Journal of Victorian Culture Online
The blog and online platform of the Journal of Victorian Culture
At 22 years old, Aubrey Beardsley was in the midst of one of the most prosperous periods of his short life, thanks to regular employment with the quarterly artistic and literary periodical The Yellow Book (fig. 1). For the journal’s third volume, published in October 1894, Beardsley created an illustration entitled Portrait of Himself in Bed (fig. 2).[1] This drawing was printed using the line block technique, which necessitated his use of only black and white, with no middle tones.
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Lutz, Deborah. Victorian Paper Art and Craft: Writers and Their Materials. Oxford University Press, 20 January 2023, 240 pp., $45.00 (hardcover), ISBN: 9780198858799 In 1845, desperate after months of silence from Constantin Heger, the French professor she loved, Charlotte Brontë wrote to him in a frantic state. She begged for the crumbs of his friendship in the strongest of terms, ascribing a life-giving quality to his written word. Her final letter ends with a plea: “when the sweet delight of
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“My wallpapers are killing me; one of us must go!” Oscar Wilde’s infamous last words are usually construed as a rueful comment on the ugliness of the decorations in his Paris hotel bedroom. Yet they could also be interpreted literally, and applied to the thousands of Victorians who fell victim to the deadly pigments in their wallpapers. Even from the vantage point of the recent pandemic, the nineteenth century was a hazardous time to be alive: subject to regular outbreaks
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Our latest issue, 28.1, features an extended Round Table entitled ‘Sculpture and Faith at St Paul’s Cathedral, c. 1796—1914‘. Lavishly illustrated, the collection boasts fifteen mini-essays, each devoted to one of the cathedral’s important monuments from our period. Many of these are free access. The Round Table is fuelled by the energies of multiple disciplines and approaches: art history, theology, history, ecclesiology, biography, empire- and queer studies, to name a few. As the introduction by Marjorie Coughlan, Jason Edwards and
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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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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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Over the course of her record breaking six-decade reign, Queen Victoria was the subject of numerous formal and informal musical compositions alike. While most formal music was reverential in nature and sought to praise the monarch, by and large the informal music that Victoria inspired among the lower classes tended to contain derogatory or mocking depictions of the queen. However, there were a small number of compositions that celebrated Victoria’s personal and political successes. Still, most of these were informal
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This is the third post in the ‘Crafting Communities’ series on JVC Online. See Part One and Part Two. At a virtual roundtable on Victorian material culture held in February 2021, Andrea Korda presented on The Plough, a large-scale print published by London’s Art for Schools Association in 1899 for classroom walls. By large-scale, we mean enormous—five by six feet, to be exact, a height that would tower over most schoolchildren, and even over the teachers, once mounted on a
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Red squirrels had reason to be wary of the Victorians. Nineteenth-century culture popularised the animals – they were even kept as pets – but the Victorians also unwittingly caused the decline of the red squirrel population by introducing the rival species, the grey squirrel, to Britain.[1] Today, sciurus vulgaris stands at the centre of an emotionally charged debate about the conservation of native habitats. The red squirrel’s persistent appeal most likely has to do with its endearing looks. But in
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This is the first post in the ‘Crafting Communities’ series on JVC Online. See Part Two and Part Three. It is July 2020, the summer of Covid. Libraries are closed. Museums are closed. University courses and conferences have moved online. A small group of Victorianists gathers on Zoom to learn how to make hair art. Led by Vanessa Warne (U of Manitoba), the event is a test run for the upcoming semester, when Vanessa plans to make hair art with
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