This post accompanies Helen Kingstone’s Journal of Victorian Culture article: ‘Feminism, Nationalism, Separatism? The Case of Alice Stopford Green’. This article can be downloaded here. For several years now, I’ve been tussling with a troublesome question: how do you write contemporary history? Luckily, perhaps, I haven’t had to do it myself, but instead have been looking at how Victorian writers approached the challenge. Because it is a challenge. How do you write a history (conventionally a generalising, singular, even grand
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Roller Derby’s Victorian Prehistory
By Susan Cook (Southern New Hampshire University, Manchester, NH) Roller derby was not a Victorian sport. But it should have been. Today roller skating is typically thought of as a twentieth-century fad, but historians trace its origins back to the eighteenth century. Although the Dutch began using roller skates in the early 1700s, the Belgian inventor Joseph Merlin made the most memorable early impression on the new sport by skating into a masquerade party in 1760 whilst playing the violin.
Read moreBook review: Amy Levy’s Fate: Death and the Statistician
The Women Who Dared: A Biography of Amy Levy, by Christine Pullen, Kingston upon Thames: Kingston University Press, 2010, 241 pp., illustrated, ₤20 (paperback), ISBN 978 1 899999 43 9 Reviewed by Theodore M. Porter, University of California, Los Angeles The narrative trajectory of this biography begins and ends with the suicide of the writer Amy Levy at the age of 27 on 9 September 1889. That tragic end gives direction to Christine Pullen’s wide-ranging study of Levy and her
Read moreSusan Schuyler, ‘Crowds, Fenianism, and the Victorian Stage’
In her essay forthcoming in JVC issue 16.2, Susan Schuyler analyzes two Irish rebellion-themed plays in context of the growth of Fenianism in the months preceding the Clerkenwell explosion. The melodramatic dramas Oonagh; or the Lovers of Lisnamona (Her Majesty’s, 1866) and Achora Machree; or Gems of Ould Ireland (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1867) reveal the ways that popular theatre participated in a wider public discussion about what was seen as the modern phenomenon of the crowd. Produced on the eve of one
Read moreBook Reviews (15.1)
Jacky Bratton on Jennifer Hall-Wit’s Fashionable Acts: Opera and Elite Culture in London, 1780-1880 (Durham, New Hampshire: University of New Hampshire Press, 2007). To read the full review, visit http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=article&issn=1355%2d5502&volume=15&issue=1&spage=164. Charlotte Mitchell on Gavin Budge’s Charlotte M. Yonge: Religion, Feminism and Realism in the Victorian Novel (Oxford, Bern & Peter Lang, 2007). To read the full review, visit http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=article&issn=1355%2d5502&volume=15&issue=1&spage=158. Donna Loftus on James Taylor’s Creating Capitalism. Joint-Stock Enterprise in British Politics and Culture 1800-1870 (Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Royal Historical Society
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