It won’t have escaped the notice of readers of this blog that January saw the 150 year anniversary of the London Underground: the first underground line running from Paddington to Farringdon opened on 9th January 1863, marking the beginning of London’s expansive subterranean network of railway lines. Having studied Victorian mobilities for some years now, it came as some surprise to me to realise that I hadn’t yet visited the London Transport Museum, and with a range of new events
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Imagining the Ripper
Jenny Pyke (Mount Holyoke College) As the new “Ripper Street” series begins on BBC, the many other versions from books, tv, film, and stage echo like footsteps in a dark alley. “Crime present,” says David Taylor “has a fascination, in part at least, rooted in fear; crime past has a fascination rooted in curiosity.”[i] Figure One: Front cover of the Police Illustrated News found here Teaching Victorian detective fiction, I am reminded regularly that the sensation of Jack the Ripper
Read moreRoundtable on Paul St George’s Telectroscope
As part of JVC‘s ongoing commitment to exploring the continually evolving intersections Victorian culture with contemporary literature, arts, and popular culture, we have convened a virtual roundtable discussion on Paul St George’s Telectroscope. This roundtable is also being simultaneously published in the print edition of JVC 17.4 : http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rjvc20/17/4. From May until June of 2008, New York City and London were visually connected in real time via the Telectroscope’s tubes and tunnels, to the amazement and delight of residents and
Read moreRoundtable on Paul St George’s Telectroscope – David L. Pike
The post below is David L. Pike’s initial response to the questions posed in the JVC Online roundtable on Paul St George’s Telectroscope. David Pike is Professor of Literature at the American University. To view the questions and ongoing conversation, as well as the other participants’ initial responses, use the links below. Questions & Ongoing Conversation || Jay Clayton || David L. Pike || Paul St George There are a number of possible factors in the popularity of the Telectroscope.
Read moreWalking “Dickens’s London”
Charlotte Mathieson explores “Dickens’s London” through a series of walking tours about Dickens’s literary and biographical connections to the city.
Read moreA Walking Tour of London’s Forgotten Model Lodging Houses?
Jane Hamlett and Rebecca Preston Everyday, across London, thousands of people pass by hundreds of homes for the poor erected by Victorian philanthropists. Their exteriors often impress, but some are less noticeable, and probably very few Londoners realise what went on inside them. Last summer, equipped with contemporary maps and illustrations, Jane Hamlett, Lesley Hoskins and Rebecca Preston from Royal Holloway’s ESRC-funded At Home in the Institution Project set out on a London street walk to rediscover some of these
Read moreIn Search of Dickens’ Workhouse
By Rohan McWilliam To King’s College London on 23 February for the launch of Ruth Richardson’s new book, Dickens and the Workhouse, produced in an extremely handsome edition by Oxford University Press (don’t even think of reading it on a Kindle). The Anatomy Theatre at Kings is packed out for the party and Ruth delivers a wonderful speech making clear that the book is the product of her lifelong love of Dickens. Dickens and the Workhouse (I’ve now read the
Read more“Can you show me the places?”: Dickens 2012 and literary tourism
Dr Charlotte Mathieson, Associate Fellow Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, University of Warwick The bicentenary of Charles Dickens’s birth on 7th February 2012 has prompted a wide range of celebratory responses across the world, with some prominent themes emerging in the proceedings: unsurprisingly, an emphasis on film adaptations and a biographical focus on Dickens’s life and works feature highly; and in Britain, neither is it unexpected to find events around the notion of “Dickens’s London” recurring throughout the
Read moreMegan A. Norcia, ”Come Buy, Come Buy’: Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market’ and the Cries of London’
A blazingly sunny summer day in 2009 found me camped out at the Baldwin Collection of Historical Children’s Literature at the University of Florida. I was there researching nineteenth-century children’s guides to London (or so I thought), when in the midst of this study, the happy serendipity of archival work led me to Andrew Tuer’s nineteenth-century collection of London cries. As I read through Tuer’s guide and then rapidly searched for and consumed several others, I kept scrawling in my
Read moreBook Reviews (15.3)
Helen Brookman on Gail Marshall’s Shakespeare and Victorian Women (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2009) and Clare Broome Saunders’sWomen Writers and Nineteenth-Century Medievalism (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). To read the full review, visit http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=article&issn=1355%2d5502&volume=15&issue=3&spage=402. Gavin Budge on Mary Poovey’s Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain (Chicago, IL: Chicago UP, 2008). To read the full review, visit http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=article&issn=1355%2d5502&volume=15&issue=3&spage=406. Grace Moore on Radhika Mohanram’s Imperial White: Race, Diaspora and the British Empire (Minneapolis, MN: University
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