Tag: Ethics

Hard Times and radical collectivity in the era of COVID-19 

Teaching the Victorians

One of the most memorable – and puzzling – moments in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854) occurs when the beleaguered factory worker Stephen Blackpool falls into an abandoned mineshaft.  Ostracized by his fellow mill “Hands” for his refusal to join the union, prevented by intractable Victorian divorce laws from marrying his true love Rachael, and framed for a bank robbery he did not commit, Stephen flees the grim, industrial city of Coketown but changes course when Rachael implores him to

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An Introduction to Novelist Edna Lyall in Two Parts (Part 2)

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Edna Lyall’s persona in the literary marketplace – as a compassionate author of novels rooted in sympathy – was satirized in 1891 by Punch. Her popular work Donovan was parodied as Sonogun by ‘Miss Redna Trial, Author of “Wee Jew;” “A Lardy Horseman;” “Spun by Prating,” &c., &c., &c.’.[1] A short note from ‘the fair Author’ caricatured Lyall further, giving readers her foolproof recipe for ‘pleas[ing] the publishers and captur[ing] the public’: The philosophic infidel must be battered into belief

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‘Rethinking the Nineteenth Century’ Conference Report

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By Kirsten Harris, University of Nottingham The University of Sheffield’s one day conference ‘Rethinking the Nineteenth Century’, held on 24th August, centred on the timely question ‘what constitutes nineteenth century studies today?’.  This stimulated a thought-provoking and broad set of responses, with some papers offering rethinkings of specific texts, ideas or historical assumptions while others focused on considerations of the changing field itself. The day began with Mark Llewellyn’s interrogation of contemporary engagement with Victorian culture in his keynote paper,

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