Nineteenth-century Archive Research Articles

LGBT Victorians: Sexuality and Gender in the Nineteenth-Century Archives by Simon Joyce (review)

LGBT Victorians: Sexuality and Gender in the Nineteenth-Century Archives by Simon Joyce (review)

LGBT Victorians: Sexuality and Gender in the Nineteenth-Century Archives, by Simon Joyce

<i>LGBT Victorians: Sexuality and Gender in the Nineteenth-Century Archives</i>, by Simon Joyce

Nothing but a Humbug: P.T. Barnum, Charles Dickens, and the Construction of National Identities in a Living Archive

Abstract: Even as the Victorians attempted to stabilize British national identity through institutional ownership of cultural property, Britishness remained a protean, imagined construct. This essay shows, through a new narrativization of the auction of Shakespeare's birthplace in 1847, that the purportedly kitschy and fake aspects of Barnumesque, new-money America were paradoxically also constitutive of Britain's own nationalism. In the spring of that year, newspapers advertised that Shakespeare's birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon would soon go up for public auction. Rumours immediately began circulating that the American showman P.T. Barnum, who had recently barnstormed through England with the "Greatest Show on Earth," was intent on purchasing the birthplace for his menagerie of cultural oddities. In opposition to this foreign threat, a full-blown rescue campaign, driven by British media fearmongering, was launched in order to save Shakespeare's home "for the nation." Soon, these efforts drew in Britain's own premier showman of the 1840s, Charles Dickens. The nineteenth-century popular press's mythologization of these events, and the myth's subsequent recapitulation in the twenty-first century, is emblematic of the way national-infused archives wind and unwind in a double-spooled temporality. As I renarrativize archival materials associated with the auction of Shakespeare's birthplace, I proffer a different model of American and British nationalisms that points to their symbiotic development and perpetual reinvention. Ultimately, I suggest, we can learn from the Victorians' reinvention of their own history that the nineteenth-century archive is not a stable point of origin but rather a point of departure for questioning our national heritage and understanding the ways in which we inscribe the past with our present.

“The General Practice of the Nation”: Walt Whitman, Language, and Computerized Search in the Nineteenth-Century Archive

Abstract Word-search technologies have played a significant role in literary scholarship for decades, yet they have received little attention from literary theorists. This paper considers how we might more thoughtfully approach the use of search in navigating cultural material from the nineteenth century. Taking the writings of Walt Whitman as both an example and a theoretical foil, I argue that the use of these tools can amplify historical differences in word use that are relatively unimportant to close reading, influencing what sorts of texts we read in ways that are not immediately apparent. I suggest that if we as literary scholars are to use word search in our research, we should approach it from a philological point of view, actively exploring the limits of our knowledge about the linguistic practices of the past and considering the effects of technological mediation on our encounters with historical texts.

In the Cloud: Nineteenth-Century Visions and Experiments for the Digital Age

What shapes does the nineteenth-century paper archive take in the twenty-first century digital cloud? Luisa Cale and Ana Parejo Vadillo situate the crafts, experiments, and visions discussed in this anniversary issue in the wider context of questions raised by the emergence and possibilities of nineteenth-century archives for the digital era. What happens when objects float free of their bibliographic and museum anchorings? What is gained and lost in the digital transformations? What new imaginary spaces open up in the transition from the book to the virtual codex and from the terrestrial library to cloud-sourced collections? What formations does the nineteenth century take in digital discourse networks? How are nineteenth-century objects made digital, and through what crafts, skills, and disciplines? How are they shaped by circulation through digital platforms, social media, and remix on the semantic web? What kinds of authoring, what structures of labour, what kinds of making and knowing shape agency in the nineteenth-century digital archive?

Leah King-Smith and the Nineteenth-century Archive

In postmodern criticism the camera has often been seen as an apparatus of control, one of the surveillance mechanisms of the state, in the service of its institutions and immersed in its technologies of power. The metaphor of the camera as a weapon, as analysed by Susan Sontag in the early 1970s, describes an unbalanced and non-reciprocal relationship between photographer and subject.1 One is the hunter, the other the prey; one is the agent, the other the victim. This theoretical paradigm was consolidated in the 1980s when structuralist critics started to analyse nineteenth-century photographic archives held in libraries, institutions and museums.2 Much of this criticism followed the work of Michel Foucault who used Jeremy Bentham's model of the Panopticon to analyse the controlling mechanism of the gaze in modern institutions.3 I am aware that aligning Foucault with structuralism will appear problematic to some; however, the way in which some of his work has been adapted by postmodern critics of photography does underline the determinism of his theory. For a lucid analysis, see Joan Copjec, Read my Desire: Lacan against the Historicists, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1994, 1–10. For a different perspective, sympathetic to Foucault, see Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1997. Although Foucault's concept of power is productive and he admits to sites of resistance, he is pessimistic about the possibilities of such resistance.4 Discipline and Punish, upon which many theories of photographic surveillance are predicated, constructs disciplinary power as ‘the nonreversible subordination of one group of people by another’.5