JVC Online Blog

Books and Borders in the Atlantic World

Other

The nineteenth-century Anglo-Atlantic world, although fractured by emergent national categories after 1776, continued to share a vibrant literary market united by language and trade.[1] Charles Dickens and Sir Walter Scott were popular in Britain, Canada, and the United States, and James Fenimore Cooper was read and imitated on both sides of the Atlantic. British literature provided Canadian colonial writers with models to emulate and with iconic names to admire; Canadian book buyers dealt with American, as well as with British

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‘The Battle of Dorking’ and Combat Trauma

Other

The unnamed narrator of Lieutenant-Colonel George Chesney’s invasion scare story, The Battle of Dorking: Reminiscences of a Volunteer (1871), is a complex character. His war-experience, recounted to his grandchildren in 1921 before they emigrate to a ‘new home in a more prosperous land’,[1] contains several details which should elicit readers’ sympathy – or, at the very least, pity. After he volunteers to defend Britain from German-speaking invaders, the protagonist experiences several distressing ordeals in 1871. At the titular battle, he

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Literary responses to the Cotton Famine in Lancashire

Other, Victorians Beyond the Academy

The Cotton Famine (1861-65) was a significant era of poverty and unemployment resulting from a blockade on raw cotton during the American Civil War, which hit Lancashire’s textile communities particularly hard. It produced a wide variety of contemporary literary responses, many of which have been under-discussed in scholarship on Victorian industrial literature. In the past decade, however, more effort has been put into archiving and analysing these responses. This is primarily seen in the University of Exeter’s open access digital

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Anna Kingsford’s Spiritual Thunderbolt

Other

“I have killed Paul Bert, as I killed Claude Bernard; as I will kill Louis Pasteur, and after him the whole tribe of vivisectors, if I live long enough. . . it is a magnificent power to have, and the one that transcends all vulgar methods of dealing out justice to tyrants,” claimed Anna Kingsford in her diary after Bert’s death in 1886 (qtd. in Maitland, vol. 2, 268). Kingsford, a staunch animal rights activist and spiritualist, believed that her

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Who’s Wearing the Pant(aloon)s Now?: Women Illustrators and Rational Dress

Other

In “‘Rational’ Dress”, a cartoon published in the 6 June 1883 edition of Judy, or the London Serio-comic Journal, Marie Duval (1847-90) parodies the rational dress movement, which strived for improvements in women’s clothing, through a series of individual figures (fig. 1). The figures, or ‘characters’, represent various ways in which rational dress has influenced fashion trends and women’s place in society. Printed underneath are captions pertaining to each character on the page or ‘stage.’ Everyone has a unique ‘role’

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The Endowment of Motherhood Wars of the 1900s

Other

Who doesn’t love Mother? Consider two scenarios that faced late Victorian and Edwardian social reformers and opinion makers: working-class mother tending the family’s oh-so-many children while father drinks up his wages at the local public house (I’m thinking of the premise of Reginald Cripps’s Public House Reform); and, moving up a notch, mother pointlessly tending the family’s suburban villa (“The Laurels” of George and Weedon Grossmiths’ Pooter sagas) and anxiously watching one or two children (all the family can afford),

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Books, Reading, and Daydream Believing: Christy Carew Has ‘Nothing’ to Do

Other, Victorians on Display

The current pandemic triggered what appears to be a reading revival. As I noted media discourse on people accumulating books, I wondered whether sometimes these books were companions to a daydream, as individuals imagined an alternative present or felicitous future; experiencing, as Charlotte Bronte expressed it in Villette, “the life of thought, and that of reality”.[1] Researching fictional experiences of reading in women’s writing at the fin de siècle, I notice a book is often accompaniment to a daydream. It

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‘Crushed Flounces and Broken Feathers’: British Women’s Fashions and their Indian Servants in Victorian India

Victorians Beyond the Academy, Victorians on Display

‘We have had so many inquiries respecting Indian outfits, and necessary articles of dress for the Presidencies…’ (The Englishwoman’s Conversazione, Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, 1 July 1869). Britain’s imperial control and power over India had reached its epitome in the nineteenth century, as the East India Company had become entrenched, and later, the colonial society was consolidated by the imposition of Crown Rule in 1858. The nineteenth century, especially the second half, witnessed many British women crossing the seas to reside

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Language of Feminism in Arabic and British Fin-de-Siècle Writing

Other

Writing a comparative PhD thesis on the New Woman in Britain and the Arab world at the fin de siècle entailed establishing similarities and differences in language usage in the early feminist movements in both cultural contexts. Considering that the New Woman is a well-established field of study in Western scholarship, the main focus of my research project was to demonstrate that, contrary to the assumptions made in existing literature – that the New Woman appeared in Arabic from the

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