Victorian England Research Articles

Immersion – new media and old ambitions

As immersive exhibitions and entertainments have become fashionable, it should be remembered that they have a long history, stretching back to the panoramas of the 18th century and the many optical novelties of the Victorian era, leading up to cinema and subsequent attempts to make this a more immersive experience. More recently, the concepts of cyberspace and the metaverse have been imported from science fiction to describe virtual experiences now available through digital media. Remediation theory should explain these, as well as their evident popularity, yet cultural and aesthetic hostility to such spatial illusions is almost as old as the new media themselves, and has reappeared in response to immersive exhibitions.

Unlocking the Voices of Children: The Evolution of Child Narrators in Anglophone Literature

ABSTRACT This research investigates the evolution of child narrators in adult Anglophone fiction, tracing their development from being marginalized figures in the pre-romantic era to significant voices in the subsequent Romantic, Victorian, and modern periods. It explores how evolving perceptions of childhood contributed to the inclusion and growth of child narrators over time, arguing that children’s capacity for providing unique insights and valuable perspectives was increasingly acknowledged and exploited by authors to delve deeper into the complexities of human nature. By examining key works and authors, including Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, J.D. Salinger, Emma Donoghue and Mark Haddon among others, and drawing upon interdisciplinary resources from fields such as literary criticism, childhood studies, and socio-cultural history, the paper establishes a thorough examination of the changing role and portrayal of child narrators, their cultural significance, and the ways in which they help drive social, emotional, and psychological exploration in literature.

Threads of Tradition Social Expectations and Marriage in Emma by Jane Austen and Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

This study explores the theme of marriage and social expectations in two beloved novels: In case of two British novelists Jane Austen's Emma and Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D’Urbervilles. The paper is focused on revealing a multi-faceted character of the figure of gender roles, social values and traditions linking the lives of Emma Woodhouse and Tess Durbeyfield by means of a comparative analysis. These tensions between female characters' individual goals and social constraints are exposed by the study and the opinions of Elizabeth V. Spelman, Ann Bo-Hubert, Hazel Carby, Elaine Showalter, Susan Gubar and Sandra M. Gilbert are referred to. Austen dismantled the precedent social norms of the Regency period through the vital tool of satire and wit after this novel is through and through analysed out. The made decision to make the word association “Brain” instead of “love” is a pretty good way to show the society who sees marriage as only a calculated action, not the passionate connection. The multilayered substructures of a theme are formed due to the "crazy woman in the attic" metaphor constructed by Gilbert and Gubar which implies the true self of a woman in society is suppressed due to restricted roles. Unlike Stone's 'Greek Myths,' Hardy in Tess of the D’Urbervilles focusing on a gloomy story that work to demonstrate the harmful consequences of ignoring Victorian society rules. The article analyses the marriage and gender role issues that Hardy has shown in a vivid manner as Eagleton says. The main conflict of the play is about what man want and what society demands, that is: what is true happiness and what is right in social term. Social class differences get intensively scrutinized, as the plot shows how the social systems influence the lives of the characters and build their destinies which deepens the theme analysis further. The study shows that these classic novels have been excellent guides and examples that have helped readers figure out what they would like to do with their lives. Moreover, the readers have been able to see people confront the challenges they encounter from institutions or interpersonal dynamics as well as expectations to balance their culture and social obligations.

Social Issues During the Victorian Era Lead to the Formation of Nice Girl Syndrome in Gaskell’s Ruth

This study aimed to elaborate on the relationship between social issues during the Victorian era and Nice Girl syndrome, as demonstrated in Elizabeth Gaskell's Ruth. A qualitative descriptive method was employed to achieve this objective, incorporating Alfred Adler's Individual Personality approach and Beverly Engel's Nice Girl syndrome as the grand theory. Data on female characters' behaviour and thoughts in Elizabeth Gaskell's Ruth were collected and analyzed using Adler's and Nice Girl syndrome theories, respectively. Furthermore, the dialogue and monologue of female characters were also considered. The results showed that social issues such as social class, Victorian family, Victorian ideal womanhood, and Victorian religion and morality related to Nice Girl syndrome during the Victorian era influenced and contributed to the formation of Ruth's female characters.

Cows, Communities, and Religious Responses to the 1865–66 British Rinderpest Outbreak*

The devastating outbreak of rinderpest in the British Isles in 1865–66 — the so‐called “cattle plague” — was a significant event in Victorian Britain, one that did much to shape British agriculture, animal disease control, and veterinary medicine. This article argues that the cattle plague also had long‐term significance for the relationship between the Church of England and non‐human animals. During eighteenth‐century rinderpest outbreaks, Anglican clergy had rarely considered the suffering animals. In 1865–66 and afterwards, services in Anglican churches increasingly involved animal themes, issues, and presences. From this time, it became usual for Anglicans to mark moments of severe animal disease with special prayers and services. The crisis also encouraged changes in how Church of England clergy, and ministers in other Christian denominations, spoke about animals in sermons. During the outbreak of rinderpest, there was a sharpened awareness of the extent to which cows and humans had common interests and inhabited a shared community. A heightened appreciation of the bonds and interdependencies between people and farmed animals, the article suggests, had much significance for ecological thinking among nineteenth‐century ministers of religion. The article argues for the distinctive status of cattle in modern Christianity.

Was Shaw a Victorian? We Need to Ask Another Question

ABSTRACT Shaw scholars have long hesitated to label Shaw a Victorian writer. Although almost half of his life overlapped Queen Victoria’s reign, Shaw’s challenges to nineteenth-century morals and mores tend to mark him as an outlier. This article advocates a fresh approach: perhaps we have been taking the “Victorian” question too literally. Postmodern critics have long urged us to look for diverse and contradictory elements in literary works that seem to be staid and classical. In this article, the author looks for commonalities between Shaw’s Getting Married and three nineteenth-century novels (Eight Cousins, Great Expectations, and Jane Eyre). Do theatrical strategies and fictional writing techniques ever change places? Do the characters in Victorian novels ever explore Shavian ideas? And can we use those commonalities to rethink some of our assumptions about the Victorian era?

Living Outside with the Sun

This paper reflects upon the history of design of outdoor living spaces, a typology that blends interior directly with landscape. In Australasia, outdoor living is a symbol of contemporary life style but it must adapt to the danger of over-exposure to the sun’s ultraviolet rays. Tempering openness to the summer sky is not just a choice but rather a survival strategy. The relationship of European descendents to the Antipodean sun has fluctuated over time. In Victorian times, hats, copious clothing and villa verandahs protected prized pale complexions. Tanned skin branded the labouring classes and the native population. In the 1920s, the ancient Greek practice of heliotherapy was hailed as beneficial for the treatment of tuberculosis. Concurrently architecture clipped verandahs and proposed open sun terraces, sometimes scantily clad by a pergola. The negative consequences of this sun-worship were not known until the 1980s when the relation between ultraviolet rays and skin cancer was made and the recognition that one in three Australasians will be affected. Living outside with the sun therefore requires modification. Sunscreen is prescribed for application every two hours; hats, clothing and sun-glasses protect the body but hinder communication between people and their surroundings. Traditional solid shade shields direct rays, but deny the warmth of the sun, which is often so welcome in temperate New Zealand. Open shade sails fail to acknowledge the fact that ultraviolet rays scatter. Living well outside is not simple.

Loosening the Stays: Victorian Shaw

ABSTRACT This article for the special edition “Victorian Shaw” focuses on the intersections across social issues in the mid- to late-Victorian era that influenced the writing and reception of plays by George Bernard Shaw and contemporaries Wilde and Pinero. Shaw was an advocate for workers’ rights, as well as women’s rights, and spoke out in writing and orally to abolish the Contagious Diseases Acts that went after women but not the men who transmitted the diseases. Shaw’s connections to women activists are also featured; key speeches/essays by women are included. Shaw’s role as a theater critic gave him the opportunity to show the impact of the social ills of the era. By the 1890s, he began to write plays; by the end of the Victorian era, he was an established playwright who gave women roles that went beyond the boundaries of nineteenth-century theater.

“Avenging the Nation”. Freedom of the Press and Constitutional Deliverance in Trollope’s Palliser Novels

Abstract This essay examines the notion of constitutional deliverance within the Victorian settlement. The expression points to the way constitutional arrangements react to threats that may disrupt the politico-legal order. Rooted in constitutional morality, it entails executing justice, restoring order, and protecting individuals’ rights and freedoms. To this end, it analyses Phineas Finn, Phineas Redux, and The Prime Minister, i.e. three of the six Anthony Trollope’s Palliser Novels, and explores whether the freedom of the press executed constitutional deliverance in the Victorian era. The essay will focus on Mr Quintus Slide, the editor of the People’s Banner, whose acts of moralisation seem to fit into the (political and biblical) notion of deliverance. The article argues that Slide used the press not to deliver the Nation, but to avenge his own interests. In so doing, he contradicted the idea of constitutional deliverance as embedded in Parliament, where the anointed Monarch summons His body politic to execute justice and protect it.

Prospect and Refuge in Villette’s Forbidden Garden

During the Victorian period, the expansion of the domestic sphere into the garden afforded women greater agency within their own physical and psychological landscapes. The Pensionnat in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853) provides Lucy Snowe, the protagonist, with access to a forbidden avenue within the school garden, initially providing her with shelter and solitude. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this article reads the novel through the lens of the ‘prospect–refuge’ theory developed by the aesthetic geographer Jay Appleton, which considers people’s emotional and psychological responses to their environment. It explores the symbolic uses of the garden space to convey the emotional landscape of characters as well as examining how Brontë positions her protagonist in the garden to allow Lucy freedoms not easily afforded within formal indoor settings.

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.

Wolf Rock Lighthouse Long-Term Monitoring

Wolf Rock Lighthouse is a Victorian era masonry structure located in an extreme environment facing the fiercest Atlantic storms off the southwest coast of England whose dynamic behaviour has been studied since 2016. Initially, a modal test was used to determine modal parameters; then, in 2017, a monitoring system was installed that has operated intermittently providing response data for a number of characteristic loading events. These events have included wave loads due to storms, a small UK earthquake, helicopters landing on the helideck, and the grounding of a ship on the reef. This is believed to be the most extensive experimental campaign on any structure of this type. This paper briefly describes a unique project involving the characterisation and measurement of dynamic behaviour due to different forms of dynamic loading.

‘The Black Prince of Baker Street’ and the Black Presence in Britain, 1837–1849

Between 1838 and 1849 a man repeatedly visited London claiming to be ‘Louis Christophe’, seeking access to money deposited in the Bank of England by his ‘brother’ the deceased King of Haiti, Henri Christophe. By following this impostor around London and the wider Atlantic, this article makes an important contribution to understanding of the Black presence in Britain during the early Victorian period. Alongside his interactions with the Black community, it documents how ‘Louis Christophe’ was able to defraud British philanthropists, the forms of racial prejudice he received during the decade, and the legacy of the Haitian Revolution.

Crafting British medicine in the Empire: the establishment of medical schools in India and Canada, 1763-1837.

In the early nineteenth century, medical schools became a growing means of regulating medicine in the British Empire, both in the metropole and in two colonies: India and Canada. By examining the establishment of medical schools in Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, Quebec City, Montreal and Toronto between the end of the Seven Years' War and the beginning of the Victorian era, this article argues that the rise of the British Empire was a key factor in the gradual replacement of private medical apprenticeships with institutional medical education. Although the imperial state did not implement a uniform medical policy across the British Empire, the medical schools established under its jurisdiction were instrumental in devising a curriculum that emphasised human dissection, bedside training in hospitals and organic chemistry as criteria of medical competence.

“She is the Great Outside”: Ecofeminist Potentiality in H. G. Wells’s The Sea Lady

Abstract H. G. Wells’s serial fable The Sea Lady (1902) offers a satirical commentary on the Victorian Age: It draws a societal allegory that criticises both a cohesive conception of the natural world, and Victorian notions of the domestic realm – in the private and national sense of the term. Yet the story has long been regarded as an oddity in the author’s oeuvre. Wells’s Victorian contemporaries criticised its lack of scientific detail so characteristic of his more successful scientific romances. The reason for this appears to be the story’s eponymous central figure – a mermaid, supposedly rather the stuff of legend, folklore and fairy tales. However, by opening up a utopian realm in which ‘better dreams’ await, the figure of the sea lady destabilises Victorian moral orders as a potential discovery of the future lingers on the horizon of the century’s turn. In this article, I foreground the story’s ecofeminist potential by analysing the intersections between its unconventional form, the ‘untameable female’ protagonist at its centre, and the specific oceanic and littoral environments it presents.

The Transitional Career of Mary Gurney (1836–1917): Work for the Reform of English Middle-Class Female Education at Secondary and Tertiary Levels

ABSTRACT This article presents an understanding of the context, nature and significance of Mary Gurney’s educational career during the years 1863 to 1917. It is assisted in part by the conceptual lenses of feminist thinking and network theory. Despite neglect by past historians, Gurney’s work was seen by contemporaries as equal in significance to that of leading reformers who, like her, sought equality between English middle-class male and female education at secondary and tertiary levels. The article demonstrates her career’s transitional position between that of middle-class female philanthropist and professional female during the British Victorian and Edwardian periods of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It discusses the educational consequences of Gurney’s work before and after her death, including how its effects spread to other geographical and social locations, as part of the process of assessing its value.

Sarah Woodbine: a black nurse in Victorian Britain Sarah Woodbine: a black nurse in Victorian Britain , by David Gleave, Neasa Roughan and John D. Ellis, Historycal Roots, 24 August, 2023, £5.00 (paperback), £1.99 (ebook), ASIN Number BOCGM9CBKK

Sarah Woodbine: a black nurse in Victorian Britain <b>Sarah Woodbine: a black nurse in Victorian Britain</b> , by David Gleave, Neasa Roughan and John D. Ellis, Historycal Roots, 24 August, 2023, £5.00 (paperback), £1.99 (ebook), ASIN Number BOCGM9CBKK

Visibility, Precarity and Public Spaces: Reading Matthew Arnold’s “West London” in an Indian Classroom

This essay is an account of my experience of teaching Matthew Arnold's "West London" in an Indian classroom through the conceptual prism of vulnerability. The essay argues that the configuration of public space in Arnold's poem in terms of differential class relations in Victorian society offers a literary mode of visualizing vulnerablity and prompts an ethical recognition of the humanness of marginalized characters. It further demonstrates how the peadgogic exercise of 'reading' such poetry in the contemporary urban Indian context can alert students to the politics of occupying and negotiating public spaces in terms of (the lack of) class position and privilege across diverse cultural and historical contexts.

The Early Novels of Ivy Low: Literature, Love, and Lust in 1910s London

ABSTRACT This article examines the early literary career of the writer Ivy Low. Low’s work and literary friendships of this period offer a rich source of insight into the contradictions and challenges of British literary culture in the early 1910s, especially for a young woman of Jewish descent eager to belong to a new generation of writers. The article examines Low’s two early novels Growing Pains (1913) and The Questing Beast (1914). The novels continue existing literary traditions of the Victorian and Edwardian era while at the same time being determinedly modern if not Modernist in outlook. Low’s psychologically honest explorations of women’s sexual feelings and descriptions of women in the workplace supplement the more conventional subjects of marriage, education, religion, and art, as well as a vivid portrait of the process of becoming a published author. Drawing on archival autobiographical writing, the article explores how Low’s initially promising career becomes increasingly problematic as she grows more aware of barriers of class and race which make her an outsider despite her close friendship with the writer Viola Meynell and D. H. Lawrence’s early interest in her.

Ella Erskine, Elkin Mathews, and the “Long Aesthetic Century”

ABSTRACT Scholars have used terms such as the “long nineteenth century” to convey the fact that the characteristics, principles, and artistic debates of the Victorian era did not suddenly vanish in 1900, but continued to inform British literature throughout the Edwardian era and into the start of the First World War. From work written by women, in particular, during the first decade of the twentieth century, it is obvious that one of the most significant developments of late-Victorian literature – i.e. the Aesthetic Movement – continued to enjoy an active life. This chapter uses a 1909 volume of prose poems, Shadow-shapes by Ella Erskine, to make that point, while demonstrating the important role played by Elkin Mathews, her publisher, in keeping Aestheticism before the public.