented with different names and titles for himself, although perhaps the
Read moreSophie Cooper, The Rush for Gold – A Global Quest
Sophie Cooper is a second year PhD student and William McFarlane Scholar at the University of Edinburgh. She is studying Irish communities in Melbourne and Chicago between 1850 and 1890, specifically in relation to situational influences on identity formation and nationalist thought. Sophie tweets using the handle @SophcoCooper and more information can be found on her academia page. When you think of the poor migrants who left the United Kingdom during the nineteenth century, it is usual to think of
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