Michael Ledger-Lomas is Lecturer in the History of Christianity in Britain at King’s College, London. He is the editor, with David Gange, of Cities of God: the Bible and Archaeology in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) and is currently working on the British reception of St Paul from the eighteenth century onwards. Macaulay and Son: Architects of Imperial Britain, by Catherine Hall, New Haven, Conn. and London: Yale University Press, 2012, xxviii + 389 pp. illustrated, £35 (hardback),
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A Beautiful Fiction of Law
Kieran Dolin (University of Western Australia) This post accompanies Kieran Dolin’s Journal of Victorian Culture article published (2013). It can be read in full here. My article, ‘A Beautiful Fiction of Law: Rhetorical Engagements with Terra Nullius in the British Periodical Press in the 1840s,’ emerged out of an interest I have in the way legal ideals percolate throughout Victorian literature and culture. Many writers had legal training, and even without that, educated Victorians drew on the vocabulary of law and justice in
Read moreEthics and the Digital Archive: The Case for Visualizing H. Rider Haggard
By Kate Holterhoff, Carnegie Mellon University Over the past fifteen years, digitization has completely revised archival work. Digital texts introduce novel means of encountering the past because they simultaneously exist materially and ideally; everywhere and nowhere; in the past and the present. As NINEs and BRANCH founder Dino Felluga argues, ‘our current postmodern age tends toward dematerialization’ (308), or what Alan Liu of RoSE and Transliteracies calls ‘unit-detail atomism’ (84), suggesting that online archives are postmodern by virtue of their
Read moreThe Victorian Tactile Imagination: Reappraising touch in nineteenth-century culture
THE VICTORIAN TACTILE IMAGINATION: Reappraising touch in the nineteenth-century culture Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies, Birkbeck, London 19-20 July, 2013 It is always exciting when you feel part of something big, and when Professor David Howes (Concordia University) asserts that there are some ‘stirrings’ in the academy then you know it’s special. Many claims are made for the impact of a conference’s scope, and they do establish new ideas and contribute to the wider scholarship as well as create new networks
Read moreSelected Papers from, Strange New Today (Exeter, 17 September 2011)
JVC Online is delighted to have the opportunity to provide our readers with access to a selection of seven of the twenty-two papers that graduate students delivered at a conference specifically aimed at showcasing their research. In the past decade, there has been a welcome growth in the number of symposia that provide specific opportunities for doctoral students to share their work not only with their peers but also with established scholars who can offer supportive feedback. Such events can
Read moreMerrick Burrow, ‘The Imperial Souvenir: Things and Masculinities in H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines & Allan Quatermain’
By Merrick Burrow (University of Huddersfield) This post accompanies Merrick Burrow’s Journal of Victorian Culture article published (2013). It can be read in full here. H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines ends with a letter in which Sir Henry Curtis, one of the main protagonists, highlights the significance of hunting and battle trophies brought back from the ‘lost world’ of Kukuanaland for his renewed sense of his own hegemonic masculinity: The tusks of the great bull that killed poor Khiva
Read moreAndrea Rehn, ‘White Rajas, Native Princes and Savage Pirates: Lord Jim and the Cult of White Sovereignty’
Andrea Rehn’s article “White Rajas, Native Princes and Savage Pirates: Lord Jim and the Cult of White Sovereignty” reads Conrad’s Lord Jim as an ironic but also nostalgic re-imagining of the first of the white rajas, James Brooke. This figurehead of informal imperial expansion was idolized in England, as archival documents reveal, for his charismatic bestowal of the rule of law in Borneo. Ironically, Brooke achieved sovereignty through his personal suspension of law, an example of what Carl Schmitt terms
Read moreHilary M. Carey, ”The Secret of England’s Greatness’: Medievalism, Ornithology, and Anglican Imperialism in the Aboriginal Gospel Book of Sir George Grey’
Sir George Grey Special Collections, Auckland Libraries holds many treasures, but one of the more remarkable is the Aboriginal Gospel Book (Grey MS 82). This is work of unique importance because it contains the only manuscript copy of the first translation of the gospel into any Australian Aboriginal language. The translation was completed by the missionary Lancelot Threlkeld and presented to the bibliophile and statesman Sir George Grey on 26 June 1858. But this was not the end of the
Read moreLuisa Villa, ‘A ‘Political Education’: Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, the Arabs, and the Egyptian Revolution (1881-82)’
Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (1840-1922) represents an interesting case of Victorian internationalism, and a significant figure in the history of the critique of modern imperialism. His name is not one that is likely to pop up in surveys of the late Victorian age, and even in substantial books on the literature and culture of the period it is hard to come by.Villa came across him while researching her book on the representations of the Sudan military campaigns, as the author of
Read moreMartin Dubois, ‘Diverse Strains: Music and Religion in Dickens’s Edwin Drood’
In his essay forthcoming in JVC issue 16.3, Martin Dubois challenges recent interpretations of Dickens’s final and unfinished novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood, arguing that these have neglected the variability in Dickens’s representation of traditional religion. Dickens’s novel centres on the town of Cloisterham, where a spreading moral torpor extends to the heart of community life: the choral worship offered in its cathedral. Fuelled by opium-induced fantasies, the cathedral’s obsessive and unstable choirmaster appears to engineer the disappearance and
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