Victorian England Research Articles

A Stylistic Study of "The Windhover" by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) is the greatest religious poet and Jesuit priest of the Victorian age who was born in London in the rapidly changing time, fundamentals, visions and sights. He wrote many poems such as “The Windhover”, “The Wreck of the Deutschland”, “God’s Grandeur”, “Spelt from Sibyl’s Leaves”, “I Wake and feel the fell of dark, not day”, “Carrion Comfort”, “Pied Beauty”, “Felix Randal”, “Binsey Poplars” and “Thou art indeed just, Lord” but none of them was published in his life. when he decided to become a Jesuit, he burned all his literary works as he felt that they were against the principles of his Catholic religion. His friend, Robert Bridge kept a copy of his poems and published them in 1918. As a Jesuit priest, Hopkins infused his personal religious devotion into his poetry. The Windhover reflects his intense spiritual connection. For him The Windhover is “the best thing I ever wrote”. The Windhover is not the love poem which is addressed to any person, (even though “To Christ our Lord”), but to the life itself. The Windhover is the masterpiece of Hopkins style, imagery, in which he fuses the beauty of nature with the divine and religious believes. In order to reach his goal, Hopkins used figures of speech, sprung rhythm and different forms of sound patterning. This study is a stylistic analysis of The Windhover from the graphological, phonological, lexical, structural and semantic points of view. The Windhover stands out for its innovative style, vivid imagery, and seamless integration of nature and faith, a combination that distinguishes it from other religious poems. Keywords: Gerard Manley Hopkins, Victorian poet, The Windhover, Stylistic Study.

Algologies: an artistic exploration of the entangled relationship between seaweed, women and science through a BioArt methodology

ABSTRACT This paper describes the “Algologies” project, an art project about seaweed exploring the entangled relationships between seaweed, women and science. The project was created in 2021, during the COVID-19 Pandemic, through the Living Coast Art Residency awarded by Fabrica Gallery and The Living Coast UNESCO World Biosphere and the coastline to the East of Brighton. The project plays with the Victorian word algology which used to mean the study of seaweed and its contemporary meaning as the study and medical treatment of pain and highlights the calming nature of the coastal environment during a time of collective global trauma. The “Algologies” project drew links between Victorian seaweed collectors, the use of seaweed-based agar jelly in contemporary biology, and seaweed growth as a barometer of climate change and the environment as well as a strategy for carbon capture. The transdisciplinary project fused fine art, performance and BioArt techniques with biohacking and DIY science, as well as digital technologies and resulted in a series of outputs including a public sculpture. Central to “Algologies” was the examination of the historical role of women in seaweed collection and scientific observation. In Victorian Britain, where patriarchal norms prevailed, women were often relegated to domestic roles but found opportunities for scientific engagement through activities like seaweed collecting. Figures such as Mary Philadelphia Merrifield and Anna Atkins emerged as pioneers in the study of seaweed, making significant contributions to botanical research and early photographic techniques. Notably, the project highlighted the pivotal role of Angelina (Lina) Fannie Hesse in suggesting the use of seaweed-derived agar in microbiology, a contribution that continues to impact scientific practices today. Beyond historical perspectives, “Algologies” addresses contemporary issues such as climate change and invasive species of seaweed and how the public can be engaged in these topics through art. The paper concludes by discussing the potential of seaweed for carbon capture and its role as a barometer of environmental health, as well as its use biotechnology

Ceramics in the Victorian Era: Meanings and Metaphors in Painting and Literature by Rachel Gotlieb (review)

Ceramics in the Victorian Era: Meanings and Metaphors in Painting and Literature by Rachel Gotlieb (review)

The Deviant Body: Object and Spectacle in The Old Curiosity Shop

Abstract: The Old Curiosity Shop , by title and by content, sublimely exhibits the Victorian period's enchantment with the curious. At first blush, the items of allure are the inanimate objects on display in Nell's grandfather's shop. With more measured inspection the question of animacy blurs, as both living and nonliving curiosities are subjected to the glare of fixation and fetishization. The Old Curiosity Shop is crowded with both inanimate and animate curiosities, the partition often obscured. As Victorian society obsessed over things and peculiarities, the animacy distinction collapsed. Deviant body forms were not exempt, reduced to mere curiosities, interchangeable and without identity, resulting in their ultimate abstraction through commodity culture, and displayed for profit in fairground sideshows. The Old Curiosity Shop embraces this fascination with body deviance, serving both as a reflection of cultural interest and as a vehicle to fuel societal captivation.

Reading the Book of Nature: How Eight Best Sellers Reconnected Christianity and the Sciences on the Eve of the Victorian Age

Reading the Book of Nature: How Eight Best Sellers Reconnected Christianity and the Sciences on the Eve of the Victorian Age

Reading the Book of Nature: How Eight Best Sellers Reconnected Christianity and the Sciences on the Eve of the Victorian Age

Reading the Book of Nature: How Eight Best Sellers Reconnected Christianity and the Sciences on the Eve of the Victorian Age

Closing ranks: The Publishers Association in Victorian Britain and its powerful place in institutional formation

Professional associations have been explored as institutional agents and can be powerful mechanisms for instigating practices into an industry. Despite this identification there is a lack of research which delves deeper and explores the contexts that allow strategies which contribute to institutional formation; which in turn can create professional associations in the process. Through an analysis of archival letters and newspaper articles surrounding the formation of the net book agreement in the Victorian British publishing industry, this paper illustrates how individuals formed the Publishers Association to further their own causes and protect their business interests. This paper argues that the construction of the professional association was used as the vehicle for individuals with the most power in the Victorian publishing industry to instigate change.

The Impact of Violence on Culture in Edward Bond’s Early Morning

Edward Bond's play, Early Morning, serves as a powerful exploration of violence in society by transcending temporal and cultural boundaries. Rooted in the Victorian era, Bond employs historical characters and anachronistic elements to create a narrative that critiques corruption and brutality through a reflection on contemporary societal challenges. The mixture of realism and stylistic experimentation in the play reveals a timeless commentary on morality, corruption, and societal decay. Bond's masterful blending of historical context with timeless themes invites readers and audiences to draw parallels between the Victorian world presented and the complexities of modern societies. It underscores the role of literature in exposing the darker facets of humanity and serves as a cautionary tale about the enduring nature of human flaws. The universality of violence depicted in the play prompts critical reflections on the human condition. Early Morning investigates the origins of human savagery and gives a striking representation of the aftermath of inappropriate power elements. This article investigates the connection between violence and power as depicted in Bond's play by working inside the system of Michel Foucault's arguments on power and its appearances.

The Plight of the Child in Charles Dicken’s Oliver Twist and John Nkemngong Nkengasong’s Achakasara

This paper examines the ordeal of the Victorian English and Postcolonial Cameroonian children through the lenses of Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist and John Nkemngong Nkengasong’s Achakasara. Child abuse cuts across universality, timelessness, racial and gender constructs. The child in these two societal backgrounds undergoes untold suffering perpetrated by adults and their fellow children. They are exploited for commercial purposes, at the expense of their education and wellbeing. They experience physical assault through undeserved beating under the guise of domestic correction with pending eventualities being psychological trauma. A continuity of intentional abuse consciously impacts the child to view his place of birth and development as a problem. That child sees the streets as a better option. Very high probability abounds that these streets are not suitable for the developmental processes of the child but at that point, his/her actions are shaped by convictions. Dickens and Nkengasong take interest what happens to a child, in their respective societies. They pen with certainty that conventional Victorian England and contemporary Postcolonial Cameroonian societies are fraught with different shades of injustices, jeopardising the future of the younger generations. This paper is vehiculated by the Psychoanalytic theory, with focus on Anna Freud’s dimension of Psychoanalysis. Anna Freud is a child psychoanalyst concerned with the upbringing of children. The purpose of this paper is to portray the various abuses experienced by the child as demonstrated in Dickens’ Oliver Twist and Nkengasong’s Achakasara.

Critical Decades: Textiles and Material Culture in Jane Eyre and Three Recent Adaptations

This paper discusses the social commentary of textile production as revealed in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and three recent adaptations. First, I focus on Rosamond Oliver’s deceptively offhand allusion to the Luddite riots of 1812 to argue that Brontë sets her novel in the 1810s during the upheavals impacting the textile industries of the East Midlands, Yorkshire and the North West regions. This setting coupled with textual allusions to early nineteenth-century fashions are used to connect the female characters’ dress in Jane Eyre to local and global labour issues, colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade. I then turn to the visual representation of textiles in the intermedial adaptations of Jane Eyre by Robert Young (1997), Susanna White (2006) and Cary Fukunaga (2011), which by visually highlighting the material culture of the 1830s and 1840s, move Brontë’s narrative from the late Georgian to the early Victorian era. These adaptations overwrite the novel’s allusions to early nineteenth-century debates on industrialisation, colonialism and human enslavement in order to privilege its mid-nineteenth-century feminist critique of British marriage laws.

VIKTORIYA DAVRIDAGI REALISTIK ROMANCHILIK

This article discusses the history of Victorian realist novels, the rise of the novel, the evolution of Victorian realist novels, the characteristics of Victorian realist novels, and the publication of realist novels in newspapers and magazines. In world literature, it is recognized that the history of realistic novels of the Victorian era had a great influence on the development of humanitarian ideas, and that they fully described social life and existing problems in society.

Race, Gender, Sexuality, and the Pursuit of Modernity: British Biopower and Female Sexuality in Domestic and Colonial Practice

This paper explores how female sexuality became a primary site for the exercise of British biopolitical regulation as illustrated both in colonial Hong Kong and Singapore, and in domestic practice within the metropole. The application of biopolitical regulation on the subject of female sexuality was based on a discursive production making indissociable the success of the imperial project and the survival of the imperial race and the control of the female body. This discursive production mobilized intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality through the Victorian cult of domesticity, resulting in a racialization of female sexuality with implications transcending the permeable frontier between the metropole and the colonies. Making “the prostitute” the exemplar of deviant, dangerous, and immoral sexuality had discursive repercussions for female sexuality more broadly; explained in contrast to “the prostitute,” the construction of sexual deviance had implications for understandings of sexual conformity and acceptability both in Victorian society and abroad.

Introducing 'Brother-Love': If 'No-Homo' Were Invented in the Victorian Era

Working off of information surrounding nineteenth century intimate male friendships provided by E. Anthony Rotundo’s 1989 article “Romantic Friendship: Male Intimacy and Middle-Class Youth in the Norther United States, 1800-1900,” as well as ideas of female intimacy of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Julian Carter’s 2005 article “On Mother-Love: History, Queer Theory, and Nonlesbian Identity,” the concept of “brother-love” encompasses important components of intimate male friendships during the Victorian period. Hidden physical and emotional intimacy were vital to these intimate friendships, in ways differing from Carter’s “mother-love” as explored in this project. Anna Clark’s concept of “Twilight Moments” (2005) will help explain “brotherlove” as it is compared to Carter’s “mother-love.” “Brother-love” is a response to contemporary terms and concepts queer scholars use when focusing on historical moments, and it provides an alternative frame of reference for intimate and romantic male friendships while extracting contemporary influence of same-sex relations.

Transformasi Sosial Dalam Novel An Enola Holmes Mystery The Case Of The Missing Marquess Karya Nancy Springer

In this study to analyze how social transformation contained in the novel An Enola Holmes Mystery The Case Of The Missing Marquesss in the Victorian Era. The author used a qualitative descriptive approach in this study. The qualitative descriptive approach refers to the formulation of problems that encourage research to explore or photograph social situations to be researched thoroughly, deeply, and deeply. As a result of this research we can understand the historical and cultural context in the novel, which is set in Victorian era 18th century England. It will provide insight into social, cultural, or historical aspects related to the characters' lives and enrich understanding of their social context. And we can contribute to the study, especially English literature by examining aspects of life transformation in the novel An Enola Holmes Mystery The Case Of The Missing Marquess.

‘The Hideous Old Lady of Fashion’: dressing the ageing body in Victorian Britain

Abstract This article explores how the biological realities and cultural constructions of ageing combined to influence a daily decision taken by Victorian women: what to wear. The cartoons found in Punch, and the guidance given by fashion papers and journalistic and literary sources highlight the individualized experience of dressing the ageing body, and the knowledge and skill needed to chart a course of compromise between ageing and the expectations that came with longer-held identities such as class, gender and sexuality. The difficulties in navigating this transition demonstrate how ageing was an art, and doing it well was a merit.

A New Historicist Perspective on The Question of Faith in W. Collins’ The Woman in White and E. B. Browning’s Aurora Leigh

The relationship between fiction and ideology is a crucial issue to many critical schools and theoretical approaches. Such an issue has been flowing smoothly across historical periods and influencing various social, historical, and cultural aspects. The Victorian era is one of these stages, and Victorian literature has played a significant role in determining the nature of such a relationship in the subsequent generations in England. Departing from the New Historicist theoretical framework, this study examines the views of two Victorian masterpieces, namely, W. Collins’ The Woman in White and E. B. Browning’s Aurora Leigh as both texts and contexts. Both are influenced by and influential in their circumstances. The subjectivities of the two authors are changed, and they are, at the same time, agents of change within their sociohistorical spheres. These literary works cannot be considered as only products of their times; they are also major players in creating new pathways for the development of people and culture. The conventional views of religion are questioned, and several inherent rules are constantly replaced by others. Although W. Collins and E. B. Browning explicitly voice their full adherence to religious beliefs and principles, skepticism becomes strongly expressed in some of their literary works while institutional faiths and their status are called into question in certain ways.

Coupled indoor air quality and dynamic thermal modelling to assess the potential impacts of standalone HEPA filter units in classrooms

The quality of the classroom environment, including ventilation, air quality and thermal conditions, has an important impact on children’s health and academic achievement. The use of portable HEPA filter air cleaners is widely suggested as a strategy to mitigate exposure to particulate matter and airborne viruses. However, there is a need to quantify the relative benefits of such devices including the impacts on energy use. We present a simple coupled dynamic thermal and air quality model and apply it to naturally ventilated classrooms, representative of modern and Victorian era construction. We consider the addition of HEPA filters with, and without, reduced opening of windows, and explore concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2), particulate matter PM2.5, airborne viral RNA, classroom temperature and energy use. Results indicate the addition of HEPA filters was predicted to reduce PM2.5 by 40–60 % and viral RNA by 30–50 % depending on the classroom design and window opening behaviour. The energy cost of running HEPA filters is likely to be only 1 %–2 % of the classroom heating costs. In scenarios when HEPA filters were on and window opening was reduced (to account for the additional clean air delivery rate of the filters), the heating cost was predicted to be reduced by as much as − 13 %, and these maximum reductions grew to − 46 % in wintertime simulations. In these scenarios the HEPA filters result in a notable reduction in PM2.5 and viral RNA, but the CO2 concentration is significantly higher. The model provides a mechanism for exploring the relative impact of ventilation and air cleaning strategies on both exposures and energy costs, enabling an understanding of where trade-offs lie.

‘O! awa wi sic sangs as aft hae been sung’: radical songwriting and the rethinking of Chartism

ABSTRACT Chartist songs, and the movement’s culture more generally, have received growing scholarly attention in recent decades. This article uses a case study of the many Chartist songs written to the tune of Robert Burns’s ‘Scots wha hae’ to explore the ways in which Chartist songwriters participated in the reworking of radical culture and ideas taking place in the 1830s and 1840s. These Chartist versions of ‘Scots wha hae’ – new words to an old tune – engaged in a conscious and creative dialogue between the Chartist present and the radical past. As such, they are an ideal source for exploring continuity and change in nineteenth-century radicalism, a topic of sustained historical controversy since the 1980s. Rather than indicating continuity, these re-writes of ‘Scots wha hae’ reveal how the Chartists saw themselves as a new phase of radicalism, facing novel political and economic challenges, appealing to broader constituencies of nationality, class and gender, and foregrounding working-class, rather than gentlemanly, leadership. Moreover, the act of showcasing this plebeian musical creativity on a scale unmatched by previous radical movements illustrates Chartism’s commitment to songwriting as both a key form of democratic activism and an innovative challenge to the cultural hierarchies of Victorian society.

The Ideology and Propaganda of the Ruling Ideas as Painted by an Irishman in the Victorian Era: A Study on the Daniel Maclise Murals in the Royal Gallery of the Palace of Westminster

The Ideology and Propaganda of the Ruling Ideas as Painted by an Irishman in the Victorian Era: A Study on the Daniel Maclise Murals in the Royal Gallery of the Palace of Westminster

Uncaged Angels: Ecofeminist Literary Ornithology as Citizen Science in the Nineteenth Century

This article examines how women’s ornithological literature facilitated their participation in scientific research and political activism in the nineteenth century. Despite the many confining associations between women and birdcage imagery in Victorian culture, female involvement in the observation of birds was instrumental in the period’s transferring of women’s activity from the private to the public sphere in Britain, the United States and colonial South Africa. By focusing on birdwatching as an early form of what Alan Irwin defines as citizen science (1995), it is possible to explore how women’s ornithological nature writing encouraged environmental advocacy, thus fomenting female autonomous expression in the male-dominated field of natural history. The texts analysed here therefore anticipated ecofeminist approaches to avifauna, allowing for women’s subversive excursions into nature which dissolved the restrictions of the normative ‘angel in the house’.