Nineteenth-century Popular Culture Research Articles

The Victorian Baby in Print: Infancy, Infant Care, and Nineteenth-Century Popular Culture by Tamara S. Wagner (review)

The Victorian Baby in Print: Infancy, Infant Care, and Nineteenth-Century Popular Culture by Tamara S. Wagner (review)

The Victorian Baby in Print: Infancy, Infant Care, and Nineteenth-Century Popular Culture by Tamara S. Wagner

The Victorian Baby in Print: Infancy, Infant Care, and Nineteenth-Century Popular Culture by Tamara S. Wagner

The Victorian Baby in Print: Infancy, Infant Care, and Nineteenth-Century Popular Culture by Tamara S. Wagner

The Victorian Baby in Print: Infancy, Infant Care, and Nineteenth-Century Popular Culture by Tamara S. Wagner

Writing Maternity: Medicine, Anxiety, Rhetoric, and Genre by Dara Rossman Regaignon, and: The Victorian Baby in Print: Infancy, Infant Care, and Nineteenth Century Popular Culture by Tamara S. Wagner

Writing Maternity: Medicine, Anxiety, Rhetoric, and Genre by Dara Rossman Regaignon, and: The Victorian Baby in Print: Infancy, Infant Care, and Nineteenth Century Popular Culture by Tamara S. Wagner

Review of Monica Cohen, Pirating Fictions: Ownership and Creativity in Nineteenth-Century Popular Culture.

Review of Monica Cohen, Pirating Fictions: Ownership and Creativity in Nineteenth-Century Popular Culture.

Tamara S. Wagner. The Victorian Baby in Print: Infancy, Infant Care, and Nineteenth-Century Popular Culture

<scp>Tamara S. Wagner</scp>. <i>The Victorian Baby in Print: Infancy, Infant Care, and Nineteenth-Century Popular Culture</i>

“Theatricals of Day”: Emily Dickinson and Nineteenth-Century Popular Culture by Sandra Runzo

Reviewed by: “Theatricals of Day”: Emily Dickinson and Nineteenth-Century Popular Culture by Sandra Runzo George Boziwick (bio) Runzo, Sandra. “Theatricals of Day”: Emily Dickinson and Nineteenth-Century Popular Culture. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2019. 240 pp. $27.95. My own interest in Sandra Runzo’s work was first piqued when reading in Cristanne Miller’s Reading in Time: Emily Dickinson in the Nineteenth Century (2012) a tantalizing footnote (217 n1) and a citation (269) for a book manuscript by Runzo concerning Dickinson and popular culture. The following year, Runzo’s fascinating essay “Popular Culture” was included in Emily Dickinson in Context, edited by Eliza Richards. Theatricals of Day has arrived, and it is indeed the book for which many of us have been waiting. Each chapter encounters and enlivens a broad area of the spectrum of popular culture with Emily Dickinson as a central participant. Runzo asks in her introduction, “[W]hat are the ‘Theatricals’ of Dickinson’s day? Played out within both public settings and private spaces, they are the turbulent narratives regarding human rights and human identity, the variations of captivity that stole or constrained people’s lives, and a civil war, all of which entranced yet rived the nation” (3). Runzo commences her study by giving the reader a fair and familiar warning: “Studying some of the day’s popular theatricals, especially those forms that Dickinson herself was most drawn to or participated in, does not explain her, although recognizing her enjoyment in and engagement with a number of different forms of popular culture helps us to see her differently and, I think, more fully. Dickinson’s alignment with the tropes and narratives of popular culture turns a light on provocative shimmering blends of fact and fiction, revealing and dramatizing what is difficult to see, know, and tell” (15–16). [End Page 48] Knowing and telling or more precisely not telling was something Dickinson alluded to a number of times (L 190, 261). With that trope as a guide, Runzo’s historical study consistently uses, as its home base, edges or shadows of popular culture, where ambiguities of race, captivity, and otherness were both explored and exploited. Ultimately Runzo escorts us outward into the public spaces where the commodification and commercialization of these identities, by way of the platform of theatrical display, captivated the public in the form of the circus, menagerie, the minstrel show, and the gothic novel. Runzo shines a full and penetrating light on these and other issues, contextualizing the faceted range of historic scholarship while seamlessly introducing Dickinson, her poems, and her personae into the enlarging picture as an eager and willing participant. Chapter One, “Emily Dickinson’s American Museum,” explores Dickinson’s curiosity about the “extraordinary exhibits” associated with the Dime Museum, the Menagerie, and the circus, entertainments that enticed her and the world at large with their fantastical attractions of otherness. For Dickinson, the circus, the “show” (Fr1270) contained signifiers of near religious engagement, animated by creatures of wonder – materializations of the “Holy Ghosts in Cages!” “A transport one cannot contain” (33/Fr212). Dickinson certainly identified with the whole world of human and animal creatures both high and low that these entertainments offered, and her poetry absorbed it. As Runzo says, “As one gazes into the cosmorama of the poems one views scenes of the majestic and the marginal, of the ecstatic and the agonized” (18). In positioning Dickinson’s poetic voice within the phenomena of these theatrical entertainments, Runzo concludes that “If, through her poems, she evokes incongruity, if she is unrestrained by the boundaries of the body, if she eludes classification, if she becomes a riddle, then she is not so different from the extraordinary exhibits of the nineteenth-century dime museum” (26). In her chapter on Dickinson and popular music, Sandra Runzo pays particular interest to the music of the famous Hutchinson Family Singers as both a social / political as well as musical model for Dickinson’s verse (55). Dickinson collected five popular songs associated with the Hutchinsons. Four of them are in her bound volume of published sheet music (in the Dickinson Collection in the Houghton Library, Harvard University).1 The Hutchinsons were...

Review: Pirating Fictions: Ownership and Creativity in Nineteenth-Century Popular Culture by Monica F. Cohen

Review: Pirating Fictions: Ownership and Creativity in Nineteenth-Century Popular Culture by Monica F. Cohen

The Multiple Lives of Billy Waters: Dangerous Theatricality and Networked Illustrations in Nineteenth-Century Popular Culture

Billy Waters ( c. 1780–1823), the ‘King of the Beggars’, was a London street-performer and a well-known figure in early nineteenth-century popular culture, yet despite this he has received no sustained critical or cultural attention. Close attention to depictions of Waters offers the potential for developing a new model of 1820s and 1830s popular culture that shows – in more detail than the critical models currently available – how popular theatre connects with print and visual media. The use and reuse of Waters’ image allows us to see how Regency popular culture had a specific kind of matrix in which characters, scenes, and images were used and reused across media: with Waters as a case study we can track the ways in which representations of theatricality as a mode of urban life spread across popular culture in a series of networked illustrations. This article analyses visual and textual representations of Billy Waters to suggest a new approach to ascertaining the relationship between ideological agency and popular cultural forms. Building on Robert Darnton’s more linear ‘communication circuit’ it proposes the model of the ‘communication network’ to give new insight into the ways in which theatre and its visual culture function across Regency popular forms.

American Polka in the Media: From Next to Nothing to 24/7

From its very inception as a nineteenth century popular culture fad, the media presence of polka music has been crucial to its diffusion. In the 1940s and 1950s, polka enjoyed a high profile in American mass media. By the 1990s this presence was reduced to next to nothing. The advent of digital media has generated new platforms for the creation and sharing of polka music: internet radio, cable and satellite TV, and on-line videos. These new media have changed the nature of the interaction of communities of polka enthusiasts.

Monica F. Cohen, Pirating Fictions: Ownership and Creativity in Nineteenth-Century Popular Culture

Monica F. Cohen, <i>Pirating Fictions: Ownership and Creativity in Nineteenth-Century Popular Culture</i>

The Queer Contact Zone: Empire and Military Masculinity in the Memoirs of Hannah Snell and Mary Anne Talbot, 1750–1810

The cross-dressed female soldier played a prominent role within Anglophone popular culture from the American Revolution through the Napoleonic Wars, appearing in ballads, comic operas, plays, and life writing. Feminist and queer analyses of these figures have largely been celebratory, framing historical military cross-dressers as working-class heroines or important examples of an emerging model of female masculinity. However, these interpretations have yet to acknowledge how these transgressive figures' claims to subjectivity as representatives of the British military depend upon active participation in the imperial project. These female soldiers' ability to perform masculinity is contingent upon a narrative and discursive investment in colonialism, violence, and racial hegemony. Using concepts from contemporary decolonial theory as a point of entry into eighteenth- and nineteenth-century popular culture, this article documents how the memoirs of two combat veterans–Hannah Snell and Mary Anne Talbot–serve as early examples of what Jasbir Puar and others describe as "homonationalism." By repeatedly marking the difference between their own "queerness" and the strangeness of the cisgender women, slaves, and indigenous people they encounter, Snell and Talbot garner legitimacy within the dominant by aligning themselves with masculinity, patriotism, and imperialism. Re-examining these warriors' self-proclaimed "surprising adventures" within their colonial context reveals an unsettling relationship between queer historicism and the history of imperialism.

Pirating Fictions: Ownership and Creativity in Nineteenth-Century Popular Culture by Monica F. Cohen

Reviewed by: Pirating Fictions: Ownership and Creativity in Nineteenth-Century Popular Culture by Monica F. Cohen Carrie Sickmann Han COHEN, MONICA F. Pirating Fictions: Ownership and Creativity in Nineteenth-Century Popular Culture. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017. 312 pp. $45.00 cloth and eBook. When a colleague suggested that I read Monica F. Cohen's Pirating Fictions to inform my work on unauthorized continuations, I wasn't expecting a book on literal parrot-toting, wooden-legged pirates. In it, Cohen links maritime piracy to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century practices of unauthorized reprinting and adaptation in ways that sometimes strained my credulity but nonetheless impressed me with her ingenuity, entertaining delivery, breadth of knowledge, and unexpectedly captivating interpolations. Pirating Fictions argues that in nineteenth-century pirate fiction "the pirate becomes a vehicle of profound tension between an emergent ideal of intellectual property and a literary culture whose emphatically collective, derivative, citational character tends to confound claims of individual originality and ownership" (2-3). In other words, it argues that nineteenth-century authors employ the figure of the pirate to work through their ambivalent responses to literary piracy: many objected to the reprints and plagiarisms siphoning profits from their own works while simultaneously celebrating collective ownership and authorship in the abstract. Cohen narrates her own surprise at discovering this ambivalence in the introduction to the book, where she writes, I expected nineteenth-century pirate fiction to craft allegories that defended personal artistic ownership against literary dishonesty of all sorts….What I found, however, was that many of the same writers who suffered from literary piracy of their fiction also fictionalized maritime pirates…in ways that celebrate them as…figures whose affective energies make a case against a Romantic originality that emphasized individual intellectual ownership. (2) Cohen devotes the book to making meaning of this disconnect, to explaining why and how authors use maritime piracy as a metaphor for their conflicting views of literary piracy. At first I questioned this impulse, wondering if the disconnect didn't simply indicate a lack of correlation. After all, sometimes isn't a pirate just a pirate? But Cohen assembles evidence from multiple archives and disciplines that cast pirates as "charismatic storytellers and dramatic entertainers," thus positioning them as figures laden with metatextual significance. While pirates are the central conceit of the book, to my mind they aren't central to its primary payoff, which I understand to be tracing canonical nineteenth-century [End Page 445] authors' conflicted responses to evolving conceptions of authorship and grounding those responses in the interdependence of print and theater. Cohen organizes the book according to "three waves of copyright discussion" (13): the first centers on the personalized model of authorship outlined in the Copyright Act of 1814, the second on the challenges of regulating dramatic performances of published novels as reflected in debates about the 1833 Dramatic Literary Property Act, and the last on the free-trade ideology and role of international copyright regulation discussed in the 1878 Report of the Royal Commission on Copyright. Using an impressive interdisciplinary approach, she weaves theater history, print culture, literary criticism, and maritime history into each chapter. Chapter One establishes Defoe's ambivalent view of commerce as an attractive alternative to property; Chapter Two highlights Byron's use of melodramatic conventions to cultivate his authorial celebrity; Chapter Three outlines Scott's emphasis on depersonalized and collective authorship; Chapter Four reveals Cooper's international fame to be a product of the unregulated stage; Chapter Five juxtaposes Dickens's notorious battles over American reprinting with his devotion to the same theater that appropriated his works; Chapter Six exposes Gilbert and Sullivan's anti-property themes in the very play, The Pirates of Penzance, designed to facilitate their protest of American literary piracy; Chapter Seven suggests that Stevenson's playful representation of literary looting as cliché disguises the anti-property energies of free trade in discussions about copyright; and Chapter Eight depicts Barrie's resistance to proprietary authorship as an aesthetic statement about creativity. Cohen uses the "staginess" of the nineteenth-century pirate to elucidate some of the complex connections between copyright history and theater history (8). In doing so, she contributes an important voice to...

Pirating Fictions: Ownership and Creativity in Nineteenth-Century Popular Culture

Pirating Fictions: Ownership and Creativity in Nineteenth-Century Popular Culture

Dr. Corry’s National Diorama of Ireland and Irish Performance in Nineteenth-century Urban Popular Culture

Dr. Corry’s National Diorama of Ireland and Irish Performance in Nineteenth-century Urban Popular Culture

Napoleonic Periodicals and the Childhood Imagination: The Influence of War Commentary on Charlotte and Branwell Brontë’s Glass Town and Angria

The impact of the Napoleonic Wars was keenly felt by Charlotte and Branwell Brontë in their post-war juvenilia (1829‒39). Their imaginary worlds of Glass Town and Angria were primarily based on the Duke of Wellington and Napoleon Bonaparte. The siblings used post-Waterloo accounts in periodicals to reshape and reanimate the relationship between these two military heroes. Examining the characteristics imprinted on Wellington and Bonaparte by the contemporary press, this article argues that the Brontës’ writings provide important commentary on the worship of soldier figures in the periodical press and its enduring influence on early nineteenth-century popular culture.

Who Will Not Shudder to Hear?

Far into the nineteenth century popular culture was based on tradition. Using Dutch and German murder songs, the author explores to what extent this situation changed around 1850. Wherever these changes occur, they signalled social renewal. But street singers had a mind of their own, even in these matters. And sometimes the news they brought travelled from far – really far. How reliable can that news be?

“Dead Eyes Open”: The Role of Experiments in Galvanic Reanimation in Nineteenth-Century Popular Culture

During the first decades of the 19th century, a number of prominent scientists conducted experiments in the revival of dead organisms using new galvanic technologies. In several cases, these experiments were conducted on human bodies, using the corpses of executed criminals. Such experiments captured the cultural imaginary of the day, posing new questions about the relationship between emergent technologies, automated movement, and human agency. This article examines the role played by spectacle, aesthetics, and new practices and technologies of visualization in these scientific experiments.

Deep-Seated Barriers to End-of-Life Care Improvement in the Twenty-first Century

Deep-Seated Barriers to End-of-Life Care Improvement in the Twenty-first Century David Clark (bio) Emily K. Abel. The Inevitable Hour: A History of Caring for Dying Patients in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. viii + 226 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $32.95. By the late nineteenth century, the people of Europe and North America were living longer and had rising expectations of health and well-being, but with the benefits of longevity and the diminished threat of early death came other consequences. The predominant causes of death started to shift ground—from the sudden demise brought on by infection, disaster, and plague to protracted dying associated with the emerging chronic diseases of the modern era—not least cancer and tuberculosis. Whereas in the Middle Ages in Europe, the death that came too swiftly was something to be feared and defended against, now concerns began to grow about lengthy dying and the suffering it might entail. Mid–nineteenth-century popular culture presented idealized images of a slow and controlled farewell to the world, with family members gathered around and confidence in a passage to another and better world. But, by the close of the century, preoccupations were emerging about the manner of dying—now coming to be seen not only as a social and cultural event but also as potentially a medical process. This brought growing unease in the disposition towards dying. Changing personnel around the deathbed, secrecy about the imminence of death, as well as the desire to quell the threat of pain and suffering—all reveal a new anxiety that opened up a space for medical intervention. The nineteenth century, for the French historian Phillipe Ariès, was associated with the emergence of new sentimental orientations to death that reflected, in particular, major changes within the culture and structure of family life. As the meaning of family relationships deepened and became more nuanced, parting with a dying relative and subsequent grief for that loss became increasingly emotional and expressive. A growing emphasis fell on the emotional pain of separation and on keeping the dead alive in memory. This was enhanced by new developments in photography that enabled carefully staged postmortem images to be captured and preserved for posterity. It also meant elaborate rituals of mourning and funeral observance as well [End Page 751] as the emergence of the cult of the grave as a family resting-place. Undoubtedly, it led to new representations of the deathbed itself. The wider Romantic movement contributed to notions of the “beautiful death,” to la mort de toi (“thy death”) personified in the death of a loved one. Ariès also showed that, in the nineteenth century, the rise of modern science brought challenges to religious authority and, specifically, in this context, to the necessity of dying in the presence of the official representatives of formal religion. For Ariès, medical men began to replace priests, clergy, and ministers at the bedsides of the dying. But this created a moral vacuum. For if the role of medicine was to focus on the technical preoccupations of attending to the relief of pain and the easing of physical distress, who was to address the fears of the dying, the distress of the bereaved, and the achievement of the “good death”? There has been a tendency to see this as the period in which dying was drained of meaning by science and medicine—forcing life’s end to retreat from its public and family dimensions into the sequestered spaces of hospitals and other institutions. This was also strengthened by the growing tendency to shield the dying person from the reality of their fate. For Ariès, the mid-nineteenth century was therefore the origin of “the lie” wherein the gravity of the dying person’s situation was kept from them—and death was on the way to becoming “shameful and forbidden.” Emily Abel’s thoroughly researched book steps into this broad historical narrative and gives context, detail, and definition. Focused on the American experience, and with some stretching of the period at either end, she takes us from the close of the nineteenth century to the mid-1960s, explaining how the movement...

Editorial Note

Editorial Note Cristanne Miller This issue foregrounds the topic of performance. Contributors write about performance as a subject in Dickinson’s poetry in relation to nineteenth-century popular performance culture; about how to perform Dickinson’s poems aloud; about Dickinson’s use of Hamlet as a structuring text for considerations of mortality; and about her negotiation of power relationships in poems having to do with (among other things) gender. Performance is also an aspect of Dickinson’s reception worldwide. While translation is not a performance as such, it certainly involves cultural as well as linguistic interpretation—as another essay of this issue indicates, and as previous essays published in the Journal on Dickinson’s translation and reception make clear. Events celebrating Dickinson outside the United States include, among many readings and symposiums, gatherings in Brazil, Italy, Finland, France, and Japan—and two upcoming conferences: in November, at Fudan University, “Emily Dickinson Dwells in China: Possibilities of Translation and Transcultural Perspectives,” and in March 2015, in Paris, on “Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson.” More literal performances also abound. Marathon readings of many or all of Dickinson’s poems (or of all poems as represented in a major edition) have occurred annually, occasionally, or at least once in cities including Amherst, MA; Buffalo, NY; Houston, TX; Portland, OR; and St. Paul, MN. Even Mackinac Island in the upper peninsula of Michigan has hosted one such marathon reading, in conjunction with the Emily Dickinson Museum and involving at least three women dressed in white. As Dickinson knew, one performs also by attending public events: “The Show is not the Show / But they that go” (Fr 1270). We hope you are enjoying the “Menagerie” of daily life and its spectacular performances. [End Page vi] Copyright © 2014 The Johns Hopkins University Press