Scotland’s History Uncovered is a blog which focuses on the social history of Scotland, concentrating on the Victorian era. The object of the blog in essence, is to give an enjoyable learning experience for people of all levels of historical knowledge. Having always had an interest in Victorian history, I wrote a book entitled ‘A Year in Victorian Edinburgh’ to try and give the reader a real feel for life in this time. From there, I decided to develop a blog which I
Read moreTag: City
Megan A. Norcia, ”Come Buy, Come Buy’: Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market’ and the Cries of London’
A blazingly sunny summer day in 2009 found me camped out at the Baldwin Collection of Historical Children’s Literature at the University of Florida. I was there researching nineteenth-century children’s guides to London (or so I thought), when in the midst of this study, the happy serendipity of archival work led me to Andrew Tuer’s nineteenth-century collection of London cries. As I read through Tuer’s guide and then rapidly searched for and consumed several others, I kept scrawling in my
Read moreBook Reviews (15.3)
Helen Brookman on Gail Marshall’s Shakespeare and Victorian Women (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2009) and Clare Broome Saunders’sWomen Writers and Nineteenth-Century Medievalism (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). To read the full review, visit http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=article&issn=1355%2d5502&volume=15&issue=3&spage=402. Gavin Budge on Mary Poovey’s Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain (Chicago, IL: Chicago UP, 2008). To read the full review, visit http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=article&issn=1355%2d5502&volume=15&issue=3&spage=406. Grace Moore on Radhika Mohanram’s Imperial White: Race, Diaspora and the British Empire (Minneapolis, MN: University
Read moreNew Agenda – Katharina Boehm and Josephine McDonagh, ‘Urban Mobility: New Maps of Victorian London’
‘The Uncommercial Traveller, whose urban explorations by foot, coach and train lead him from genteel Bond Street to the muddy thoroughfares of the East End, and from London’s ‘shy neighbourhoods’ to the docks by the Thames, reminds us of the mobility of Victorian city dwellers. Like Dickens’s compulsive traveller, countless fictional and historical Londoners experienced the city and its material cultures on the move.’ Introducing the New Agenda on ‘Urban Mobility’, Katharina Boehm and Josephine McDonagh survey the scholarship on the
Read moreNew Agenda – John Stokes, ‘”Encabsulation”: Horse-Drawn Journeys in Late-Victorian Literature’
In 1900 there were some 50,000 horses working in London, although by 1914 with the coming of motorized transport that number was down to 1,400. Focusing on one of the primary ways that Victorians moved around London, John Stokes examines the perils and social niceties of hailing a horse-drawn cab in the nineteenth-century city. Click here for John Leech’s cartoons for Punch on the hazards of taking a cab (and on many other topics) To read the full article, visit
Read moreNew Agenda – David L. Pike, ‘Afterimages of the Victorian City’
The Victorian street and underworld have had remarkable afterlives in twentieth-century reinterpretations of Victorian cityscapes. In JVC 15.2, David L. Pike explores what persists in our vision of the nineteenth-century city well over a century after it was, so to speak, first seen, and how what persists impacts on our attempts to reconstruct that act of seeing. He sees spectral ‘afterimages’ of the Victorian street and underground, in a variety of contemporary sources, ranging from Gary Sherman’s Death Line (1972)
Read moreNew Agenda – James Grande, ‘Nineteenth-Century London in William Godwin’s Diary’
William Godwin’s diary provides ‘a picture of London’s literary and extra-parliamentary political life’. In JVC 15.2, James Grande retraces the philosopher’s footsteps to reveal Godwin’s immersion in the material conditions and popular politics of nineteenth-century London. For this image and to read more about the diary, visit the Leverhulme-funded project, William Godwin’s Diary: Reconstructing a Social and Political Culture, 1788-1836. To read the full article, visit http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=article&issn=1355%2d5502&volume=15&issue=2&spage=201.
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