JVC Online Blog

The Woman Professional and De Facto Non-Biological Motherhood in ‘The Story of a Modern Woman’

Other

Ella Hepworth Dixon’s novel, The Story of a Modern Woman (1894), unlike many of its mid-century predecessors and fin-de-siècle contemporaries, does not burden its heroine, an aspiring professional woman, with marriage and biological motherhood.[1] Mary Erle, the main protagonist of Dixon’s novel, “did not care for babies” and “would rather have had a nice, new, fluffy kitten.”[2] Having thus described Mary’s lack of interest in children in no uncertain terms, Dixon’s narrative is also careful to point out her natural,

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The Curious Case of Mr. and Mrs. Holmes

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Sherlock Holmes is not often associated with the supernatural, having “confined [his] investigations to this world” when Dr. Mortimer presented Sherlock with his most overtly supernatural case, in The Hound of the Baskervilles. Sherlock was logical, factual, and believed that human nature and the natural world, not the paranormal, could explain anything unexplainable. Despite this, Sherlock’s origins have closer ties to the supernatural than it might first appear. Sherlock’s creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, was a known spiritualist and a dedicated

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New issue: JVC 27.3 is now available!

Published in JVC

Journal of Victorian Culture 27.3 is now online, featuring an exciting range of articles spanning topics from royal pregnancy to feminine hunting culture, libraries to the intertwined complexities of language, class and race in the nineteenth century. Travel is a prominent theme, with Sam Tett’s “‘Going home when it was not home’: Jamais Vu in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction” offering a literary history of jamais vu that demonstrates its importance as a ‘rich interdisciplinary category’ of great interest to scholars of the nineteenth

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‘Hearts and Pockets’: Consumerism and the early Salvation Army

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Figure 1 (header image): An advertisement for the wide range of goods to be purchased at the Salvation Army Trade Department, including an illustration of shoppers in the ‘Salvation Emporium’ showroom on Clerkenwell Road. From Salvation Army newspaper War Cry, 18 November 1893. Salvation Army International Heritage Centre. The notion of a ‘consumer identity’ is simultaneously ubiquitous and elusive. We are all consumers; and many of us do our best, in one way or another, to ensure that our consumer

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Sexualizing Narratives: Layered Scopophilia in Tess of the d’Urbervilles and the Female Reader

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Header image: 1891 illustration from Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles, by Joseph Syddall. “Why so often the coarse appropriates the finer thus,” comments the narrator of Tess of the d’Urbervilles following Tess Durbeyfield’s fateful encounter with Alec d’Urbervilles at the Chase.[1] The exploration of sexuality within Victorian culture and literature, especially female sexuality, is extensive; Michel Foucault’s first volume of The History of Sexuality (1976), Nancy Armstrong’s Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (1987), Christopher

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‘Dear Boss, I am staying in Manchester at present’: Regional Jack the Ripper Letters and Northern Representation

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‘Dear Boss, I keep on hearing the police have caught me but they wont fix me just yet. I have laughed when they look so clever and talk about being on the right track. That joke about Leather Apron gave me real fits. I am down on whores and I shant quit ripping them till I do get buckled.’ [1] [2] Scribbled in red ink, these sentences marked the first of several letters attributed to the serial killer known as

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‘Morphinomania’: Morphine use in three Edwardian novels

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To be young, socially privileged, and in love; such is the happy situation of Felix Wilding, the euphonious hero of Robert Hichens’s 1902 novel. The object of Felix’s adoration is socially prominent Valeria Ismey, who is the more attractive for being older and married; this after all is the 1900s, and Victorianism, represented by Felix’s loving, ineffectual mother, is in retreat. No: Mrs. Ismey’s problem – one evident to the reader before it is to Felix – is her hopeless

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Lady Clementina Hawarden: the silhouette motif in photographic art

Other, Victorians on Display

1st June 2022 marked the bicentenary of the birth of pioneering photographer Clementina Hawarden (1822-1865), one of the most significant women to contribute to early photography. In this blog I highlight a specific genre within the extensive Hawarden photographic collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, concentrating on use of the silhouette as a stylistic motif in her photographic portraiture. Viscountess Clementina Hawarden, née Fleeming, left an extensive oeuvre of collodion photographic images marking her brief embrace of the

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“That tree gives me the creeps!”: Tales of Vampiric Plants

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Readers of Gothic literature will quickly recognize that Irene is suffering from a vampire bite. She is not the victim of Dracula, Carmilla, or Lord Ruthven, though. Rather, it is a vampiric sumach tree that has attacked her during her sleep. Ulric Daubeny’s “The Sumach,” published in his collection The Elemental: Tales of the Supernormal and the Inexplicable (1919), is a fascinating killer-plant story. It tells of a tree that has grown from a stake plunged into the heart of a buried vampire. The tree possesses hypnotic powers that seduce young women to its branches to feed upon them.

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Pop-Up Anthology: Victorian Music

Victorians Beyond the Academy

The summer issue of Journal of Victorian Culture includes an important roundtable on Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Music that exemplifies the interdisciplinary strengths of JVC. Our music collection boasts work in art history, literary history, musicology and music history. Music as an aspect of Victorian culture has been less celebrated, and certainly less fully researched, than the so-called ‘sister arts’ of poetry and painting. Essays by Michael Allis, George Kennaway, Elizabeth Helsinger and Marte Stinis in issue 27:2 find new ways

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