Journal of Victorian Culture Online
The blog and online platform of the Journal of Victorian Culture
The first edition of H. G. Wells’s 1911 publication Floor Games, a manual for a worldbuilding game for children, opens with a declaration: [On a floor] may be made an infinitude of imaginative games, not only keeping boys and girls happy for days together, but building up a framework of spacious and inspiring ideas in them for after life. The British Empire will gain new strength from nursery floors.[1] The concept that child’s play could alter the child’s future —
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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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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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The story of the medical profession in Britain during the first half of the nineteenth century is complex, and can be seen as representative of several key shifts in social, educational, and economic outlook. The emergent ‘professions’ of the early-Victorian period, including medicine, would undergo dramatic transformations in the wake of fast industrialisation, population growth, and increased centralised regulation. One of the most notable changes to the medical profession at this time is the increase in generalised medical schools, responding
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The purpose of this blog is to introduce the reader to the Victorian mathematician and educationist Thomas Muir, and to provide an entrée to his diaries, in which he wrote of his adventurous tours in the remote interior of the Cape Colony.[i] Muir’s origins and his teaching years in Scotland Muir was a Scottish ‘lad O’Pairts’: Victorian Scotland prided itself on giving opportunities to a talented child from a modest background. Muir’s rise from rural Scottish boy in Lanarkshire to
Read moreIn JVC 15.1, Rosalind Crone examines a host of evidence from Victorian prison records about prisoners’ schooling and their ability to read and write. What does this data tell us about the reading public in the nineteenth century and about the spread of literacy, especially among the labouring classes? Girls’ School at Tothill Fields Prison, from Henry Mayhew and John Binny, The Criminal Prisons of London and Scenes of Prison Life (London: Griffin, Bohn & Co., 1862), facing p. 356.
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