Nineteenth-century British Culture Research Articles

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.

Introduction

Catherine Gallagher's importance as a scholar of nineteenth-century British culture and a historian and theorist of the novel makes the appearance of a new monograph by her an event for Victorianists (among others). This is true even when few of the materials she discusses are, strictly speaking, Victorian, as is the case with her new book, Telling It Like It Wasn't: The Counterfactual Imagination in History and Fiction. In Telling It Like It Wasn't, Gallagher traces the emergence and development of analytic and narrative discourses premised on counterfactual-historical hypotheses. As the author explains, these hypotheses are past-tense, conditional conjectures “pursued when the antecedent condition is known to be contrary to fact,” such as, to take her two major examples, What if the South won the Civil War? and What if the Nazis had invaded Britain? Bringing together what Gallagher calls “counterfactual histories,” which are more analytical than narrative and typically consider multiple unrealized possibilities; works of “alternate history,” which describe one continuous sequence of departures from the historical record but draw their dramatis personae exclusively from that record; and “the alternate-history novel, [which] invents not only alternative-historical trajectories but also fictional characters,” Telling It Like It Wasn't explores the distinctive uses and dynamic interactions of these forms over the past two centuries and considers their implications for our understanding of more conventional fiction and historiography.

Introduction: Trans Victorians

IntroductionTrans Victorians Ardel Haefele-Thomas (bio) On saturday, 26 May 1810, the following excerpt appeared in the Norfolk Chronicle, or, The Norwich Gazette describing the death of Chevalier/Chevalière d’Éon:1 The Chevalier D’Éon . . . died at his lodgings in New Milman Street, Guilford Street, on Tuesday last. . . . It will be remembered that a great doubt at one time existed to which gender he belonged, which, however, was set at rest by the verdict of 12 matrons who decided in favour of the female; and from that time to the present he wore the costume of that sex. But on his decease taking place it was unexpectedly discovered that the Chevalier was a perfect male! (“Postscript”) Fifty-five years later, during a terrible heat wave in London, the gifted surgeon and social reformer Dr. James Miranda Barry died of dehydration following a long illness. Despite Dr. Barry’s instructions before he died, Sophia Bishop, a charwoman, acted out of respect by preparing his body for burial at Kensal Green Cemetery. A few days after Dr. Barry’s burial, Bishop went to the military post at Horse Guards and told the authorities that Dr. Barry was a woman. As historian Rachel Holmes writes, “Barry’s own body passed into history as one of the most disputed corpses of the modern age” (3). Clearly, though, only five decades earlier, there was another body that was highly disputed in life as well as in death. This may seem like an odd and perhaps even sensational place to start my introduction to this special issue of Victorian Review on trans Victorians. D’Éon and Barry, though, exemplify a Victorian conundrum, or at least a conundrum for scholars of the nineteenth century. We have often looked to figures like d’Éon and Barry as examples to demonstrate the ways in which Victorians were caught up in the imperial project of categorization and obsessed with a rigid gender binary that assigned women to the private and men to the public sphere. As famous controversial public figures who were often written about in the British popular press because neither adhered to a strict gender binary, the ambassador and the doctor actually present Victorian scholars with an opportunity to move away from our [End Page 31] own narratives of nineteenth-century British culture as one of absolute binarisms. As the above news article regarding d’Éon exemplifies, the chevalier/chevalière’s sex was often in dispute because of the ambassador’s gender presentation. Over the course of the nineteenth century, d’Éon, instead of passing into obscurity, in many ways became legendary. In 1895, eighty-five years after d’Éon’s death, the Leeds Times published an article entitled “Duellists In Petticoats” that featured the late ambassador as one of the duellists: “As dauntless a fighter as ever buckled a sword during the year when Louis XV was King . . . was the Chevaliere d’Éon. Whether this strange being was a man or woman . . . is not positively known to this day” (4). It is important to note the newspaper’s spelling of d’Éon’s title in the feminine despite the majority of the news articles earlier in the century proclaiming d’Éon as a “perfect male.” The ambiguity surrounding d’Éon’s identity as either a man or a woman simultaneously points out a gender dichotomy and underscores the possibility of someone embodying both or neither. Likewise, Dr. James Miranda Barry was known during the time of his medical posts in South Africa, Jamaica, and Canada as a bit of dandy. He loved lavish and colourful waistcoats when he was out in society just as he often took British and Dutch authorities to task for the horrendous ways that former slaves, sex workers, and people suffering with Hansen’s Disease (leprosy) were treated.2 Interestingly, Barry’s masculinity was anything but hypermasculine. As Lord Albermarle wrote in his memoirs, “I beheld a beardless lad . . . with an unmistakable Scotch type of countenance—reddish hair, high cheek bones. . . . there was a certain effeminacy in his manner”(144). Like d’Éon before him, Dr. Barry never clung entirely to one side or the other of the...

Introduction: Technologies of Fire in Nineteenth-Century British Culture

Cultural histories of nineteenth-century Britain have studied the important physical and psychological transformations caused by the industrialization of light. Gaslight, though discovered prior to the nineteenth century, became aligned with the era’s narratives of national and industrial progress, an arc that, one might argue, culminated in the growing popularity of electric light at the end of the century. Yet, despite these new technologies of ‘artificial light’, ‘natural’ wood and coal fires remained popular in British culture. This issue explores fire as a visual and narrative technology in art, literature, and public displays by examining the ways in which it evoked competing symbolic values, such as primitivism and modernity, vitality and destruction, intimacy and spectacle. The reading order mixes articles and shorter pieces together to demonstrate the continuities of fire across various sites, including: the domestic fireside, the tallow candle, theatrical conflagrations, Turner’s fires, fireworks, funeral pyres, subterranean fire, solar fire, and a coal-ship fire.

‘The Most Respectable Looking of Revolutionaries’

New political histories of late nineteenth-century British political culture have closely analysed the role of language and rhetoric in popular politics. The focus on the content of political messages has meant that the ways such messages were communicated has often been overlooked, as have the varied forms of political communication in the period. This article follows on from recent work that has sought to examine the place of material and visual culture in popular politics in the period. In particular, it focuses on the links between dress, class and politics. It suggests that visual, along with material, forms of political communication remained important and that they illuminate the political culture of the period.

Anti-Jacobin Fiction and the Eighteenth-Century Traditions of the Novel: Robert Bisset, Isaac D’Israeli, and the Novel’s Reclamation

This paper argues that Robert Bisset’s and Isaac D’Israeli’s fictions engage in a critical appraisal of the novel, constructing a canon committed to the “real” and the “factual.” This framing of the genre allows Bisset and D’Israeli to enlist the novel, so defined, as an ally of British order. Their efforts reveal the surprisingly inclusive nature of the anti-Jacobin canon and its overriding concern with questions of representation rather than morality; they also anticipate significant developments in early nineteenth-century British literary culture, including Henry Fielding’s ascendancy over Samuel Richardson and the emergence of the discourse that facilitated the novel’s legitimatization.

Economic Women: Essays on Desire and Dispossession in Nineteenth-Century British Culture

Economic Women: Essays on Desire and Dispossession in Nineteenth-Century British Culture

William Gladstone: New Studies and Perspectives, edited by Roland Quinault, Roger Swift and Ruth Clayton Windscheffel

William Gladstone: New Studies and Perspectives, edited by Roland Quinault, Roger Swift and Ruth Clayton Windscheffel. Farnham and Burlington, Ashgate, 2012. xvii, 350 pp. $144.95 US (cloth). This volume contains papers from a conference held at Chester in 2009 to commemorate bicentenary of Gladstone's birth. A number of essays will interest not only specialists focused on Gladstone's life and political career, but also those with a wider curiosity about both public and private determinants of nineteenth-century British political culture. The shift represented here from a primarily political focus in earlier studies on Gladstone to an interest in greater variety of roles in life of nation (p. xvi) is announced in David Bebbington's Foreword and Ruth Clayton Windscheffel's Introduction. The book is then divided into six parts: Reputations, Images, Personal Questions, Gladstone as an Official, Ethics and Internationalism, and Epilogue. Some of essays are broad in their scope and implications, while others are much more limited and narrowly focused. Examples of former would be Frank Turner's investigation of complexities of Gladstone's Liberalism, which sees him as a political, but not a cultural radical, and Roland Quinault's exploration of ambivalences and inconsistencies of Gladstone's attitudes to war, in which he points out that, though Gladstone's policies of financial retrenchment and reform were incompatible with war expenditures, he nevertheless found reasons for pursuing armed conflicts supported by notions of divine retribution, duty, and honour. The psychological understanding of Gladstone's character and wealth of illustration that underlie both of these essays make them persuasive and compelling. Other essays in volume take on more specific topics, often with equally acute insight. For example, Richard Gaunt reassesses long-standing debate about Gladstone's relationship to Sir Robert Peel and question of whether it was patriotism or power that shaped their respective visions of providential destiny. In turn Chris Wigley looks at Gladstone's involvement with Labour, arguing that his greatest contribution to Liberal Party came not with his efforts at financial reform, free-trade, or Ireland, but rather through widening of franchise that brought the moral strength of a good portion of working people into political life (p. 57). Among best pieces of this specific nature is Richard Huzzey's investigation of Gladstone's attitude to suppression of slave trade, in which tensions of cruiser debate of 1850 reflect Gladstone's complex position, caught as he was between his interest in protecting West-Indies sugar trade and new direction of Peelite politics in context of strong abolitionist sentiments. Huzzey's discussion of economic aspect of Gladstone's moral arguments finds a good complement in Alan Warren's analysis of Gladstone's concern to limit role of Treasury in responding to problems of Ireland between 1853 and 1866. Warren points out that, as Chancellor of Exchequer for most of these years, Gladstone seemed more interested in tax policy and fiscal restraint in relation to Ireland than in reflecting on root causes of country's distress and what Government might do to relieve it. But by 1866, Warren argues, Gladstone was beginning to understand more clearly how various Irish issues were interconnected, and how difficult were opportunities for reform in matters of Church, education, and land. Geography is also focus of C. Brad Faught's discussion of Gladstone's ideas and actions while serving as Lord High Commissioner to Ionian Islands in late 1850s. Faught sees this mission as a rehearsal of imperial and international themes that would come to dominate three of Gladstone's four ministries. In this regard, Gladstone's failure to make any headway in sorting out Ionians' Greek nationalism seems less significant than his views on Britain's moral responsibilities that would inform his response to Bulgarian atrocities seventeen years later. …

Economic women: essays on desire and dispossession in nineteenth-century British culture

Economic women: essays on desire and dispossession in nineteenth-century British culture

Book Reviews

Abstract Wapulumuka O. Mulwafu, Conservation Song: A History of Peasant- State Relations and the Environment in Malawi, 1860-2000 (Elias Mandala) David Kinkela, DDT and the American Century: Global Health, Environmental Politics, and the Pesticide that Changed the World (Mark Leeming) Sarah S. Elkind, How Local Politics Shape Federal Policy: Business, Power, and the Environment in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles (Thomas Jundt) Peter Borsay and John K. Walton (eds.), Resorts and Ports: European Seaside Towns since 1700 (Herbert Eiden) Stephanie Spencer, Francis Bedford, Landscape Photography and Nineteenth-Century British Culture: The Artist as Entrepreneur (Jacqueline McIsaac)

Miscellany and Collegiality in the British Periodical Press: TheHarmonicon(1823–1833)

The Harmonicon was, in its day, London's premiere music periodical, gaining a wide and loyal readership at home and abroad. Perhaps the most the distinctive feature of the journal was its deliberate imperative to raise what it considered to be the ‘lamentable’ level of musical knowledge held by the British reading public. The journal's editor, William Ayrton, was deeply concerned that there was a lack of a national school of music in his own country that could ever match that which his rival French and German critics called their own. In this light, I argue that the journal's appeal and economic success was due to a didactic philosophy of ‘collegiality’ and ‘miscellany’ – to borrow William Weber's terms – as a means of disseminating musical knowledge to the broadest readership possible. Through reviewing, critiquing and publishing a remarkably assorted array of national styles and genres of music, the Harmonicon attempted to create a very general type of musical knowledge in Britain in the early nineteenth century, one which looked necessarily beyond national borders in an effort to build up a shared knowledge of music. Data drawn from musical examples spanning all 11 years of the journal's print run is analysed, assessing in particular the high number of international composers featured in the journal. The many miscellaneous strands interwoven throughout the Harmonicon reflect a mode of thinking about music that was integral to a valiant effort to raise the status and awareness of music in early nineteenth-century British culture.

Queer Mormonism: Deuterocanonicity and Discursive Subversion

Research Article| September 01 2012 Queer Mormonism: Deuterocanonicity and Discursive Subversion Jeremy Walker Jeremy Walker University of Colorado Boulder jeremy.s.walker@colorado.edu Jeremy Walker has recently completed an MA in English at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he was primarily interested in nineteenth-century British literature and culture. He plans to go on to complete a PhD. He was a summer 2012 fellow at the Mormon Studies Summer Seminar hosted by Brigham Young University's religious studies center, the Maxwell Institute. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google English Language Notes (2012) 50 (2): 127–137. https://doi.org/10.1215/00138282-50.2.127 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Jeremy Walker; Queer Mormonism: Deuterocanonicity and Discursive Subversion. English Language Notes 1 September 2012; 50 (2): 127–137. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00138282-50.2.127 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsEnglish Language Notes Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2012 Regents of the University of Colorado2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Recountings: On Dickens’s Financial Memory

great house is, therefore, a huge circulating library. Charles Dickens on Bank of England (1850) Without memory, there is no debt Margaret Atwood, Payback: Debt and Shadow Side of Wealth (2008) In a 2006 TLS review article on architectural history of Bank of England, Gillian Darley thus describes vast expansion of Bank's operations in early-nineteenth century: By 1815, more than a thousand were working on Bank site, a factory floor in which time-keeping, discipline and mechanization ordered what may have been largest white-collar work force in world (13). This consummate display of order, precision, and systemization contributed to Bank's increasing figuration as an imposing symbol of nation and authority--an edifice responsible for good governance of, as Darley says, with language of exemplarity that so frequently accompanies its description, the largest white-collar work force in world. The Bank, and larger system it inhabited, was evidently an increasing force to be reckoned with. In recent years, a growing body of critical work has carried out a good deal of this reckoning process, encouraging us to consider degree to which institutionalization of banking system informed cultural experience--and cultural production--of nineteenth-century Britain. (1) Such thinking of course extends well beyond bounds of both that period and those of academic enquiry. I point, for instance, to a recent marketing campaign by direct, which compels us to think in similar terms about bank's construction in our own age. In ING'S 2012 Old Ways television commercial, a central feature of its new Forward Banking campaign, viewer enters a looming, grey cavernous space, a bank, which is emptied of employees and customers and, it seems, of its cultural significance as well. (2) In this fascinating piece of revisionism, bank's conventional iconography--the deposit slip; pen with chain attached; limited banking hours, marked on an archaic sign; water cooler, stale coffee, and free donuts; velvet ropes; and, above all, banker's green lamp--are, literally, obliterated, exploding one by one before our eyes. Endless reams of paper reminiscent of Dickens's Circumlocution Office rain down across this financial sepulchre and are replaced, as we move to next shot and comfortable, easy-chair bank of today, by relaxed coffee-sipping individual, happily reviewing his financials on his smooth functioning iPad at his local ING direct Cafe. In rendering such images and objects of banking realm so viscerally obsolescent, taps into a critical aspect of shared cultural memory: this commercial urgently reminds us of degree to which banking, as a physical experience, had once been bound up with individual and daily life, and perhaps, more importantly, it reminds us of just how much of it we have forgotten. And as if bank's connection to our collective memory were not plain enough from images on screen, nostalgic tones of Edith Piaff are called in to overstate case: It's all paid for, wiped out, and forgotten, she sings in her mournfully defiant Je Ne Regrette Rien. What is doing here is attempting to revise, but not altogether alter, our conception of banking as intensely personal, tactile, and experiential. Such a construction of bank can likewise be found, I would contend, in nineteenth-century British culture. Throughout century, period's fiction charts an increasing--if tentative--acceptance of bank's role as both a financial and interpersonal mediator, one often responsible for authentication of individual identity and a guarantor of social legitimacy. In George Eliot's Middlemarch (1874), for example, narrator identifies relocation of saved money from Old stocking at home to the savings-bank in town as one of a range of changes coming to Old provincial society (88). …

English Origins, Jewish Discourse, and the Nineteenth-Century British Novel (review)

Reviewed by: English Origins, Jewish Discourse, and the Nineteenth-Century British Novel Patrick Brantlinger English Origins, Jewish Discourse, and the Nineteenth-Century British Novel, by Heidi Kaufman. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009. 243 pp. $85.00. Heidi Kaufman has written a useful and consistently interesting book. She examines many of the complex ways that "Jewish discourse" is imbricated in nineteenth-century British fiction and culture. In doing so, she critiques Edward Said's Orientalism for its overly binaristic approach to Western depictions of the East. Christianity, after all, emerged from "the Holy Land" and ancient Jewish sources. Kaufman recognizes that Victorian novels are palimpsests, and that one of their underlying texts—more often than not the [End Page 192] principal one—is the Bible (p. 94). Jews also occupied an influential albeit liminal place in 1800s Britain. Among the novels that Kaufman analyzes is Tancred; or, the New Crusade (1847) by future Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, hardly a minor figure in nineteenth-century British and, indeed, global history (pp. 82-92). Kaufman begins by analyzing Britain as a "nested nation" (pp. 1-26), meaning that it was never purely "English" but contained a mix of peoples, cultures, and religions, including, from the Middle Ages on, Jews and Judaism. Just as the Bible contains both Old and New Testaments, moreover, so Anglicanism contains and supposedly goes beyond Roman Catholicism, while all versions of Christianity are obviously indebted to Judaism. As Kaufman demonstrates, this indebtedness is acknowledged in a variety of ways in many Victorian novels, even when they express antisemitism. In her second chapter, she examines the depictions of the Gordon Riots of 1780 in Maria Edgeworth's Harrington and Charles Dickens's Barnaby Rudge. Both authors simultaneously express and struggle to overcome antisemitism. Harrington was Edgeworth's self-conscious albeit ambivalent attempt to deal with the antisemitism she had been criticized for in some of her earlier work. And in treating the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots, Dickens invokes the story of Abraham and Isaac and shows both Gordon and Gashford fantasizing about becoming Jews. Gordon actually did convert to Judaism. "In the upside down world of the riots," Kaufman notes, "Gordon, the president of the Protestant Association, becomes a Jew while Jewish homes are marked as belonging to a 'True Protestant'" (p. 55) to escape the violence of the rioters. Chapter Three shows how Judah's Lion, an 1843 novel by evangelical Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, deals with a return to the Holy Land in a way comparable to the "new crusade" of Disraeli's aristocratic Young England hero, Tancred. Tonna's Anglo-Jewish protagonist Alick Cohen "watches British flags hoisted over Middle Eastern territories" (p. 60) and is proud to be both Jewish and British. Judah's lion, which Richard I supposedly added "to the English national flag on the occasion of its conquest over Jerusalem during the Third Crusade" (p. 60), symbolizes the historic and religious unity of England and Palestine, with British imperial expansion into the Middle East as the parallel to Alick's conversion to Christianity. Like other Victorian authors, however, Tonna runs into the difficulty that Jewishness had come to be understood as racial, and not just as cultural and religious: Alick converts, but biologically he will forever be Jewish—a stumbling block for those who considered the white, Anglo-Saxon race superior to all other races. In Tancred, Kaufman goes on to claim, "Christian culture is not defined against a Jewish other but as a product of Jewish origins" (p. 83). Disraeli was [End Page 193] less interested than Tonna in religion, however, and more interested in race, and particularly in reversing the standard racial polarities. Kaufman believes that Tancred meets his match in the Jewish Eva, and that her Judaism trumps or at least complements his Christianity, which is partially true. But she overlooks Tancred's friendship with the Young Syrian Fakredeen and also Tancred's encounter with "the Angel of Arabia" on Mt. Sinai, who tells him that "Arabian" or Semitic peoples have produced all of the world's great empires and religions. Fakredeen and the Angel add Islam to Tancred's melting pot, and Disraeli's term "Arabian" is more...

Stephanie Spencer. Francis Bedford, Landscape Photography and Nineteenth-Century British Culture: The Artist as Entrepreneur. Ashgate: Farnham and Burlington, 2011. ISBN: 978-1409408536. Price: US$99.95/£55.00

Stephanie Spencer. Francis Bedford, Landscape Photography and Nineteenth-Century British Culture: The Artist as Entrepreneur. Ashgate: Farnham and Burlington, 2011. ISBN: 978-1409408536. Price: US$99.95/£55.00. Un article de la revue Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net (Coleridge and his Circle: New Perspectives) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.

British Romanticism and the Catholic Question: Religion, History and National Identity, 1778–1829 by Michael Tomko

Michael Tomko. British Romanticism and the Question: Religion, History and National Identity, 1778-1829. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Pp. xii+224. $80. past several years have witnessed a growing interest among scholars housed in English and literature departments in the relationship between religion, especially Judaism and Catholicism, and British national culture of the nineteenth century. Michael Ragussis's Figures of Conversion: Jewish Question and English National Identity (1995), Gauri Viswanathan's Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (1998), Mark Canuel's Religion, Toleration, and British Writing, 1790-1830 (2002), and Michael Wheeler's Old Enemies: and Protestant in Nineteenth-Century English Culture (2006) have represented some of the most searching and influential of this happily growing field, offering not only readings of specific works, authors, or historical figures but also providing models and opening up critical space for further investigations. Michael Tomko's excellent British Romanticism and the Question is certainly a significant addition to that shelf, locating itself in the tradition of those earlier works, all of which it engages, and forging its own path. British Romanticism and the Question posits that the debates over the Catholic Question, in terms of national politics and in terms of individual relationships between groups of writers, shaped the worldview and the literature of the Romantic era to a much greater degree than we have generally supposed. Focusing on the five decades of alternating movements toward and away from the legislative granting of increased rights to subjects of Britain and Ireland culminating in the 1829 passage of Emancipation, the book traces the tropes of those debates in the parliamentary records, the articulations of historiographical principles, the personal correspondence and memoirs, and the literature of the age. Like most of the critics he addresses, Tomko is less interested in the construction of personal identity (let alone notions of deviance or abjection that have frequently grounded analyses of minority religious cultures) than in the way that Catholicism functioned as a political category; neither Freud nor Foucault appears in the extensive (and generally very well-chosen) bibliography, but Stephen Greenblatt does. This is a book that implicitly argues (rightly, I believe) that we need to start thinking about nineteenth-century religious experience not as a question of transgression but rather as one of the everyday. In his own words, Tomko offers an account of the cultural and literary history of the conflict over the Question in the Romantic period; of the ways in which it forced a disturbing, self-conscious re-examination of the foundations of British national identity at a contentious time of political upheaval in France and Ireland; and of its central role in how the viewed themselves and of how we now view the romantics (2). He points out that not only were some of the most canonical Romantics lined up explicitly on one side or the other on the question of Emancipation--Wordsworth and Southey and Coleridge against it and Hazlitt, Hunt, Keats, Byron and Shelley (at least initially) for it--but that they communicated and argued with each other publicly and privately about it. While the specific issue of enfranchisement might seem narrow, Tomko argues that it influenced Romantic-era approaches to a wide expanse of political, historiographical, and ultimately literary questions: The 1820s debate was a cathection of issues ranging from nation-building, the formation of imperial identity, genre and literary politics, the narration of history, Irish-British relations, the limits of the public sphere, the abolition movement, women's rights, the campaign for parliamentary reform and the role of religion in public life (3). …

Francis Bedford, landscape photography and nineteenth-century British culture: the artist as entrepreneur

Contents: Introduction The photographer and his setting Wild North Wales The healthful Devon coast The pastoral Midlands Architecture, religion and architects The tour of the Middle East, 1862 Appendices Bibliography Index.

The Aryan Blake: Hinduism, Art and Revelation in William Blake's Pitt and Nelson Paintings

This article considers William Blake’s use of Indian imagery, a topic which has exercised recent scholars of Blake’s work but which has led to an interpretative stalemate due to differing conceptions of Indian art’s meanings within nineteenth-century British culture. Blake’s Spiritual Form of Nelson Guiding Leviathan and Spiritual Form of Pitt Guiding Behemoth (c.1805–9, Tate) have proved particularly problematic in this regard. Focusing on these two paintings, this article seeks to move beyond the critical impasse by situating these works within the interlinked contexts of Blake’s political and spiritual beliefs, the purposefully cross-cultural and visionary dynamic of his work, and contemporary responses to the expansion of British imperial power in India.

Nadja Durbach, Spectacle of Deformity: Freak Shows and Modern British Culture (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010), pp. xiii + 273, £27.95/$39.95, hardback, ISBN: 978-0-520-25768-9.

Nadja Durbach, Spectacle of Deformity: Freak Shows and Modern British Culture (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010), pp. xiii + 273, £27.95/$39.95, hardback, ISBN: 978-0-520-25768-9. - Volume 55 Issue 4

The English Cult of Literature: Devoted Readers, 1774-1880. William R. McKelvy.The Old Enemies: Catholic and Protestant in Nineteenth-Century English Culture. Michael Wheeler.

<i>The English Cult of Literature: Devoted Readers, 1774-1880</i>. William R. McKelvy.<i>The Old Enemies: Catholic and Protestant in Nineteenth-Century English Culture</i>. Michael Wheeler.