JournalTOCs

Journal of Environmental Statistics
Number of Followers: 4

This is an Open Access Journal

Open Access journal
ISSN (Print) 1945-1296
Published by UCLA Department of Statistics

[1 journal]

Crossing the Line: Redrawing Legacies of Racial Representation in Watson
and Holmes:
- Abstract: What can audiences learn about the Victorian period and its reverberations from Watson and Holmes: A Study in Black, a 2013 graphic novel that reimagines Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet (1887) by envisioning Watson and Holmes as young Black men living in modern-day Harlem' Many recent adaptations of the Sherlock Holmes series have raised concerns similar to those about hits such as Hamilton (2015) and Bridgerton (2020–) involving the dangerous ways that superficial, color-blind casting constructs fantasies of a nonracist past for the United States and England at historical moments when these nations endorsed slavery and imperial expansion premised upon white supremacy.1 For instance, the 2021 Netflix series ... Read More
  PubDate: 2024-06-28T00:00:00-05:00
Roots in Fiction and Philology: George Eliot, Ernest Renan, and Willed
Ethnonationalism
- Abstract: Following a historic action of Parliament, Britain is mired in political turmoil: protestors clash with police forces in the street, Islamophobia and xenophobia saturate the media and campaign ads, and citizens across the island nation are divided amidst increasing partisanship. Fitting themes for a post-Brexit novel, this is the backdrop of George Eliot’s Felix Holt, the Radical (1866). Felix Holt’s relevance for contemporary discussions of race, nationality, and belonging in the United Kingdom is arguably the result of its status as the only major Condition-of-England novel published after the 1857 Indian Rebellion and 1864 Morant Bay Uprising. While the novel examines issues of industrialization and ... Read More
  PubDate: 2024-06-28T00:00:00-05:00
The Climate of Utopia: Victorian Hothouses and H. G. Wells
- Abstract: About halfway into his strange story about the world in the year 802,701, the Time Traveller in H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) reiterates the relative warmth of future Earth: “I think I have said how much hotter than our own was the weather of this Golden Age” (44). He connects the idea of an original utopia—a Golden Age that Hesiod in Works and Days (ca. 700 BCE) described as a preagricultural society where “the grain-giving soil bore its fruits of its own accord in unstinted plenty” (40)—with a warm world of abundance. However, in contrast to Hesiod’s Golden Age, the utopian climate in The Time Machine is not primordial but rather anthropogenic, “resembl[ing] the one artificially produced in ... Read More
  PubDate: 2024-06-28T00:00:00-05:00
“Beyond the Law”: The Politics of Ending the Death Penalty for Sodomy
in Britain by Charles Upchurch (review)
- Abstract: Until recently, the search for queer subjects and genealogies in modern British history prioritized the eighteenth century (when molly houses nourished nascent sexual identities) and the late nineteenth century (when sexological and legal discourses generated a new hetero/homo binary). For many scholars, the period in between was a sparsely documented gray zone where little of significance happened. Enter Charles Upchurch who, in a series of books and articles, has made it his mission to shake up this received wisdom. His latest book, “Beyond the Law”: The Politics of Ending the Death Penalty for Sodomy in Britain, is no exception.As his subtitle suggests, Upchurch’s focus is on how and why hanging for penetrative ... Read More
  PubDate: 2024-06-28T00:00:00-05:00
Unsound Empire: Civilization and Madness in Late Victorian Law by
Catherine L. Evans (review)
- Abstract: Central to the governing of nineteenth-century Britain, at home and as it spread its power and influence worldwide, was the principle of the rule of law. It was praised again and again as the glory and the justification of British rule, a model for all other states. Yet for all Britain’s material and cultural triumphs in that era, this principle was never as secure as it seemed. It rested on an implicit assumption that came in the course of the century to be recognized as fragile: that the individuals whose behavior it was governing were basically rational and autonomous and could be responsible subjects. Ironically, an equally celebrated aspect of nineteenth-century British civilization, the advance of science ... Read More
  PubDate: 2024-06-28T00:00:00-05:00
Losing the Thread: Cotton, Liverpool and the American Civil War by Jim
Powell (review)
- Abstract: Jim Powell’s Losing the Thread: Cotton, Liverpool and the American Civil War tells the story of the cotton crisis that wracked English manufacturers during the period of the American Civil War. The Confederacy, adopting the strategy dubbed King Cotton, placed an embargo on the vast supplies of cotton to which the industry had grown accustomed. The embargo was meant to induce the British government to come to the rescue of its manufacturers by intervening in the Civil War on behalf of the South. No sooner had the embargo been declared than the Union upped the ante, blockading Southern ports and reducing the cotton supply to a trickle. Supplies had been plentiful the previous year—the largest they had ever been—and ... Read More
  PubDate: 2024-06-28T00:00:00-05:00
Servants of Diplomacy: A Domestic History of the Victorian Foreign Office
by Keith Hamilton (review)
- Abstract: A housekeeper’s dog threatened with execution for barking and making messes, a library clerk who joined the Salvation Army and sang hymns at work, a mountaineer stuck on the Weisshorn who later suffers from scalp wounds, foul odors of unknown origins, and several lift accidents are just a few interesting details included in Keith Hamilton’s well-researched Servants of Diplomacy: A Domestic History of the Victorian Foreign Office. He provides a thick description of the office: clerks, librarians, messengers, and domestic staff are the primary actors in his story, while events like Fenian terror, civil service reform, the Crimean War, the Near Eastern crises of 1875 through 1878, and the scramble for Africa haunt the ... Read More
  PubDate: 2024-06-28T00:00:00-05:00
State Surveillance, Political Policing and Counter-Terrorism in Britain,
1880–1914 by Vlad Solomon (review)
- Abstract: Vlad Solomon’s State Surveillance, Political Policing and Counter-Terrorism in Britain, 1880–1914 is an interesting study of the development of what Jean-Paul Brodeur, the Canadian criminologist, described as high policing in counter-point to the ordinary low policing of nonpolitical crime. In the case of Britain this means the manner in which the patriarchal, bourgeois state dealt with the violent threats presented by Fenian bombing campaigns, working-class strikers, continental anarchists, and militant suffragettes in the late Victorian, Edwardian, and pre-First World War periods. This involves close scrutiny of the official records of the British Home Office and Metropolitan Police, as well as of newspapers ... Read More
  PubDate: 2024-06-28T00:00:00-05:00
The Trinity Circle: Anxiety, Intelligence, and Knowledge Creation in
Nineteenth-Century England by William J. Ashworth (review)
- Abstract: In Georgian times, traveling to Cambridge was a pedestrian or equestrian activity, involving people walking or using horse-drawn carriages. Victorian Cambridge was not early in acquiring its railway station (1845). Moreover, interestingly, Cambridge’s station is far from conveniently situated—to prevent interruptions to academic activities, the steamy, noisy place was located a mile away from the center of Cambridge where the “music” of God’s nature is “sweet and deep” (William Whewell, Indications of the Creator: Extracts, Bearing Upon Theology, History and the Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences [J. W. Parker, 1845], 52).In The Trinity Circle: Anxiety, Intelligence, and Knowledge Creation in Nineteenth-Century ... Read More
  PubDate: 2024-06-28T00:00:00-05:00
Carlyle, Emerson, and the Transatlantic Uses of Authority by Tim Sommer
(review)
- Abstract: Tim Sommer’s Carlyle, Emerson, and the Transatlantic Uses of Authority is a remarkable book. In it, paratextual analysis takes center stage, and what might have been seen in previous decades as influence, inheritance, tradition, or just friendship is recast in terms of print cultures, marketplace tactics, and the writing and rewriting of transnational codes: what America meant to Britain and Britain to America. Sommer does not overlook textual content and literary criticism, but he manages to understand the explicit textual performances of authority in the writings of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson in broader contexts where both authors attempt to use the transatlantic to establish and solidify their right ... Read More
  PubDate: 2024-06-28T00:00:00-05:00
Imagining Socialism: Aesthetics, Anti-politics, and Literature in Britain,
1817–1918 by Mark A. Allison (review)
- Abstract: The influence socialism exerted on literature at the end of the nineteenth century has been long appreciated and in recent years the subject of renewed critical attention by Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, Deborah Mutch, and others. As these critics have shown, socialist influence extended far beyond William Morris, Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, and Olive Schreiner to encompass a host of less well-known writers publishing in ephemeral leftwing magazines, newspapers, and journals. On the other hand, few scholars indeed have explored whether and to what extent socialist currents acted as a cultural force in the early and middle decades of the nineteenth century, even as the past twenty years have seen a burst of ... Read More
  PubDate: 2024-06-28T00:00:00-05:00
Industrial Gothic: Workers, Exploitation and Urbanization in Transatlantic
Nineteenth-Century Literature by Bridget M. Marshall (review)
- Abstract: How much can the highly fictionalized Gothic mode teach us about the real horrors of capitalist oppression' In her impressively argued and meticulously researched Industrial Gothic: Workers, Exploitation and Urbanization in Transatlantic Nineteenth-Century Literature, Bridget Marshall examines the political affordances and constraints of literary terror. She coins the term “industrial Gothic” to capture a subgenre that, both in Britain and the United States, “provided an existing framework through which writers could explore and readers could comprehend the disruptions that industrialization was causing that weren’t always visible to all” (8). A mode based on monstrous excess, the Gothic transformed factories into ... Read More
  PubDate: 2024-06-28T00:00:00-05:00
Horror in the Age of Steam: Tales of Terror in the Victorian Age of
Transitions by Carroll Clayton Savant (review)
- Abstract: Horror in the Age of Steam: Tales of Terror in the Victorian Age of Transitions by Carroll Clayton Savant begins, unusually and excitingly, by asserting its roots in pedagogy. Savant notes that the book is a product of teaching an introductory humanities course at a community college. That said, he offers limited information about the course syllabus, the experience of teaching horror in the classroom, student response, or the pedagogical significance of the book. Instead, positing that scholarly works on horror are “often myopic in scope and reductive in breadth,” Savant seeks to bridge the gap between popular and academic conceptualizations of horror through an “aesthetic and historical survey of Gothicism” (3 ... Read More
  PubDate: 2024-06-28T00:00:00-05:00
Trees in Nineteenth-Century English Fiction: The Silvicultural Novel by
Anna Burton (review)
- Abstract: Plants have recently emerged as a topic of interest in Victorian studies, with work by Sukanya Banerjee, Alicia Carroll, Elizabeth Chang, Ann Garascia, Devin Griffiths, Kate Flint, Lynn Voskuil, and Lindsay Wells all drawing our attention to how Victorians’ lives were entangled with the lives of plants. Much of this work has focused on herbaceous, aquatic, and exotic flora, or on plants in horticulture, agriculture, and science. Anna Burton’s Trees in Nineteenth-Century English Fiction: The Silvicultural Novel thus offers a welcome arboreally focused contribution to this emergent field in Victorian environmental humanities.Burton compellingly outlines a “silvicultural tradition,” or “a web of writings about trees ... Read More
  PubDate: 2024-06-28T00:00:00-05:00
British Art and the Environment: Changes, Challenges, and Responses Since
the Industrial Revolution ed. by Charlotte Gould and Sophie Mesplède
(review)
- Abstract: British Art and the Environment: Changes, Challenges, and Responses Since the Industrial Revolution brings together a range of essays that will be of interest to both Victorian scholars and those with an interest in Victorian afterlives, industrial aftermaths, and the heritage industry. The volume is generously illustrated, with an impressive and helpful quantity of color plates. It also contains two in-depth interviews, conducted by the editors, firstly with the artist and curator Tim Martin, and later with Adrian George, Director of Exhibitions and Museum Services at ArtScience Museum, Singapore. Both interviews are wide-ranging and engage with an array of practical concerns about preserving and representing ... Read More
  PubDate: 2024-06-28T00:00:00-05:00
Human Evolution and Fantastic Victorian Fiction by Anna Neill (review)
- Abstract: Anna Neill’s Human Evolution and Victorian Fantastic Fiction explores how selected nonrealist Victorian narratives challenge the dominant assumptions about human nature and its limits that circulated in the context of theories of human evolution. At the center of the argument is what Neill calls the deep time of evolutionary theory, the long periods required for gradual changes due to natural selection to accumulate into species difference. For many Victorian thinkers, Neill explains, the assumption that human evolution involved such a process implied that short-term political and cultural change could not overcome or counteract the biological imperatives determined by the workings of deep time. The gradualist ... Read More
  PubDate: 2024-06-28T00:00:00-05:00
Making Deep History: Zeal, Perseverance, and the Time Revolution of 1859
by Clive Gamble (review)
- Abstract: While the idea of a mid-nineteenth-century Darwinian Revolution has loomed large in the historical imagination (albeit alongside a more specialist literature which has critiqued this idea), there has also been a great deal of interest in a distinct Victorian time revolution occurring at about the same time. This is the idea that in the years following 1859, a series of finds in France and the United Kingdom were promoted to push the idea that human existence was not limited to the six thousand years of biblical chronology, but instead stretched into the by then well-known geological eras. The importance of this idea, and its connection to but also essential independence from the related debates over Darwinian ... Read More
  PubDate: 2024-06-28T00:00:00-05:00
The Cancer Problem: Malignancy in Nineteenth-Century Britain by Agnes
Arnold-Forster (review)
- Abstract: Cancer is so central to the disease landscape of the twenty-first century that it may come as a surprise to learn that the first cancer-specific institution in Britain opened in 1792, at the Middlesex Hospital in London. Certainly, there has been no dearth of historical interest in cancer. Robin Wolfe Scheffler’s A Contagion Cause: The American Hunt for Cancer Viruses and the Rise of Molecular Medicine (2019) and Nathan Crowe’s Forgotten Clones: The Birth of Cloning and the Biological Revolution (2021) explore elements of the twentieth-century drive to understand the viral cause of cancer and its varied biomedical cures. These recent works, both of which are significant in their own right, go to show, however, that ... Read More
  PubDate: 2024-06-28T00:00:00-05:00
Literature and Medicine: The Nineteenth Century ed. by Clark Lawlor and
Andrew Mangham (review)
- Abstract: If literature and medicine is a subfield of nineteenth-century studies, so too is it a subfield of the medical humanities, drawing from and contributing to that broader collective’s scholarly development of the history of medicine, disability studies, bioethics, gender studies, and more. Pioneering work within Victorian studies goes back several decades now to influential scholarship like Lawrence Rothfield’s Vital Signs: Medical Realism in Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1992), Athena Vrettos’s Somatic Fictions: Imagining Illness in Victorian Culture (1995), Janis Caldwell’s Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain: From Mary Shelley to George Eliot (2004), and Martha Stoddard Holmes’s Fictions of ... Read More
  PubDate: 2024-06-28T00:00:00-05:00
Medical Identities and Print Culture, 1830s–1910s by Alison Moulds, and:
Writing Maternity: Medicine, Anxiety, Rhetoric, and Genre by Dara Rossman
Regaignon, and: Medicine is War: The Martial Metaphor in Victorian
Literature and Culture by Lorenzo Servitje (review)
- Abstract: Alison Moulds’s Medical Identities and Print Culture, 1830s–1910s is an excellent piece of scholarship that argues convincingly for the material effects of creative literature in tandem with other forms of writing on medical identities and practices. Like the other authors in this review, Moulds has a firm grasp of historical and medical sources and contexts. She also exhibits a good understanding of the literary works she mines for her examples of narratives that create overlapping medical identities such as the male or female doctor, the urban or rural subject, or the colonial or metropolitan protagonist.The introduction demonstrates the Victorian medical profession’s awareness of, and enthusiasm for, the ... Read More
  PubDate: 2024-06-28T00:00:00-05:00
Bodies and Lives in Victorian England: Science, Sexuality, and the
Affliction of Being Female by Pamela K. Stone and Lise Shapiro Sanders
(review)
- Abstract: A slim volume most likely to be used by North American undergraduates, Bodies and Lives in Victorian England: Science, Sexuality, and the Affliction of Being Female has prompted historiographical questions in this reader’s mind. Its central focus is women’s experience in Victorian England, using a multidisciplinary approach, mentioning, for example, archaeological and anthropological perspectives alongside demography and published sources, such as advice books and novels. Based on the authors’ teaching at Hampshire College in Massachusetts, its pedagogic origins are evident in summarizing bullet points at the end of chapters, followed by “questions to consider” (44). Although the dominant voice is a didactic one ... Read More
  PubDate: 2024-06-28T00:00:00-05:00
Fathers and Sons in the English Middle Class, c. 1870–1920 by Laura
Ugolini (review)
- Abstract: In April 1870, notes Laura Ugolini in a chapter of this study headed “Conflict and Reconciliation,” a surgeon, Joseph Wilson, was shot twice in the head by his son Charles. The son’s motive was unclear, but it was noted that just before the shooting Charles had been reading Charles Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit (1844), in which Jonas Chuzzlewit murders his father, Anthony. The real-life father, unlike Dickens’s fictional character, miraculously survived his son’s murderous attempt, and Ugolini argues that such incidents were rare. While her discussion of father-son relationships from the late nineteenth to early twentieth century reveals a broad spectrum of variations on a theme of manly awkwardness and irritation ... Read More
  PubDate: 2024-06-28T00:00:00-05:00
The Culture of Male Beauty in Britain: From the First Photographs to David
Beckham by Paul R. Deslandes (review)
- Abstract: If you download the dating app Grindr, aimed at men seeking men, you will find a neat summary of contemporary male aesthetic ideals. Rows of thumbnail-sized images of men stare back, some smiling, most not, a few attempting the serious-erotic smolder perfected by Rupert Brooke in the famous photograph taken of him by Sherill Schell in 1913. While some opt for mugshots, many profiles display only headless naked torsos; everything you could want, stripped of the encumbrance of personality. To facilitate matches, Grindr encourages users to make further aesthetic judgements by claiming a “tribe” ostensibly associated with subcultures and body types, including bear, jock, otter, clean-cut, trans, and twink. As you ... Read More
  PubDate: 2024-06-28T00:00:00-05:00
Material Ambitions: Self-Help and Victorian Literature by Rebecca
Richardson (review)
- Abstract: Anthony Trollope is still inspiring writers today with his notoriously regimented work schedule. Allowing himself no mercy, every day he woke at 5:30 a.m. and cranked out 250 words every fifteen minutes, tabulating his output in carefully kept workbooks. In Rebecca Richardson’s Material Ambitions: Self-Help and Victorian Literature, we find that although Trollope’s work habits may be the best known, many Victorian writers kept similarly disciplined schedules. Harriet Martineau boiled her coffee at 7 or 7:30 a.m., worked from 8 a.m. until 2 p.m., and then had visitors, which seems reasonable until we are told she was going to bed at 1 a.m., averaging only five or five and a half hours of sleep. Dinah Craik wrote ... Read More
  PubDate: 2024-06-28T00:00:00-05:00
Making Pictorial Print: Media Literacy and Mass Culture in British
Magazines, 1885–1918 by Alison Hedley (review)
- Abstract: Print is a media technology—a fact that can be difficult to remember in all the excitement over digital media as the only new media that counts. In her book, Making Pictorial Print: Media Literacy and Mass Culture in British Magazines, 1885–1918, Alison Hedley considers the emergence of densely illustrated periodicals during the fin de siècle in terms of media history, arguing that these illustrated periodicals remained central to popular culture, even when new mechanical communication technologies were beginning to displace print as the main medium of entertainment. Specifically, Hedley contends that the design aesthetics of several photo-mechanical illustration methods used during the period affected how ... Read More
  PubDate: 2024-06-28T00:00:00-05:00
The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Three-Volume Novel by Troy J. Bassett
(review)
- Abstract: Because many canonical Victorian novels were published in three volumes, the prominence of this format and its economic relationship to the circulating libraries will already be somewhat familiar to most readers of Troy Bassett’s compelling study, The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Three-Volume Novel. But as Bassett repeatedly demonstrates, what we think we already know about multivolume fiction has largely been based on studies of selected books, publishers, and authors. In contrast, Bassett’s book is grounded in the comprehensive bibliographic data on Victorian fiction he has compiled in his ongoing research database, At the Circulating Library (ATCL), a project that currently encompasses data on 23,178 novels ... Read More
  PubDate: 2024-06-28T00:00:00-05:00
The Devil and the Victorians: Supernatural Evil in Nineteenth-Century
English Culture by Sarah Bartels (review)
- Abstract: At the risk of evoking the cliché concerning the Devil’s greatest trick, it is fair to question whether or not he is a topic worthy of academic study in the first place, particularly in relation to Victorian studies, rather than Medieval or Renaissance studies. Sarah Bartels acknowledges this in the conclusion of The Devil and the Victorians: Supernatural Evil in Nineteenth-Century English Culture, reminding the reader that the “primary purpose of this book has been to demonstrate that the Devil played a significant role in Victorian English culture” and that this study “serves as a response to the still relatively common perception among historians that the Devil was only of minor cultural and theological ... Read More
  PubDate: 2024-06-28T00:00:00-05:00
Dickens and the Bible: “What Providence Meant” by Jennifer
Gribble (review)
- Abstract: In Dickens and the Bible: “What Providence Meant,” Jennifer Gribble explores the intricate ways that Charles Dickens engages with the Bible, drawing attention not only to the many allusions that appear throughout his works but also to the “verbal echoes, typology, parable, and biblical themes” that she argues work together with a “prophetic narrative voice” to convey the essentially Christian framework of Dickens’s moral vision (4). Moving chronologically from The Pickwick Papers (1836–37) through Our Mutual Friend (1864–65), Gribble contends that “the Judeo-Christian grand narrative provides the master-plot” that anchors the complexities of his stories throughout his career even as Dickens develops a more nuanced ... Read More
  PubDate: 2024-06-28T00:00:00-05:00
The Routledge Companion to William Morris ed. by Florence S. Boos (review)
- Abstract: Edward Burne-Jones once described William Morris’s edition of The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer (1896) for the Kelmscott Press as a “pocket cathedral” (qtd. in Boos 501). Spanning over five hundred hand-printed pages and serving as one of the culminating projects of Morris’s literary and artistic career, the Kelmscott Chaucer is hardly pocketsized. The volume nonetheless possesses the consequence and scale of a cathedral in book form, an astounding monument to Morris’s aims and achievements. Edited by eminent scholar Florence S. Boos, The Routledge Companion to William Morris nearly equals the Kelmscott Chaucer in length and stands as a remarkable testimony to Morris’s legacy and enduring relevance well into the ... Read More
  PubDate: 2024-06-28T00:00:00-05:00
Arthur Machen: Critical Essays ed. by Antonio Sanna (review)
- Abstract: This eclectic collection of essays on the fiction of Arthur Machen positions itself broadly as an attempt to raise Machen’s profile. Machen, according to the volume editor Antonio Sanna, has been neglected in recent criticism: critical essays have been “relegated mainly to the field of Gothic studies or studies of the occult” or consigned to only one chapter of monographs that treat multiple authors (24). The eclecticism of the volume serves as an answer to this perceived narrowness in Machen studies and is both a strength and a weakness. Arthur Machen: Critical Essays exposes readers to a wide array of approaches to Machen’s fiction, nonfiction, and prose poems published during the late nineteenth century and the ... Read More
  PubDate: 2024-06-28T00:00:00-05:00
Elizabeth Gaskell’s Smaller Stories by Carolyn Lambert (review)
- Abstract: In Elizabeth Gaskell’s Smaller Stories, Carolyn Lambert addresses what she sees as a gap in scholarship on Elizabeth Gaskell, arguing that short fiction is an important aspect of the writer’s overall achievement and social critique. Lambert contextualizes the stories and novellas not only in the periodicals in which they first appeared, but also in Gaskell’s Unitarian faith, ultimately painting a picture of short fiction as a generically more flexible form that nevertheless promoted the same values of human sympathy and “toleration for difference” that can be seen in Gaskell’s novels (154). Though the topic is not nearly so untouched as Lambert describes it in the opening pages, her study does contain interesting ... Read More
  PubDate: 2024-06-28T00:00:00-05:00
Poetry in the Making: Creativity and Composition in Victorian Poetic
Drafts ed. by Daniel Tyler (review)
- Abstract: Poetry in the Making: Creativity and Composition in Victorian Poetic Drafts provides a useful collection of essays on the subject of poetic composition in the Victorian period. Daniel Tyler has brought together a number of key contributors, exploring the work of poets of both genders right across the period (starting with William Wordsworth and ending with W. B. Yeats) and offering readings of a range of poetic forms across various draft states. The rationale for the volume, as given in the introduction, is simple: to “assess the competing priorities that complicate and stimulate the making of poems” and to make the argument that “the manuscript drafts of Victorian poems require and reward careful verbal scrutiny” ... Read More
  PubDate: 2024-06-28T00:00:00-05:00
The Poems of Elizabeth Siddal in Context by Anne Woolley (review)
- Abstract: In spite of the fact that her face appears in many well-known pictures, Elizabeth Siddal remains enigmatic. Her earliest incarnation was as the cross-dressed Viola in Walter Deverell’s Twelfth Night (1850), but most people know her from John Millais’s drowning Ophelia (1852). Death stories abound around Siddal: how she contracted pneumonia modeling in a cooling bath; how anorexia and a laudanum addiction stole her strength; how her body was exhumed after Dante Gabriel Rossetti regretted his remorseful graveside gesture when he placed some manuscript poems in her coffin. In The Poems of Elizabeth Siddal in Context, Anne Woolley begins at the end with the story of Siddal’s sad demise in February 1862. But she moves ... Read More
  PubDate: 2024-06-28T00:00:00-05:00
Georgina Weldon: The Fearless Life of a Victorian Celebrity by Joanna
Martin (review)
- Abstract: Georgina Weldon was notorious in the mid-Victorian years. She was (among other things) a singer, a promoter of education, a campaigner, a spiritualist, and probably the first married woman to represent herself in a court of law. She was also, as the saying goes, a piece of work.Weldon will be familiar to Victorianists from the scholarship of Judith Walkowitz and Susie Steinbach. The book under review is not the first biography of her. It is, however, likely to be the standard work on a figure who was well known at the time to regular readers of the press that covered her exploits. Joanna Martin enjoys a family connection with Weldon and has been given access to her papers that have never been used in such depth ... Read More
  PubDate: 2024-06-28T00:00:00-05:00
Women’s Suffrage in Word, Image, Music, Stage and Screen: The Making of
a Movement ed. by Christopher Wiley and Lucy Ella Rose (review)
- Abstract: Writing about the arts in the turn-of-the-century suffrage movement is always a complex undertaking. From art student Mary Richardson’s infamous 1914 slashing of the Rokeby Venus (circa 1647–51) to militant composer Ethel Smyth’s puzzling claim that art and politics could not be “drive[n] . . . in double harness,” suffrage activists (especially those who were artists) invited public scrutiny as both creators and iconoclasts (Ethel Smyth, Female Pipings in Eden [Peter Davies Limited, 1933], 192). Suffrage scholars must untangle competing and unstable definitions of art, politics, and gender—a challenge that Women’s Suffrage in Word, Image, Music, Stage and Screen: The Making of a Movement faces boldly by bringing ... Read More
  PubDate: 2024-06-28T00:00:00-05:00
Revolutionary Domesticity in the Italian Risorgimento: Transnational
Victorian Feminism, 1850–1890 by Diana Moore (review)
- Abstract: Just over a hundred years have passed since Lytton Strachey published Eminent Victorians (1918), the collection of biographical sketches of Victorian luminaries that challenged the traditional approach of setting subjects high on pedestals. Biography has changed in many ways since then—both in whom scholars consider worthy of study and how they present their research. In her innovative new book Revolutionary Domesticity in the Italian Risorgimento: Transnational Victorian Feminism, 1850–1890, Diana Moore uses a select group of subjects to demonstrate how Victorian women navigated around social and cultural structures rooted in domesticity to enact revolutionary political change.Revolutionary Domesticity examines ... Read More
  PubDate: 2024-06-28T00:00:00-05:00
Rediscovering Lost Landscapes: Topographical Art in North-West Italy,
1800–1920 by Pietro Piana, Charles Watkins, and Rossano Balzaretti, and:
Revisiting Italy: British Women Travel Writers and the Risorgimento
(1844–61) by Rebecca Butler (review)
- Abstract: The British fascination with the Italian peninsula predates the existence of the modern nation-states of both the United Kingdom and Italy, as George Bruner Parks’s 1954 volume The English Traveler to Italy makes clear. This intercultural preoccupation arguably peaked in the nineteenth century, after the final defeat of Napoleon allowed for leisure travel across the Continent to resume, as John Pemble notes in The Mediterranean Passion: Victorians and Edwardians in the South (1987). Throughout the century, technological and infrastructural improvements—railroads, canals, and steam-powered shipping—made travel swifter and (occasionally) safer. A vast number of British artists—from the young Romantic poets to Robert ... Read More
  PubDate: 2024-06-28T00:00:00-05:00
Victorian Women’s Travel Writing on Meiji Japan: Hospitable Friendship
by Tomoe Kumojima (review)
- Abstract: To open her study of friendship in women’s travel writing, Victorian Women’s Travel Writing on Meiji Japan: Hospitable Friendship, Tomoe Kumojima offers an introductory chapter with broad sketches of three subjects: Japan and Britain’s post-1868 relationship; scholarship on British women’s travel writing about Japan; and the portrayal of Japan in British imaginative literature at the fin de siècle. The ambiguity of Japan’s position visà-vis British power, Kumojima argues, makes literature by Westerners about the country both compelling and often overlooked. Without being able to theorize about power and discrimination, Kumojima suggests, Victorianists have expressed little interest in analyzing travel writing ... Read More
  PubDate: 2024-06-28T00:00:00-05:00
Pacific Possessions: The Pursuit of Authenticity in Nineteenth-Century
Oceanian Travel Accounts by Chris J. Thomas (review)
- Abstract: Chris Thomas’s Pacific Possessions: The Pursuit of Authenticity in Nineteenth-Century Oceanian Travel Accounts offers a fresh take on, and new corpus for, ongoing discussions about nineteenth-century travelogues about Oceania. In four chapters, the scholar moves beyond the usual suspects—Herman Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson, Jack London—and features hitherto neglected travelers and writers: he analyzes four in detail but mentions close to fifty others for context and comparison. Thomas’s original theoretical contribution is that these travelers, together, create in their narratives the trope of “escaping the colonial Pacific,” (and the beaten track), “in favor of something purer and more authentic” (7). To trace ... Read More
  PubDate: 2024-06-28T00:00:00-05:00
Beyond Gold and Diamonds: Genre, the Authorial Informant, and the British
South African Novel by Melissa Free (review)
- Abstract: Reflecting on the paradoxes of nineteenth-century Brazilian literature, Roberto Schwarz comments on the stunning achievement of the novelist Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis thus: “At the age of forty, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis invented a narrative device that transformed him from a provincial, rather conventional writer into a world-class novelist” (Schwarz, Two Girls and Other Essays [Verso, 2012], 33). Machado’s innovation provided “an aesthetic solution to objective problems lodged within his own earlier fiction.” It was, additionally, crucial for the development of “Brazilian culture at large—perhaps even of ex-colonial societies in general” (Schwarz 33). This device turns out to be a particular narrative ... Read More
  PubDate: 2024-06-28T00:00:00-05:00
Estranging the Novel: Poland, Ireland and Theories of World Literature by
Katarzyna Bartoszyńska (review)
- Abstract: In Estranging the Novel: Poland, Ireland and Theories of World Literature, Katarzyna Bartoszyńska has a sense that the literatures of Poland and Ireland, perceived as peripheral from the perspective of the (particularly English-speaking) center, can present important values in relation to the literary past and present. In bi-national pairs, she juxtaposes works perceived as bizarre. These include Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and Ignacy Krasicki’s Mikołaja Doświadczyńskiego przypadki (The Adventures of Mr. Nicholas Wisdom) (1776), both written within the framework of the Enlightenment but satirizing its rational utopia; Jan Potocki’s Rękopis znaleziony w Saragossie (The Manuscript Found in Saragossa) ... Read More
  PubDate: 2024-06-28T00:00:00-05:00
Irish London: A Cultural History, 1850–1916 by Richard Kirkland
(review)
- Abstract: Richard Kirkland’s brilliant new study, Irish London: A Cultural History, 1850–1916, joins a rich and growing literature on the Irish in London, a topic that has been the focus of sustained cultural criticism during the last decade. Several excellent academic studies have been published during this time, including Tony Murray’s London Irish Fictions: Narrative, Diaspora and Identity (2012); Seán Sorohan’s Irish London During the Troubles (2012); and the two volumes of Tom Herron’s edited collection Irish Writing London (2013). There have also been significant studies of individuals from the London-Irish community, including Noreen Doody’s The Influence of Oscar Wilde on W. B. Yeats: “An Echo of Someone Else’s ... Read More
  PubDate: 2024-06-28T00:00:00-05:00
Literature in a Time of Migration: British Fiction and the Movement of
People, 1815–1876 by Josephine McDonagh (review)
- Abstract: Josephine McDonagh has significantly advanced recent attempts to situate Victorian fiction in a global perspective by addressing a neglected but timely topic: the nineteenth century’s unprecedented, extraordinary demographic movements and the impact they had on fiction. Literature in a Time of Migration: British Fiction and the Movement of People, 1815–1876 is a ground-breaking, provocative exploration of this relationship—if not the definitive account. It derives its authority from McDonagh’s remarkable cultural literacy. She locates canonical and popular novels in relation to legal and legislative reforms, pro-emigration pamphlet literature, railway guides, newsletters, advertisements accompanying serial ... Read More
  PubDate: 2024-06-28T00:00:00-05:00
Comments & Queries
- Abstract: Comments & Queries are welcome via email: victstu@indiana.edu.Please also follow us on Facebook at Victorian Studies, on X (formerly Twitter) @victstudies, and on Instagram at victorian_studies.On the Cover is “Holmes finds where the letter had been hidden” by Sidney Paget in Arthur Conan Doyle’s “Adventure of the Second Stain,” 1904. Originally published in The Strand Magazine, Dec. 1904. Public domain. ... Read More
  PubDate: 2024-06-28T00:00:00-05:00
Reviewers
- Abstract: Allison Scardino Belzer (abelzer@georgiasouthern.edu) is Professor of History on the Armstrong Campus of Georgia Southern University. She is the author of Women and the Great War: Femininity under Fire in Italy (2010) and is working on a biography of three generations of the Ashursts, a British family of nineteenth-century radical activists who campaigned for change at home and abroad.Karen Bourrier (karen.bourrier@ucalgary.ca) is Associate Professor at the University of Calgary. She is the author of The Measure of Manliness: Disability and Masculinity in the Mid-Victorian Novel (2015) and Victorian Bestseller: The Life of Dinah Craik (2019). With Susan Brown and Anthony Mandal, she is writing a history of ... Read More
  PubDate: 2024-06-28T00:00:00-05:00

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