New Agenda – Fragments of the Modern City: Material Culture and the Rhythms of Everyday Life in Victorian London

Lining the shelves of a Museum of London warehouse are thousands of boxes of the broken and fragmented belongings of Victorian Londoners. In JVC 15.2 Alastair Owens, Nigel Jeffries, Karen Wehner and Rupert Featherby consider how such evidence can contribute to our understanding of the social and cultural worlds of Victorian Londoners. Does it allow us to grasp the ‘actualities’ of life in the modern metropolis, obscured by a pervasive bourgeois gaze that saturates other historical sources? This article is

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Elaine Freedgood, ‘What Objects Know: Circulation, Omniscience and the Comedy of Dispossession in Victorian It-Narratives’

In JVC 15.1, Elaine Freedgood examines Victorian it-narratives – stories related by talking umbrellas, feathers, and dolls. What lessons did these speaking objects impart to readers, and what do these stories tell us about how Victorians imagined what it meant to be a narrator, a person, a possession and a subject? To read the full article, visit http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=article&issn=1355%2d5502&volume=15&issue=1&spage=83. Click here to enjoy it as a narrative  – Richard H. Horne’s Memoirs of a London Doll (1855)

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