Nineteenth-century British Culture Research Articles

Book Review: Medicine and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, History and Culture by Sandra Dinter and Sarah Schäfer-Althaus (eds)

Book Review: <i>Medicine and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, History and Culture</i> by Sandra Dinter and Sarah Schäfer-Althaus (eds)

The Devil and the Victorians: Supernatural Evil in Nineteenth-Century English Culture by Sarah Bartels (review)

The Devil and the Victorians: Supernatural Evil in Nineteenth-Century English Culture by Sarah Bartels (review)

Jennie Batchelor. The Lady’s Magazine (1770–1832) and the Making of Literary History

This book is the culmination of a series of projects designed to rectify the neglect of The Lady’s Magazine, a monthly periodical that survived for more than six decades following its launch in 1770 but was largely forgotten soon after its publication ceased. The magazine fell out of literary history, Jennie Batchelor maintains, as Romanticist ideas of authorship and genre came to hold sway over the histories of the period in which it flourished. As an inclusive, community-building publication that supported amateur authorship and popular literary forms, The Lady’s Magazine was systematically marginalized, Batchelor argues, by mainstream historiography, which, with masculine leanings, favoured literary exclusivity and more professional models of authorship. Like many periodical publications, it was also literally thrown away, resulting in a situation where, despite huge print runs, there are now few extant copies of individual issues and no full runs of the magazine in any public library. Batchelor’s earlier work with the digital publisher Adam Matthew has enabled readers (with a subscription) to access The Lady’s Magazine more readily than ever before, while her Leverhulme Trust project ‘The Lady’s Magazine (1770–1818): Understanding the Emergence of a Genre’ has resulted in a freely available annotated index to the vast body of content that accrued over the long run of the periodical—more than 15,000 items. Following this access-focused work, Batchelor’s book now offers an insightful and detailed history of the magazine, of its impact in its time and of its subsequent sidelining. It is an outstanding work that makes a major contribution to periodical studies and persuasively uncovers, as Batchelor terms it, an ‘unRomantic’ strand of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British literary culture.

Clare A. Simmons. Medievalist Traditions in Nineteenth-Century British Culture: Celebrating the Calendar Year. Medievalism 20. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2021. Pp. 238. $99.00 (cloth).

Clare A. Simmons. Medievalist Traditions in Nineteenth-Century British Culture: Celebrating the Calendar Year. Medievalism 20. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2021. Pp. 238. $99.00 (cloth). - Volume 62 Issue 2

Redux

How much time has passed since the publication of VLC’s Keywords issue five years ago? This is not a trick question. Students of nineteenth-century British literature and culture are primed to see five years as a long time (“with the length of five long summers”), and events at both national and global scales have encouraged a widespread sense that 2018 is located less in the recent past than on the far side of a divide—in the Before Times. On the other hand, the long view encouraged by a scholarly focus on a period that ended over a century ago may see little or no meaningful time as having passed between 2018 and 2023. Moreover, on a more quotidian level, the very pace of scholarship—the amount of time it typically takes to conceive, research, write, and publish work, even for those without a Casaubonian bone in their bodies—can make five years seem like no time at all (“five summers that flew by,” as Wordsworth might have put it had he been on an academic calendar).

Dorsality, and: Reencountered, Months Later

Dorsality, and: Reencountered, Months Later Travis Chi Wing Lau (bio) Keywords Travis Chi Wing Lau, poem Dorsality When I let him touchthe small of my backfor the first time, I thought a finwould erupt forth— to ground mewhile I learned to breathe in new waters,this first and sacred time when I was becomingsomething else entirely too slick,for the flesh I know must stay in motionor risk never moving again. [End Page 743] Reencountered, Months Later i saw you when he sought care beside meat the clinic that always runs hours behind one where more men go than comeout of impatience to court some other urgencythat feels better than a test of blood you were there in the same shirt I took offand did not bother to look me dead in the eyes you claimed were littlebitter almonds that knew more than they should because the last thing you did was hurry toescort me down the hard stairs that would break no fall after I relented and realizedthe cold of it the cold of you a persistence that gets to claim innocencewhere the no never comes only the yes skips in the recording offering but theshallowest relief of a rehearsal we both do [End Page 744] that leaves a collision of two less slipperythan it in fact always already was as I walked out of your brownstonei bathed in the coolness of former heat slowly buffeted by what i could not seeyet knew encircled me the beginning of a familiarsiege [End Page 745] Travis Chi Wing Lau travis chi wing lau (he/him/his) is assistant professor of English at Kenyon College. His research and teaching focus on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature and culture, health humanities, and disability studies. Alongside his scholarship, Lau frequently writes for venues of public scholarship like Synapsis: A Journal of Health Humanities, Public Books, Lapham's Quarterly, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. His poetry has appeared in Wordgathering, Glass, South Carolina Review, Foglifter, and Hypertext, as well as in three chapbooks, The Bone Setter (Damaged Goods Press), Paring (Finishing Line Press), and Vagaries (Fork Tine Press, 2022). Copyright © 2022 The Massachusetts Review, Inc.

Italian Politics and Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Culture, by Patricia Cove

Reviewed by: Italian Politics and Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Culture by Patricia Cove Diana Moore (bio) Italian Politics and Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Culture, by Patricia Cove; pp. x + 190. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019, $105.00, $24.95 paper, $27.94 ebook Patricia Cove's Italian Politics and Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Culture forms an admirable addition to the Edinburgh Critical Studies in Victorian Culture series and skillfully fulfills the series' mission of re-evaluating Victorian literature, culture, history, and identity through close readings. In many ways, Cove's work treads a well-established path. Countless British authors wrote about Italy during the Risorgimento, the movement for Italian independence and unification. An equal, if not greater, number of scholars have subsequently shown how these authors fashioned and refashioned their selfunderstanding through their relationship with and depictions of Italy. Cove provides a fresh take on this British obsession with Italy, however, by moving away from the most widely celebrated and studied authors, like Lord Byron, in favor of lesser-known and more marginal figures, such as Italian patriot and exile Giovanni Ruffini. Cove claims that the voices of these "outsiders and figures of cultural hybridity—women, expatriates, exiles, Anglo-Italians and Anglo-Irish"—reveal more about the contradictory and varied British responses to the Italian Risorgimento and related ongoing debates about "selfdetermination, citizenship and political rights" (23). The book is comprised of a general introduction, four case study chapters, and a brief conclusion. The chapters chronologically trace "four concrete, political focal points of British engagement with the Risorgimento" from the Congress of Vienna in 1815 to the creation in 1861 of the Kingdom of Italy, and they show how throughout this period British authors increased their engagement with the Italian present rather than its idealized past (21). Chapter 1 examines Lady Morgan's travelogue Italy (1821) and Mary Shelley's historical novel Valperga (1823). Cove argues that, unlike many of their fellow Romantic authors, who wrote about an abstract version of Italy and only cared about how Italian affairs impacted British politics, Morgan and Shelley were attentive to the specific historical and political realities of the Italian peninsula. Moreover, she claims, their status as outsiders made them more sensitive to issues of power and appreciative of Italy's resistance to the dominant post-1815 empires. [End Page 495] Chapters 2 and 3 move forward into the Victorian period, tracing the rise of leftwing Mazzinian politics, its eventual disappointment in the failed revolutions of 1848-9, and subsequent decline. In chapter 2, Cove focuses on two of Ruffini's English-language novels, Lorenzo Benoni (1853) and Doctor Antonio (1855), and reveals how Ruffini subverted the common trope of Italy as a place of exile, estrangement, and disorientation for British travelers by centering the sufferings of dispossessed Italian patriots instead. Chapter 3 then analyzes Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White (1859-60) in relation to both the 1844 Post Office Espionage Scandal and the emergence of the sensation novel. Cove demonstrates how the British public's discovery that their government had been opening Mazzini's mail and sending its contents to continental authorities prompted a crisis of mid-Victorian liberalism and uncovered hidden continental-style despotism underneath the façade of British freedom and modernity. In a parallel fashion, she claims, sensation novels like The Woman in White brought the themes of the gothic novel home from historic settings and foreign shores to the contemporary British domestic sphere. The final chapter looks at the trauma surrounding the 1859 Second War of Independence through an examination of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Poems Before Congress (1860) and Last Poems (1862). Cove shows how Barrett Browning, who was supportive of the Risorgimento, also acknowledged the costs of unification and "the silences and erasures imposed through violent, historical change" (126). Finally, in the conclusion Cove offers a brief glimpse at the period after 1870, when the Italian state reclaimed control over the city of Rome, through the writings of authors like Henry James, Vernon Lee, and George Meredith; these works "demonstrate the extent to which politics infiltrated post-Risorgimento, aestheticised Italy" (164). Overall, this volume reveals the benefits of studying nationalist movements...

Introduction to the forum:new scholarship on religion in nineteenth-century German and British Culture

Introduction to the forum:new scholarship on religion in nineteenth-century German and British Culture

Review of Medievalist Traditions in Nineteenth Century British Culture: Celebrating the Calendar Year by Clare A. Simmons

Review of Medievalist Traditions in Nineteenth Century British Culture: Celebrating the Calendar Year by Clare A. Simmons

Medievalist Traditions in Nineteenth-Century British Culture: Celebrating the Calendar Year by Clare A. Simmons

Medievalist Traditions in Nineteenth-Century British Culture: Celebrating the Calendar Year by Clare A. Simmons

Framing colonial war loot

Abstract This article investigates the provenance of four artefacts associated with the military commander Kunwar Singh (1777–1858), who fought a guerrilla campaign against the British during the Indian Uprising of 1857–8. By analysing how these objects were documented and inscribed, it can be shown that, through the invocation of what is characterized here as ‘martial discourse’, British officers framed the acquisition of the arms, armour and ceremonial possessions of an enemy commander in very specific ways. As an overlooked aspect of nineteenth-century British military culture, an examination of martial discourse helps to clarify how British officers presented acquisitions in colonial military contexts. Fundamental to the examples considered here – which include ‘taken in action’, ‘captured’ and ‘spolia opima’ – was an implicit and shared understanding within the British military establishment that artefacts deemed to signify victory and military prowess could be elevated above, and distinguished from those taken during acts of unsanctioned appropriation and looting.

Mary Howitt and &lt;i&gt;Howitt's Journal&lt;/i&gt; (1847–48)

This article examines a rare phenomenon in nineteenth-century British print culture, a periodical jointly edited by a husband and wife team. Howitt’s Journal, a weekly miscellany with a progressive political agenda, ran for only eighteen months from January 1847 to June 1848, edited by William and Mary Howitt. The history of Howitt’s Journal is particularly relevant to the question of women’s agency in the world of periodicals, the ways in which women editors could have a public voice and engage in debate on political and social issues. One methodological issue the article raises is how we assess an editor’s contribution to any publication, the nature of their input, and the extent to which they drive the agenda. In the case of a joint editorship, how do we identify the contributions and responsibilities of each editor? The paper is based on an examination of Mary Howitt’s unpublished letters in the Houghton Library, Harvard, which provide new evidence of the extent of her involvement in the Journal. It tests the Howitts’ editorial style, and Mary’s in particular, against theories of editorship put forward by Patten and Finkelstein (2006) and Matthew Philpotts (2012) and suggests that these models of editorship are essentially masculine.

Laboring in a Place of Rest: Reconsidering Victorian Domestic Work and Its Narratives

Victorian domesticity may have traditionally been acknowledged as a—if not the—definitional value of nineteenth-century British culture, but actual domestic labor has received comparatively little critical attention. What precisely this labor constituted and to what extent it should be invisible according to an ideology that was premised on its cultural significance informed debates at the time, while its depiction in popular culture ranged from class-conscious negotiations of hands-on housework to tragicomical evocations of failed domestic management as a personal crisis. Arguing for the pressing importance of recalibrating the critical investigation of domestic labor, this article explores how Victorian writers continually recrafted the ongoing cultural obsession with the well-maintained home and the question of what might constitute its most apt representation. A critical reassessment of the resulting ambiguities and complexities hence also makes an important contribution to current discussions of emotional labor, caretaking, and the experience of mundane emotions, such as boredom, as an essential part of the everyday of modernity.

Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815–1848 by Clare Pettitt

Reviewed by: Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815–1848 by Clare Pettitt David E. Latané (bio) Clare Pettitt, Serial Forms: The Unfinished Project of Modernity, 1815–1848 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. xviii + 348, $85/£65 cloth. Serial Forms is one in a line of intriguing, wide-ranging, and often enthralling books that cast the widest nets to reel in the material and intellectual phenomena of nineteenth-century British culture. Works such as Richard Stein’s Victoria’s Year: British Literature and Culture, 1837–1838 (1989), James Chandler’s England in 1819 (1999), or the more recent What the Victorians Made of Romanticism: Material Artifacts, Cultural Practices, and Reception History by Tom Mole (2019) have ignored disciplinary boundaries to freely roam across media and events. Clare Pettitt’s project to complete a trilogy of books showing the birth of the modern to the end of World War I is self-consciously ambitious, along the lines of Peter Gay’s five-volume The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud (1984–98). The book reflects immense study. The bibliography, thirty-five pages of close print, begins with Carolyn Abbate’s A History of Opera (2012) and concludes with Slajov Žižek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989). Footnotes sometimes creep into the top half of the page, allowing for careful consideration of the evolution of scholarship. Gratifyingly, predecessors such as Richard Altick and Brian Maidment are not only cited in the notes but also discussed. Pettitt expertly weaves together various strands to show how the growing infiltration of seriality into every aspect of culture forms “the dynamic processes involved in calibrating a new form of social time” (292). The page-turning and page-anticipating urgencies of the expanding news media are only one aspect of the case for the modern’s emergence. Serial Forms has chapters exploring the intersections of shows, such as the panorama and diorama; theatrical spectacles; exhibited paintings like Géricault’s “Shipwreck of the Medusa” at the Egyptian Hall (1820); canonical works, such as Childe Harold (1812–18), Don Juan (1819–24), and fictions by Sir Walter Scott and Edward Bulwer; and the play of spatial and temporal scale in works by Thomas Carlyle, Augustus Pugin, and Charles Dickens. Pettitt accurately observes that the period 1820–37 “has long been a neglected and arid field in British literary studies” (8). The same cannot be said for periodical studies, as it was the heyday of Blackwood’s, Fraser’s, and the Keepsake craze, not to mention The Times at its thundery best. Amidst the riches of Serial Forms are two chapters especially relevant to periodical scholars. Chapter 6, “History in Miniature,” makes a strong case for the centrality of a group of popular titles that are too often overlooked: the information-oriented non-news weeklies like the Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction (1822–50) and the Penny Magazine [End Page 376] (1832–45). The next chapter, “Biopolitics of Seriality,” uses the short run of the weekly Howitt’s Journal (1847–48) “to consider how seriality was becoming increasingly important to the creation and maintenance of what we might now call biopolitics” (251). “History in Miniature” starts with a remark in David Copperfield (1850) about how the Peggottys take the sort of pleasure they might receive from “a pocket model of the Colosseum” when seeing Little Em’ly and David side-by-side in their boat-house (213). What does a shrunken model of a large Roman ruin mean in this context and to such people? The chapter examines how cheap illustrated periodicals helped cause a seismic shift in attitudes toward the historical past. This shift was abetted, somewhat ironically, by the “taxes on knowledge” that meant a penny paper could not contain news—only knowledge. Pettitt explores how the intersections of “models, panoramas, inexpensive toys, dioramas, stage sets and prints, and engravings and woodcuts in the cheap press” made it possible for society “to consume the past as never before” (216). Perhaps most importantly, “novel time-space frames were beginning to be inserted into the common experience of working class people” (216). The “promiscuous miscellanity” of the cheap papers, she argues, works differently than in...

Reading Contagion: The Hazards of Reading in the Age of Print

Reading Contagion: The Hazards of Reading in the Age of Print

Miscegenation in Marble: John Bell’s Octoroon

Inspired by Hiram Powers’s successful Greek Slave, John Bell debuted The Octoroon at the 1868 Royal Academy exhibition. However, the mobilization of narrative that made Powers’s sculpture acceptable was not applicable for The Octoroon. Instead, racial difference made all the difference, prompting viewers to read the figure’s cold, white marble as hot, sensuous flesh. Bell’s sculpture reflects Victorian Britain’s fascination with the enslaved, American, mixed-race beauty and suggests provocative resonances between the antebellum South and the Orient in the popular imagination. The sculpture’s 1876 purchase by the cotton town of Blackburn also illuminates the octoroon’s significance as a trope in nineteenth-century British culture.

Getting into a Scrape: The Buckler Dynasty, Lincoln Cathedral and Mid-Victorian Architectural Politics

AbstractBetween 1859 and 1866, John Chessell Buckler (1793–1894) was accused, as architect to Lincoln Cathedral, of overseeing a process of ‘scraping’ the exterior stonework of the building during its restoration. The controversy involved the leading architectural bodies of the time, with professional journals and both national and local newspapers reporting on it over the course of half a decade. In his defence, Buckler published an angry book that, rather than exonerating the author, offended many members of the architectural profession, particularly George Gilbert Scott and the Ecclesiological Society. The dispute took place during a conservative shift in attitude to the repair of historic buildings. This essay attempts to clarify what Buckler did, what was at stake for his detractors, and what the ‘scraping’ scandal reveals about the political atmosphere of nineteenth-century British architectural culture.

Vernon Lee’s Hideous Roman à Clef

Following Henry James, literary-critical practices presume the autonomy and integrity of the literary text. The roman à clef meanwhile troubles this autonomy by presuming a transparent and concrete relation between text and world. By turning to the late nineteenth-century writer Vernon Lee, who elevates reference as a vital principle of all literary representation, this essay argues that the roman à clef challenges our assumptions about the value of reference. Lee’s novel Miss Brown (1884), a roman à clef about British aestheticism, is treated as a privileged case study for reading this alternative history of the novel. By focusing on the provisionality of literature, which Lee calls a “half-art,” this essay argues that literature’s reference to an external context provides a point of departure for thinking about women’s disempowerment and vulnerability in late nineteenth-century British culture. At the same time, it argues that provisionality offers a model for considering the broader consequences of limitation and determination in the history of the novel.

The Historians’ Preposterous Project

Contrasting its author’s microhistorical approach with other historical methodologies, especially that of Keith Thomas, Clendinnen praises Kirsten McKenzie’s A Swindler’s Progress: Nobles and Convicts in the Age of Liberty (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010) for deftly tying the apparently idiosyncratic stories of a transported convict and the noble family whose scion he impersonated to more pervasive dynamics in nineteenth-century British imperial culture.

Beyond the Empire: British Influence on the Warsaw Theatre Scene in the Nineteenth Century

In the late nineteenth century British culture, politics and history were customary topics in Polish newspapers, and Shakespeare's dramas were the most often performed classic texts on the Warsaw theatre stage. However, in this paper focusing on Warsaw seasons 1814/1815–1900/1901 I demonstrate that surprisingly one can hardly talk about any form of cultural transfer between the British and Polish popular theatre and drama in that period. The analysis of the Warsaw repertoire, travel recollections to the United Kingdom and press articles, reveal that even though the Polish nation treated the UK as a point of reference, it consistently rejected the British theatre at large and theatre entertainment in particular, and considered it ‘crude’ and in bad taste. I claim that the geopolitical situation of Poland cannot alone account for this puzzle.