Tag: Nineteenth-Century Periodicals

The rise and fall of the historical novel?

Digitizing the Victorians

Everyone agrees that the historical novel is an almost impossible genre to write successfully. Yet it keeps being written, and being successful. It’s having rather a boom in the early 21st century, with the success of Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell trilogy and others.  And it had its biggest boom in the early Victorian period, propelled into the limelight by Walter Scott and his Waverley novels, and proliferated by many anonymous and many now sidelined authors including John Galt, sisters Jane

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Just Like Us: Victoria, Albert and the middle-class family (part 2 of 4)

Published in JVC

Part 2: Taking position – ‘the look’ The Christmas tree engraving was not untypical of depictions of the royal family in the mid-nineteenth century, a period which had in recent decades witnessed a vast expansion in the publication and distribution of popular newspapers and periodicals as a result of technical innovations in printing, distribution and communications. [1] In an analysis of Victoria’s representation in the illustrated press, Virginia McKendry argues that images of the Queen in the Illustrated London News

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Laura Foster, ‘Merry Christmas in the Workhouse’

Published in JVC

Laura Foster completed her PhD at Cardiff University in 2014. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on the representation of the workhouse in nineteenth-century culture, with a particular focus upon periodical publications and visual material. Her most recently published article, ‘Dirt, Dust and Devilment: Uncovering Filth in the Workhouse and Casual Wards’, is available to read online at Victorian Network. A perusal of the December issues of the Illustrated London News or the Graphic is a gratifying pastime for anyone indulging a

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Knickerbockers and Tight-Lacing:Ruth Goodman’s ‘How To Be A Victorian’

Other

‘How To Be A Victorian’ (Penguin/Viking, 2013) by Ruth Goodman review by Gabrielle Malcolm Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman, as the song goes. It was especially hard to be a Victorian woman. We think we know, and we certainly do – on many levels – understand the hardships that people underwent on a daily basis, from morning until night. But is this awareness not just one of academic, historic facts? Do we really appreciate or empathise with what

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Daniel Grey, “Liable to Very Gross Abuse’: Murder, Moral Panic and Cultural Fears over Infant Life Insurance, 1875-1914′

Other

By Daniel Grey My article, “Liable to Very Gross Abuse’: Murder, Moral Panic and Cultural Fears over Infant Life Insurance, 1875–1914′, examines the late nineteenth century belief that working-class parents were liable to neglect and ultimately kill their children in hopes of receiving a life insurance payout from a friendly society. This idea was not only widely and repeatedly debated in the Victorian press and in Parliament, but the desire to eradicate this supposedly widespread practice became a cornerstone of

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‘What is a Journal? Towards a Theory of Periodical Studies,’ MLA 2013 Special Session

Victorians Beyond the Academy

MLA Convention 2013, Special Session 384 Friday, 4 January 2013, 5.15pm Participants Presider:  James Murphy Discussants:  Ann Ardis (Professor of English, University of Delaware), Sean Latham (Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Tulsa), Dallas Liddle (Associate Professor of English, Augsburg University), James Mussell (Lecturer in English, University of Birmingham), and Matthew Philpotts (Senior Lecturer in German Studies, University of Manchester) Position Papers Ann Ardis, ‘Towards a Theory of Periodical Studies’ Sean Latham, ‘Affordance and Emergence: Magazine as New

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Andrew Hobbs and Claire Januszewski, The Local Press as Poetry Publisher, 1800-1900

Digital Forum

The local press as poetry publisher, 1800-1900 English local newspapers probably published around two million poems during the nineteenth century – more, if we include Scottish, Irish and Welsh papers. Although poetry in periodicals is acknowledged in recent research and scholarly databases, newspaper poetry has received less attention. Studies of working-class poets acknowledge in passing that much of their writing was first published in the local press, before moving on to more prestigious (but less widely read) publication in volume

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Matrimonial Advertising: A Very Brief Madness?

Other

By Jennifer Phegley Mrs. Punch: “A man ought to be punished for writing such idiotic love-letters.” Mr. Punch: “Logical as ever, my adored . . . but it is in the fitness of things that a love letter should be idiotic. Love is a brief (very brief) madness.” “On Love Letters.” Punch (December 11, 1869): 236. As Mr. and Mrs. Punch’s conversation indicates, love letters were a central part of courtship that could easily go awry.  In this scene, Mr.

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Sarah Wah, ”The Most Churlish of Celebrities’: George Eliot, John Cross and the Question of High Status’

Other

Published in 1885, John Cross’s biography of his late wife, George Eliot’s Life as Related in Her Letters and Journals, was written with the intention to ‘make known the woman as well as the author’. Yet, ironically, the biography is renowned precisely for the lack of insight it affords readers into the private life of George Eliot. Why did Cross make a promise that he could not keep? In JVC 15.3, Sarah Wah seeks to answer this question by examining

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Book Reviews (15.2)

Other

Malcolm Chase on G. W. M. Reynolds: Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Politics, and the Press, edited by Anne Humpherys and Louis James (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008). To read the full review, visit http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=article&issn=1355%2d5502&volume=15&issue=2&spage=299 David Richter on Rebecca Stern’s Home Economics: Domestic Fraud in Victorian England (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008). To read the full review, visit http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=article&issn=1355%2d5502&volume=15&issue=2&spage=303. Talia Schaffer on John Plotz’s Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). To read the full review, visit http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=article&issn=1355%2d5502&volume=15&issue=2&spage=307.

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