The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Three-Volume Novel Buchanan, David
Bibliographical Society of Canada. Papers of the Bibliographical Society of Canada,
10/2022, Volume:
59, Issue:
1
Journal Article, Book Review
Peer reviewed
Open access
Troy J. Bassett, The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Three-Volume Novel, New Directions in Book History (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), xvii, 256 pp., ISBN 978-3-030-31925-0 ...(hardcover), ISBN 978-3-030-31926-7 (e-book)
Based on an in-depth historical study of how Thomas Cook's travel agency moved from stigmatization to legitimacy among the elite of Victorian Britain, we develop a model of organizational ...destigmatization. We find that audiences stigmatize an organization because they fear that it threatens a particular moral order, which leads them to mount sustained attacks designed to weaken or eradicate the organization. Our model suggests that an organization that experiences this form of profound disapproval can nonetheless purge its stigma and become legitimate through a two-step process: first the organization engages in stigma reduction work designed to minimize overt hostility among audiences by showing that it does not pose a risk to them. Second it engages in stigma elimination work designed to gain support from stigmatizers by showing that it plays a positive role in society. Our study therefore reorients organizational stigma research from a focus on how organizations can cope with the effects of stigma, and considers instead how they can eradicate the stigma altogether. We also shed light on much neglected audience-level dynamics by examining the process through which audiences construct stigma and why these constructions may change.
In Angela Carter’s neo-Victorian novel Nights at the Circus we get to know London at the end of the 19th century. The protagonist of the story is Fevvers, a blonde winged aerialiste, whose life and ...identity are inseparable from London. In the beginning of the novel she tells the story of her life to a reporter, Walser, and starts the narrative by stating that she is a Londoner, the “Cockney Venus”. Fevvers’ life is connected to the capital city in many ways, and although the characters travel throughout most of the story, London plays an important role in the whole novel. Fevvers in her life embodies many important urban and non-urban female characters in the Victorian era showing how they function in the city: the prostitute, the angel in the house, the madwoman in the attic, the New Woman, the shopgirl, the flâneuse, and the object of the male gaze. In my paper I show how Fevvers embodies and questions the traditional female roles, how her identity changes throughout the novel and how London plays a key role in the formation of Fevvers’ identity as the only solid identifying point for her.
ROSSETTI THE UNMODERN Eha, Brian Patrick
First things (New York, N.Y.),
01/2024
Journal Article
On our side of the pond, Rossetti's name is less familiar, and he is known chiefly for his visual art, not his poetry. Even housebound, "his life fast flickering to extinction" (in his brother ...William's words), the leader of the Pre-Raphaelites roused himself to paint, make sketches of his father, finish a ballad (in which a hard-hearted Dutchman loses a smoking contest with the devil and is carried off to hell), and regale his friend's sister with tales from the Arabian Nights. Many of the individual sonnets in The House of Life had been written much earlier, but a handful-including the collection's introductory sonnet -were composed in Rossetti's last years. Like labour-laden moonclouds faint to flee From winds that sweep the winter-bitten wold,- Like multiform circumfluence manifold Of night's flood-tide,-like terrors that agree Of hoarse-tongued fire and inarticulate sea,- Even such, within some glass dimmed by our breath, Our hearts discern wild images of Death, Shadows and shoals that edge eternity.
Nineteenth-century British drama is frequently marginalized in historical overviews of theatre and drama, often overshadowed by the looming legacy of Shakespeare and less critically-revered than ...other periods and forms of English literature in general. However, theatrical pursuits throughout the Victorian era are marked with an enviable amount of creativity and innovation in both form (from Romantic closet dramas to melodramas to social dramas to comedies) and shape (as production techniques, management, and business models evolved and thrived). Countless scholars have offered critical examinations of individual playwrights, theatre companies, dramatic forms, actors, directors, and so on. Examining these shifts through the lens of a small collection of Victorian comedic plays, Klaus Stierstorfer's expertly-edited entry in the venerable Oxford World'ass Classics series, London Assurance and Other Victorian Comedies, presents an interesting and ideal exploration.
Christian MacLagan (1811-1901), from Stirling, occupies the intersection of amateur antiquarian-ism and modern archaeology. Although not Scotland’s earliest female archaeologist, she pioneered the ...compilation and publication of prehistoric sites, using her own plans and fieldwork. This paper examines her previously undocumented social background and the roots of her maternal family, the Colvilles, and their fortune in the colonial indigo trade in Bengal. Colville links with Annfield estate, Stirling and Laws, Monifieth, are noted. A large Calcutta-derived legacy in 1859 enabled MacLagan to circumvent many conventional restrictions on women.
Octagonal shell mosaics-colloquially known as sailors' valentines-were produced in a cottage industry by black and brown Barbadian women for the burgeoning Caribbean tourism industry in the Victorian ...era. As a commercial colonial craft, sailors' valentines have been occluded in art historical discourse. Nevertheless, these vibrant collages foreground the multivalent significance of creolised material culture circulating within modernising colonial economies. Through their artful assemblage of shells, they not only embody the legacy of eighteenth-century natural philosophy and the picturesque movement, but also reflect diasporic West African spiritual and aesthetic practices engaged in creating an Afro-Barbadian cultural autonomy within a plantation society. This article traces the material evolution of sailors' valentines from their origins in British conchology and craft to their implication in the rise of international seaside leisure. Honing in on the adaptation of shell mosaics in the Victorian Caribbean as object emissaries of a post-emancipation island tourism economy, it considers how they were engaged in rebranding the British West Indies as a consumable natural wonderland. The article concludes with an assessment of contemporary sailors' valentines that invoke the creolisation of Barbadian shell mosaics to negotiate global cultural interchange, while critiquing the environmental legacy of the Victorian consumption of nature.
This thesis seeks to understand the so-called Irish quarters that prompted speculation, condemnation and intervention in mid-Victorian cities. I analyse material and discursive constructions of the ...Irish quarter using spatial thinking and cross-disciplinary methodologies including GIS mapping and discourse analysis. Scholars of the Irish in Britain have typically studied the Irish as discrete and separate communities. Urban historians have studied the material and cultural construction of the Victorian slum. I draw these historiographies together by analysing the how the Irish quarter came to be: how the Irish were understood at local level, within contemporary understandings of race; how such neighbourhoods gained their notorious reputations; and how the self-perception of the Irish contributed to these spaces. To investigate this, I focus on the Stafford Street neighbourhood of Wolverhampton, synonymous with its Irish community in the mid-Victorian era. To outsiders, Stafford Street's reputation was formed through territorial stigmatisation, religious discrimination and policing choices, viewed through lenses such as sanitary reform, criminal behaviour and anti-Catholicism, shaped by the power structures which formed Wulfrunian and British identities in the mid-nineteenth century. For residents however, everyday relationships and networks, supplemented by intertwining religious and political understandings of Irishness, formed a uniquely diasporic Irish space. I argue that rather than forming an Irish enclave or simply an imagined community, the Irish quarter was a very real diaspora space in which Irishness, Englishness, class, race and place were constantly revised and renegotiated. I argue too that space is a useful category of historical analysis for understanding marginalised communities, a means to access histories of those often deemed an inaccessible mass.
Hugh Welch Diamond (1808–1886) was a British physician-psychiatrist-antiquarian, an early adopter of the technology of photography, and the first to take photographs of female patients in the Surrey ...County Asylum, where he was superintendent from 1848 to 1858. Along with many others at the dawn of photography, Diamond believed in the apparent objectivity and realism of the faithful photographic record, ‘free altogether from the painful caricaturing which so disfigures almost all the published portraits of the Insane as to render them nearly valueless for purposes of art or of science.’1 However, Diamond's photographic images were not objective depictions of mental illness but rather reflections of the predominant cultural understanding and iconography of the Victorian era. Whatever Diamond's intention as a leader of the asylum reform movement that advocated for non-restraint and moral treatment, his photographs humanise these anonymous women.
Since completing her tenure with thejournal, Sarah hasjoined IU's Center for Learning Analytics and Student Success. Jaelyn Glennemeier is excited to continue her work at Victorian Studies as Senior ...Book Review Editor. Evan Leake is delighted to join Victorian Studies this fall as the Assistant Book Review Editor. When not researching or combing catalogs for the latest and greatest books on the Victorian era, Evan enjoys spending too much time cooking elaborate meals and continuing the Sisyphean task of perfecting his New York-style pizza recipe.
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