Victorian Paper Art and Craft: Writers and Their Materials

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

Read more

The Architecture of Victorian Christendom (book review)

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

Read more

Review: Alistair Robinson’s ‘Vagrancy in the Victorian Age’

Studies dealing with textual representations of homelessness in Britain during the early modern period are plentiful: for instance, Arthur Kinney’s Rogues, Vagabonds & Study Beggars: A New Gallery of Tudor and Early Stuart Rogue Literature (1973), A.L. Beier’s Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England 1560-1640 (1985), Linda Woodbridge’s Vagrancy, Homelessness, and English Renaissance Literature (2001), Patricia Fumerton’s Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England (2006) and Craig Dionne and Steve Mentz’s Rogues and Early

Read more

Rohan McWilliam, On Reviewing

Rohan McWilliam is Professor of Modern British History at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, and reviews editor of the Journal of Victorian Culture.  He is a past president of the British Association for Victorian Studies.  His comments are made in a personal capacity and do not necessarily reflect the views of the JVC editorial board.  My thanks to the editors of JVC and my colleagues in the History pathway at Anglia Ruskin for feedback on this blog. Reviewing, it’s fair to

Read more

Laura Fox Gill, Review: The Hardy Way: A 19th-Century Pilgrimage, Margaret Marande

Laura Fox Gill, University of Sussex Laura Fox Gill is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Sussex. Her research investigates the influence of John Milton on nineteenth-century culture (painting, poetry, and prose) and she is soon to begin work on connections between the thought and writing of Milton and Thomas Hardy. She tweets at @kitsunetsukiki. Walking for Thomas Hardy was a complicated matter; never simply a way of getting from A to B . Though his novels

Read more

Poor Women and Elite Men

Victorian Women, Unwed Mothers and the London Foundling Hospital, by Jessica A. Sheetz-Nguyen, London: Continuum, 2012, xii + 258 pp. (softcover), ISBN 978 1 441 1 4112 5 Elizabeth M., a waitress in a vegetarian restaurant, sought help from the London Foundling Hospital in 1891.  She had met a respectably employed man, Daniel B., a foreman in the office of a dairy company, and the two began courting.  They decided to marry and engaged in sexual intercourse.  She became pregnant

Read more