Journal of Victorian Culture Online
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When a woman suspects her husband of having an affair with a former flame, who is now his partner in a murder investigation, she has an affair of her own – with the murderer. The above description could easily pass as a pitch for a made-for-TV thriller, but it is the plot of Ellen Wood’s most famous novel, East Lynne (1861). I have recently been reading some of Wood’s lesser-known novels, such as St. Martin’s Eve (1866), Anne Hereford (1868),
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It is a starting point rather than a truism that the Victorians’ vision of domesticity had ‘the domestic hearth’ front and centre. This post will discuss novels (or novellas) written in the 1840s to the 1880s, by Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Frances Hodgson Burnett. These authors explore the theme of the domestic hearth through characters whose experiences of states like warmth, comfort, mutuality, cold, want, and social isolation may be fixed, or undergo transformations. Meanwhile, Isabella Beeton’s Book of
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Our autumn issue, 28 3, contains an important Round Table, Piston, Pen and Press, covering new scholarship on nineteenth-century working-class literary cultures, from Mechanics Institutes to periodical poetry. The convenors of Piston, Pen and Press remind us that JVC has a rich tradition of publishing work on labouring class culture.
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Ella Hepworth Dixon’s novel, The Story of a Modern Woman (1894), unlike many of its mid-century predecessors and fin-de-siècle contemporaries, does not burden its heroine, an aspiring professional woman, with marriage and biological motherhood.[1] Mary Erle, the main protagonist of Dixon’s novel, “did not care for babies” and “would rather have had a nice, new, fluffy kitten.”[2] Having thus described Mary’s lack of interest in children in no uncertain terms, Dixon’s narrative is also careful to point out her natural,
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Figure 1 (header image): An advertisement for the wide range of goods to be purchased at the Salvation Army Trade Department, including an illustration of shoppers in the ‘Salvation Emporium’ showroom on Clerkenwell Road. From Salvation Army newspaper War Cry, 18 November 1893. Salvation Army International Heritage Centre. The notion of a ‘consumer identity’ is simultaneously ubiquitous and elusive. We are all consumers; and many of us do our best, in one way or another, to ensure that our consumer
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‘Dear Boss, I keep on hearing the police have caught me but they wont fix me just yet. I have laughed when they look so clever and talk about being on the right track. That joke about Leather Apron gave me real fits. I am down on whores and I shant quit ripping them till I do get buckled.’ [1] [2] Scribbled in red ink, these sentences marked the first of several letters attributed to the serial killer known as
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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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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
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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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‘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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