Tag: Periodicals

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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Who’s Wearing the Pant(aloon)s Now?: Women Illustrators and Rational Dress

Other

In “‘Rational’ Dress”, a cartoon published in the 6 June 1883 edition of Judy, or the London Serio-comic Journal, Marie Duval (1847-90) parodies the rational dress movement, which strived for improvements in women’s clothing, through a series of individual figures (fig. 1). The figures, or ‘characters’, represent various ways in which rational dress has influenced fashion trends and women’s place in society. Printed underneath are captions pertaining to each character on the page or ‘stage.’ Everyone has a unique ‘role’

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‘Crushed Flounces and Broken Feathers’: British Women’s Fashions and their Indian Servants in Victorian India

Victorians Beyond the Academy, Victorians on Display

‘We have had so many inquiries respecting Indian outfits, and necessary articles of dress for the Presidencies…’ (The Englishwoman’s Conversazione, Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, 1 July 1869). Britain’s imperial control and power over India had reached its epitome in the nineteenth century, as the East India Company had become entrenched, and later, the colonial society was consolidated by the imposition of Crown Rule in 1858. The nineteenth century, especially the second half, witnessed many British women crossing the seas to reside

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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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Reading Serially: The Digital Resurrection of a Victorian Experience?

Digitizing the Victorians, Published in JVC

By Eleanor Reeds Eleanor Reeds is a PhD student and instructor in the Department of English at the University of Connecticut. Her research focuses on issues of genre and form in the transatlantic nineteenth century, and she blogs from The Ivory Tower. Exactly 150 years after Charles Dickens first published Our Mutual Friend, readers around the world are taking part in an online reading project led by Birkbeck, University of London that attempts to recreate the original experience of encountering

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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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Conference Report: W. T. Stead: Centenary Conference for a Newspaper Revolutionary

Victorians Beyond the Academy

Paul Horn, University of Birmingham On 16 and 17 April 2012, early career researchers, established academics, media and law professionals met at the British Library to exchange their perspectives on the life and work of the pioneering journalist and editor, W. T. Stead.  With Stead’s discursive career as a focal point, multiple routes were developed into knowledge of his time and ours. Day One The conference was opened with a keynote from Laurel Brake (Birkbeck), whose paper ‘W. T. Stead

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Bloggers Fair: Michelle Smith and her blog ‘Girls’ Literature’

Victorians Beyond the Academy

I began Girls’ Literature and Culture in 2008, not long after completing my PhD at the University of Melbourne. While my scholarly work focuses on gender in nineteenth-century print culture, the freedom of writing a blog, where academic conventions can be flagrantly violated, has helped me to think more about how girls are situated in contemporary popular culture as well. The blog is therefore a melange of all things relating to girlhood from Victorian magazines and novels to recent debates

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