Journal of Victorian Culture Online
The blog and online platform of the Journal of Victorian Culture
By Susan E. Cook (Southern New Hampshire University, Manchester, NH) and Elizabeth Coggin Womack (Penn State Brandywine) You can read part one here. Reading Discussion 4 (Serial Parts VII, VIII, and IX): In America (Can We Go Home Now?) Susan: Well, this section was a downer. To summarize, Dickens does not like America or Americans. Between Chapters 16 and 23, we learn that Americans: sustain a totally corrupt press, which regularly engages in forgery (Ch. 16); are either slave owners
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By Susan E. Cook (Southern New Hampshire University, Manchester, NH) and Elizabeth Coggin Womack (Penn State Brandywine) A book club can be an opportunity to share the joys of a literary experience with others. It can provide communal pathos, collective insight, and (depending on the group) tasty baked goods. a Our book club was not of that nature. a This fall, we decided to form a Martin Chuzzlewit reading support group, a virtual book club organized for the sole purpose
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by Duncan McLaren I’ve just been the inaugural writer-in-residence at Hospitalfield near Arbroath. The place is a great resource in respect of Victorian art and literature, as Patrick-Allan Fraser – who left the house to artists of the future when he died in 1890 – had personal links with Dickens as well as Augustus Egg, William Powell Frith and many other artists. I’ve put together a website www.patisback.co.uk which is ongoing. Here is a page-by- page guide to what’s there
Read moreRohan McWilliam A Tale of Two Cities is at the Kings Head, Islington, from 25 September-19 October 2013. The script has been published by Samuel French. To the King’s Head pub theatre in Islington for a real curio: the premiere of a dramatisation of Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities by, of all people, Terence Rattigan and John Gielgud. This version, written in 1935, has never been performed by professional actors on stage so its arrival at the Kings Head
Read moreBy Susan Cook (Southern New Hampshire University, Manchester, NH) On October 1, 2013, close to two weeks ago as I write this, the United States Congress failed to agree on a spending bill. This triggered a government shutdown, the eighteenth in this country since the creation of a new congressional budgetary procedure in 1976. The eighteenth shutdown in less than 40 years. This number would indicate that we’ve been there, done that. Except, as some journalists and political pundits inform
Read moreBy Peter J. Katz, Syracuse University In the latest Doctor Who Christmas Special (watch from 53:41 to 54:30), the Great Intelligence, a disembodied and purely intellectual power, threatens to take over Victorian London with an army of snowmen. At the last moment, The Doctor stumbles upon the secret weapon to use against the horde: a family crying on Christmas Eve. To be more particular, though: a Victorian family crying on a Victorian Christmas Eve. Doctor Who taps into a nostalgia
Read moreBy Peter J. Katz, Syracuse University In the latest Doctor Who Christmas Special (watch from 53:41 to 54:30), the Great Intelligence, a disembodied and purely intellectual power, threatens to take over Victorian London with an army of snowmen. At the last moment, The Doctor stumbles upon the secret weapon to use against the horde: a family crying on Christmas Eve. To be more particular, though: a Victorian family crying on a Victorian Christmas Eve. Doctor Who taps into a nostalgia
Read moreBy Carrie Sickmann Han, Indiana University Charles Dickens’s novels might actually go on forever, not only as immortal works of literature, but as infinitely continuable fictions, thanks in part to tweets like the one above. It’s a familiar fact that the digital humanities supply us with new methodological tools and reading platforms, but these technologies also produce a seemingly inexhaustible, living archive of neo-Victorian fictions that reposition us as co-authors of beloved Victorian novels. Twitter isn’t only “like” a Dickens
Read moreIn a memorable scene from Dickens’s Hard Times, Sissy Jupe recounts to Louisa Gradgrind her failure in her lessons to understand the ‘true’ meaning of numbers. She laments: ‘And [Mr M’Choakumchild] said, This schoolroom is an immense town, and in it there are a million of inhabitants, and only five-and-twenty are starved to death in the streets, in the course of a year. What is your remark on that proportion? And my remark was – for I couldn’t think of
Read moreMichael Slater’s recent work, The Great Charles Dickens Scandal, brilliantly opens with a selection of the various headlines that Dickens-based news stories have run in recent years. Predictably, they mostly relate to his relationship with Ellen Ternan, and range from the dramatic (‘THE DARK SIDE OF DICKENS AND THE LOVE THAT DESTROYED HIS MARRIAGE’) to the salacious (‘DICKENS’S ROMPS WITH NAUGHTY NELLY’) to the somewhat bizarre and creepy (‘DICKENS KEPT A KEEN EYE ON FALLEN WOMEN’).[1] With the approaching release
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