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
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Online 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
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
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