The Value of Victorian Studies: View from the Publisher

Linda Bree is Editorial Director, Arts and Literature, at Cambridge University Press. Her own scholarly work is in the literature of the long eighteenth century, from Daniel Defoe to Jane Austen: among other projects she is editor of Defoe’s Moll Flanders (OUP, forthcoming) and Henry Fielding’s Amelia (Broadview, 2010), and co-editor of Jane Austen’s Later Manuscripts (CUP, 2008). This post is one part of a four-part discussion on the value of Victorian studies. To read the other posts, visit http://myblogs.informa.com/jvc/2011/10/07/the-value-of-victorian-studies/.

Read more

The Public Value of Victorian Studies

This September the British Association of Victorian Studies gathered for its annual conference at the University of Birmingham to explore the theme ‘Composition and Decomposition’. In the final plenary, delegates met to debate ‘The Value of Victorian Studies’. Here, we present Shearer West’s paper on ‘The Public Value of Victorian Studies’ which opened discussion and in related posts we publish the plenary responses to Shearer’s paper by Linda Bree, Sarah Parker and Regenia Gagnier. With the rise of university tuition fees

Read more

Muddy, Foggy Papers: SCOTUS and/as Chancery?

Ryan D. Fong University of California, Davis Despite her untimely passing in 2007, Anna Nicole Smith is still making headlines. But then again, so is Charles Dickens. In a decision against her estate’s case against the family of her late husband, the Supreme Court ruled against her claim and announced its decision yesterday. When Chief Justice John Roberts read his majority decision aloud, he alluded to the past, but reached back much further than four years. In fact, it was

Read more

‘The line, the mark, the blot and the scribble’: exploring Pre-Raphaelite drawing

The Poetry of Drawing: Pre-Raphaelite Designs, Studies & Watercolours, Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, 29 January–15 May 2011; The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 17 June–4 September 2011. http://www.bmag.org.uk/events?id=1038 Pre-Raphaelite Drawing [Catalogue], by Colin Cruise, London: Thames & Hudson, 2011, 248 pp., illustrated, £29.95 (hardback), ISBN 9780500238813, £19.95 (paperback), ISBN 9780709302643 The Poetry of Drawing: Pre-Raphaelite Designs, Studies & Watercolours, on display at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (BMAG), provides the most comprehensive survey of Pre-Raphaelite works on

Read more

Victorian madness and financial crises: some modern parallels

Financial crises, stock market crashes, and bankers’ nervous breakdowns are not new to this latest recession, nor were they new in the Great Depression of the 1920s. Stockbrokers’ suicides and money madness were even more familiar to the pages of Victorian newspapers than ours today. The public’s fascination with these kinds of crises both fed and was fed by an enormous volume of publication on the subject, spilling out of financial papers and journals, into mainstream newspapers, popular periodicals and

Read more

Victorians and ‘the Big Society’: Some reimaginings and reflections

by Lucinda Matthews-Jones The Victorians are everywhere. They are on our TV screens, bookshelves and DVD cabinets. Our appetite for Victorian culture is even fuelled, now, by newly-written ‘neo-Victorian’ novels and their TV adaptations, including Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith, Affinity and Tipping the Velvet and Michael Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White. More recently, though I hardly dare mention it, the Victorians have even been re-imagined in the corridors of Westminster. Type David Cameron into Google and one of the

Read more

The Framework Knitters’ Museum: See how the Victorian lived and worked

          Image One and Image Two showing the road sign directing visitors to the Framework Knitters’ Museum in Ruddington. I have recently moved from Manchester to a small Nottinghamshire village called Ruddington. Here is a corner of Englishness that still sees the shops close on Wednesday afternoon and where couples descend to the picturesque Anglican church to get married in summer. The nearby Great Central Heritage Railway provides the occasional ‘choo-chooing’ of visiting steam trains. The opening of

Read more

Philanthropic Princes – Charles, Prince of Wales, Edward VII and Victorian Cultures of Charity

Last month Prince Charles officially became the longest serving heir to the British throne in history, outstripping the record held by his great-grandfather Edward VII, who spent fifty nine years in the wings waiting to take over from his mother Queen Victoria. Many of the British newspapers which carried the story indulged in comparisons of these two most senior Princes of Wales; some focusing on the relationships the two men had with their reigning mothers and their long preparations for

Read more

The Crimson Petal and the White and seeing Victorian London

London 1874, keep your wits about you, this city is vast and intricate, and you do not know your way around. You imagined from other stories you read that you know it well, but those stories flattered you: you are an alien from another time and place altogether. You don’t even know what hour it is, nor do most where you’re going. Sugar, Episode One.                                                                                                        Victorian London has returned to British screens with the dramatization of Michel Faber’s 2002 novel

Read more

The Importance of Being Earnest Live in HD

On 2 June 2011, the Roundabout Theatre Company’s production of Wilde’s masterpiece will be broadcast live in HD at cinemas throughout the United States and internationally, with repeat performances being shown periodically until 28 June. To complete the experience, the Playgoer’s Guide to the production is available online, offering a brief sketch of the play’s original cultural context. [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcTmJHsbOXQ&feature=player_embedded[/youtube] It is interesting that the information in the guide, as well as some of the trailers and videos on the theatre

Read more