The Stranger’s Child by Alan Hollinghurst, London: Picador, 2011, 576 pages, £20 paperback, ISBN: 0330483242 Till from the garden and the wild A fresh association blow, And year by year the landscape grow Familiar to the stranger’s child; Tennyson, ‘In Memoriam A.H.H.’ I’ve just finished reading Alan Hollinghurst’s new novel, The Stranger’s Child. I bought it at the beginning of June in Cardiff after running a conference there on ‘Material Religion’. Exhausted and falling asleep on the train, I put it away
Read moreAuthor: lucinda matthews-jones
A weekend of Objects: Tolson Museum in Huddersfield
This weekend I went to Huddersfield in West Yorkshire. Little did I know that my short visit would be filled by encounters with interesting objects! From the moment I stepped off the train I was greeted at the station by a dismantled parlour attached to the foyer wall. There is a lovely playfulness about this public art display. Objects were either photographs of an original (wall mounted candle holder, female bust) or the actual object (chair, table, grandfather clock, flowers).
Read moreDiscriminating Fossils – the crystal models belonging to the Watt family, c.1800
by Jane Insley (curator) and Valerie McCathern (volunteer; this project was Valerie’s fault, so she is co-author!) Science Museum, London. Image One: Watt workshop The Science Museum has recently opened a new permanent exhibition about the 18th century steam pioneer James Watt. This had two main aims – one, the redisplay in public view of the garret workshop James Watt set up in Heathfield, his retirement home, and the other, to make more sense of the huge steam engines in
Read moreStudying Nineteenth Century Media: Marking the Shift from ‘Reader’ to ‘User’
Clare Horrocks, Liverpool John Moores University C.L.Horrocks@ljmu.ac.uk The Nineteenth-Century Press in the Digital Age by James Mussell, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, vii + 232 pages, illustrated, £55 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-230-23553-3 In this much-awaited volume on the impact of the digital age on our study of the nineteenth century press, James Mussell is able to demonstrate how the traditional monograph no longer serves the professional needs of the academy (xi). Identifying a new era for research he asserts that there are
Read moreNot-reading: the Burden of the Book
Maria Damkjær, King’s College London maria.damkjaer@kcl.ac.uk How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain, by Leah Price, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2012, ix + 350 pages, illustrated, £19.95 (hardback), ISBN: 9780691114170 The dust jacket of Leah Price’s book is dominated by an image of cannibalised printed pages, cut and twisted into paper flowers. This, and the title How to Do Things with Books, might lead the reader to think that Price is writing about material books and
Read moreA Walking Tour of London’s Forgotten Model Lodging Houses?
Jane Hamlett and Rebecca Preston Everyday, across London, thousands of people pass by hundreds of homes for the poor erected by Victorian philanthropists. Their exteriors often impress, but some are less noticeable, and probably very few Londoners realise what went on inside them. Last summer, equipped with contemporary maps and illustrations, Jane Hamlett, Lesley Hoskins and Rebecca Preston from Royal Holloway’s ESRC-funded At Home in the Institution Project set out on a London street walk to rediscover some of these
Read more‘Taking Liberties’ Conference Report
by Harriet Briggs and Hellen Giblin-Jowett, Newcastle University On the 15th and 16th of June 2012, delegates gathered for an international and multidisciplinary conference at Newcastle University: ‘Taking Liberties: Sex, Pleasure, Coercion (1748-1928)’. As promised by its emphasis on pleasure and liberation, together with the more troubling matter of coercion, the conference proved entertaining, stimulating, but throughout deeply thought-provoking, posing challenging questions and demanding considerable intellectual energy! Not less difficult were the choices to be made about which panels to attend,
Read moreTeaching and Learning Showcase
Many of us often use the summer months to create new courses and revise existing ones for the new academic year. To facilitate this work and encourage productive conversations around the teaching of nineteenth-century culture, the Journal of Victorian Culture Online (JVC) will be hosting a Teaching and Learning Showcase to feature this work. In August and September, we would like to showcase posts that explore the imaginative and innovative ways we teach Victorian studies. Blog topics could include: Digital
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