By Wendy Parkins, Kent University The exciting re-discovery of wall paintings and decorations during recent restoration work at William Morris’s Red House – as widely reported in the media this week – raises as many questions as it answers. Who painted the five Old Testament figures in the mural in the main bedroom? And why? After all, Noah holding a miniature ark doesn’t exactly say ‘honeymoon suite’, not to mention the sense of foreboding a depiction of Adam and Eve
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Literary Places: A Review of Placing Literature
By Susan Cook (Southern New Hampshire University, Manchester, NH) Thomas Hardy’s Wessex, The Thomas Hardy Association “The Ring at Casterbridge was merely the local name of one of the finest Roman Amphitheatres, if not the very finest, remaining in Britain. “Casterbridge announced old Rome in every street, alley, and precinct. It looked Roman, bespoke the art of Rome, concealed dead men of Rome. It was impossible to dig more than a foot or two deep about the town fields and
Read moreGuidelines for JVC Online Contributors
The Journal of Victorian Culture (JVC) Online welcomes proposals addressing issues of pedagogy, contemporary popular culture, and the academy as they relate to Victorian studies. JVC Online asks that all contributors be conscious of the online medium in which their work will appear. For text-based pieces, contributors should be careful to limit paragraph length for readability, and posts should be no more than 1500 words in length. We also invite contributors to be a little bit less formal that traditional
Read moreWill the Real Esther Price Please Stand Up? Archival Fiction & The Mill
By Catherine Feely Quarry Bank Mill in Cheshire, the setting and subject of Channel 4’s drama The Mill, holds a privileged place in my early historical training. My mother remembers that when I was a child, bored stiff by country houses when my parents invested in membership to the National Trust in the 1980s, a trip to the cotton mill could always be counted on to stop me moaning. (My father half-jokes that he has spent all of his adult
Read moreKnickerbockers and Tight-Lacing:Ruth Goodman’s ‘How To Be A Victorian’
‘How To Be A Victorian’ (Penguin/Viking, 2013) by Ruth Goodman review by Gabrielle Malcolm Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman, as the song goes. It was especially hard to be a Victorian woman. We think we know, and we certainly do – on many levels – understand the hardships that people underwent on a daily basis, from morning until night. But is this awareness not just one of academic, historic facts? Do we really appreciate or empathise with what
Read moreCruise Liners, Crypts and the Paradox of Venice
by Helen Kingstone (Leeds Trinity University / University of Leeds) Standing in the majestic Council Chamber of the Doge’s Palace, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Venice was still thriving as a Renaissance maritime empire. But suddenly a shadow falls over the room. The view from the window is obliterated, and filled instead with a different image: the huge white side of a cruise liner. This is a common occurrence in Venice, whose population is more than doubled each day
Read moreJohn Addington Symonds, literary tourism and the colour of Venetian canals
Amber K. Regis (University of Sheffield) In the weeks leading up to the recent NAVSA/BAVS/AVSA conference, hosted by Ca’ Foscari University in Venice, I read the following passage from John Addington Symonds’s The Fine Arts, the third volume in his Renaissance in Italy series: Venice, with her pavement of liquid chrysoprase, with her palaces of porphyry and marble, her frescoed facades, her quays and squares aglow with the costumes of the Levant, her lagoons afloat with the galleys of all
Read moreIssues in the Digital Humanities: A Key Skills Package for Postgraduate Researchers
Jen Morgan (University of Salford) It is surprising, given the increase in both the production and use of digitised materials by people who wouldn’t necessarily describe themselves as ‘digital humanists’, that it is so difficult to find a general, introductory course on what is involved in producing such resources. That was the position that Elinor Taylor (@ElinorMTaylor) and I found ourselves in when, having bid successfully for funding to run a course for post-graduate students and early career researchers on
Read moreImages of Victorian Motherhood, Effaced and Exposed
Recently I’ve been contemplating motherhood as it is represented in Victorian hidden mother portraits and Victorian breastfeeding portraits, two fascinating photographic trends. A little over a year ago, I stumbled upon Chelsea Nichols’ post about hidden mothers in Victorian photographs on her blog, The Museum of Ridiculously Interesting Things. These images typically depict a shrouded woman holding or standing behind a baby or child, ostensibly to keep the child still for the camera while remaining out of the image. The
Read moreBrontë by Polly Teale
By Charlotte Mathieson, University of Warwick In May 2013, the Capitol Theatre in Manchester staged a production of the play Brontë, by Polly Teale. Originally staged by Shared Experience in 2005 (of which you can view a short trailer online), the play explores the life and writing of the Brontës through key episodes from their lives and scenes from their writing. I went to watch the production with fellow Victorianist and life-writing specialist Amber Regis, and in this filmed conversation
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