Journal of Victorian Culture Online
The blog and online platform of the Journal of Victorian Culture
JVC
Our autumn issue, 28 3, contains an important Round Table, Piston, Pen and Press, covering new scholarship on nineteenth-century working-class literary cultures, from Mechanics Institutes to periodical poetry. The convenors of Piston, Pen and Press remind us that JVC has a rich tradition of publishing work on labouring class culture.
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Our latest issue, 28.1, features an extended Round Table entitled ‘Sculpture and Faith at St Paul’s Cathedral, c. 1796—1914‘. Lavishly illustrated, the collection boasts fifteen mini-essays, each devoted to one of the cathedral’s important monuments from our period. Many of these are free access. The Round Table is fuelled by the energies of multiple disciplines and approaches: art history, theology, history, ecclesiology, biography, empire- and queer studies, to name a few. As the introduction by Marjorie Coughlan, Jason Edwards and
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Journal of Victorian Culture 27.3 is now online, featuring an exciting range of articles spanning topics from royal pregnancy to feminine hunting culture, libraries to the intertwined complexities of language, class and race in the nineteenth century. Travel is a prominent theme, with Sam Tett’s “‘Going home when it was not home’: Jamais Vu in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction” offering a literary history of jamais vu that demonstrates its importance as a ‘rich interdisciplinary category’ of great interest to scholars of the nineteenth
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Anyone who’s read, or seen the latest adaptation of, Kate Atkinson’s Life after Life will remember the hapless Irish maid, Bridget, accused in an early scene of being ‘brought up in a field’. As Catherine Healy explores in her Prize Winning essay in this issue, Ethnic Jokes: Mocking the Working Irish Woman, ‘Bridget’ is a stock comic figure of the nineteenth-century press, appearing liberally in English, Irish and American light journalism. Healy’s essay extends and deepens the explorations pioneered in
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Journal of Victorian Culture 26.2 is now online, with lots of exciting interdisciplinary work, encompassing art history, print history, literary studies, digital humanities and medical history. Articles by Jina Moon and James Aaron Green will be of especial interest to readers of popular and New Woman fiction. There are some fabulous fashion plates in Rebecca Mitchell’s piece on Dolly Varden! The issue also features several free access articles, including a cutting edge Digital Forum on Mapping. We’d also like to remind everyone of imminent
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This is the first post in the ‘Crafting Communities’ series on JVC Online. See Part Two and Part Three. It is July 2020, the summer of Covid. Libraries are closed. Museums are closed. University courses and conferences have moved online. A small group of Victorianists gathers on Zoom to learn how to make hair art. Led by Vanessa Warne (U of Manitoba), the event is a test run for the upcoming semester, when Vanessa plans to make hair art with
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We are pleased to announce the next JVC Essay Prize competition. The aim of the prize is to promote scholarship among postgraduate research students working on the Victorian period in any discipline in the UK and abroad. The Journal inaugurated the prize in 2007, and our past winners include Louise Lee, Tiffany Watt-Smith, Bob Nicholson, Tom Scriven, Roisín Laing and Lucy Whitehead, whose essays appear in issues 13.1 (2008), 15.1 (2010), 17.3 (2012), 19.1 (2014), 21 4 (2016) and 24.
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Today, most of us cannot imagine waking up at the desired hour without our alarm clocks and smartphones. Clearly, such devices add to the convenience of our lives. But how did people wake up when alarm clocks did not exist or were not affordable to ordinary people? How did people ensure that they were not late for work? The answer is with the aid of “knocker ups”. Knocker ups were human alarm clocks –they were employed by clients who needed
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Given the challenging circumstances in which we are all working – authors, editors, the team at OUP, our anonymous reviewers – we are especially proud to launch the Summer issue of Journal of Victorian Culture. We want to thank all the contributors to the work of the journal for their patient and too often unsung efforts on behalf of JVC. Our cover image comes from Victoria Mills’ richly illustrated open access essay on Charles Kingsley’s Hypatia, a mid-century novel that
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Toy theatre was a popular children’s entertainment from around 1811 (the date of the first preserved sheets) until the 1860s. More than just a model stage, publishers offered young practitioners a variety of scenery and character sheets, abridged play scripts, and small-scale special effects with which to perform juvenile dramas.[1] Publishers often based juvenile productions on popular plays staged in full-scale London theatres. Melodramas and pantomimes were usually favoured for miniature productions. In an interview with Henry Mayhew in 1850,
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