Journal of Victorian Culture Online
The blog and online platform of the Journal of Victorian Culture
Our autumn issue, 28 3, contains an important Round Table, Piston, Pen and Press, covering new scholarship on nineteenth-century working-class literary cultures, from Mechanics Institutes to periodical poetry. The convenors of Piston, Pen and Press remind us that JVC has a rich tradition of publishing work on labouring class culture.
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The Cotton Famine (1861-65) was a significant era of poverty and unemployment resulting from a blockade on raw cotton during the American Civil War, which hit Lancashire’s textile communities particularly hard. It produced a wide variety of contemporary literary responses, many of which have been under-discussed in scholarship on Victorian industrial literature. In the past decade, however, more effort has been put into archiving and analysing these responses. This is primarily seen in the University of Exeter’s open access digital
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On 10 February 1875, William Seymour, a cab driver, was remanded in custody and charged with stealing ‘22 lbs of beef’ and ‘5 lbs of veal’ from Mr Henry Moorby who owned a butcher’s on Leece Street in Liverpool.[1] Although William categorically maintained his innocence, he was charged with theft and the Liverpool Mercury commented that ‘upon the arm and breast of [his] coat were traces of suet which proved incontestably that he was guilty of the crime’.[2] Although this
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In July 1844, a jovial, portly ship’s steward named Sharrock Dupen mounted a white horse in the Cornish town of Redruth and prepared to accompany 65 of his fellow Free Gardeners in procession to his home town of Hayle, a distance of some ten miles. He was preceded by a trumpeter on horseback, a Brother holding the banner of the Cornubian Lodge, the chaplain carrying a bible on a purple velvet cushion, and a triumphal arch of fruit and flowers
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Today, most of us cannot imagine waking up at the desired hour without our alarm clocks and smartphones. Clearly, such devices add to the convenience of our lives. But how did people wake up when alarm clocks did not exist or were not affordable to ordinary people? How did people ensure that they were not late for work? The answer is with the aid of “knocker ups”. Knocker ups were human alarm clocks –they were employed by clients who needed
Read moreThis post accompanies Peter K. Andersson’s Journal of Victorian Culture 2015 ‘How Civilised were the Victorians’. This article can be downloaded here. An increasing interest in “history from below” among Victorian scholars can be detected when looking at the contents of periodicals and books. The Journal of Victorian Culture is at the forefront of this evolution with articles on blood-sports, rat-catchers and the material culture of everyday city life. But although an ambition to encompass the “voiceless masses” has never
Read moreUshashi Dasgupta is a DPhil student at St John’s College, Oxford. She is researching the significance of tenancy and rented spaces – lodgings, boarding-houses, hotels, taverns – in the literary imagination, with a particular focus on Dickens and his circle. Ushashi Dasgupta can be contacted via email at ushashi.dasgupta@sjc.ox.ac.uk The inaugural BAVS Talks were held in May, at the Oxford Centre for Research in the Humanities. During these talks, Helen Rogers spoke about the manner in which interest is turning, once
Read moreVicky Holmes – University of Essex This post accompanies Vicky Holmes JVC 2014 article ‘Accommodating the Lodger: The Domestic Arrangements of Lodgers in Working-Class Dwellings in a Victorian Provincial Town’, which can be downloaded here. In my article, ‘Accommodating the Lodger: The Domestic Arrangements of Lodgers in Working-Class Dwellings in a Victorian Provincial Town’, I attempt to locate the lodger and reappraise our understanding of their position in working-class homes, including their place in the family’s bedroom.Despite the idea that the
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