[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmvHzCLP6ug[/youtube] With today’s nationwide release of Les Misérables I booked my ticket and hurried off to my local cinema, excited to catch ‘The Best Film Of The Year’ – which is high praise indeed as it is only January. The film adaptation of the world’s longest running musical has a lot to live up to: a dedicated fan base more judgmental than any twihard, and reputation for having attracted some of the biggest names of stage and screen to its
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The elephant in the room: Questioning the absence of paedophilia in children’s histories
Lesley Hulonce (Swansea University) For the past four years I have been researching how pauper children fared under the ‘new’ poor law in Swansea between 1834 and 1910. Although the vast majority of these children stayed at home with their families or were fostered, the Swansea Guardians of the Poor paid for many children to live in a number of institutions. There were children in the workhouse, in cottage homes, privately-run orphanages, Catholic children’s homes and philanthropic institutions for deaf
Read moreA Biographical Sketch of East London
Beyond the Tower: A History of East London, by John Marriott, London: Yale University Press, 2011, xii + 421 pp., £25 (hardback), ISBN 9780300148800 Reviewed by Lucinda Matthews-Jones (Liverpool John Moores University) L.M.Matthew-Jones@ljmu.ac.uk In Beyond the Tower: A History of East London, John Marriott joins historians such as Gareth Stedman Jones, Judith Walkowitz and Seth Koven in offering readers a journey through the eastern districts of London. Our fascination with the East End continues apace, it seems. Nineteenth-century social commentators,
Read more‘A blue furry Charles Dickens who hangs out with a rat?’: A Muppets Chritsmas Carol
2012 has been a fascinating year for Dickens on screen. From Gwyneth Hughes’s Mystery of Edwin Drood (carried on from Dickens’s half-finished manuscript with a newly-written, brilliantly satisfying ending) to the BBC’s daytime modern reimagining of Nicholas Nickleby; from Sarah Phelps’s beautifully stylised, haunting version of Great Expectations last Christmas to David Nicholls’s more ponderous, reverent film adaptation this autumn; Dickens’s sympathies with the screen, most notoriously noted by film theorist Sergei Eisenstein, have been abundantly clear. In light of
Read moreA Joke in Dickens
Alfie Bown (University of Manchester) In his relatively recent book on humour Simon Critchley writes that ‘it is important to recognize that not all humour is [liberating], and most of the best jokes are fairly reactionary, or at best, simply serve to reinforce social consensus.’[1] Thus, for Critchley, as for much other joke theory, there are two types of joke; the reactionary on the one hand and the radical or liberatory on the other. Dickens’s jokes, I argue, complicate this
Read moreTasting the Neo-Victorian Christmas: Mince pies and Chocolate Santas
Lucinda Matthews-Jones (Liverpool John Moores University) Last Thursday was the end of a very long term for me and my students. I’m not saying that I was bribing my students with treats, but my co-lecturer on ‘Victorian Popular Culture’ and I were both aware that we needed to sweeten the blow of week 14. For Mike, this meant stopping off at a local shop to purchase ‘A Victorian Christmas: Milk Chocolate Santas’. The box showed a ‘traditional’ image of Christmas
Read moreLucinda Matthews-Jones, Tasting the Victorian Christmas: Mince pies and Chocolate Santas
Lucinda Matthews-Jones (Liverpool John Moores University) Last Thursday was the end of a very long term for me and my students. I’m not saying that I was bribing my students with treats, but my co-lecturer on ‘Victorian Popular Culture’ and I were both aware that we needed to sweeten the blow of week 14. For Mike, this meant stopping off at a local shop to purchase ‘A Victorian Christmas: Milk Chocolate Santas’. The box showed a ‘traditional’ image of Christmas
Read more“A powerful engine of civilization”: Rowland Hill’s Post Office Reform
In 1837, Rowland Hill set out to reform the way in which a nation communicated with the publication of the pamphlet Post Office Reform: Its Importance and Practicability. It’s a document which I’m sure many Victorianists are familiar with, but I wanted to raise a couple of points that Hill’s pamphlet signals in terms of national belonging and connectedness, as well as its resonances in the British postal service today. Hill set out to address the problem of the Post Office’s unsatisfactory
Read moreMerrick Burrow, ‘The Imperial Souvenir: Things and Masculinities in H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines & Allan Quatermain’
By Merrick Burrow (University of Huddersfield) This post accompanies Merrick Burrow’s Journal of Victorian Culture article published (2013). It can be read in full here. H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines ends with a letter in which Sir Henry Curtis, one of the main protagonists, highlights the significance of hunting and battle trophies brought back from the ‘lost world’ of Kukuanaland for his renewed sense of his own hegemonic masculinity: The tusks of the great bull that killed poor Khiva
Read moreStandard Cuts and Lace Collars: What Patients Wore in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Asylums
Jane Hamlett and Lesley Hoskins Forthcoming article ‘Comfort in Small Things? Clothing, Control and Agency in County Lunatic Asylums in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century England’ This photograph offers us a glimpse of the women’s day ward at Long Grove Asylum in Surrey in the early twentieth century. The nurses standing in the background are immediately identifiable by their uniforms. The patients, meanwhile, are dressed apparently warmly and comfortably, but their clothes seem to have been cut to a standard pattern.
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