Ann Gagné is College Instructor at Seneca College in Toronto, Canada. Her current research explores how touch and ethics relate to education as well as the spatial framing of learning in the nineteenth century which is an extension of themes found in her doctoral dissertation. She is very active on Twitter @AnnGagne and also writes a blog that relates to teaching and pedagogical strategies at www.allthingspedagogical.blogspot.ca Sensory studies has really expanded in the past few years which is great
Read moreTag: Victorian Studies
This Charming Dickens…
Michael Slater’s recent work, The Great Charles Dickens Scandal, brilliantly opens with a selection of the various headlines that Dickens-based news stories have run in recent years. Predictably, they mostly relate to his relationship with Ellen Ternan, and range from the dramatic (‘THE DARK SIDE OF DICKENS AND THE LOVE THAT DESTROYED HIS MARRIAGE’) to the salacious (‘DICKENS’S ROMPS WITH NAUGHTY NELLY’) to the somewhat bizarre and creepy (‘DICKENS KEPT A KEEN EYE ON FALLEN WOMEN’).[1] With the approaching release
Read moreRoller Derby’s Victorian Prehistory
By 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 moreThe Victorian Tactile Imagination: Reappraising touch in nineteenth-century culture
THE VICTORIAN TACTILE IMAGINATION: Reappraising touch in the nineteenth-century culture Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies, Birkbeck, London 19-20 July, 2013 It is always exciting when you feel part of something big, and when Professor David Howes (Concordia University) asserts that there are some ‘stirrings’ in the academy then you know it’s special. Many claims are made for the impact of a conference’s scope, and they do establish new ideas and contribute to the wider scholarship as well as create new networks
Read moreKnickerbockers and Tight-Lacing:Ruth Goodman’s ‘How To Be A Victorian’
‘How To Be A Victorian’ (Penguin/Viking, 2013) by Ruth Goodman review by Gabrielle Malcolm Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman, as the song goes. It was especially hard to be a Victorian woman. We think we know, and we certainly do – on many levels – understand the hardships that people underwent on a daily basis, from morning until night. But is this awareness not just one of academic, historic facts? Do we really appreciate or empathise with what
Read moreCelebrity Circulation II: Dickens’s Moving/Images
By Susan Cook (Southern New Hampshire University, Manchester, NH) Dickens was famously mobile throughout his life, walking miles each day, moving households repeatedly, and traveling often. “If I could not walk far and fast,” he once wrote, “I think I should just explode and perish.”[1] This quote describes an obsession with walking, a physical need to walk not only long distances but quickly at that. Dickens saw walking as essential, writes Rosemary Bodenheimer. Walking allowed The Inimitable “to bring his
Read moreCelebrity Circulation I: Dickens in Photographs
By Susan Cook (Southern New Hampshire University, Manchester, NH) As a photographic image, Charles Dickens circulated far and wide. The man was photographed in excess of 120 times during his life [1], and was among all Victorians, as Joss Marsh recently put it, “the most photographically famous person in Britain outside the royal family” [2]. Ironically, however, Dickens disliked having his photographic image taken. Not only was he concerned that these images gave viewers a lie—a false sense of possessing
Read moreDickens in the West End: Great Expectations, adaptations and Dickensian fatigue
by 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 moreOn the Images of Others
By Susan Cook (Southern New Hampshire University, Manchester, NH) As a Victorianist and a collector with an interest in photography, I decided, about a year ago, to begin amassing my own Victorian photography collection. I soon acquired three daguerreotypes, two tintypes, and eleven cartes-de-visite—all portraits, save two. I know very little about the images—no names, no dates, no locations beyond the photography studio imprinted on the cartes-de-visite. I have become transfixed by how little I know about these images. Two
Read moreReading and Reacting: The Heir of Redclyffe
Serena Trowbridge (Birmingham City University) Recently I re-read The Heir of Redclyffe (1853), Charlotte M. Yonge’s most famous novel. This is the romantic novel over which Jo March cried in Little Women, a book described as ‘genius’ by Henry James, and which provided an ideal of chivalry to the young William Morris and Burne-Jones. It enjoyed enormous popularity in the nineteenth century, though this has faded over the years, but recent work on Yonge examines her as a professional
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