JVC Online Blog

The Architecture of Victorian Christendom (book review)

Book Reviews, Other

English Victorian Churches: Architecture, Faith & Revival (John Hudson Publishing) by the eminent architectural historian James Stevens Curl is a book that can be read in more than one way and appeal to more than one kind of audience. It can be read as a work of scholarship; one that spans two distinct but related disciplines, namely Victorian church architecture and nineteenth-century ecclesiology. As an authoritative survey and critique of the finest examples of nineteenth-century English church building, it would

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Pregnancy and Childbirth in the Age of Victoria

Other

Under the direction of Lisa Surridge and with the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, a group of scholars have created the peer-reviewed “Pregnancy and Childbirth in the Age of Victoria,” which can be found at  https://www.victorianweb.org/science/maternity/uvic/index.html   Thus far the project consists of the following, with more to come: “Pregnancy Testing,” by Isabel Davis “Pregnancy and Venereal Disease,” by Anne Hanley “Birth Control,” by Lesley Hall “Abortion,” by Lesley Hall “Breastfeeding, Wet Nursing, and Feeding ‘by

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False Teeth and Dishonesty in William Makepeace Thackeray’s ‘The Virginians’ (1859)

Other

Header image: A full upper vulcanite denture with porcelain teeth (1880-1920) from Sir Henry Wellcome’s Museum Collection at the Science Museum. In the mid-nineteenth century, the show of teeth in ordinary life began to mean something new. While many edentulous – or toothless – Victorians experienced shame due to widespread tooth loss, with the increasing proliferation of dentists and dental treatments came the lessened desire to conceal broken teeth behind handkerchiefs and fans. Arguably more than ever before, an emerging

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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

Other

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

Other

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

Other

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

Other

‘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

Other

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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