Laura Foster completed her PhD at Cardiff University in 2014. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on the representation of the workhouse in nineteenth-century culture, with a particular focus upon periodical publications and visual material. Her most recently published article, ‘Dirt, Dust and Devilment: Uncovering Filth in the Workhouse and Casual Wards’, is available to read online at Victorian Network. A perusal of the December issues of the Illustrated London News or the Graphic is a gratifying pastime for anyone indulging a
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Lauren Padgett, ‘Salt’s Mill, Saltaire: Brief History and Review’
Lauren Padgett is a PhD student at Leeds Trinity University, investigating representations of Victorian women in contemporary museums. She worked in local museums for four years; her first museum job, assisting with the redevelopment of textile galleries, fuelled her interest of the textile industry and Bradford’s textile heritage. Saltaire, a model Victorian village (a few miles from Bradford’s city centre), has been a UNESCO world heritage site since 2001. [1] Saltaire was commissioned by Sir Titus Salt (1803 – 1876),
Read moreVicky Nagy, The Essex Poisoning Cases 1846-1851
Vicky received her PhD in 2012 from Monash University. Her PhD focused on the social and legal representations of female poisoners’ femininity during the Victorian period. Vicky has been a lecturer at ELTE (Hungary), and researcher at Monash and La Trobe Universities. She is currently an Honorary Associate at La Trobe University and about to begin a new project looking at female criminality in Australia during the colonial period. Her book, Nineteenth-Century Female Poisoners: Three English Women Who Used Arsenic
Read moreGeorgina Grant, Smoking and Respectable Femininity
Georgina is a Curatorial Officer for the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust, based at Blists Hill Victorian Town. She has the responsibility of maintaining, developing and delivering the interpretation of the 52 acre site. Her role is varied, ranging from researching the history of canal vessels to installing Quaker costume displays and giving talks on a traditional Victorian Christmas. Follow Georgina @GeorgyGrant. ‘I never saw a woman – not a basket woman or a gipsy – smoke before!’ Charles Dickens 1846
Read moreClare Walker Gore, Adventures in Marble and Monochrome: Victorian Sculpture and Photography at Tate Britain
Salt and Silver: Early Photography 1840-1860 25 February – 7 June Sculpture Victorious 25 February – 25 May With its fabulous permanent collection of Pre-Raphaelite paintings, Tate Britain always has an embarrassment of riches to offer the Victorian enthusiast, but its latest exhibitions are a further inducement to make the trip to Millbank if you can. Salt and Silver provides a fascinating glimpse into the world of early Victorian photography, bringing together ninety rare salted paper photographs from the mid-nineteenth
Read moreLauren Padgett, Representations of Victorian Women in Museums
Lauren Padgett is a PhD candidate at Leeds Trinity University investigating representations of Victorian women in museums. She is attached to the Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies and coordinates its blogs. She worked for several years in the museum industry. Her wider research interests include physical, intellectual and cultural museum access for traditionally marginalised individuals. She is also interested in Bradford’s local history. She tweets @LaurenPadgett24 and can be contacted at 1408014@leedstrinity.ac.uk Millions of people visit museums, heritage sites and
Read moreHelen Kingstone: Women are aliens! Radical feminism and contemporary-history-writing in the work of Alice Stopford Green
This post accompanies Helen Kingstone’s Journal of Victorian Culture article: ‘Feminism, Nationalism, Separatism? The Case of Alice Stopford Green’. This article can be downloaded here. For several years now, I’ve been tussling with a troublesome question: how do you write contemporary history? Luckily, perhaps, I haven’t had to do it myself, but instead have been looking at how Victorian writers approached the challenge. Because it is a challenge. How do you write a history (conventionally a generalising, singular, even grand
Read moreThinking about Francesca Wilson and the Victorian imaginary that surrounded her philanthropic work
Ellen Ross is Professor of History and Women’s Studies at Ramapo College of New Jersey. She has written about motherhood and London poverty in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Victorian and Edwardian women’s urban philanthropy, missions and social work in London, and Christian conversion efforts aimed at London Jews. Francesca Wilson’s story is part of a study of post-suffrage women’s voluntarism–which increasingly had a European or even global scope. Contact at: eross@ramapo.edu Francesca M. Wilson (1888-1981), a Birmingham-born Quaker
Read morePoor Women and Elite Men
Victorian Women, Unwed Mothers and the London Foundling Hospital, by Jessica A. Sheetz-Nguyen, London: Continuum, 2012, xii + 258 pp. (softcover), ISBN 978 1 441 1 4112 5 Elizabeth M., a waitress in a vegetarian restaurant, sought help from the London Foundling Hospital in 1891. She had met a respectably employed man, Daniel B., a foreman in the office of a dairy company, and the two began courting. They decided to marry and engaged in sexual intercourse. She became pregnant
Read moreDownton Abbey & Jane Austen; Or, in Praise of Lady Mary
By Alice Villaseñor (Medaille College, Buffalo, NY) References to and parodies of Downton Abbey on popular US television shows such as The Big Bang Theory, The Colbert Report, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, and Sesame Street testify to the widespread popularity of the series on this side of the pond. Because Jane Austen’s legacy as an emblem of nineteenth-century British costume drama is so engrained in our cultural consciousness (as a result of the
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