Journal of Victorian Culture Online
The blog and online platform of the Journal of Victorian Culture
This is the first post in the ‘Crafting Communities’ series on JVC Online. See Part Two and Part Three. It is July 2020, the summer of Covid. Libraries are closed. Museums are closed. University courses and conferences have moved online. A small group of Victorianists gathers on Zoom to learn how to make hair art. Led by Vanessa Warne (U of Manitoba), the event is a test run for the upcoming semester, when Vanessa plans to make hair art with
Read moreBy Lindsay Lawrence In Fall 2012, I proposed and taught a 4000-level major authors class on Charles Dickens at the University of Arkansas-Fort Smith. Using the wealth of online materials that have become available in the last five years, particularly the Dickens Journals Online in this class, we explored Dickens’s legacy as a serial novelist, journalist, and literary magazine editor. The class also focused on Dickens’s cultural impact and his shrewd reading of the publication industry, including serialization. Inherently, this
Read moreBy Susan Cook (Southern New Hampshire University, Manchester, NH) In the fall of 2012, I taught a version of my department’s Major Author Studies course on Charles Dickens. As this was my second time teaching a course dedicated to Dickens (and my fourth time teaching Bleak House), I knew I had to pull out all the stops to convince my students—many of whom were non-majors or students who otherwise had no familiarity with Victorian literature—to care about three tomes of
Read moreSean McConnell, Department of English and Cultural History, Liverpool John Moores University Given that the module I study is ‘Prison Voices’, it is perhaps surprising that the wide variety of literary and historical sources we have engaged with are as interested with what goes on outside the prison walls as they are with what happens within. We have examined various literary tropes about the courtroom, such as Dickens’ critique of the Victorian legal system through his characterization of Jaggers in
Read moreMegan Ainsworth, Department of English and Cultural History, Liverpool John Moores University On a recent field trip to one of Liverpool’s most prominent buildings, St. George’s Hall, our ‘Prison Voices’ module was taken beyond the university. The building, regarded as a monument to the city, opened in 1854 and was to serve a multitude of purposes for the people of Liverpool, being both a concert hall and courtroom. The building is renowned for its judicial history. Initially, the Assizes (the
Read moreBeth McConnell, Department of English and Cultural History, Liverpool John Moores University When we visited the welcoming pub, L1 Bridewell, it was difficult to believe we were sitting in what were once the holding cells for Victorian prisoners. Known in the nineteenth century as Argyle Street Bridewell, it was one of ten police stations in the Liverpool district as each station could not be more than 1.5 miles apart. In one of the original cells, we did a close reading
Read moreKeiran Southern, Department of English and Cultural History, Liverpool John Moores University In our sessions on Victorian street robbery, we examined a case involving a ‘garotter’, 19 year old Martin Corrigan. In 1869 Corrigan was tried at Liverpool Assizes, held in St George’s Hall, for robbing Patrick Spelman, a porter in the city’s St John’s market, on Chisenhale Street bridge. This bridge had a fearsome reputation for violent street crime in the mid-nineteenth century, so I decided to do more
Read moreRiain Egan, Department of English and Cultural History, Liverpool John Moores University The factual information in this blog has been drawn from Steve Binns’s informative tour of St George’s Hall and his series of podcasts which are available online here Liverpool has always been, and continues to be, synonymous with great feats of architecture from ‘The Three Graces’ that line the Pier Head to the neo-classical St George’s Hall. Opened in 1842, and built on the site of the old
Read moreSam Bennett, Department of English and Cultural History, Liverpool John Moores University During a field trip to Liverpool’s St George’s Hall for our Prison Voices module, I noticed a piece of graffiti on one of the cell walls. It reads, ‘Mary Lecy Hornby Street 7 years 1871’. One of the key areas of the module aims to recover ‘prison voices’, so I was thrilled to find this original graffiti. I was interested in finding out about the apparent author of
Read moreBy Zoë Alker, (Liverpool John Moores University) In JVC Online’s ‘Teaching and Learning Showcase’, September 2012, Drew Grey (University of Northampton) discussed his experience of ‘Putting Undergraduates On Trial: Using the Old Bailey Online as a Teaching Tool.’ Drew introduces his second-year history students to eighteenth-century court proceedings by getting them to re-enact cases from the Old Bailey. Even more ambitiously, he is planning in future years to re-stage the trials at the Sessions House in Northampton. This gave Helen
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