Tag: Religion

New issue: JVC 28.1 is now available!

Published in JVC, Roundtables

Our latest issue, 28.1, features an extended Round Table entitled ‘Sculpture and Faith at St Paul’s Cathedral, c. 1796—1914‘. Lavishly illustrated, the collection boasts fifteen mini-essays, each devoted to one of the cathedral’s important monuments from our period. Many of these are free access. The Round Table is fuelled by the energies of multiple disciplines and approaches: art history, theology, history, ecclesiology, biography, empire- and queer studies, to name a few. As the introduction by Marjorie Coughlan, Jason Edwards and

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The Architecture of Victorian Christendom (book review)

Book Reviews, Other

English Victorian Churches: Architecture, Faith & Revival (John Hudson Publishing) by the eminent architectural historian James Stevens Curl is a book that can be read in more than one way and appeal to more than one kind of audience. It can be read as a work of scholarship; one that spans two distinct but related disciplines, namely Victorian church architecture and nineteenth-century ecclesiology. As an authoritative survey and critique of the finest examples of nineteenth-century English church building, it would

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‘Hearts and Pockets’: Consumerism and the early Salvation Army

Other

Figure 1 (header image): An advertisement for the wide range of goods to be purchased at the Salvation Army Trade Department, including an illustration of shoppers in the ‘Salvation Emporium’ showroom on Clerkenwell Road. From Salvation Army newspaper War Cry, 18 November 1893. Salvation Army International Heritage Centre. The notion of a ‘consumer identity’ is simultaneously ubiquitous and elusive. We are all consumers; and many of us do our best, in one way or another, to ensure that our consumer

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Bankimchandra Chatterjee’s Fiction and Nineteenth-Century Cross-Cultural Dialogue

Other

The cross-cultural dialogue generated as a part of the discursive assimilation between the East and the West during the nineteenth century was not only textured and nuanced, but further reflected larger epistemological debates emerging from this socio-historic conflation of ideas. The question of ‘colonial modernity’, which gained currency in later critical writing, focusing on the multiplicity of ideological categories formed as a part of this discursive shift, certainly testifies to the transformative cultural landscape of the time period. Significant among

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Anna Kingsford’s Spiritual Thunderbolt

Other

“I have killed Paul Bert, as I killed Claude Bernard; as I will kill Louis Pasteur, and after him the whole tribe of vivisectors, if I live long enough. . . it is a magnificent power to have, and the one that transcends all vulgar methods of dealing out justice to tyrants,” claimed Anna Kingsford in her diary after Bert’s death in 1886 (qtd. in Maitland, vol. 2, 268). Kingsford, a staunch animal rights activist and spiritualist, believed that her

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North American Democracies in the Victorian Era: The Political Satire of Th. Ch. Haliburton

Other

Throughout 2020, the world has been watching American democracy appearing to unravel as its Covid-19 pandemic spiralled out of control; the responsibility for public health measures devolved from the federal level to state level, then to county level, and ultimately down to individuals who pushed back in the name of freedom and challenged lockdowns in courts, and attempted to take over the US Capitol. Prudently, on March 31 Canada closed its southern border and is continuing to monitor the increasingly

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Ruth Mason, Odd Objects from Victorian Britain

Victorians Beyond the Academy

Ruth is a PhD student in the Geography Department at University College London. Her research focuses on the designed spaces and material culture of Wesleyan Methodism in London between 1851 and 1932 and what they can reveal about contemporary congregational experiences of Methodism. Alongside other graduates from the Royal College of Art and Victoria & Albert Museum’s History of Design MA, Ruth is a founding member of the Fig.9 experimental History of Design Collective (www.fig9collective.com). She is also a co-editor

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Odd Objects from Victorian Britain: The Ceramic Lovefeast Mug

Victorians Beyond the Academy

by Ruth Mason (University College London) Ruth is a PhD student in the Geography Department at University College London. Her research focuses on the designed spaces and material culture of Wesleyan Methodism in London between 1851 and 1932 and what they can reveal about contemporary congregational experiences of Methodism. Alongside other graduates from the Royal College of Art and Victoria & Albert Museum’s History of Design MA, Ruth is a founding member of the Fig.9 experimental History of Design Collective.

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Gareth Atkins, ‘CRASSH The Bible and Antiquity in Nineteenth-Century Culture’

Victorians Beyond the Academy

by Gareth Atkins is Fellow and Director of Studies in History at Magdalene College, Cambridge. He is a member of the CRASSH Bible and Antiquity Project, and is currently working on the reception of saints, religious heroes, and biblical characters in nineteenth-century Britain. The Holmes stereoscope is a Victorian icon. Designed by the American poet and polymath Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-94) and deliberately left unpatented, this cheap wooden frame with its two prismatic lenses allowed viewers in the comfort of

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Domesticating the Cosmos: Plurality and Familiarity

Published in JVC

Ben Carver (University of Exeter) This post accompanies Ben Carver’s Journal of Victorian Culture article published (2013). It can be read in full here. My article, ‘‘“A Gleaming and Glorious Star”: Rethinking History in the Plurality-of-Worlds Debate’ looks at how astronomical knowledge reframed debates about history in the nineteenth century. In 1817, Thomas Chalmers considered the possibility of other worlds and quoted from the Psalms for a modern age of astronomical knowledge in which orthodox Christian cosmogony seemed to be troubled in new

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