Tag: John Tenniel

‘“Who am I, then?” Tell me that first, and then, if I like being that person, I’ll come up: if not, I’ll stay down here till I’m somebody else’: Femininity and Madness in ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ (1865)

Victorians on Display

Unlike many other examples of “Golden Age” nineteenth-century children’s literature that promoted morality through allegorical form, Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) was without a clear instructional purpose. In this post, I consider two images by Sir John Tenniel (1865) and Salvador Dalí (1969) in order to reinterpret Wonderland’s possibilities through femininity and madness. In the Victorian period, ‘madness’ was a gendered construct associated with ideas of the feminine, such as hysteria.[1] Although Alice is represented as a child

Read more

Helen Kingstone, ‘Noiseless revolutions? The Victorian roots of Theresa May’s rhetoric’

Published in JVC, Victorians Beyond the Academy

Helen Kingstone is co-Deputy Director of the Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies, and Postdoctoral Research Associate at Leeds Trinity University. Her book Victorian Narratives of the Recent Past: memory, history, fiction is forthcoming with Palgrave If you were tuning in to the UK news in early October, you would probably have heard snippets from Theresa May’s first Conservative Party conference speech as leader and Prime Minister. What might – or might not – have surprised you was how steeped it was

Read more

Rosalind White, Dietary Didacticism In Wonderland, or Female Growth Through the Looking Glass

Published in JVC

Rosalind White is a first-year PhD student at Royal Holloway, University of London looking at gender and emotions in the science and literature of the nineteenth century. She is part of the Techne doctoral training partnership which is funded by the Arts Humanities Research Council and is assistant director of the Centre for Victorian Studies at Royal Holloway. Her research traces how natural history in many ways dwelt within the feminine sphere of Victorian culture and charts a more intimate, personal

Read more