Lucinda Matthews-Jones is a Senior Lecturer in History at Liverpool John Moores University. Her research explores the roles of domesticity, gender and class in the British university settlement movement. As part of this, she is currently completing her first monograph ‘Settling: Domesticity, Class and Urban Philanthropy in the British University Settlement Movement’. Recent publications include Material Religion in Modern Britain: The Spirit of Things. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) with Timothy W. Jones. Articles in ‘Journal of Victorian Culture’, and forthcoming
Read moreTag: Middle Class
Oliver Betts, How Civilized Were the Victorians?: A Reply
Oliver Betts is Research Fellow at the National Railway Museum in York. Having completed his PhD on the working-class idea of home 1870-1914 at the University of York, he is now writing a history of the interplay between railways, society, and human geography in South London 1850-1940. He tweets at @DrOliBetts This post responds to Peter K. Andersson’s Journal of Victorian Culture article ‘How Civilised were the Victorians’. This article can be downloaded here. Working in a National Museum with
Read moreRuth Slatter, Odd Victorian Objects 3: Brent Museum, ‘The Library’, Willesden Green
Willesden Green Library was initially opened in 1894 following a poll of the local ratepayers. The library itself could therefore be the subject of this third instalment of ‘Odd’ Victorian Objects in Victorian Britain. However, this post is not going to focus on this building’s heritage, but a new addition to its recent re-development: The Brent Museum. Located on the third floor of the new library in Willesden Green, the museum provides an overview of the history of the borough
Read moreRohan McWilliam, The Victorians Are Still With Us
Rohan McWilliam is Professor of Modern British History at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge. He is the author of The Tichborne Claimant: A Victorian Sensation (London: Continuum, 2007) and is currently writing a history of the West End of London. Contact: rohan.mcwilliam@anglia.ac.uk We seldom lack heirs to G.M.Young. When it comes to the Victorians, every age throws up its portrait of an age.[1] But producing a wide-ranging account of Victorian Britain these days is becoming increasingly difficult. The historical literature is
Read moreThe Palace of Art
Serena Trowbridge, Birmingham City University Serena Trowbridge is Lecturer in English Literature at Birmingham City University. Research interests include Victorian poetry and novels; nineteenth century cultures of faith; Pre-Raphaelitism and Gothic. She blogs at Culture and Anarchy and tweets @serena_t. I built my soul a lordly pleasure-house, Wherein at ease for aye to dwell. (Tennyson, The Palace of Art) Lord Leighton’s art has, like the work of many of the Pre-Raphaelites and their followers, had a mixed reception in the twentieth and twenty-first century. Both
Read moreAlison C Kay: The Victorian Professions project
Victorian Professions is a three-year research project (began in January 2014) investigating whether the professions formed a distinct self-sustaining social group with its own mores and values. A multi-institution project, team members are drawn from the Universities of Oxford, Northumbria and Leicester. Supported by an Economic and Social Research Council large grant award, the Victorian Professions team are combining crowdsourcing of family histories with their own extensive archival research. The project website contains an interface to the substantial research data already
Read moreIdentifying the Victorian middle class
By Guy Woolnough At BAVS this year, Lucinda Matthews-Jones raised an interesting point about how we define class. How useful or sound is it to typify a person as ‘middle class’? What could that mean, when the individuals who might be so described are such a diverse group in every respect? Education, income, profession, respectability are so subjective and variable that they must be of poor value in any attempt to construct an objective assessment of the middle class status
Read moreBook Review: Elite Dancing and Dining in London and Paris
Society Dancing: Fashionable Bodies in England, 1870-1920, by Theresa Jill Buckland, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, x + 200 pp., £50.00 (hardback) ISBN 978-0-230-27714-4 Bourgeois Consumption: Food, Space and Identity in London and Paris, 1850-1914, by Rachel Rich, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011, ix + 213 pp., £55.00 (hardback) ISBN 978-0-7190-8112-5 Reviewed by Dr Kelly Boyd, Institute of Historical Research, University of London k.boyd@blueyonder.co.uk As Leonore Davidoff showed us in The Best Circles, one of the most difficult tasks in nineteenth-century English
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