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
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The 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
Read moreHow to be a #socialmediahistorian: plug in and plog on
By Naomi Lloyd-Jones (King’s College London) The proliferation of that previously innocuous little symbol, the dear sweet hashtag, raises a big question for today’s historians. How do we build our networks and communicate with others in our profession, while simultaneously disseminating our research to a wider audience, in a world increasingly dominated by the use of social media? Seeking to answer this conundrum opens up a veritable Pandora’s Box and forces us to think about how far we are willing
Read moreRabindranath Tagore: The Poetics of Landscape
Supriya Chaudhuri (Jadavpur University) The Tagore season has passed, with his 150th birth anniversary being celebrated in 2011, so it was refreshing to listen to Anita Desai’s reading of one of Rabindranath Tagore’s early short stories, ‘The Postmaster’, as a Guardian podcast. This is one of the three stories that were filmed by Satyajit Ray in a remarkable evocation of life in the Bengal countryside close to the turn of the nineteenth century. The stories that Ray chose were all
Read moreThe Work of Art in the Age of Steampunk: A Review of the Tate Britain’s ‘Pre-Raphaelites: Avant-Garde’ show
Gillian Piggott (Middlesex University) In our image-obsessed world, where versions of paintings are infinitely reproduced on cards, fridge magnets and coffee coasters, how is it possible to comport ourselves productively towards the great originals on display at an exhibition – such as those in the recent Pre-Raphaelites: Avant-Garde show at Tate Britain? In his late essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Walter Benjamin outlines the phenomenon so descriptive of the experience one has nowadays of
Read moreRipper Street: The Historian’s Dilemma
Guy Woolnough (Keele University) I have watched Ripper Street with interest. There is an unpleasant interest in ‘Ripperology’ which distorts the popular view of Victorian crime and policing, and I feared that a series with this title might be focussed too narrowly. There are stories far more worthy of investigation by historians and programme makers than the unsolved Whitechapel murders. The first episode dispelled my fears, for although ‘The Ripper’ was the hook to catch the audience, the message to
Read moreJVC Graduate Student Essay Prize 2013–14
The Journal of Victorian Culture successfully inaugurated an essay prize competition in 2007, and our past winners include Louise Lee, Tiffany Watt-Smith, and Bob Nicholson whose essays appear in issues 13.1 (2008), 15.1 (2010) and 17.3 (2012). We are pleased to announce the next competition. The aim of the JVC Essay Prize is to promote scholarship among postgraduate research students working on the Victorian period in any discipline in the UK and abroad. The essay, which must be no longer
Read moreNew Year’s Resolution: Let’s Self-Archive
Helen Rogers (Liverpool John Moores Univeristy, Editor of Journal of Victorian Culture) In July 2012 the British government declared the UK would take the lead in accelerating the drive towards Open Access. It would kick-start a stuttering global movement by mandating that publicly-funded research in the UK must be published in open access journals. This was a bold policy turn, taken it would seem with little international consultation, to the so-called ‘gold’ or ‘author pays’ open access model where publication
Read moreThe Lure of the Solution: How do we consume the detective story today?
Alfie Bown (University of Manchester) The place of the fictional detective in contemporary popular culture is as central now as it was when the form first became popular in the nineteenth-century. Detective and crime fiction of innumerable sub-genres line the shelves of Waterstones, Poirot and Miss Marple are seemingly looped continuously on ITV3, film continues its interest in the whodunit, and the form is strangely prevalent in children’s and teenage television and fiction. But is there a continuity between the
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