Tag: media

Digital Clairvoyance: Lessons Learned by Text Mining the “Dr Slade Number” from 1876

Digitizing the Victorians, Other

The American medium Henry Slade was a nineteenth-century sensation. At the height of his career in the early 1870s he was considered one of the most extraordinary psychics of his generation. His main performance featured a type of supernormal communication where written messages, said to be from spirits existing beyond the veil, appeared on supposedly blank slates. It was a hugely popular act, and Slade toured all over North America and Europe demonstrating his incredible mediumship to broad and eager

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Crafting in the Classroom: Hands-On Approaches to Victorian Material Culture

Other, Teaching the Victorians, Victorians Beyond the Academy, Victorians on Display

This is the third post in the ‘Crafting Communities’ series on JVC Online. See Part One and Part Two. At a virtual roundtable on Victorian material culture held in February 2021, Andrea Korda presented on The Plough, a large-scale print published by London’s Art for Schools Association in 1899 for classroom walls. By large-scale, we mean enormous—five by six feet, to be exact, a height that would tower over most schoolchildren, and even over the teachers, once mounted on a

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Podcasting (and) the Victorians

Digitizing the Victorians, Teaching the Victorians, Victorians Beyond the Academy

This is the second post in the ‘Crafting Communities’ series on JVC Online. See Part One and Part Three. When Thomas Edison debuted the phonograph in 1878, he circulated an ambitious list of possible uses. In addition to the reproduction of music, the use we most readily associate with his invention, Edison anticipated the creation of phonographic books for blind people. He also proposed applications with notably less traction, such as phonographic clocks designed to announce meal times. Noteworthy among

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The Industrial Devolution podcast

Digitizing the Victorians, Other, Victorians Beyond the Academy

The Industrial Devolution podcast is a new project by Dr. Tobias Wilson-Bates that seeks to think through many of the systems, practices, and aftereffects of the nineteenth century. In its first episode, Dr. Pearl Chaozon-Bauer and Dr. Sabrina Gilchrist lend their expertise to an exploration of the role dance plays in Jane Austen’s Emma (1815). By examining the text, the project seeks to explore how dance scenes’ narrative gravity was not only a product of good writing, but also a

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‘[T]he Dickensesque run mad’: Continuities and Ruptures in the History of the ‘Dickensian’

Book Reviews, Other, Television Shows, Victorians Beyond the Academy, Victorians in Film

This blog post reflects on Dickens’s legacy as captured in the term ‘Dickensian’, from early uses of the term to what the events of 2020 might mean for study of his afterlife. It also introduces a new open access edited collection, Dickens After Dickens (White Rose UP, 2020), which explores some of the forms in which Dickens’s influence has manifested from the nineteenth century to the present, from his influence on writers including Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, William Faulkner and Donna Tartt

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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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Amy Milne-Smith, On the trail of madness: (Micro) media panics in the Victorian press

Digitizing the Victorians, Published in JVC

 Amy Milne-Smith is Associate Professor of History at Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada. She is the author of London Clubland: A Cultural History of Gender and Class in Late-Victorian Britain (2011) and several articles on the history of elite masculinity. Her current research focuses on representations and understandings of men’s mental illness both in public and private life. You can follow her on Twitter @AmyMilneSmith. This post accompanies Amy Milne-Smith’s Journal of Victorian Culture article, ‘Shattered Minds: Madmen on the Railways’, which can

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