Tag: Romanticism

How Victorian jewellery both shaped and reflected changes in society

Victorians Beyond the Academy, Victorians on Display

Jewellery’s evolution in the 1800s highlights many of the economic and moral changes that transformed British society during the Queen’s 63-year reign. Jewellery is a private, yet paradoxically the most visible, sign of these social shifts. The growth of personal autonomy meant it was worn on the body, exchanged in love and carried into mourning — yet its evolution was based on the large-scale trends of imperial expansion and technological advance. From Tudor exclusivity to Victorian ubiquity By the nineteenth

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Reading Toru Dutt as a ‘Romantic’ Urban Nature Poet

Essay

Sing his name, o dear, who in this far land Sings your name in all his songs for Bengal. Michael Madhusudan Dutt, ‘Kapatakkha River’. This essay reads nineteenth-century poet Toru Dutt’s work as a Bengali author’s successful attempt to write the Romantic sonnet in English, but within a Bengali context. Dutt achieves this both by being influenced by, and deviating from, the poetics of the British Romantics. The poems in focus are ‘Sonnet — Baugmaree’ and ‘Sonnet — The Lotus’,

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Books, Reading, and Daydream Believing: Christy Carew Has ‘Nothing’ to Do

Other, Victorians on Display

The current pandemic triggered what appears to be a reading revival. As I noted media discourse on people accumulating books, I wondered whether sometimes these books were companions to a daydream, as individuals imagined an alternative present or felicitous future; experiencing, as Charlotte Bronte expressed it in Villette, “the life of thought, and that of reality”.[1] Researching fictional experiences of reading in women’s writing at the fin de siècle, I notice a book is often accompaniment to a daydream. It

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The Tragic Poet: Whose Name was Writ in Water

Other, Victorians Beyond the Academy

There are those who consider the words of the sanguine poet scarcely worth the reading. A prescription formula for funerals, heartbreak and teenage angst, poetry has long been established as the literary tonic for the dilapidated human condition. In the name of authenticity, it naturally follows that the greater the suffering of a maudlin bard, the greater their work and legacy. Mythology has romanticised and popularised the tragic poet, a familiar archetype in celebrity literary culture. It is the reason

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“A Shadow of a Magnitude”: Toru Dutt’s Writing and Nineteenth-Century Cross-Cultural Dialogue

Other

This is an ode to one of those poets of the world literary tradition whose work captured and immortalized the everlasting magnanimity of the natural world, in the spirit of the Romantic poets of the nineteenth century, who strived for excellence in the literary arts, whose life was like a temporal spring that came to an end at the time when it was blossoming; like the nightingale’s voice of Keats’ poem, or the ‘golden autumn’ of Chatterton’s. Yet it was

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Emily Bowles, ‘Writing Lives Together: A Conference on Romantic and Victorian Biography’

Published in JVC

Emily Bowles is a PhD candidate at the University of York. Her research focuses on Charles Dickens’s self-representation 1857-1870, and representations by Dickens’s friends and family in life writing 1870-1939. She is also a postgraduate representative for the Northern Nineteenth Century Network, and you can find her on Twitter @EmilyBowles_. She has co-edited a special issue of ‘Peer English’ on Victorian biography. Writing Lives Together was a one-day conference that took place on 18 September 2015, put together with the

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