Timothy Alborn is Professor of History at Lehman College and the City University of New York Graduate Center. He has published widely on British history in such journals as Victorian Studies, Journal of Victorian Culture, and Journal of Modern History; as well as two books: Conceiving Companies: Joint-Stock Politics in Victorian England (Routledge, 1998) and Regulated Lives: Life Insurance and British Society, 1800-1914 (Toronto, 2009). His current research focuses on the cultural and financial history of gold in Great Britain
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Emily Bowles, ‘Writing Lives Together: A Conference on Romantic and Victorian Biography’
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 in life writing 1870-1939. She is also a postgraduate representative for the Northern Nineteenth Century Network, and you can find her on Twitter @EmilyBowles_. She has co-edited a special issue of ‘Peer English’ on Victorian biography. Writing Lives Together was a one-day conference that took place on 18 September 2015, put together with the
Read moreJessica Hindes, ‘Beyond Expectations: Review and Interview’
Untold Theatre’s Beyond Expectations, which had a run this summer at the Edinburgh Fringe and a short tour around the UK, stated an intention to retell Great Expectations with an emphasis on Estella Havisham’s life and story. I saw the show on September 14 at Camden’s Etcetera Theatre, thanks to a press ticket from JVC. I enjoyed Beyond Expectations and found the show’s greatest strengths in the writing and acting. Adapting Dickens is a difficult task but Levinson and Silk’s
Read morePhilip Howell, ‘Mary Tealby and the Battersea Dogs and Cats Home’
October this year sees the 150th anniversary of the death of Mary Tealby, the founder of what is now known as the Battersea Dogs and Cats Home, the first animal shelter of its kind and probably the most famous animal charity in the world. Mary Bates was born in 1801 in Huntingdon, the eldest of three surviving children. Her father was a chemist or ‘druggist’, which usually meant a lower-class clientele, so her provincial life was probably not very privileged,
Read moreSophie Cooper, ‘Oh woman! woman! Who can resist thy influence’: Male personal writings on romance in mid-nineteenth century Chicago
Sophie Cooper is a third 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 If E___ be really a living thing of a warm heart – all elevated sentiments & deep womanly passions – not a
Read moreLauren Padgett, ‘Salt’s Mill, Saltaire: Brief History and Review’
Lauren Padgett is a PhD student at Leeds Trinity University, investigating representations of Victorian women in contemporary museums. She worked in local museums for four years; her first museum job, assisting with the redevelopment of textile galleries, fuelled her interest of the textile industry and Bradford’s textile heritage. Saltaire, a model Victorian village (a few miles from Bradford’s city centre), has been a UNESCO world heritage site since 2001. [1] Saltaire was commissioned by Sir Titus Salt (1803 – 1876),
Read morePetra Clark, Illustration as Play: Charles Ricketts and the “Woman’s World”
Petra Clark is a PhD candidate at the University of Delaware whose research interests lie in late-Victorian print culture, particularly women’s periodicals, Aestheticism, illustration, and art criticism. The working title of her dissertation is Reading Aestheticism: Visual Literacy in Late-Victorian Women’s and Girls’ Periodicals. This post accompanies her article, “‘Cleverly Drawn’: Oscar Wilde, Charles Ricketts, and the Art of the Woman’s World,” which appears in the September 2015 print issue of the Journal of Victorian Culture and can be downloaded
Read moreKristina McClendon, Curating Feeling: Emotions and the Exhibition Space in Displays of Nineteenth-Century Art and Culture
Kristina McClendon is a graduate student pursuing an MA in Victorian Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London. Her current areas of academic study and research interests include: fiction in nineteenth-century periodicals with a particular emphasis on feminist publications and women’s magazines, theatrical adaptations of Victorian novels, American women in Victorian London, and Queen Victoria’s connection to various Victorian artistic and literary works. Originally from Southern California, Kristina is thrilled to be studying in London and using every available opportunity
Read moreUshashi Dasgupta, The Roaring Streets: Voices From Below in Literary Studies
Ushashi Dasgupta is a DPhil student at St John’s College, Oxford. She is researching the significance of tenancy and rented spaces – lodgings, boarding-houses, hotels, taverns – in the literary imagination, with a particular focus on Dickens and his circle. Ushashi Dasgupta can be contacted via email at ushashi.dasgupta@sjc.ox.ac.uk The inaugural BAVS Talks were held in May, at the Oxford Centre for Research in the Humanities. During these talks, Helen Rogers spoke about the manner in which interest is turning, once
Read moreEmma Butcher, ‘Strong, Active and Hardy as Bears’: The Mountain Men of the ‘Wild West’
This man, known through the Territories and beyond them as ‘Rocky Mountain Jim’, or, more briefly, as ‘Mountain Jim’, is one of the famous scouts of the Plains, and is the original of some daring portraits in fiction concerning Indian Frontier warfare. So far as I have at present heard, he is a man for whom there is now no room, for the time for blows and blood in the part of Colorado is past, and the fame of many
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