Journal of Victorian Culture Online
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On a cold February day in 1844, a small group of travellers disembarked their ship at the port of Liverpool in England. There was no welcoming party, no bands nor banners, and the visitors slipped silently away to their hotel. Amongst them were the American showman P. T. Barnum and his protégé Charles S. Stratton, known as General Tom Thumb. Both were little-known in England at that time, but this would mark the beginning of a three-year-long tour of the
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‘North and South’ by Elizabeth Gaskell uses the Industrial Revolution as a catalyst to delve into questions about female agency and the themes of female resistance. Indeed, class conflict and gender dynamics are intertwined throughout the novel in order to reveal how women negotiate the oppressive structures of their society. Gaskell reveals, through the experiences of the key female characters – Margaret Hale, Bessy Higgins, and Mrs. Thornton – that, quite often, emancipation comes through conflict, where women can assert
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Mary Barton occupies a special place in the history of English author Elizabeth Gaskell’s Chinese reception. It was the only Gaskell work to be translated into Chinese in Maoist China, and one of the most valued pieces of British literature at that time because of its direct engagement with sociopolitical themes of class conflict and labor struggles. The Chinese translation of Mary Barton was printed three times by different publishing houses during the Mao years and was included in the
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When a woman suspects her husband of having an affair with a former flame, who is now his partner in a murder investigation, she has an affair of her own – with the murderer. The above description could easily pass as a pitch for a made-for-TV thriller, but it is the plot of Ellen Wood’s most famous novel, East Lynne (1861). I have recently been reading some of Wood’s lesser-known novels, such as St. Martin’s Eve (1866), Anne Hereford (1868),
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It is a starting point rather than a truism that the Victorians’ vision of domesticity had ‘the domestic hearth’ front and centre. This post will discuss novels (or novellas) written in the 1840s to the 1880s, by Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Frances Hodgson Burnett. These authors explore the theme of the domestic hearth through characters whose experiences of states like warmth, comfort, mutuality, cold, want, and social isolation may be fixed, or undergo transformations. Meanwhile, Isabella Beeton’s Book of
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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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Ella Hepworth Dixon’s novel, The Story of a Modern Woman (1894), unlike many of its mid-century predecessors and fin-de-siècle contemporaries, does not burden its heroine, an aspiring professional woman, with marriage and biological motherhood.[1] Mary Erle, the main protagonist of Dixon’s novel, “did not care for babies” and “would rather have had a nice, new, fluffy kitten.”[2] Having thus described Mary’s lack of interest in children in no uncertain terms, Dixon’s narrative is also careful to point out her natural,
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Figure 1 (header image): An advertisement for the wide range of goods to be purchased at the Salvation Army Trade Department, including an illustration of shoppers in the ‘Salvation Emporium’ showroom on Clerkenwell Road. From Salvation Army newspaper War Cry, 18 November 1893. Salvation Army International Heritage Centre. The notion of a ‘consumer identity’ is simultaneously ubiquitous and elusive. We are all consumers; and many of us do our best, in one way or another, to ensure that our consumer
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‘Dear Boss, I keep on hearing the police have caught me but they wont fix me just yet. I have laughed when they look so clever and talk about being on the right track. That joke about Leather Apron gave me real fits. I am down on whores and I shant quit ripping them till I do get buckled.’ [1] [2] Scribbled in red ink, these sentences marked the first of several letters attributed to the serial killer known as
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1st June 2022 marked the bicentenary of the birth of pioneering photographer Clementina Hawarden (1822-1865), one of the most significant women to contribute to early photography. In this blog I highlight a specific genre within the extensive Hawarden photographic collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, concentrating on use of the silhouette as a stylistic motif in her photographic portraiture. Viscountess Clementina Hawarden, née Fleeming, left an extensive oeuvre of collodion photographic images marking her brief embrace of the
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