Jessica Cox, Brunel University. Jessica Cox read Wuthering Heights at the age of sixteen, resulting in a developing obsession with all things Victorian. This eventually led to her completing a PhD (on sensation writer Wilkie Collins) at Swansea University in 2007. She is currently a lecturer in English at Brunel University, London. Jessica has research interests in Victorian popular fiction (particularly sensation fiction), the Brontёs, first-wave feminism, and neo-Victorianism. She is the author of a short biography of Charlotte Brontё,
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JVC
James Cutler, The Cultural Afterlives of Our Mutual Friend: ‘Adapting Our Mutual Friend for TV and Radio’ Panel Report
James John Cutler, Royal Holloway James Cutler is a PhD candidate at Royal Holloway, University of London, having previously studied at Aberystwyth, Liverpool and Cambridge. His thesis examines how and why certain places dominate the cultural memory of the most enduringly popular Victorian novelists. It investigates the crucial link between Victorian literary longevity and a cultural heritage characterised by strong associations with particular places. In addition to doctoral work, James volunteers at the Charles Dickens Museum and plays cricket for
Read moreSteven Harkins, Boris Johnson and the Victorian elite: Why Inequality is always fair at the top
Steven Harkins (University of Sheffield) Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, was recently criticised for his remarks on the importance of IQ tests and their relevance to equality. Delivering the annual Margaret Thatcher lecture, Johnson said ‘It is surely relevant to a conversation about equality that as many as 16% of our species have an IQ below 85 and 2% have an IQ above 130’. The Mayor of London’s remarks resurrected a discourse about poverty and inequality that was developed by the intellectuals of Victorian Britain.
Read moreLaura Fox Gill, Review: The Hardy Way: A 19th-Century Pilgrimage, Margaret Marande
Laura Fox Gill, University of Sussex Laura Fox Gill is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Sussex. Her research investigates the influence of John Milton on nineteenth-century culture (painting, poetry, and prose) and she is soon to begin work on connections between the thought and writing of Milton and Thomas Hardy. She tweets at @kitsunetsukiki. Walking for Thomas Hardy was a complicated matter; never simply a way of getting from A to B . Though his novels
Read moreCFP The Body and Pseudoscience in the Long Nineteenth Century, Interdisciplinary Conference, 18 June 2016, Newcastle University
Call for Papers: The Body and Pseudoscience in the Long Nineteenth Century, Interdisciplinary Conference, 18 June 2016, Newcastle University ‘Sciences we now retrospectively regard as heterodox or marginal cannot be considered unambiguously to have held that status at a time when no clear orthodoxy existed that could confer that status upon them’ (Alison Winter, 1997). The nineteenth century witnessed the drive to consolidate discrete scientific disciplines, many of which were concerned with the body. Attempts were made to clarify the
Read moreDrew Gray, Returning to Ripper Street (Part One): A Historian’s Perspective
Drew Gray, University of Northampton. Drew Gray teaches at the University of Northampton. He’s a social historian who specializes in the history of crime. You can follow his Twitter updates @HistoryatNmpton. The third series of Ripper Street had a delayed passage to terrestrial TV. Apparently axed by the BBC after series two’s dramatic finale it finally resurfaced on Amazon Prime after a vociferous campaign by the show’s many fans. I will admit to being one of those who struggled to
Read moreTimothy Alborn, ‘A Digital Window onto Writing History Research Notes’
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
Read moreEmily 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,
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