Girl in a Blue Dress, by Gaynor Arnold. Birmingham, Tindal Street Press: 2011 (2008), 438 pages, £7.99 paperback, ISBN 978-1-906994-15-0 “My husband’s funeral is today. And I’m sitting here alone in my upstairs room while half London followed him to his grave.” So begins Gaynor Arnold’s Girl in a Blue Dress, a novel which traces the story of Dorothea Gibson following the death of her estranged husband, famous author Alfred Gibson. Narrated from Dorothea’s perspective, the novel sees her look
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Victorian legacies in Alan Hollinghurst’s The Strangers Child
The Stranger’s Child by Alan Hollinghurst, London: Picador, 2011, 576 pages, £20 paperback, ISBN: 0330483242 Till from the garden and the wild A fresh association blow, And year by year the landscape grow Familiar to the stranger’s child; Tennyson, ‘In Memoriam A.H.H.’ I’ve just finished reading Alan Hollinghurst’s new novel, The Stranger’s Child. I bought it at the beginning of June in Cardiff after running a conference there on ‘Material Religion’. Exhausted and falling asleep on the train, I put it away
Read moreDiscriminating Fossils – the crystal models belonging to the Watt family, c.1800
by Jane Insley (curator) and Valerie McCathern (volunteer; this project was Valerie’s fault, so she is co-author!) Science Museum, London. Image One: Watt workshop The Science Museum has recently opened a new permanent exhibition about the 18th century steam pioneer James Watt. This had two main aims – one, the redisplay in public view of the garret workshop James Watt set up in Heathfield, his retirement home, and the other, to make more sense of the huge steam engines in
Read moreStudying Nineteenth Century Media: Marking the Shift from ‘Reader’ to ‘User’
Clare Horrocks, Liverpool John Moores University C.L.Horrocks@ljmu.ac.uk The Nineteenth-Century Press in the Digital Age by James Mussell, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, vii + 232 pages, illustrated, £55 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-230-23553-3 In this much-awaited volume on the impact of the digital age on our study of the nineteenth century press, James Mussell is able to demonstrate how the traditional monograph no longer serves the professional needs of the academy (xi). Identifying a new era for research he asserts that there are
Read moreNot-reading: the Burden of the Book
Maria Damkjær, King’s College London maria.damkjaer@kcl.ac.uk How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain, by Leah Price, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2012, ix + 350 pages, illustrated, £19.95 (hardback), ISBN: 9780691114170 The dust jacket of Leah Price’s book is dominated by an image of cannibalised printed pages, cut and twisted into paper flowers. This, and the title How to Do Things with Books, might lead the reader to think that Price is writing about material books and
Read moreBook Review: Bloody Victorians: Violence and Historical Narrative
Violent Victorians: Popular Entertainment in Nineteenth-Century London, by Rosalind Crone, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012, xv + 304 pages, illustrated, £16.99 (paperback), ISBN 978 0 7190 8685 4 Reviewed by Sara Hackenberg, San Francisco State University shackenb@sfsu.edu Sweeny Todd refuses to die. Ever since his 1846 debut in Lloyd’s sensational serial, The String of Pearls, the murderous barber of Fleet Street has been adapted countless times into literary, dramatic, cinematic, musical, and even balletic forms, most recently in Tim Burton’s
Read moreBook review: Never Such Innocence
Visions of England, by Roy Strong. London: Bodley Head, 2011, viii + 229, illustrated, £17.99 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-847-92160-4 Reviewed by Mark Storey, University of Nottingham Among the many figures, institutions and traditions admitted to Roy Strong’s pantheon in Visions of England, one surprising omission is Philip Larkin. He would seem at first glance a perfect candidate: the pastoral impulse which Strong locates as the binding force throughout English cultural history finds a distinctly twentieth-century articulation in much of
Read moreBook review: Amy Levy’s Fate: Death and the Statistician
The Women Who Dared: A Biography of Amy Levy, by Christine Pullen, Kingston upon Thames: Kingston University Press, 2010, 241 pp., illustrated, ₤20 (paperback), ISBN 978 1 899999 43 9 Reviewed by Theodore M. Porter, University of California, Los Angeles The narrative trajectory of this biography begins and ends with the suicide of the writer Amy Levy at the age of 27 on 9 September 1889. That tragic end gives direction to Christine Pullen’s wide-ranging study of Levy and her
Read moreBook Review: Victorian poetry when?
Victorian Poetry Now: Poets, Poems, Poetics, by Valentine Cunningham, Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2011, xiii + 537 pp., £95 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-631-20826-6 Reviewed byEmma Mason, University of Warwick emma.mason@warwick.ac.uk From his work on dissenting religious traditions to the significance of intertextual writing and reading practices and the status of critical theory in literary studies, Valentine Cunningham has shaped for himself a scholarly guise at once robustly intellectual and critically jocose. His critical voice – homiletic and idiosyncratic – resonates with a
Read moreBook Review: Elite Dancing and Dining in London and Paris
Society Dancing: Fashionable Bodies in England, 1870-1920, by Theresa Jill Buckland, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, x + 200 pp., £50.00 (hardback) ISBN 978-0-230-27714-4 Bourgeois Consumption: Food, Space and Identity in London and Paris, 1850-1914, by Rachel Rich, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011, ix + 213 pp., £55.00 (hardback) ISBN 978-0-7190-8112-5 Reviewed by Dr Kelly Boyd, Institute of Historical Research, University of London k.boyd@blueyonder.co.uk As Leonore Davidoff showed us in The Best Circles, one of the most difficult tasks in nineteenth-century English
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