Victorian Paper Art and Craft: Writers and Their Materials

Lutz, Deborah. Victorian Paper Art and Craft: Writers and Their Materials. Oxford University Press, 20 January 2023, 240 pp., $45.00 (hardcover), ISBN: 9780198858799 In 1845, desperate after months of silence from Constantin Heger, the French professor she loved, Charlotte Brontë wrote to him in a frantic state. She begged for the crumbs of his friendship in the strongest of terms, ascribing a life-giving quality to his written word. Her final letter ends with a plea: “when the sweet delight of

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The Architecture of Victorian Christendom (book review)

English Victorian Churches: Architecture, Faith & Revival (John Hudson Publishing) by the eminent architectural historian James Stevens Curl is a book that can be read in more than one way and appeal to more than one kind of audience. It can be read as a work of scholarship; one that spans two distinct but related disciplines, namely Victorian church architecture and nineteenth-century ecclesiology. As an authoritative survey and critique of the finest examples of nineteenth-century English church building, it would

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Review: Alistair Robinson’s ‘Vagrancy in the Victorian Age’

Studies dealing with textual representations of homelessness in Britain during the early modern period are plentiful: for instance, Arthur Kinney’s Rogues, Vagabonds & Study Beggars: A New Gallery of Tudor and Early Stuart Rogue Literature (1973), A.L. Beier’s Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England 1560-1640 (1985), Linda Woodbridge’s Vagrancy, Homelessness, and English Renaissance Literature (2001), Patricia Fumerton’s Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England (2006) and Craig Dionne and Steve Mentz’s Rogues and Early

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‘[T]he Dickensesque run mad’: Continuities and Ruptures in the History of the ‘Dickensian’

This blog post reflects on Dickens’s legacy as captured in the term ‘Dickensian’, from early uses of the term to what the events of 2020 might mean for study of his afterlife. It also introduces a new open access edited collection, Dickens After Dickens (White Rose UP, 2020), which explores some of the forms in which Dickens’s influence has manifested from the nineteenth century to the present, from his influence on writers including Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, William Faulkner and Donna Tartt

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David Craig, Strange Modernity? Review: Distant Strangers: How Britain Became Modern, by James Vernon

David Craig is Lecturer in History at Durham University. He is the author of Robert Southey and Romantic Apostasy (2007), and editor, with James Thompson, of Languages of Politics in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2013). His current work focuses on the language of ‘liberalism’ in the long nineteenth century.   Distant Strangers: How Britain Became Modern, by James Vernon, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014, xvii +166 pp., £16.95 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-520-28204-9 When did Britain become modern? In this bracing new book,

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Lara Rutherford-Morrison, Dracula as Prince Consort? Lord Ruthven as PM? The Vampiric Alternate History of Kim Newman’s ‘Anno Dracula’

Lara Rutherford-Morrison has a PhD in Victorian literature from the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is currently an Affiliated Scholar at Concordia University in Montreal and blogs daily for Bustle. Her research considers the ways that contemporary culture reimagines and plays with Victorian literature and history, in contexts ranging from adaptations of Victorian novels in film and fiction to heritage tourism in the U.K. She can be found at her website and on Twitter @LaraRMorrison. With Halloween just around

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Laura 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

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John Marriott, Streets Paved with Gold

John Marriott is a professor and senior associate at Pembroke College, Oxford. Among recent publications is Beyond the Tower: a History of East London, published by Yale University Press in 2012. Dirty Old London. The Victorian Fight Against Filth, by Lee Jackson, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014, 293 pages, illustrated (hardback), £20, ISBN: 978-0-300-19205-6. That London streets are paved with gold is surely one of the most enduring of myths. It was, of course, never to be

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Rosemary Mitchell, The Stories of My Life: Disraeli in Politics and Prose

Rosemary Mitchell is Associate Principal Lecturer in History and Reader in Victorian Studies at Leeds Trinity University, where she is also Director of the Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies. She is currently working on a monograph on gender roles and domesticity in Victorian historical cultures. Disraeli: The Romance of Politics, by Robert O’Kell, Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 2013. x + 595 pages, illustrated, £66.99 (hardback), ISBN 978-4426-4459-5. This literary life of Benjamin Disraeli is the most

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Rohan McWilliam, The Victorians Are Still With Us

Rohan McWilliam is Professor of Modern British History at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge.  He is the author of The Tichborne Claimant: A Victorian Sensation (London: Continuum, 2007) and is currently writing a history of the West End of London. Contact: rohan.mcwilliam@anglia.ac.uk We seldom lack heirs to G.M.Young.  When it comes to the Victorians, every age throws up its portrait of an age.[1]  But producing a wide-ranging account of Victorian Britain these days is becoming increasingly difficult.  The historical literature is

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