In the run up to the BAVS/NAVSA/AVSA Global and the Local conference (3-6 June), the Journal of Victorian Culture Online has organised a short online reading group of John Ruskin’s Stones of Venice. The reading will extend over three weeks and each week will focus on a different extract. Extract One: ‘The Throne’ (Friday 11th May- concluding Friday 18th May) led by Samantha Briggs (University of Exeter) Extract Two: ‘Modern Education’ (Friday 18th May- concluding 25th May) led by Jonathan Memel (University
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How do you use academic journals and social media?
Lucinda Matthews-Jones and Helen Rogers are writing a paper called ‘Doing Things Differently: Writing, Academic Journals and Social Media in the Online World’. Notwithstanding our title, we want to start by examining how our people currently access and engage with print and digital media. We would like to know about your experience and views, whether or not you regularly read journals, visit academic blogs and websites, tweet or use Facebook. We aim to map what our community is doing now, rather than what we ought
Read morePoor Women and Elite Men
Victorian Women, Unwed Mothers and the London Foundling Hospital, by Jessica A. Sheetz-Nguyen, London: Continuum, 2012, xii + 258 pp. (softcover), ISBN 978 1 441 1 4112 5 Elizabeth M., a waitress in a vegetarian restaurant, sought help from the London Foundling Hospital in 1891. She had met a respectably employed man, Daniel B., a foreman in the office of a dairy company, and the two began courting. They decided to marry and engaged in sexual intercourse. She became pregnant
Read moreAvoiding those Madding Crowds: Date Night with Thomas Hardy
Ryan D. Fong Kalamazoo College For most of our readership across the United States and in the UK, April is proving to be a very cruel month indeed—with severe weather patterns and cold fronts marching across the North America and Atlantic. In these frigid days and dank nights, in which we grow ever wearier of these lingering and intemperate climes, what is a good Victorianist to do? The options would seem (at least to this Victorianist) to either sink into
Read moreCelebrity Circulation I: Dickens in Photographs
By Susan Cook (Southern New Hampshire University, Manchester, NH) As a photographic image, Charles Dickens circulated far and wide. The man was photographed in excess of 120 times during his life [1], and was among all Victorians, as Joss Marsh recently put it, “the most photographically famous person in Britain outside the royal family” [2]. Ironically, however, Dickens disliked having his photographic image taken. Not only was he concerned that these images gave viewers a lie—a false sense of possessing
Read moreOnline Reading Group on John Ruskin’s ‘Stones of Venice’
In the run up to the BAVS/NAVSA/AVSA Global and the Local conference (3-6 June), Journal of Victorian Culture Online is planning an online reading group on John Ruskin’s Stones of Venice. The reading will extend over five weeks (22 April -27 May) and each week will focus on a different extract. We are looking for volunteers to select a chapter for discussion from any of the 3 volumes and to spark off the online discussion for that week. Each volunteer
Read more‘Parklife’ past and present: The Whitworth Park Community Archaeology and History Project
by Siân Jones, Hannah Cobb, Ruth Colton and Melanie Giles (University of Manchester) Whitworth Park was opened in 1890 towards the tail end of the most prolific park building period the country has ever known. It cost £69,000, and was filled with features designed for the recreation and health of the surrounding neighbourhood. The park became extremely popular on its opening, “abundantly visited” by the local population,[1] with some “six to eight thousand” people present on a Sunday afternoon in
Read moreAmanda Paxton, ‘Husbands and Wives: Nineteenth-Century Contours of Power’
By Amanda Paxton One of the most rewarding opportunities I had while researching my doctoral dissertation was working with the manuscripts of the clergyman, novelist, and social reformer Charles Kingsley in the British Library, particularly the uncompleted prose text “Elizabeth of Hungary.” Begun in 1842 but never completed, the breathtaking oversize volume was intended to provide a retelling of the life of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, whose biography served as the subject of Kingsley’s later verse closet drama, The Saint’s
Read moreThe delights of a tipsy hedgehog
Jessica Hindes Trawling through recipes for the JVC Bake Off, my eye was caught by a mysterious recipe in the Lady’s Own Cookery Book reading simply ‘Hedgehog’. As a long-time connoisseur of the hedgehog cake (my Mum baked one for my first birthday party in 1986), the prospect of a Victorian variant on this much-loved dessert was profoundly appealing. Unfortunately, the Lady’s Own recipe was not. Instructions for a kind of eggy, almondy paste, cooked on the stove-top until ‘stiff
Read moreJVC Online Editors & Contributors
JVC Online Editor & Contributors Lucinda Matthews-Jones, Editor Lucinda Matthews-Jones is a lecturer in Modern British History at Liverpool John Moores. She completed her PhD, ‘Centres of Brightness: The Spiritual Imagination of Toynbee Hall and Oxford House, 1883-1914’, in 2009. Lucie is currently expanding this research for her first book. Her publications include ‘Lessons in Seeing: Art, Religion and Class in the East End of London, 1881–1898’, Journal of Victorian Culture (2011) and ‘St Francis and the Making of Settlement
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