Michael Ledger-Lomas is Lecturer in the History of Christianity in Britain at King’s College, London. He is the editor, with David Gange, of Cities of God: the Bible and Archaeology in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) and is currently working on the British reception of St Paul from the eighteenth century onwards. Macaulay and Son: Architects of Imperial Britain, by Catherine Hall, New Haven, Conn. and London: Yale University Press, 2012, xxviii + 389 pp. illustrated, £35 (hardback),
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“As far away from England as any man could be”: The Luminaries as sensation sequel?
By Kirby-Jane Hallum Kirby-Jane Hallum teaches English Literature at the University of Otago in New Zealand. Her research interests lie in the long 19th century in Britain and New Zealand, with particular focus on women’s and popular literature. Kirby-Jane’s monograph, Aestheticism and the Marriage Market in Victorian Popular Fiction: The Art of Female Beauty, is forthcoming from Pickering & Chatto in 2015, and she is currently embarking on a new project regarding Britain’s influence on colonial New Woman writing. Follow
Read more‘A Diversity of Dickens: Or, Should We Read Literature and Culture in Context?’
Mary L. Shannon, King’s College London Dickens’s London: Perception, Subjectivity and Urban Multiplicity (Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Literature), by Julian Wolfreys, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012, illustrated, £70 (hardback), xx + 251 pages, ISBN 978-0-7486-4040-9 Dickens and the Sentimental Tradition: Fielding, Richardson, Sterne, Goldsmith, Sheridan, Lamb (Anthem Nineteenth-Century Series), by Valerie Purton, London: Anthem, 2012, £60 (hardback), xxvii + 190 pages, ISBN 978-0-85728-418-1 Dickens and the Artists, edited by Mark Bills; with contributions by Pat Hardy, Leonée Ormond, Nicholas
Read more‘That difficult thing, the liberal self’
The Foundation of the Unconscious: Schelling, Freud and the Birth of the Modern Psyche, by Matt ffytche, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, ix + 310 pp., £60.00 (hardback), ISBN 978 0 521 76649 4 Reviewev by Carolyn Burdett (Birkbeck, University of London) C.Burdett@bbk.ac.uk Unusually, this review of Matt ffytche’s book on the origins of the Freudian concept of the unconscious requires a word or two to justify its inclusion in this journal. The Foundation of the Unconscious is not primarily,
Read moreMind the Gap: Transport, History, and the Work of Fiction
Charles Dickens’s Networks: Public Transport and the Novel, by Jonathan H. Grossman, New York: Oxford University Press, 2012, vii + 256 pp., illustrated £25 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-19-964419-3 Reviewed by Ruth Livesey (Royal Holloway, University of London) Ruth.Livesey@rhul.ac.uk Living through the transport developments of the nineteenth century seems to have been a pretty dizzying experience. In 1851 Charles Dickens celebrated the opening of the new railway line from Boulogne to Paris by the South-Eastern Railway in an article in Household Words.
Read moreMusical Inspirations in the Long Nineteenth Century
British Music and Literary Context – Artistic Connections in the Long Nineteenth Century, by Michael Allis, Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2012, xii + 320 pages, illustrated, £60 (hardback), ISBN 9781843837305 Reviewed by Iain Quinn (Western Connecticut State University) ijtquinn1@yahoo.com This book offers an interdisciplinary examination of the relationship between literature and music during the long nineteenth century. Music and literature fulfill defined roles in British life with the paradox that, although Victorian literature has remained popular to the present day,
Read moreThe Past is Red: Some New Departures in the Historiography of Victorian Socialism
The Making of British Socialism, by Mark Bevir, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011, xiii + 350 pages, £24.95 (hardback), ISBN 0-691-15083-3 Ecology and the Literature of the British Left: The Red and the Green, edited by John Rignall and H. Gustav Klaus in association with Valentine Cunningham, Farnham: Ashgate, 2012, xi + 267, £60 (hardback), ISBN 1-4094-1822-1 William Morris and the Idea of Community: Romance, History and Propaganda, 1880-1914, by Anna Vaninskaya, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010, viii
Read more“Is there anybody there?” :Examining Victorian Responses to Spiritualism and the Occult
The Ashgate Research Companion to Nineteenth Century Spiritualism and the Occult, by Tatiana Kontou and Sarah Willburn (eds.), Surrey: Ashgate, 2012, v + 436 pages, illustrated, £85 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-7546-6912-8 The Theology of Dracula: Reading the Book of Stoker as a Sacred Text, by Noel Montague-Etienne Rarignac, London: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2012, v +234 pages, illustrated, $40 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-7864-6499-9 Reviewed by Dr Clare Horrocks (Liverpool John Moores University) C.L.Horrocks@ljmu.ac.uk As the dust jacket of the Ashgate Companion notes,
Read moreDickens in Performance
Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World, by Simon Callow, London: Harper Press, 2012, xiii + 370pp, £16.99 (Hardback), ISBN 978 0 00 744530 1 Dickens’ Women, by Miriam Margolyes and Sonia Fraser, London, Hesperus Press Limited, 2011, 96 pp, £8.99 (Paperback) ISBN 978 1 84391 351 1 Reviewed by Gillian Piggott gillian-piggott@hotmail.com Two of our top actors have dovetailed the publication of their thoughts on Dickens with the Bicentenary festivities, providing an actor’s perspective on the great
Read moreGillian Piggott, ‘Dickens in Performance’
Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World, by Simon Callow, London: Harper Press, 2012, xiii + 370pp, £16.99 (Hardback), ISBN 978 0 00 744530 1 Dickens’ Women, by Miriam Margolyes and Sonia Fraser, London, Hesperus Press Limited, 2011, 96 pp, £8.99 (Paperback) ISBN 978 1 84391 351 1 Reviewed by Gillian Piggott. Gillian Piggott is visiting lecturer at Middlesex University and Associate Lecturer in the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her book, Dickens and Benjamin:
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