Mrs. Beeton’s Valentine’s Day Bake-Off: Lucie’s Pouding au Cognac (Brandy Pudding)

The Challenge || Lisa’s Half-Pay Pudding || Lucie’s Brandy Pudding || Ryan’s Savoy Cake Sunday 4th February 2011 Yesterday, we, the editors of JVC online, decided that we would bake a Valentine’s treat from Mrs Beeton’s Household Management for our respective partners. I am very excited for several reasons. Firstly, British readers will already know that the ‘bake off’ has become a part of our mental landscape (well, at least mine) with the BBC’s The Great British Bake Off, a

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Bloggers’ Fair

I’m not sure about you but I would love to know more about Victorian blogs for teaching and for my own research. We’ve decided that it would be great to showcase blogs written by Victorianists on any area of nineteenth-century studies. If you are a blogger, you can contribute by sending a short description of your blog to Lucie at l.m.matthew-jones@ljmu.ac.uk throughout April and May. You can also send images (as jpegs) and a hyperlink to your blog.  We would

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STOP PRESS: Lee Jackson’s ‘The Diary of a Murder’ to kick start our online book club

We’re excited to report that Lee Jackson’s Diary of a Murder will kick start our online book club. We hope that that the JVC book club will provide followers with a virtual platform to discover or rediscover books on the Victorian period, whether they are from the period or Neo-Victorian. Lee describes his book as follows: “The Diary of a Murder revolves around the death of a middle-class housewife, Dora Jones, brutally killed in her own home. Her missing husband,

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Peter Ackroyd’s brief account of Wilkie Collins

I have recently left one university (Swansea) for another (Liverpool John Moores). Before I departed, I decided to offer some final pearls of wisdom to my personal tutees, along the lines of ‘Try thinking about how you might engage with your module outside the classroom; why not read a novel from the period, watch a film or documentary, or maybe find a blogger who frequently comments on some area of historical interest?’ Whether or not they have taken up my

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Mrs. Beeton’s Valentine’s Day Bake-Off: The Challenge

The Challenge || Lisa’s Half-Pay Pudding || Lucie’s Brandy Pudding || Ryan’s Savoy Cake At the beginning of February (over a skype conference call), we decided to start writing some co-edited themed blog entries. With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, it seemed fitting that for our first co-edited blog we should bake a dessert for our respective partners from Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management – lucky them! Mrs Beeton was- and continues to be- a familiar name. However,

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Richard Scully, ‘The Epitheatrical Cartoonist’; or, Matthew Somerville Morgan and the World of Theatre, Art and Journalism in Victorian London’

Richard Scully examines the close connections between the world of Victorian comic journalism and the theatre, taking Matthew Somerville Morgan (1837-1890) as a case-study. Morgan’s brilliant cartoons for Fun, Judy, and The Tomahawk (all competitors of Punch) owed much to his background as a scene-painter and designer of pantomime and melodrama. In fact, so bound up were his cartoons with theatrical modes of composition and subject-matter, that he can be described as an ‘epitheatrical’ cartoonist. ‘Epitheatrical’ is a recent coinage

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A Man of Charms: Edward Lovett Exhibition at the Wellcome Collection

Edward Lovett (1852-1933) was an amateur folklorist who, from the age of 8, was an avid collector of charms and amulets. Despite his ‘amateur’ status, Lovett was widely considered to be a leading authority in British folklore and superstitious tradition. Lovett’s reputation was borne out of the many excursions he made to working-class districts of London. He visited shops, dockyards and costmongers looking for discarded or lost objects. It seems only fitting that nearly a hundred years later, his rather

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“Can you show me the places?”: Dickens 2012 and literary tourism

Dr Charlotte Mathieson, Associate Fellow  Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick  The bicentenary of Charles Dickens’s birth on 7th February 2012 has prompted a wide range of celebratory responses across the world, with some prominent themes emerging in the proceedings: unsurprisingly, an emphasis on film adaptations and a biographical focus on Dickens’s life and works feature highly; and in Britain, neither is it unexpected to find events around the notion of “Dickens’s London” recurring throughout the

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Transnational dialogues: Antoinette Burton and the rewritings of British imperial history

Empire in Question: Reading, Writing and Teaching British imperialism by Antoinette Burton, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011, 392 pp., £67.00 (hardback) ISBN: 978-0822348801; £16.99 (paperback) ISBN: 978-0822349020 For nearly twenty years Antoinette Burton has practiced and proselytised the ‘new imperial history’. Few interested readers will be unaware of Burton’s contribution to the field of British studies even if, as many of the essays reproduced here make clear, a fundamental objective of Burton’s work has been ‘displacing the nation

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Dickens and Mass Culture

Dickens and Mass Culture, by Juliet John, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010, xii + 321 pp., £50.00 (hardback), ISBN: 987-0-19-925792-8 Dickens studies needs this book; the first to wrestle, in a detailed way, with Dickens’s strangely overlooked relationship with mass culture. Juliet John provides some complex answers to questions such as: What was the basis for Dickens’s extraordinary popularity? Why has it persisted from his age to ours? How have relationships with Dickens changed? What makes Dickens so translatable “across

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