Journal of Victorian Culture Online
The blog and online platform of the Journal of Victorian Culture
“My wallpapers are killing me; one of us must go!” Oscar Wilde’s infamous last words are usually construed as a rueful comment on the ugliness of the decorations in his Paris hotel bedroom. Yet they could also be interpreted literally, and applied to the thousands of Victorians who fell victim to the deadly pigments in their wallpapers. Even from the vantage point of the recent pandemic, the nineteenth century was a hazardous time to be alive: subject to regular outbreaks
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Anyone who’s read, or seen the latest adaptation of, Kate Atkinson’s Life after Life will remember the hapless Irish maid, Bridget, accused in an early scene of being ‘brought up in a field’. As Catherine Healy explores in her Prize Winning essay in this issue, Ethnic Jokes: Mocking the Working Irish Woman, ‘Bridget’ is a stock comic figure of the nineteenth-century press, appearing liberally in English, Irish and American light journalism. Healy’s essay extends and deepens the explorations pioneered in
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Red squirrels had reason to be wary of the Victorians. Nineteenth-century culture popularised the animals – they were even kept as pets – but the Victorians also unwittingly caused the decline of the red squirrel population by introducing the rival species, the grey squirrel, to Britain.[1] Today, sciurus vulgaris stands at the centre of an emotionally charged debate about the conservation of native habitats. The red squirrel’s persistent appeal most likely has to do with its endearing looks. But in
Read moreDr. 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 On March 21st, 2015 the William Morris Society of Canada celebrated what would have
Read moreBy Wendy Parkins, Kent University The exciting re-discovery of wall paintings and decorations during recent restoration work at William Morris’s Red House – as widely reported in the media this week – raises as many questions as it answers. Who painted the five Old Testament figures in the mural in the main bedroom? And why? After all, Noah holding a miniature ark doesn’t exactly say ‘honeymoon suite’, not to mention the sense of foreboding a depiction of Adam and Eve
Read moreLaura French and Amber Kohl How We Might Live: The Vision of William Morris is a University of Maryland exhibit examining the life of William Morris, focusing on his written works, political activism, and artistic endeavors. The exhibit showcases rare books, pamphlets, and ephemera from the William Morris Collection in Special Collections. The collection was established in 1985 with the purchase from collector Jack Walsdorf of approximately 340 books and related material printed by or about William Morris. It
Read moreThe Making of British Socialism, by Mark Bevir, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011, xiii + 350 pages, £24.95 (hardback), ISBN 0-691-15083-3 Ecology and the Literature of the British Left: The Red and the Green, edited by John Rignall and H. Gustav Klaus in association with Valentine Cunningham, Farnham: Ashgate, 2012, xi + 267, £60 (hardback), ISBN 1-4094-1822-1 William Morris and the Idea of Community: Romance, History and Propaganda, 1880-1914, by Anna Vaninskaya, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010, viii
Read moreIn 1885 William Morris wrote that poetry had become near-impossible in the modern age, since ‘language is utterly degraded in our daily lives, and poets have to make a new tongue each for himself: before he can even begin his story he must elevate his means of expression from the daily jabber to which centuries of degradation have reduced it’ (IIB 483). Abberley explores the intellectual influences that shaped Morris’s belief in such linguistic degradation, and how his late fiction
Read moreIn JVC 15.1, Wendy Parkins explores the relationships between men and women, friends and lovers at Red house, home of Jane and William Morris. She considers how the inhabitants expressed hospitality and affection through their use of space and objects. In their furnishings and ornamentation, Jane Morris and Georgiana Burne-Jones articulated their capacity for agency not merely as aesthetic objects but as creative subjects. Click here for further images of Red House Click here to visit Red House Click here
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