Rachel Duffield (Norfolk Museums’ Live Interpretation Officer) Life as an interpretation officer at Gressenhall Farm & Workhouse working with more than 10,000 Norfolk schoolchildren a year is never dull. I spend most of my time in costume inhabiting a Victorian wash-house, farm kitchen or workhouse schoolroom, teaching students about rural domestic life 150 years ago. Now I am preparing for a bigger challenge: living the workhouse diets of more than 100 years ago for three whole weeks. From 26 April, I’ll
Read moreAuthor: lucinda matthews-jones
The Chartist Rising Retold.
David R. Howell (University of South Wales and Cyfarwydd) Politics is boring, we are often told. Every party, apart from the colour of their rosettes, seems to offer pretty much the same thing when it comes to policy and personality. So disconnected are voters with the modern breed of candidates, that in recent decades, some 30 percent of the electorate have seemingly disenfranchised themselves by just not bothering to vote at all, and that’s on a good day. Yet, 175
Read moreReally Sick in Bleak House
By Susan E. Cook (Southern New Hampshire University, Manchester, NH) Susan Cook is Assistant Professor of English at Southern New Hampshire University, where she teaches nineteenth- and twentieth-century British literature. She writes about Victorian literature and visual culture. Follow Susan @Susan_E_Cook. I should begin this post with a confession: I am a hypochondriac. When faced with even the most innocuous medical anomaly, my mind goes to the worst-case scenario. Discovering Internet medical advice sites is perhaps one of the worst
Read moreFilm Review: The Invisible Woman (2014)
Charlotte Mathieson, University of Warwick February 7th marked two years since the bicentenary of Charles Dickens, and with it the release of The Invisible Woman: the film adaptation by screenwriter Abi Morgan, directed by Ralph Fiennes, of Claire Tomalin’s 1990 biography of Nelly Ternan, the woman who was Dickens’s mistress from 1857 until his death in 1870. At the time of its publication Tomalin’s biography caused controversy among some, but has since become mostly accepted as a credible and valuable
Read moreEscaping ‘Horrible Sanity’: Teaching Victorian Literature and Psychology
By Serena Trowbridge, Birmingham City University One of my favourite modules to teach is Literature and Psychology, a third-year module which focuses on Victorian literature and reads it in the light of contemporary psychological thought. It is popular with students, though many find it much further removed from their A-level Psychology than they anticipated! The students examine ideas about character formation in nineteenth-century poetry and prose, and place them in the context of philosophical and scientific descriptions of mental development during
Read moreThe deleterious dominance of The Times in nineteenth-century scholarship
By Andrew Hobbs (University of Central Lancashire) This post accompanies Andrew Hobb’s Journal of Victorian Culture article published (2013). It can be read in full here. There were more local newspapers than London papers throughout the nineteenth century (Fig. 1), and their total circulation overtook the total circulation of the London press from the early 1860s to the 1930s. I didn’t realise this when I started my PhD, which aimed to establish a link between the local press and readers’ sense
Read moreFan Discourse and Teaching Charles Dickens
By Lindsay Lawrence In Fall 2012, I proposed and taught a 4000-level major authors class on Charles Dickens at the University of Arkansas-Fort Smith. Using the wealth of online materials that have become available in the last five years, particularly the Dickens Journals Online in this class, we explored Dickens’s legacy as a serial novelist, journalist, and literary magazine editor. The class also focused on Dickens’s cultural impact and his shrewd reading of the publication industry, including serialization. Inherently, this
Read moreLulu: The Tiger Lillies at Contact Theatre, Manchester
By Guy Woolnough Lulu, based on the verses of Wedekind, performed by the Tiger Lillies[1], is a dark, compelling and shocking show. It shocks in the most affecting way, not with overt displays of violence or sex, but with powerful words and an intense narrative. I found the performance stunning and fascinating: it is good. Lulu, the eponymous heroine danced by Laura Caldow, is the beauty from the slums who is abused and exploited by men. From her childhood in
Read moreCall for Blog Posts for International Women’s Day
It’s International Women’s Day on Saturday 8th March and at the JVC Online we would like to mark this day with a number of short contributions on nineteenth-century women (real and imagined). Your post could be on an inspirational Victorian woman/ women, a hidden female voice or someone you are/ have researched and want to bring to the fore. You can also highlight any individual or collaborative research projects and posts that discuss how to study and teach nineteenth-century gender
Read more‘Of the people’: Simplicity and popularity in Brighton Rock and David Copperfield
Peter Orford Sometimes it feels like you just can’t escape Dickens. Just the other day I was reading Brighton Rock, and early on in the story was greeted by this passage, as Grahame Greene describes his amateur detective Ida Arnold as she ponders on the death of Hale, a man she barely knew: the cheap drama and pathos of the thought weakened her heart towards him. She was of the people, she cried in cinemas at David Copperfield, when she
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