Anyone curious about the influence of Victorian pseudoscience and spiritualism in our contemporary entertainment culture should take a stroll down Shaftesbury Avenue in London. On the side of the Shaftesbury Theatre there currently is a giant sign with the word “Svengali” written on it in large bold letters. The self-styled Svengali is the illusionist Derren Brown, a British author and performer who has appeared in numerous television series and the sign refers to his 2011 stage tour. Like George du Maurier’s
Read moreCategory: Victorians Beyond the Academy
Pete Orford, ‘Scrooge in Space; updating A Christmas Carol for the twenty-first century and beyond’
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_KJG5w91cE[/youtube] A Christmas Carol is Dickens’ most appropriated tale, with an eclectic mix of artists involved in its retelling, from Mr Magoo to the Mr Men, and Batman to Barbie. The latest, and highly entertaining, offering was from the BBC’s flagship drama Doctor Who in its 2010 Christmas Special (aired in Britain on BBC1 on Christmas Day), in which the miserly Kazran Sardick (played by Michael Gambon) was the only man who could save the Doctor’s friends – and several
Read moreScrooge in Space; updating A Christmas Carol for the twenty-first century and beyond
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_KJG5w91cE[/youtube] A Christmas Carol is Dickens’ most appropriated tale, with an eclectic mix of artists involved in its retelling, from Mr Magoo to the Mr Men, and Batman to Barbie. The latest, and highly entertaining, offering was from the BBC’s flagship drama Doctor Who in its 2010 Christmas Special (aired in Britain on BBC1 on Christmas Day), in which the miserly Kazran Sardick (played by Michael Gambon) was the only man who could save the Doctor’s friends – and several
Read moreToasting Boz’s Bicentennial
As the two-hundredth anniversary of Charles Dickens’s birthday draws nigh, pre-bicentennial celebrations are already underway. Most recently, the New York Institute of Technology hosted a conference featuring several eminent Dickens scholars: http://www.nyit.edu/index.php/about_nyit/news-full/literature_lovers_explore_the_works_of_charles_dickens/ Commemorations of Dickens’s life will soon abound in his homeland and across Europe, as this helpful website announces: http://www.dickens2012.org/calendar If you find yourself farther afield from these metropolitan amusements, all is not lost. Follow Charles Dickens’s own instructions for creating a libation that is sure to lead to
Read moreDrugs in Victorian Britain: A Wellcome Collection Symposium
“High Society” and “Drugs in Victorian Britain” by Cheryl Blake Price Sherlock Holmes took his little bottle from the corner of the mantle-piece and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case. With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle, and rolled back his left shirt-cuff. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture-marks. Finally, he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the
Read moreFrom Heavy Industry to High Culture: the Riverside Museum in Glasgow
Glasgow’s third transport museum, designed by the famous Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid, is scheduled to open its doors to the public on 21 June 2011. The Riverside Museum constitutes the first purpose-built transport museum in Glasgow and can thus be seen as a product of an ongoing change in the city’s attitudes to its industrial heritage. Many Victorian material remnants testifying to Glasgow’s abundant trade and industrial expansion have been displayed in various relatively small collections, such as that exhibited
Read moreA Fresh Eyre?: Charlotte Brontë on the Big Screen (Again)
by Ryan D. Fong, University of California, Davis [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8J6Cjn06kA[/youtube] Adapting Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre must be a daunting, if seductive, task for any screenwriter and director. Beloved the world over, the novel features an eponymous heroine whose story has struck an emotional chord with readers—and female readers, especially—for over one hundred and fifty years. One colleague confessed to me that every time she got mad at her parents as a child, she would retreat to her bedroom and re-read the
Read moreAestheticism at the V&A
The Victoria and Albert Museum’s major new exhibition on the Aesthetic Movement has just opened. ‘The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860-1900’ will run until 17 July. As well as bringing together paintings by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, James Whistler, and Frederic Leighton, the exhibition also examines how the Movement influenced design, fashion, and architecture. A long and lively review by Fiona MacCarthy in The Guardian reflects on the themes of the exhibition and discusses the influence of
Read moreA Renaissance for Gothic?
The Midland Grand hotel beside London’s St Pancras station is about to re-open – 76 years after closing its doors to its last paying guests. Following a £200million refurbishment, this most extraordinary of Victorian Gothic edifices, renamed the St Pancras Renaissance Hotel London, is now taking reservations ahead of its official opening in May. The occasion represents an extraordinary reversal in the building’s fortunes. When the Midland Grand first opened in 1871, it was the smartest of the Victorian terminus
Read moreImages of Empire: Felice Beato and Photographing the Nineteenth-Century East
Entering its final month, the J. Paul Getty Center’s exhibit Felice Beato: A Photographer on the Eastern Road offers a rich retrospective of an important Victorian photographer and provides an evocative lens for viewing the global nineteenth century. Collecting images of Japan, China, India, Korea, and Burma and photos of some of the most important conflicts of the age, including the Crimean War, the Indian Mutiny and the Second Opium War, Beato and his work grant a fascinating glimpse into
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