Journal of Victorian Culture Online
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This final post (see Parts One and Two) was inspired by a pair of pale pink knitted tights worn by the music hall singer Kitty Lord (1881-1972) in the early 1900s. Part of a collection of Lord’s costumes held at the Museum of London, these ‘symmetricals’ were carefully padded with wool to ensure that her thighs and calves looked suitably shapely and voluptuous [Figure 1]. As these padded symmetricals reveal, and this post will discuss, in late nineteenth century Burlesque
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Costumes are powerful objects, which carry multiple meanings and memories in their fibres. Through three connected blog posts, I will highlight the importance of costume for performance: revealing the insights costumes offer into the lives of the people who designed, made, wore and saw them. Commencing with Ellen Terry’s ‘Beetlewing Dress’, moving on to Edwin Moxon’s embroidered ‘shorts’, and concluding with Kitty Lord’s carefully padded ‘Symmetricals’, I will showcase the information which these unique garments offer about the performer, performance,
Read moreBy Guy Woolnough Lulu, based on the verses of Wedekind, performed by the Tiger Lillies[1], is a dark, compelling and shocking show. It shocks in the most affecting way, not with overt displays of violence or sex, but with powerful words and an intense narrative. I found the performance stunning and fascinating: it is good. Lulu, the eponymous heroine danced by Laura Caldow, is the beauty from the slums who is abused and exploited by men. From her childhood in
Read moreby Ann Victoria Roberts Would Bram Stoker recognise the characters in Sky’s new TV series? I doubt it. But Dracula the TV series is just one more twist on a popular theme, one that has been endlessly re-interpreted since the unauthorised film, Nosferatu, first appeared in 1922. Stoker’s widow sued the German production company, and in doing so created the publicity which led to a fresh surge of interest in the novel. After good reviews at the time of its
Read moreBy Benjamin Poore, University of York Eckart Voigts (Braunschweig) then presented the second keynote, on Nell Leyshon and her first-person tale of murder The Colour of Milk, which has been widely compared with Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Via a live Skype link with the author in the department’s Holbeck Cinema, Professor Voigts was able to interview Leyshon, and she was able to take questions from the floor. One of the questions that arose from this session, and from the
Read moreBy Susan Cook (Southern New Hampshire University, Manchester, NH) Roller derby was not a Victorian sport. But it should have been. Today roller skating is typically thought of as a twentieth-century fad, but historians trace its origins back to the eighteenth century. Although the Dutch began using roller skates in the early 1700s, the Belgian inventor Joseph Merlin made the most memorable early impression on the new sport by skating into a masquerade party in 1760 whilst playing the violin.
Read moreI recently realized that in my ‘Victorian life’, I have been harbouring a rather shameful secret: in my thesis research, seminar preparation, reading group suggestions, and even leisure-time choices, I am guilty of focusing almost solely on nineteenth-century novels. Thinking back to undergraduate days, it was the same in my Victorian modules then: I would almost always choose to read, talk about, or write on a novel, shunning poetry and plays for what I saw as the comparative ‘safety’ and
Read moreRyan D. Fong Kalamazoo College For most of our readership across the United States and in the UK, April is proving to be a very cruel month indeed—with severe weather patterns and cold fronts marching across the North America and Atlantic. In these frigid days and dank nights, in which we grow ever wearier of these lingering and intemperate climes, what is a good Victorianist to do? The options would seem (at least to this Victorianist) to either sink into
Read moreby Emma Curry, Birkbeck College Dickens writes in The Old Curiosity Shop of the strange feeling of flatness we experience a short time after an exciting event. He describes Kit Nubbles spending a pleasurable half-holiday off work with his family and friends, drinking tea, eating oysters, and attending a performance at the theatre; only to wake up the next day feeling full of ‘that vague kind of penitence which holidays awaken’.[1] As Dickens’s narrator laments: Oh these holidays! why will
Read moreCharles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World, by Simon Callow, London: Harper Press, 2012, xiii + 370pp, £16.99 (Hardback), ISBN 978 0 00 744530 1 Dickens’ Women, by Miriam Margolyes and Sonia Fraser, London, Hesperus Press Limited, 2011, 96 pp, £8.99 (Paperback) ISBN 978 1 84391 351 1 Reviewed by Gillian Piggott gillian-piggott@hotmail.com Two of our top actors have dovetailed the publication of their thoughts on Dickens with the Bicentenary festivities, providing an actor’s perspective on the great
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