Queen Victoria's Reign Research Articles

EXPLORING THE HISTORICAL LAYERS OF VICTORIAN SOCIETY & FASHION TRENDS: A LITERARY REVIEW

The Victorian era, spanning Queen Victoria's reign from 1837 to 1901, witnessed a complex interplay of societal norms, cultural trends, economic factors, and gender roles that profoundly influenced fashion. This era was characterized by a strict code of morality and respectability, leading to clothing that emphasized modesty and concealment, along with a distinctive class-based approach to attire. The fascination with Orientalism and the Arts and Crafts Movement left a distinct mark on fashion, introducing exotic elements and handmade details. Economic and technological factors, notably the Industrial Revolution, transformed the fabric market and influenced clothing availability and affordability. The proliferation of visual media disseminated fashion trends, while distinct men's and women's fashion reflected the "separate spheres" ideology. This exploration of Victorian fashion is not merely a retrospective analysis but an examination of how clothing serves as a mirror to society. The legacy of this era endures, influencing contemporary fashion and underscoring the enduring relationship between attire and culture. The study of Victorian fashion offers a deeper understanding of how societal values, cultural dynamics, economic forces, and gender constructs intertwine to shape the clothing choices of a bygone era, leaving a rich and resonant tapestry of historical and cultural significance.

IMPORTANT ASPECTS OF ENGLISH POETRY IN THE AGE OF MODERNISM

Most often, academics propose that the end of Queen Victoria's reign (1901) could be considered as the starting point if we were to think of a precise historical period from which Modernism begins. Additionally, it was at this time that Britain's protracted period of stability came to an end. Due to the Boer War (1899–1902) and the immense impact imperialism had on English society, the nation was going through a time of shock. People started to pay attention to the social issues in their culture because they were tired of the exhausting characteristics of imperial growth. These changes laid the foundation for significant literary and social revolutions. It was gradually becoming apparent that the prior conventional forms were disappearing from literary genres including the novel, theater, and poetry.

«СЕВЕР И ЮГ»: ИСТОРИЯ ДВУХ КУЛЬТУР ИЛИ ИСТОРИЯ ПЕРЕМЕН? / “NORTH AND SOUTH”: A STORY OF TWO CULTURES OR A STORY OF CHANGE?

The novel of the British writer Elizabeth Gaskell "North and South" is often put on a par with the industrial novels of that era, the main theme of which, as a rule, was the opposition of the worldviews of the middle and working class. However, taking the historical context of the novel into account, namely the era of Queen Victoria's reign as a period of progress and rapid changes, we tend to consider "North and South" a novel about changes and mutual influence of phenomena opposite in nature, which enables us to understand the present novel as a novel of upbringing. These processes take place in the novel simultaneously at several levels (territorial, social and personal), at the same time transforming the socio-cultural space of the whole of England. The railway, a symbol of technological progress and industrialization, connects the agrarian south and the industrial north, thereby actualizing changes at the territorial level. Margaret Hale and John Thornton not only find a way to reconcile the two existing views within the middle class, but also find a way to mutual understanding with representatives of the working class. In the historical and social perspective, this can be seen as progress at the level of social and class conflict. Finally, the characters experience changes in their own characters and go through a reassessment of the value system. It is noteworthy that changes occur not only at each of the levels in particular, but at all three at the same time, with each of them serving as a catalyst for transformations in other areas. Thus, "North and South" becomes the embodiment of the progress of England in the middle of XIX century.

Queen Boudica and Historical Culture in Britain: An Image of Truth, by Martha Vandrei

Reviewed by: Queen Boudica and Historical Culture in Britain: An Image of Truth by Martha Vandrei Arianne Chernock (bio) Queen Boudica and Historical Culture in Britain: An Image of Truth, by Martha Vandrei; pp. xi + 233. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2018, £60.00, $74.00. Victorianists are probably familiar with Queen Boudica. That is because Boudica—the leader of the ancient Iceni tribe who staged a bloody rebellion against the Romans in AD 61 in retaliation for the enslavement of her family and rape of her two daughters—figured prominently in nineteenth-century British life. Victorian children committed William Cowper's Boadicea: An Ode (1782) to memory, while archaeological enthusiasts surveyed Hampstead Heath searching for Boudica's remains. In 1898, Thomas Thornycroft's imposing statue of Boudica was erected at the end of Westminster Bridge, within a stone's throw of Parliament—surely a sign of Boudica's primacy of place in Victorian culture. For a nation headed by a female sovereign and committed to imperial expansion, the draw was obvious. Boudica provided a useable past. Or so the story goes. Martha Vandrei wants to shake up this narrative. In her ambitious if at times unwieldy Queen Boudica and Historical Culture in Britain: An Image of Truth, Vandrei situates Boudica in the broader sweep of history and insists that the Victorian fascination with the ancient queen was nothing new. Yes, Boudica provided a convenient predecessor to Queen Victoria; Victorians on occasion referred to Boudica as Victoria I. And yes, she anchored Britons' late-nineteenth-century imperial ambitions. But Britons had long been intrigued by Boudica, "one of the first named figures in British history" (83). Since the Elizabethan period, Vandrei shows, they had been [End Page 324] playing out Boudica's life on both the page and stage, to different ends and with different purposes. Continuity, rather than rupture, drives Vandrei's account. Building on some of the themes introduced by Jodi Mikalachki in her The Legacy of Boadicea: Gender and Nation in Early Modern England (1998), Vandrei proposes that we use Boudica as a lens through which to view how Britons across the centuries have wrestled with and attempted to project meaning onto their past. In this sense, Vandrei is as much concerned with Boudica in particular as with the rise of so-called historical culture in Britain. By looking at the ways in which various writers, poets, playwrights, sculptors, and artists engaged with Boudica over time, Vandrei contends, we learn much about the formation of the historical discipline. It is here that the subtitle for Vandrei's book—"an image of truth"—becomes crucially important. Boudica, Vandrei argues, played a key role in helping Britons determine what distinguished history (with its claims to truth and authenticity, and emphasis on evidence) from other forms of knowledge. These are weighty themes, and Vandrei grounds them by homing in on specific moments: the dynamic relationship between dramatic performances and prose histories of Boudica in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the politicization of Boudica's story in the wake of the Glorious Revolution, Boudica and the nineteenth-century search for "brave female hero[es]" through which to interpret and legitimate Queen Victoria's reign, and Boudica's place in early cinema (115). Along the way, Vandrei makes some surprising—and welcome—interventions. We learn, for example, that Britons were producing so-called serious history long before the rise of an alleged history market in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We also discover that these histories were being produced in all sorts of locations and that critics and audiences, as well as authors, helped to shape the meanings attached to Boudica's story. We also develop a greater appreciation for the role of theater in the rise of the field of history. In the process, Vandrei also provides a nuanced assessment of Victorians' own complex relationship with Boudica. She shows that Victorians were not always enthusiastic in their embrace of Boudica and that the queen's connection to Victorian imperialism could be quite strained. During the Indian Uprisng of 1857, for example, Britons struggled to determine if Boudica should be invoked on the side of the colonial ruler or the...

Harriet Tubman: Transnationalism and the Land of a Queen in the Late Antebellum

Abstract Harriet Tubman and female fugitives from the United States maintained elevated expectations for British Canada during the late antebellum period. Their quest to reach Canadian soil was twofold: they wanted to resist enslavement in America, and also to sidestep sexual exploitation and gender degradation. Female runaways and refugees reasoned that their dual desires could be achieved in Canada, both because slavery had been abolished there via the Imperial Act of 1834 and because Queen Victoria's reign, starting in 1837, gave the impression of greater esteem and rights for women. Unfortunately, what they found on the “Queen's soil” was that racism as well as sexist beliefs were a transcending sentiment, which did not discontinue at the American-Canadian international border. Still, these women in the dominion of Canada fought to challenge constructed borders, whether racial, sexual, or national.

Vauxhall Gardens: a history

From their early beginnings in the Restoration until the final closure in Queen Victoria's reign, Vauxhall Gardens developed from a rural tavern and place of assignation into a dream-world filled with visual arts and music, and finally into a commercial site of mass entertainment. By the 18th century, Vauxhall was crucial to the cultural and fashionable life of the country, patronized by all levels of society, from royal dukes to penurious servants. In the first book on the subject for over fifty years, Alan Borg and David E. Coke reveal the teeming life, the spectacular art and the ever-present music of Vauxhall in fascinating detail. Borg and Coke's historical exposition of the entire history of the gardens makes a major contribution to the study of London entertainments, art, music, sculpture, class and ideology. It reveals how Vauxhall linked high and popular culture in ways that look forward to the manner in which both art and entertainment have evolved in modern times.

Shop names as cultural mediators

1 Globalisation as communicative contextOne of the aspects that has captivated the attention of researchers from various fields (linguistics, marketing, advertising, sociology, psychology, or anthropology), and that has been subject to diverse and multidimensional analysis, both diachronic and synchronic, is the study of trade names, particular branch of onomastics that includes firm names, company names and brand names1. This extremely adaptable and prolific naming pattern has only recently begun to receive attention, as result of the economic boom recorded in the 20th century, and especially as result of the effects of the globalisation era, which is unfolding even as we speak. The extreme changes occurring in technology continuously alter our perspective on communication as linguistic, social, and psychological process, especially since there seem to be no more obstacles that could fundamentally hinder it. With the telegraph and the telephone, with the development of the mass media and the dissemination of the Internet (its availability), communication can today happen instantaneously, regardless of the spatial and temporal limitations that would have up to now rendered impossible the mere chatting of people from distant lands. Within the global village we are said to inhabit, we can communicate with anyone, basically anywhere and anytime. It is how we communicate that makes the difference.The fascination that this new form of settlement weaves is neither new, nor unusual. Thus, what Latin underwent during the Middle Ages (and, in some parts of Europe, even later on), and French throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, English undergoes today. From the first conquests of new territories and the establishment of trading posts in overseas colonies, but mostly during Queen Victoria's reign, the English language was disseminated throughout the Empire on which the sun never set, and became its lingua franca. For obvious political and economic reasons, all the of the colonies were downgraded. Even after the dissolution of the Empire, in the now independent territories (some of which adhered to the Commonwealth of Nations), the status of English as lingua franca never changed, as it continued to be the language of trades, diplomacy, and foreign affairs.If up to the 17th century English proved of the most hospitable in its acceptance of foreign loans (Stojkovic 2005:106), due to the cultural and economic changes it witnessed, it became today's primary donor language. According to Nadezda Stojkovic, In nearly all fields of human knowledge there is very free and versatile linguistic borrowing of English words by other languages (Stojkovic 2005). Therefore it comes as no surprise that during the past 50-60 years, there has been considerable growth in the number of nonnative speakers of English, which proves that it is still perceived as lingua franca, the global language of the new millennium. It has spread with great speed and ease, just like social adhesive.It is virtually impossible now to associate English only with native English speakers; the language is so widely established that it can no longer be thought of as 'owned' by any single nation (Crystal 2010:26). The relativisation of English, entailed, to great extent, by its de-nativisation, is result of the thorough attempts to implement the English culture (and language implicitly) within every other culture that the one in question has been in contact with. As more or less conspicuous sample of cultural imperialism, the diversification of English into many non-native varieties determined that it be perceived as a linguistic software infrastructure (Stojkovic 2005:107), device ensuring cohesion in communication at global level. Whilst doing so, the English language facilitates the contact between the culture that it represents (no longer Imperial Britain, but the consumerist American dream), and the target-culture, which is ready and eager to embrace it due to the mobility it promises. …

South African cricket and British imperialism, 1870–1910

During the later years of Queen Victoria's reign, cricket was as popular as ever in the home country while overseas the game's influence had spread to all boundaries of Britain's Empire. It was during this period too that South Africa, one of England's most recent ‘cricketing colonies’, was experiencing major transition in both society and structure. This essay will explore the early development of cricket in South Africa and investigate its link to British imperialism and colonialism. It will highlight how key agencies and individuals were pivotal in the process of securing the early cricketing ties between England and South Africa. The essay will also investigate the growth of cricket's political significance during the latter part of the nineteenth century – a time when within Britain and her colonies, the game came to symbolize the very essence of an exclusive white, Victorian society.

City Remains Treasure Trove of Painted Ladies

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Information on Host CityFull AccessCity Remains Treasure Trove of Painted LadiesJoan Arehart-TreichelJoan Arehart-TreichelSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:20 Feb 2009https://doi.org/10.1176/pn.44.4.0005aWhen you visit San Francisco for the annual meeting, be sure to pay a call on the “Painted Ladies.”The ladies we're refering to are six rainbow-colored Victorian houses located in a row on Steiner Street between Hayes and Grove streets. A number of Victorian houses in San Francisco have been pained in pastel colors—hence the term “Painted Ladies.” But the most famous of all of them (above) are located on Steiner Street.Credit: SFCVB photo by Christine KriegWhen viewed from Alamo Square—the park across the street—they provide a stunning picture with the modern skyline of downtown San Francisco as background. This view is perhaps the most beloved of all San Francisco views and has made the Painted Ladies world famous.Yet if you are really a devoted fan of Victorian architecture, don't stop with the Painted Ladies. There are some 14,000 other Victorian houses in San Francisco to admire as well, making San Francisco one of the treasure troves of such structures.Victorian architecture got its name from the period in which it became popular—during the reign of Queen Victoria in England in the second half of the 19th century. It is generally known for its complex lines and countless“ bells and whistles”—high-peaked gables, rounded corner towers, gingerbread trim, and other flourishes. But actually the Victorian houses in San Francisco, as well as in other American cities, include a number of variations on this general theme depending on when they were built.For example, from 1840 to 1900 the Gothic Revival style was popular. Houses built in this style had irregular, pitched gable roofs; fanciful eaves; pointed arch windows; and sometimes extravagant ornamentation. The Westerfeld House, built in 1889 for a confectioner named William Westerfeld, is a good example of a San Francisco Gothic-style Victorian house. The house, whose top floor has 360-degree views of San Francisco, is located on the northwest corner of Alamo Square.From 1850 to 1890 the Italianate style was in vogue. Italianate houses were rectangular in shape, tall and narrow, with two to three stories. These houses had angled bay windows and a balustraded stairway leading up to the double doors over which was a curved transom. Italianate-style houses can be found throughout San Francisco. For instance, those on Buchanan Street sport angled bay windows and a heavy cornice typical of the style.During the 1880s and 1890s, the Queen Anne style was all the rage. It was the most elaborate and eccentric of the Victorian architectural styles. Houses were asymmetrical and had steeply pitched, irregular roofs; cylindrical corner towers wearing “witch's hat” turrets; fish-scale shingles; delicate porch posts; stained glass windows; and other embellishments. Even though this style was popular during Queen Victoria's reign, it was named after England's 18th-century Queen Anne, who was associated with grandeur and elegance. A splendid example of the style is the Haas-Lilienthal House, at 2007 Franklin Street in the Pacific Heights neighborhood. It was built in 1886 for William Haas, a Bavarian Jew who immigrated to San Francisco in the 1860s.More information about Victorian houses in San Francisco is posted at<www.inetours.com/Pages/SFNbrhds/Victorian_Homes.html>. Information about a walking tour of San Francisco's Victorian houses offered every Sunday at 2 p.m. is posted at<www.sfcityguides.org>.▪ ISSUES NewArchived

Food and cooking in Victorian England: a history

Nine recipes serve as entry points for detailing the history of food production, cooking, and diet throughout Queen Victoria's reign in England. More than that, however, Broomfield offers an introduction to the world of everyday dining, food preparation, and nutrition during one of the most interesting periods of English history. Food procurement, kitchen duties, and dining conventions were almost always dictated by one's socioeconomic status and one's gender, but questions still remain. Who was most likely to dine out? Who was most likely to be in charge of the family flatware and fine china? Who washed the dishes? Who could afford a fine piece of meat once a week, once a month, or never? How much did one's profession dictate which meal times were observed and when? All these questions and more are answered in this illuminating history of food and cooking in Victorian England.

Victorian Studies in France

Victorian Studies in France Alain Jumeau University of Paris-Sorbonne It is one thing to say that Victorian Studies are thriving in France. It is quite another to prove it. Perhaps a few facts and figures are necessary. Most French scholars involved in Victorian Studies belong to a society known as the SFEVE (Société Française d'Études Victoriennes et Édouardiennes), to which I have belonged ever since its creation in 1976, and whose chairman I have been since 2001. Of course, there may be a few exceptions, but practically all French Victorianists have chosen to belong to this society. Our two annual conferences (one in January and another in May) give them the opportunity of meeting colleagues and presenting papers, which, after a selection has been made bythe editorial board, are published in Cahiers Victoriens et Édouardiens, a journal printed by Montpellier University Press. The titles of both our society and our journal show that Victorian Studies in France are closely linked with Edwardian Studies, for we believe that, as far as cultural trends are concerned, there is no clear-cut division between the end of Queen Victoria's reign and the beginning of King Edward VII's. Nor do we start with the beginning of Queen Victoria's reign in 1837. For reasons of historic continuity, we consider the nineteenth century in general, which, for many historians, begins in 1815, after the Napoleonic Wars, and ends with the First World War. Recently, we have even accommodated scholars working on Jane Austen and the Regency, which tends to demonstrate that our field is indeed the 'Long Nineteenth Century'. During much of the remainder of this presentation of 'Victorian Studies in France', which, as I have just shown, could be called, rather, 'Nineteenth-Century Studies in France', I will use the latest list of members of our society (October 2006) as working material. Our society boasts a total of 191 members, i.e. approximately 8 or 8.5% of all university teachers of English in France. Junior Members: 117 Senior Members: 33 Retired Members: 35 Foreign Members: 6 Total 191 (male: 76, female: 15) Most members specialize either in literature or in 'civilization' (or cultural studies), but there is no real borderline between the two fields of research and a few members manage to bridge the gap between the [End Page 292] two. The fact that, when they specify their own particular interests, they often mention several fields accounts for the difference between the total number of members and the number of special interests. Let us start with literature, which is still more popular than cultural studies, for that is a field that was introduced into the French curriculum more recently (in the 1960s and the 1970s). Here is a list of authors and literary topics mentioned: Austen: 3 Braddon: 1 Brontë sisters: 10 Browning: 2 Carlyle: 2 Carroll: 3 Chesterton: 1 Collins: 2 Conrad: 3 Dickens: 16 Disraeli: 1 Doyle: 1 Eliot: 10 Forster: 3 Gaskell: 7 Gissing: 2 Hardy: 8 Hopkins: 2 James: 3 Kipling: 4 Vernon Lee: 1 Maugham: 1 Meredith: 1 Moore: 1 Morrison: 1 Newman: 3 Pater: 3 Ruskin: 3 Rutherford: 1 Shaw: 2 Stevenson: 3 Tennyson: 1 Thackeray: 2 Trollope: 6 Wilde: 1 Anglo-Indian literature: 5 Children's literature: 2 Detective novel: 2 Edwardian drama: 1 Edwardian fiction: 2 Fantastic literature: 4 Gothic literature: 1 Imperial literature: 2 Literature and science: 1 Literature of the 90s: 6 Neo-Victorian novel: 2 Scottish literature: 1 Sensation novel: 2 Victorian drama: 1 Victorian poetry: 8 War poets: 1 Women's fiction: 1 Women in literature: 1 Women's poetry: 1 This tabulation shows quite clearly that fiction is more represented than poetry and even more than drama, most probably because of the triumph of the novel in England in the nineteenth century. Amongthe novelists, it comes as no surprise that Dickens is given pride of place. [End Page 293] It should be noted that one Dickens scholar works on 'Dickens on screen', a...

Degrees Kelvin: A Tale of Genius, Invention, and Tragedy

LORD KELVIN. In 1840, a precocious 16-year-old by the name of William Thomson spent his summer vacation studying an extraordinarily sophisticated mathematical controversy. His brilliant analysis inspired lavish praise and made the boy an instant intellectual celebrity. As a young scholar William dazzled a Victorian society enthralled with the seductive authority and powerful beauty of scientific discovery. At a time when no one really understood heat, light, electricity, or magnetism, Thomson found key connections between them, laying the groundwork for two of the cornerstones of 19th century science -- the theories of electromagnetism and thermodynamics. Charismatic, confident, and boyishly handsome, Thomson was not a scientist who labored quietly in a lab, plying his trade in monkish isolation. When scores of able tinkerers were flummoxed by their inability to adapt overland telegraphic cables to underwater, intercontinental use, Thomson took to the high seas with new equipment that was to change the face of modern communications. And as the worlda (TM)s navies were transitioning from wooden to iron ships, they looked to Thomson to devise a compass that would hold true even when surrounded by steel. Gaining fame and wealth through his inventive genius, Thomson was elevated to the peerage by Queen Victoria for his many achievements. He was the first scientist ever to be so honored. Indeed, his name survives in the designation of degrees Kelvin, the temperature scale that begins with absolute zero, the point at which atomic motion ceases and there is a complete absence of heat. Sir William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, was Great Britain's unrivaled scientific hero. But as the century drew to a close and Queen Victoria's reign ended, this legendary scientific mind began to weaken. He grudgingly gave way to others with a keener, more modern vision. But the great physicist did not go quietly. With a ready pulpit at his disposal, he publicly proclaimed his doubts over the existence of atoms. He refused to believe that radioactivity involved the transmutation of elements. And believing that the origin of life was a matter beyond the expertise of science and better left to theologians, he vehemently opposed the doctrines of evolution, repeatedly railing against Charles Darwin. Sadly, this pioneer of modern science spent his waning years arguing that the Earth and the Sun could not be more than 100 million years old. And although his early mathematical prowess had transformed our understanding of the forces of nature, he would never truly accept the revolutionary changes he had helped bring about, and it was others who took his ideas to their logical conclusion. In the end Thomson came to stand for all that was old and complacent in the world of 19th century science. Once a scientific force to be reckoned with, a leader to whom others eagerly looked for answers, his peers in the end left him behind -- and then meted out the ultimate punishment for not being able to keep step with them. For while they were content to bury him in Westminster Abbey alongside Isaac Newton, they used his death as an opportunity to write him out of the scientific record, effectively denying him his place in history. Kelvina (TM)s name soon faded from the headlines, his seminal ideas forgotten, his crucial contributions overshadowed. Destined to become the definitive biography of one of the most important figures in modern science, Degrees Kelvin unravels the mystery of a life composed of equal parts triumph and tragedy, hubris and humility, yielding a surprising and compelling portrait of a complex and enigmatic man.

Industrialisation and society: a social history, 1830-1951

Indusrialisation and Society provides an essential introduction to the effects of industrialisation on British society, from Queen Victoria's reign to the birth of the welfare state in the 1940s. This book deals with the remarkable social consequences of the industrial revolution, as Britain changed into an urban society based on industry. As the first nation to undergo an industrial revolution, Britain was also the first to deal with the unprecedented social problems of rapid urbanisation combined with an unparalleled growth in population. Industrialisation and Society looks at contemporary ways in which the government and ordinary people tried to cope with these new pressures, and studies their reactions to the unforseen consequences of the steam revolution. In particular, this indispensable book considers: * the Victorian inheritance * Edwardian England and the Liberal reforms * the two world wars * the Welfare State.

The Quest for the Grail: Arthurian Legend in British Art 1840-1920 by Christine Poulson (review)

REVIEWS135 Westminster Manuscript the leitet O is in blue, the ornamental pen-work flourishes in red, the text written in brown ink. It would be advisable for Garland to drop the —, appropriate in typewritten text, but not for printed typescript in published books, which instead use en and em dashes. Garland could also investigate a better font than the one awarded Brant Pelphrey's fine use of Greek. JULIA BOLTON HOLLOWAY Hermit of the Holy Family, Fiesole, Italy Christine poulson, The Questfor the Grail: Arthurian Legend in British Art 1840— 1920. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press and St. Martin's Press, 1999. Pp. xix, 268. isbn: 0-7190-5379-?. $79.95 (cloth), isbn: 0-7190-5537-7. $29.95 (paper). The Industrial Revolution in Britain created a demand for a new definition of 'gentleman,' one that went beyond landowners, Anglican clergy, military officers and men of law to include an increasingly large and wealthy middle class. A suitable model, combining ideals ofservice, courtesy, fellowship, piety, fidelity and devotion to a monarch, was found in medieval knighthood, especially as depicted in Malory's Morte Darthur. In The Questfor the Grail, Christine Poulson chooses a particular chivalric adventure as a basis for surveying eighty years of art. The exemplary role ofArthurian chivalry was confirmed early in Queen Victoria's reign when William Dyce was commissioned to decorate the Queen's Robing Room in the new Palace of Westminister with frescoes based on Malory, despite the fact that the adulterous courtly love and Catholic religion were subjects 'scarcely appropriate for such an apartment,' as Dyce reminded Prince Albert. Poulson discusses Dyce's strategies in adapting the material for a respectable Protestant society. Malory was also the source for another programmatic series, the Oxford Union murals, begun in 1857. The artists, who came to be known as Pre-Raphaelites and among whom were D.G. Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris, being Anglo-Catholic in sympathy, were so attracted to the Grail legend that they continued to represent it in painting, stained glass and tapestries for the next forty years. An alternate source for Arthurian art was Tennyson's poetry—the early works such as 'The Lady ofShalott,' 'Sir Galahad' and 'Morte d'Arthur' (1842) and the extensive IdylL· ofthe King. Tennyson 'sieved out the undesirable elements and reworked what remained' so that 'the legends could be a useful source of didactic and sentimental subjects.' A significant development ofthe Grail legend's hero by way ofOF. Watts's painting 'Sir Galahad' (1862)—attached to the Quest by its title alone—was the knight's transformation from a lonely contemplative to a memorial figure commemorating young men who had died in war or in peacetime acts ofcourage. To Poulson's substantial list of memorials could be added the window in Moberley's parish church honouring George Mallory, who died in 1924 while trying to conquer Mt. Everest and whose body was recently discovered on the frozen slopes. 136ARTHURIANA The addition of angels in Grail art Poulson attributes to afin de siècle interest in the occult as expressed in Freemasonry, Theosophy and Spiritualism. But as the motif appeared much earlier in Rossetti's and Burne-Jones's art, its source is more likely the medieval iconology retrieved to decorate the numerous Gothic Revival Churches. The second part ofthis study shows the difficulty ofencompassing British Arthurian art under the Grail Quest umbrella when Arthur, Tristan, Merlin, the Fays and the courtly ladies (except Perceval's sister) were not participants. Burne-Jones's personal myth was the non-Christian story of Merlin's enchantment while Morris's was the romance ofTristram and Isoud. The most popular subjects, however, from 1850 to 1914 were Tennyson's women, here discussed in the context of current feminist criticism. WH. Hunt and J.W Waterhouse, we are told, presented the Lady ofShalott as a fallen woman who, because she has stepped out from her appointed sphere and surrendered to sexual temptation, is exposed to judgement and punishment. When King Arthur is the subject, it is his death that interests painters, allowing them to commemorate Prince Albert and to create autumnal sunsets or winter nights, not, I think, influenced...

Annie Besant's Quest for Truth: Christianity, Secularism and New Age Thought

Annie Besant was arguably the most famous, or rather infamous, woman of her age. For much of the 1870s and 1880s she promoted the secularist cause with remarkable vigour. She became a vice- president of the National Secular Society, the members of which thought almost as highly of her as they did of Charles Bradlaugh, the president. In 1889, however, she joined the Theosophical Society in a sensational move that shocked even her closest friends. Eventually she became president of the Theosophical Society, the members of which again revered her almost as much as they did its prophet, Madame Blavatsky. Besant moved from the materialist atheism of the secularists to the New Age thought of the theosophists. All of her previous biographers have emphasised the contrast between these two sets of beliefs. They have been unable to recover any coherence in her activities within the secularist, Fabian and theosophical movements. Indeed, they have spoken of her many lives, as though she wandered aimlessly, if enthusiastically, from cause to cause with no guiding theme whatsoever. When they do look for a pattern in her life, they typically turn not to her reasons for doing what she did, but rather to her hidden needs, such as to follow a dominant man or to exercise her powers. They turn to her emotional make-up to explain her final flight from reason, and they then explain her earlier commitments by reference to the emotions they have uncovered. In contrast, I hope to represent Besant's life as a reasoned quest for truth in the context of the Victorian crisis of faith and the social concerns it helped to raise. Besant, with her secularism, Fabianism and theosophy, was very much of her time, for whilst the early part of Queen Victoria's reign was shaped by a religious movement to make Britain a truly Christian nation and a political movement to make Britain a democratic nation, the later part of her reign took its shape from the need to find both a faith capable of surviving the rationalist onslaught and solutions to the social problems an extended franchise had failed to solve.

The Victorian world picture: perceptions and introspections in an age of change

David Newsome's monumental history, The Victorian World Picture, takes a good, long look at the Victorian age and what distinguishes it so prominently in the history of both England and the world. The Victorian World Picture presents a vivid canvas of the Victorians as they saw themselves and as the rest of the world saw them. Situated between the watershed of the French Revolution in 1789 and the fin-de-siecle, the Victorians' world was one of rapid change. Whether they greeted it with hope and exhilaration or with mounting apprehension, there was general acknowledgment among contemporary thinkers and commentators that they were destined to live in uncommonly stirring times. The Victorian intellectual world in full bloom counted among its luminaries Dickens, Carlyle, Eliot, Arnold, Ruskin, Southey, and Wordsworth. But it was also a time of unprecedented population growth, massive industrialization, and an acceleration in the pace of life due in part to improved transportation, especially the advent of the railway. Darwinian theory shook people's religious beliefs and foreign competition threatened industry and agriculture. The defeat of Napoleon in 1815 and the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy had created profound unease and political tension that lasted into Queen Victoria's reign. Even the books that the Victorians read and their interpretations of history reveal a conflict between unbounded belief in progress and a nostalgic yearning for the values of the past. The transformation of the world of the Victorians was social, cultural, intellectual, economic and political - in a sense, earth-shaking. David Newsome weaves all these strands of Victorian life into a compelling evocationof the spirit of a fascinating time that laid the foundation for the modern age.

Viewing the Victorians: Recent Research on Victorian Visuality

Since carol christ's pioneering research in 1975 on the “finer optic” of Victorian poetry, the optic has become even finer in all senses of the word: refined, particular, precise, scientific, and, most importantly, thoroughly historical and material. The optical is no longer a metaphor, but a reality: a device, apparatus, or gadget whose lens-crafted appearance on the scene of vision enhances and alters “visuality,” a recently coined term for “how we moderns see seeing.” Terms which once stood solely upon metaphorical ground, as in W. D. Shaw's “The Optical Metaphor: Victorian Poetics and the Theory of Knowledge” (Victorian Studies, 1980), now refer to concrete practices, scientific optically monitored experiments, and lens and mirror evidentiary and entertainment venues that shaped internal and external life as “modern” during Queen Victoria's reign. In fact, her reign from 1837 until 1901 exactly corresponds with the era that saw the invention and gradual institutionalization of photo- and cinematographic techniques of imaging.

Churchill, The Victorian Man of Action

Abstract : The most common public image of Winston Churchill may be the wartime picture taken by the famed photographer, Yousuf Karsh. The British leader glowers out from that photograph, truculent and combative. Never mind that the menacing look was reportedly caused by Karsh's insistence that Churchill remove his ever-present cigar from his mouth. What remains is that quintessential aura of resistance and defiance against all odds that came to symbolize the spirit of the nation Churchill led throughout World War II. Paradoxically, this image of a modern warlord in the greatest of all 20th century conflicts owes its existence to the late Victorian era into which Churchill was born in 1874. For it was during those years in the Indian Summer of Queen Victoria's reign that the future British Prime Minister developed his singular traits of character and formed his concepts of war and personal leadership that were to endure throughout his long life.

HUNDREDTH VOLUME

The first journal was published just after the end of Queen Victoria's reign. Stability had ruled for forty years and from Britain obstetricians turned to Europe for intellectual and technical stimulation; American medicine followed rather than led. It was a brave group of doctors who in 1902 put up the money to start a journal in what was a small speciality in a small island. Now, with numbering not being precisely annual, we have reached the hundredth volume and it is time to take stock. The world is a more unstable place. European medicine has lost its lead and Americans fuel the fires. In Britain, the subject of Obstetrics and Gynaecology is under pressure from educationalists and politicians, from the altruists on one hand who tell us we are too technical and not human enough to the epidemiological purists on the other hand who berate us for not following the results of randomised controlled trials and of being too human. The British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology has reflected all these changes and Sir John Peel traces them in his review of the history of the Journal (p. 2). We reproduce also what the contemporary British Medical Journal and the Lancet said about our first number (p. 9). The style of our Journal follows fashion like any other dynamic organisation. The first cover, which we have reproduced, is overcrowded in heavy Gothic style to get every possible fact on to the front page. It resembles the shop window of the village grocer. The current cover is startlingly simple and reflects the design ideas of the 1990s, looking more like an Italian racing motor car. Between the covers, the more anecdotal events of clinical practice have given way to objectively judged scientific material. We started the century with one man's account of a hundred cases of women with fibroids and end with randomised placebo controlled trials assessing pharmacological marvels. We reproduce two previous Journal articles, on ergometrine by Chassar Moir and C. S. Russell and ultrasound by Ian Donald; we consider these amongst the most important in the last ninety years, for each led to major changes in practice. To choose them we read widely in the previous ninety-nine volumes and selection was difficult, being dictated more by the pages available than the number of seminal articles. It was interesting, however, to note that events such as the early use of antibiotics for puerperal pyrexia or of gynaecological laparoscopy had their first publications in other journals and only after a couple of years was material available to the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology. Perhaps this reflects the more drawn out processing of articles in a monthly journal; the immediacy of the weekly journals influenced authors keen to see their innovations in print more promptly. The Journal editors have distanced their protegé from the wider social and political world; we searched in vain for comment on the foundation of the College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, the Second World War or the introduction of the National Health Service. Even the obituary columns were stopped and the Journal has kept to the science of Obstetrics and Gynaecology within its covers. For the future we hope that the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology will reflect the world of Obstetrics, its science, its work and the Royal College which guides and guards British Obstetrics. We will keep the scientific standards at the high levels to which previous editors have raised them and add other material slowly during the next years. The changes that we will reflect in Obstetrics and Gynaecology before the turn of the century are likely to be greater in the practice of the subject than any other that has occurred in the last ninety years. It is right therefore, that the Journal should have some reporting of these, rather than just the scientific measurement of Obstetrics and Gynaecology. As well as changes in clinical treatment, there will be much alteration in the management of obstetricians. Education, service commitments and work patterns will be altered so much in the next few years that the Journal should rightly keep its readers, in Britain and beyond, aware of some of these changes in which the Royal College is taking an active role. We look towards exciting days; the science of Obstetrics and Gynaecology has bloomed actively and will go on so doing, whilst the art of the subject will expand also. Both of these will take place inside the changes which society will provide. These are in two parts, the micro-environment of the hospitals and universities within which we work and the larger environment of the community we serve. All these variables need to be reflected in a balanced journal.

Westminster and the Victorian Constitution

The British constitution is unwritten, but not unbuilt. The character of Britain's government buildings reflects the nature of its political system. This is particularly true with respect to the Houses of Parliament. They were almost entirely rebuilt after a fire, in 1834, which seriously damaged the House of Commons and adjacent buildings. The new Houses of Parliament were the most magnificent and expensive public buildings erected in Queen Victoria's reign. Their architectural evolution has been meticulously chronicled by a former Honorary Secretary of the Royal Historical Society, Professor Michael Port. But constitutionalists and historians have shewn little or no interest in the political character of the Victorian Houses of Parliament. Walter Bagehot, in his famous study, The English Constitution, published in 1867, made no reference to the newly completed Houses of Parliament. Likewise most modern books on Victorian political and constitutional history make no mention of die rebuilding.