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
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Tasting 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.
Read moreSimon Morgan, ‘Material Culture and the Politics of Personality in Early Victorian England’
My article on ‘Material Culture and the Politics of Personality in Early Victorian England’ explores the role and meaning of things in the development of nascent personality cults around politicians, particularly those involved in extra-parliamentary campaigns such as the free trade and anti-slavery movements. Such objects ranged from mass produced items like medals, ceramics or popular prints, to more intimate and personal artefacts such as locks of hair. It is my contention that, by studying these artefacts, historians can gain
Read moreDominic Janes, ‘William Bennett’s Heresy: Male Same-Sex Desire and the Art of the Eucharist’
In ‘William Bennett’s Heresy: Male Same-Sex Desire and the Art of the Eucharist,’ Dominic Janes’ continues to develop his study of the history of Christian ethics and aesthetics—first, in the context of the early Church, and secondly, in relation to the nineteenth century. In Victorian Reformation: The Fight over Idolatry in the Church of England, 1840-1860 (2009), he explored the discourses surrounding ‘idolatry’, which was, in a narrow sense, the worship of idols, but, in a broad sense, could mean
Read morePunking the Victorians, Punking Pedagogy: Steampunk and Creative Assignments in the Composition Classroom
Dr. Kathryn Crowther (Georgia Perimeter College) As a Victorianist teaching primarily first-year English, I have to look for creative ways to bring my 19th-century interests into the classroom. A few semesters ago I was teaching freshman composition at Georgia Tech, and I began brainstorming for a way to design a course that combined Victorian texts with a focus on technology. I thought that 19th-century literature would be a hard sell in a class of engineers and programmers until conversations with
Read moreWill Abberley, ‘To Make a New Tongue’: Natural and Manufactured Language in the Late Fiction of William Morris
In 1885 William Morris wrote that poetry had become near-impossible in the modern age, since ‘language is utterly degraded in our daily lives, and poets have to make a new tongue each for himself: before he can even begin his story he must elevate his means of expression from the daily jabber to which centuries of degradation have reduced it’ (IIB 483). Abberley explores the intellectual influences that shaped Morris’s belief in such linguistic degradation, and how his late fiction
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