Tag: London

The Domestic Hearth: Writings by Dickens, Beeton, Stevenson, and Hodgson Burnett

Other

It is a starting point rather than a truism that the Victorians’ vision of domesticity had ‘the domestic hearth’ front and centre. This post will discuss novels (or novellas) written in the 1840s to the 1880s, by Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Frances Hodgson Burnett. These authors explore the theme of the domestic hearth through characters whose experiences of states like warmth, comfort, mutuality, cold, want, and social isolation may be fixed, or undergo transformations. Meanwhile, Isabella Beeton’s Book of

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Kitty Lord’s Padded ‘Symmetricals’

Other, Victorians Beyond the Academy, Victorians on Display

This final post (see Parts One and Two) was inspired by a pair of pale pink knitted tights worn by the music hall singer Kitty Lord (1881-1972) in the early 1900s. Part of a collection of Lord’s costumes held at the Museum of London, these ‘symmetricals’ were carefully padded with wool to ensure that her thighs and calves looked suitably shapely and voluptuous [Figure 1]. As these padded symmetricals reveal, and this post will discuss, in late nineteenth century Burlesque

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A Tale of Two Whitechapels: Jack the Ripper and the Canonical Five in Contemporary True Crime

Other, Television Shows, Victorians Beyond the Academy

It wasn’t the best of times, and it wasn’t the worst of times. For Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elisabeth Stride, Cate Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly, Whitechapel, London in 1888 was the end of times. Known as “the canonical five” of Jack the Ripper’s victims, these women—largely invisible to London culture during their lives—can’t rest in their deaths. For 130 years writers, criminologists, armchair detectives, filmmakers, and artists have studied and reproduced all of the blood-soaked details of their murders

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‘In Harkness’ London’: a symposium on the life and work of Margaret Harkness

Digitizing the Victorians, Victorians Beyond the Academy

Birkbeck College (University of London), 22 November 2014  Report by Rosalyn Buckland (King’s College London) and Kate Taylor (Birkbeck College, University of London) Rosalyn Buckland is a PhD student at Kings College London where she is researching mining in 19th-century literature. She tweets @rosalynbuckland. Kate Taylor has recently completed a Master’s Degree in Victorian Studies at Birkbeck College and will begin a PhD on the inebriate Women of the late nineteenth-century later this year. She tweets @katetaylorfc. This one-day symposium

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Corrina Connor ‘Die Fledermaus lands in Victorian London’

Victorians Beyond the Academy

Corrina Connor is in the first year of her PhD research, which focusses on the performance of masculinities and nationality in Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus. She is a student at OBERTO, the opera research unit at Oxford Brookes University, where she is supervised by Dr Alexandra Wilson.  Originally from New Zealand, Corrina studied performance and music history and Victoria University of Wellington, before completing an MPhil in Musicology and Performance at Oxford University where she researched the sacred music of Pelham

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Suburban Identity in Paul Maitland’s Paintings of Cheyne Walk

Published in JVC

by Simon Knowles This post accompanies Simon Knowles 2014 Journal of Victorian Culture article ‘Suburban Identity in Paul Maitland’s Paintings of Cheyne Walk’. You can download a copy of this article here. The rapid growth of London’s suburbs during the latter half of the nineteenth century was viewed by the Victorians as an extremely mixed blessing. As a signifier of the entrepreneurial spirit of the middle class, coupled to the high moral value placed upon domestic privacy and family life,

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Lulu: The Tiger Lillies at Contact Theatre, Manchester

Victorians Beyond the Academy

By Guy Woolnough Lulu, based on the verses of Wedekind, performed by the Tiger Lillies[1], is a dark, compelling and shocking show. It shocks in the most affecting way, not with overt displays of violence or sex, but with powerful words and an intense narrative. I found the performance stunning and fascinating: it is good. Lulu, the eponymous heroine danced by Laura Caldow, is the beauty from the slums who is abused and exploited by men. From her childhood in

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Sarah Olwen Jones, ‘Bringing the Carlyles to Life: Public Intimacies of a Chelsea Interior’

Victorians Beyond the Academy

By Sarah Olwen Jones My recent article, ‘Staging the Interior: The Public and Private Intimacies of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle’s Domestic Lives,’ has it roots in a seemingly chance and brief conversation. Several years ago, I found myself in a University of Sydney elevator being quizzed by Associate Professor Richard White about why so many great men and women — great literary figures, prominent intellectuals, and other persons of ‘note’ — frequented Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyles’ London residence.

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Victoriana: The Art of Revival

Other

by Helen Goodman (Royal Holloway, University of London) and Emma Curry (Birkbeck, University of London) EC: Reinventing the Victorian period in film and literature has become something of a trend in recent years, from the multiple new versions of Sherlock Holmes to Sarah Waters’s fantastic Neo-Victorian novels. In response to this repeated reimagining and reshaping, the Guildhall Art Gallery has put together a wonderful new collection of work inspired by the nineteenth century, entitled, appropriately, ‘Victoriana: The Art of Revival’.

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‘A Diversity of Dickens: Or, Should We Read Literature and Culture in Context?’

Book Reviews

Mary L. Shannon, King’s College London Dickens’s London: Perception, Subjectivity and Urban Multiplicity (Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Literature), by Julian Wolfreys, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012, illustrated, £70 (hardback), xx + 251 pages, ISBN 978-0-7486-4040-9 Dickens and the Sentimental Tradition: Fielding, Richardson, Sterne, Goldsmith, Sheridan, Lamb (Anthem Nineteenth-Century Series), by Valerie Purton, London: Anthem, 2012, £60 (hardback), xxvii + 190 pages, ISBN 978-0-85728-418-1 Dickens and the Artists, edited by Mark Bills; with contributions by Pat Hardy, Leonée Ormond, Nicholas

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