Late Victorian Era Research Articles

Historical Cookbooks in the Study of American Religion

This study examines late Victorian era Protestant church community cookbooks as moral and cultural guides written by women for women (gendered texts), and examines the domestic roles and Christian practices of women in the years before and after the turn of the twentieth century. For this project I used a sample of eleven Protestant community cookbooks published from 1881 to 1913 to serve as case studies, illuminating the late Victorian period through the words and recipes of the women who wrote them. As domestic guides, the cookbooks employ paratexts, presenting recipes for food and life in broader terms. Artwork and advertisements from the texts offer additional information about the connections between gender, domesticity and religion during the era.

Nights out: life in cosmopolitan London

London's Soho district underwent a spectacular transformation between the late Victorian era and the end of the Second World War: its old buildings and dark streets infamous for sex, crime, political disloyalty, and ethnic diversity became a center of culinary and cultural tourism servicing patrons of nearby shops and theaters. Indulgences for the privileged and the upwardly mobile edged a dangerous, transgressive space imagined to be outside the nation. Treating Soho as exceptional, but also representative of London's urban transformation, Judith Walkowitz shows how the area's foreignness and porousness were key to the explosion of culture and development of modernity in the first half of the twentieth century. She draws on a vast and unusual range of sources to stitch together a rich patchwork quilt of vivid stories and unforgettable characters, revealing how Soho became a showcase for a new cosmopolitan identity.

THE ENGLISH PRONUNCIATION OF LATIN: ITS RISE AND FALL

Before the modern Restored pronunciation of Latin, the English language had an Anglicised system for pronouncing Latin, whose legacy is still quite clear in the modern language. This paper examines the English system of pronouncing Latin, and the collapse of that system in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This includes a short review of the history of the pronunciation of Latin in Britain from the Middle Ages until the nineteenth century; a review of the rules and historical development of the English system, in the form it reached by the mid-nineteenth century; the reform of that system in the late Victorian era; and its erosion from the late nineteenth century and replacement with the Reformed pronunciation of Latin.

Progress, Interrupted

Theodore Koditschek’s Liberalism, Imperialism and the Historical Imagination is an ambitious contribution to the debate over the ways in which liberal concepts of progress influenced the intellectual and political life of modern Britain and empire. Its achievements suggest we are, indeed, getting somewhere. This impressively researched and, on the whole, elegantly realized study seeks to explore the mutually transformative relationship between historical writing and imperial agendas in the nineteenth century. To this end, it delves into the lives and work of three generations of literary and historical masterminds in England, Scotland, Ireland and India. The result is a sweeping examination of liberal progress narratives as they tangled with imperial politics from the Battle of Seringapatam and the Union of 1801 through the late-Victorian era. Koditschek approaches his subject from two premises. First, a ‘second’ British Empire arose in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Second, such an empire – a spectacle of political inequality, slavery, expansion and coercion – must have presented gross challenges to liberal thinkers. Why, then, did that ‘second’ empire appear without inciting substantial protest or abhorrence on the part of liberal thinkers? How were liberal thinkers complicit in the life processes of the empire; and how did they live with themselves? The answer is that problems of imperial inequality ‘could be managed, and sometimes provisionally resolved, by discourses about history’ and particularly by ‘the progress narrative … deployed over the course of the nineteenth century to explain and justify Britain’s imperial activity within a liberal framework’ (pp. 2–4). The ‘historical imagination’ in question, then, largely sprang from a series of intellectual urges: to manage contradiction, to justify inequity, and to resolve, if only provisionally, incendiary political and moral dilemmas.

ヴィクトリア朝後期の女性雑誌の役割:―『ガールズ・オウン・ペーパー』のファッション記事をとおして―

ヴィクトリア朝後期の女性雑誌の役割:―『ガールズ・オウン・ペーパー』のファッション記事をとおして―

Chemistry in Victorian Detective Fiction: “A Race with the Sun”

The late-Victorian era provided aficionados of detective fiction with an abundance of short stories belonging to this literary genre. Many of these works contained some aspect of chemistry, either in the execution of a crime or in the identification of the perpetrator. In the example discussed in this article, the gas-phase reaction of hydrogen and chlorine plays an important role as the plot unfolds. Other chemistry related topics, including the use of a gas-filled balloon, the instability of nitrogen chloride, and the effects of the drug narceine, also enter into the story.

Stewards of the Nation’s Art: Contested Cultural Authority 1890–1939 by Andrea Geddes Poole (review)

Reviewed by: Stewards of the Nation’s Art: Contested Cultural Authority 1890–1939 by Andrea Geddes Poole Anne Clendinning (bio) Stewards of the Nation’s Art: Contested Cultural Authority 1890–1939 by Andrea Geddes Poole; pp. 304. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2009. $65.00 cloth. With this monograph, historian Andrea Geddes Poole addresses the ongoing debate regarding the relative decline of Britain’s landed aristocracy from the late Victorian era to the interwar period. As Geddes Poole explains in her introduction, historians agree that Britain’s landed classes experienced a period of transition from the late nineteenth century onward due to a combination of social, political, and economic pressures, including the reduction of agricultural revenues and an increase in land taxes. According to some historians, including David Cannadine and Peter Mandler, the financial strain experienced by the landed aristocracy meant that although this group retained a high degree of social status, they no longer wielded real political or economic clout and were thus reduced to an ornamental class of figureheads in prestige appointments. In contrast to this view, an opposing school of thought, represented by the work of Ross McKibbon and Andrew Adonis, finds the British aristocracy to have been highly resilient in response to financial and political pressures, and able to successfully retain its longstanding hegemony by absorbing recently titled aristocrats into its ranks and by developing ties with powerful financial and business interests (Geddes Poole 8–10). The issue is far from settled and continues to impact studies of class, empire, gender, material culture, and political reform. Geddes Poole makes an important contribution to this ongoing debate by focusing on the issue of cultural authority in relation to stewardship. To do this, she looks at the administration of four of Britain’s public art galleries: the National Gallery, the National Gallery of British Art (later known as the Tate Gallery), the Wallace Collection, and the National Portrait Gallery. Noting the predominance of aristocrats who served as governors for these institutions, Geddes Poole poses a central question: was the prevalence of aristocratic board members on the nation’s leading art galleries an indication of the elite’s continued power and influence, even as Britain became an increasingly meritocratic society that valued professional expertise? The opening chapters establish the context for this question. Geddes Poole addresses a number of related subjects, including the impact of Victorian and Edwardian philanthropy on the development of national art collections, the role of government in terms of gallery appointments and acquisitions, and the actions and perspectives of the men who ran these four principal galleries. She divides them into three groups: the men who served on boards of governors, including members of the old landed aristocracy and the newly titled men of wealth from industry and finance; the administrative directors, who were usually professional artists or academics employed to run the galleries’ daily operations and manage the collections; and the Oxbridge senior civil servants [End Page 215] in the Treasury who oversaw the funding of public galleries and decided on gallery and board appointments. To understand how these groups interacted and perceived one another, Geddes Poole draws on an extensive range of primary and secondary sources, including gallery archives, published and unpublished government documents, and private papers. This is far more than an institutional history of government and gallery operations, however, since much of the book addresses the dynamics of power and the conflicts between boards and directors as they jockeyed for control of everything, from daily gallery operations to art acquisitions and sales, the most acrimonious examples being the feuds between the governors and administrative directors at both the National Gallery and the Wallace Collection. These conflicts represented the clash between competing kinds of cultural capital: one based on knowledge of and familiarity with elite culture, represented by middle-class arts professionals and (to some extent) the new men of wealth, and one based on the social capital of birth, prestige, and position, exemplified by the aristocratic, but amateur, gentlemen connoisseurs who served as gallery trustees (4, 216). In describing the relationship between aristocratic trustees and professional gallery administrators, Geddes Poole notes the importance of the 1894 Rosebery Minute, which transferred the...

Sassi contro il cielo : menzogna individuale e verità di stato in Oscar Wilde

The late Victorian era saw Oscar Wilde’s rise to success and fall from grace. For many years the Irish author lived a double life. He was both a celebrated man of letters, and an irreducibly extraneous body. His essay The Decay of Lying , published in 1889, is a Socratic dialogue that, through its inherent duplicity, exhibits this binary condition. On one hand it is a brilliant work of criticism – pleasantly heterodox – that fully embodies Wilde’s rule of “bewildering the masses”, while on the other, even though backhandedly, it gives a recalcitrant account of the implacable social control of his time. In this eulogy of the art of lying – mainly understood as a way of “saying no” to the truths of power – Wilde reveals the theoretical foundations and originality of his political philosophy, which is the same as that displayed in his later essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891).

‘The race for supremacy’: the politics of ‘white’ sport in South Africa, 1870–1910

In line with policies of imperialism, Britons of the late Victorian era believed themselves to be superior culturally, economically and politically when compared with other groups of people. This led to a promotion of things British, including sport, in the new regions of the Empire. In South Africa, however, this imposition of culture alienated an Afrikaans population, who, despite their European origins, were now as much a part of South Africa as the other groups that inhabited this area. Based on research conducted in South African archives over the past decade, this article examines the early development of ‘white’ sport in South Africa and its link to the politics of the late nineteenth century. Although a significant amount of work has concentrated on ‘race’ relations between black, coloured and white participants in the history of South African sport, this investigation reveals how the progress of sports such as cricket, rugby and soccer was tied to an antagonistic relationship between the two dominant white factions – the Afrikaners and the British. As such, this article marks an original contribution to the field.

The Economic Benefits of Political Connections in Late Victorian Britain

The late-Victorian era was characteristed by especially close links between politicians and firms in the UK. Roughly half of all members of Parliament served as company directors, many as directors of multiple firms. We analyze 467 British companies over the period 1895 to 1904 to investigate the interaction of firms and politicians. We find that new-technology firms with politicians serving on their boards were more likely to issue equity finance and had higher Tobin's Q. Our evidence suggests that causality runs from director-politicians to a firm's performance, rather than in the opposite direction.

The late Victorian folksong revival: the persistence of English melody, 1878-1903

This book traces the early history of the first English folksong revival during the late Victorian era, focusing on the work of three prominent song collectors, Sabine Baring-Gould, Frank Kidson and Lucy Broadwood. It follows E. David Gregory's earlier book, Victorian Songhunters, continuing the story of English folksong collecting from when that book left off, and is copiously illustrated with examples of the folksongs collected during these years.

The mummy's curse: a study in rumour

We associate the curse of the mummy with the opening of the tomb of Tutankhamen in February 1923 and the death, six weeks later, of the fifth Earl of Carnarvon. In fact, this curse rehearsed two prior curse stories associated with Victorian gentleman and which circulated as gossip and rumour in the late Victorian era. This essay tries to recover those fugitive narratives in the belief that they help reveal more of the cultural significance of the curse narrative in the Victorian and Edwardian era.

Sexual Consent and the Adolescent Male, or What Can We Learn from the Greeks?

Classical Athens offers a useful comparative test‐case for essentialist assumptions about the necessary harm that emanates from sexual intimacy between adults and adolescent boys. The Athenian model does not fit victimological expectations, but instead suggests that adolescent boys could be credited with considerable powers of discretion and responsibility in sexual matters without harming their future cultural productivity. Contemporary American legislation premised on children’s incapacity to “consent” to sexual relations stems from outmoded gender constructions and ideological preoccupations of the late Victorian and Progressive Era; that it has been extended to “protection” of boys is a matter of historical accident, rather than sound social policy. Rigorous social science and historical comparanda suggest that we should consider a different “age of consent” for boys and girls.

Remaking the Medico-Legal Scene: A Social History of the Late-Victorian Coroner in Oxford

There have been wide-ranging debates about medicine and the law encapsulated in the figure of the coroner in Victorian England. Recently the historical literature on coroners has been enriched by macro-studies. Despite this important research, the social lives of coroners and their daily interactions remain relatively neglected in standard historical accounts. This article redresses that issue by examining the working life of the coroner for Oxford during the late-Victorian era. Edward Law Hussey kept very detailed records of his time in office as coroner. New research material makes it feasible to trace his professional background, from doctor of the sick poor, to hospital house surgeon and then busy coroner. His career trajectory, personal interactions, and professional disputes, provide an important historical prism illuminating contemporary debates that occupied coroners in their working lives. Hussey tried to improve his medico-legal reach and the public image of his coroner's office by reducing infanticide rates, converting a public mortuary, and acquiring a proper coroner's court. His campaigns had limited success because the social scene in which he worked was complicated by the dominance of health and welfare agencies that resented his role as an expanding arm of the Victorian information state.

The Heyday of Amateurism in Modern Lawn Tennis

This article, and the linked article ‘The road to 1968’ which follows, both aim to develop historical understanding of how the Victorian amateur, a lover of sport who eschewed payment, was eclipsed by the rise of the modern-day professional. Taken together, the articles provide an in-depth assessment of how the international controlling authorities of lawn tennis perceived and handled the relationship between amateurism and professionalism from the late-Victorian era to the 1960s, and how the system operated in the eyes of those who experienced it. In tracing the long-running tension between administrators on the one hand and players and promoters on the other, the emphasis is placed in this first article on the resilience of amateurism before 1945. In spite of major changes to the sport and the social context in which it was played, amateur principles remained firmly in the ascendant.

Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (review)

Reviewed by: Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship Jonathan Harris Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship. Leela Gandhi . Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Leela Gandhi's Affective Communities is an engaging journey to the fringes of late Victorian imperial society where the reader discovers an eclectic mix of radical, socialist, and antiimperial politics. Gandhi primarily seeks to provide an alternative history of antiimperialism. Whereas postcolonial studies typically define antiimperialism as a set of actions performed by the colonized against the colonizers (the "putative" East against the "putative" West), Gandhi investigates the antiimperialism of several metropolitan, mainly British characters (1). According to Gandhi, these characters forsook the privileges of imperial domination to critique both imperialism and the tradition of Enlightenment thought that appeared to legitimize it, developing affinity with the oppressed in the process. In doing so, Gandhi's characters display a capacity for personal hybridity and radical alterity that she places at the center of a proposed politics alternatively called anti-communitarian communitarianism, immature politics, or the politics of friendship. Curious to understand why E. M. Forster should hope "to have the guts to betray [his] country" rather than his friend" (10),1 and why other metropolitans shared his sentiments, Gandhi presents four case studies covering homosexual activism, vegetarianism, mysticism, and aestheticism in the late Victorian era. In each case, Gandhi shows her characters struggling to defend their lifestyles against the binary classifications that they, and she, see as endemic to Western theory and politics. These "binarisms," distinguishing mainly between "mature" and "immature," push the protagonists' various interweaving commitments outside of the bounds of "mature" Western society, thereby throwing the protagonists into the same category as the colonized, whose "immaturity" legitimated the civilizing impulse of the imperial project. The protagonists ultimately defend themselves by asserting the superiority of Indian civilization. Homosexual and vegetarian mystic Edward Carpenter, for example, criticizes the male/female dualism in Western society, which renders the homosexual a deficient being and, sustained by a meat-based diet, becomes a disease leading to imperialism and racism (58). The cure required [End Page 183] embrace of "intermediate types" (i.e., homosexuals), who were more readily accepted in Indian and ancient civilizations, and who were capable of forming utopic communities that defied the logic of the social and sexual contract. Thus, writes Gandhi, the "savage" and the "invert" were natural allies against binary thinking and its imperial product (59). We see Carpenter's "cure" at work in the figure of Mahatma Gandhi, a loose friend to Carpenter and others of Carpenter's milieu such as vegetarian Henry Salt, whose political persona seems to have included a form of "bisexual radicalism" (63–64). Gandhi wants to embrace the "messiness" of politics, defined by hybridity and alterity, against the conceptual tidiness of Kantian and Aristotelian appeals to self-identity or corporate unity. Gandhi's characters estrange themselves from Western civilization to enter the great unknown of "a world without taxonomy," risking the "psychic derangement" (p) that occurs upon dislocating the self, something that the aforementioned tidiness intended to prevent. In this way, Gandhi's theme is reminiscient of Bonnie Honig's argument against the "displacement of politics" that occurs in both liberalism and communitarianism.2 In her most ambitious chapter, Gandhi quarrels with both streams to defend the political nature by noting the intersection of mysticism and antiimperial politics, exemplified in the figure of Mirra Alfassa, the French-born spiritual partner of Indian nationalist Sri Aurobindo and "Mother" of the latter's eponymous ashram. Gandhi blames Kant for pushing religion, "dogmatic" religion, outside of the realm of political in what she calls an argument against "hybridity." The Kantian subject must be free from metaphysical and empirical contaminants in order to be considered a self-identical rational subject. Here, Gandhi turns to Derrida who, in his "Faith and Knowledge," turns Kant's preferred rational "reflective" religion into a simple capitulation to the same and familiar, making it incapable of developing any moral capacity. The "dogmatic" faith that Kant refuses for its risky attempt to gain knowledge of an unknowable God is essential to Derrida, who argues...

Ally Sloper’s Half-Holiday : The Geography of Class in Late-Victorian Britain

A regular feature of Ally Sloper's Half-Holiday, an illustrated comic newspaper published from 1884 until 1923?though sporadically after 1916, is Ally Sloper's travels in and around London and to the seaside.1 Ally's journeys and their chronicling by his daughter Tootsie serve as kind of travel literature for the working-class and lower-middle-class readership of the paper. On one hand, Tootsie's accounts of Poor Papa running afoul of Victorian ideas about social decorum, whether at the seaside, back stage at a music hall, at Ascot, at the Lord Mayor's Ball, in the pit at Drury Lane, at the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race, or countless other places, are mere back drop for the paper's jokes and satires. On the other hand, the vast range of locales and events visited by Ally and his motley band of companions serves to give us a sense of the types of places the varied readership of Ally Sloper's Half-Holiday (ASHH) may have visited in search of leisure. These travelogues tell us what the Victorian readership of the paper may have actually done (or hoped to do) while there. I emphasis the Victorian readership of the paper because even though ASHH continued publishing well into the twentieth century, I am largely concerned with the Victorian versions of the paper and have confined my discussion and examples to the 1880s and 1890s. Beyond telling us where the paper's Victorian readers may have gone on their holidays and showing us what they may have done once there, ASHH engages in a sustained critique of class. In short, ASHH operates as a satirical geography of leisure and class of the late-Victorian era in which physical and class boundaries are overcome with a degree of ease and even shown to be unimportant. In its critique of late-Victorian class, we can see the ways in which popular culture has the potential to

Voting for Pleasure, Or a View from a Victorian Theatre Gallery

Voting for Pleasure, Or a View from a Victorian Theatre Gallery

Voting for Pleasure, Or a View from a Victorian Theatre Gallery

Voting for Pleasure, Or a View from a Victorian Theatre Gallery

Victorian Psychology and the Novel

AbstractOver the last three decades, literary critics have evinced growing interest in nineteenth‐century psychology and its reciprocal relationship with the Victorian novel. The resulting body of interdisciplinary scholarship has yielded insight into how early and mid‐Victorian psychological movements (moral management, associationism, evolutionary psychology, and so forth) left their mark on realist authors like George Eliot and writers of sensation fiction such as Wilkie Collins or Mary Elizabeth Braddon. But these scholarly works have dealt less comprehensively with the psychological significance of late Victorian genres like the romance and neo‐Gothic novel. Moreover, literary critics are only beginning to explore the ways in which psychology subtly shaded into physiology during the late Victorian era. This materialist shift was felt most strongly after 1870, when cerebral localization experiments by David Ferrier, John Hughlings Jackson, and other neurologists linked specific emotions, faculties, and movements to discrete areas of the brain. These experiments suggested that human behavior amounted to the sum of various neurochemical impulses, a conclusion that raised hackles because it threatened cherished notions of the soul, will, and individual identity. Literary scholars have only recently discussed the ways in which late Victorian novels engaged with these unsettling neurological discoveries. Based on the early promise of these discussions, we might expect to see more work on Victorian brains than Victorian psyches in future literary criticism.