Journal of Victorian Culture Online
The blog and online platform of the Journal of Victorian Culture
Little is known about Mary Newell before 1860, and perhaps she might have remained a relatively anonymous woman in mid-nineteenth century England. That is, if not for the events of the autumn of 1861 and her subsequent trial that winter, where her story shared newsprint with one of England’s most galvanizing tragedies.[1] Born in 1839, Mary Newell’s name appears on the April 1861 census record in the household of William J. Barker. Residing with the Barker family at 29 Bessborough
Read moreKieran 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 moreRecent studies have demonstrated how, far from being confined to the theatre, ‘the melodramatic mode’ permeated various fields of nineteenth-century discourse, including politics and the law. Whereas most of the research in this area to date has concentrated upon domestic melodrama, in this article Robert Burroughs extends the discussion to the ‘tar drama’, or nautical melodrama. Burroughs examines how one example of this sub-genre, J.T. Haines’s My Poll and My Partner Joe (first performed 1835), engages in the political, legal
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