Victorian Popular Research Articles

Explaining the Cosmos to the People

Victorian Popularizers of Science . Designing Nature for New Audiences. By Bernard Lightman . University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2007. 563 pp. $45, £23.50. ISBN 9780226481180. The author provides a scholarly, detailed consideration of the bloom of books by writers and journalists who presented science to the British public through the second half of the 19th century

Fire Escape

victorian review • Volume 34 Number 1 52 Johnston, M. George. History of the British Zoophytes. 2 vols. London: J.VanVoorst, 1847. Jordan, Steven L.“TheTalisman of the Deep: Coral Jewelry.” Collector’s Universe 1999. 20 August 2007 . Kingsley, Charles. Glaucus,or the Wonders of the Shore. London: Macmillan, 1855. Lewes, George Henry. Sea-side Studies. Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1858. Lightman, Bernard. Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 2007. Montgomery, James. The Pelican Island,and Other Poems. London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1827. O’Day, Deirdre. Victorian Jewellery. London: Letts, 1974. Rudwick, Martin J. Science from DeepTime: Early Pictorial Representation of the Prehistoric World. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992. “Something About Coral.” Peter Parley’s Annual: A Christmas and NewYear’s Present forYoung People 1853: 241–46. Stafford, Barbara.“Images of Ambiguity: Eighteenth Century Microscopy and the Neither/Nor.” Visions of Empire: Voyages,Botany and Representations of Nature. Ed. David Philip Miller and Peter Hans Reill. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge UP, 1993. 230–57. Stoddart, David R.“Darwin, Lyell and the Geological Significance of Coral Reefs.” British Journal for the History of Science 9 (1976): 199–218. Stott, Rebecca.“Darwin’s Barnacles: Mid-Victorian Natural History and the Marine Grotesque.” Transactions and Encounters: Science and Literature in the 19th Century. Ed. Roger Luckhurst and Josephine McDonagh. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2002. 151–81. Tolini, Michelle.“‘Beetle Abominations’ and Birds on Bonnets: Zoological Fantasy in Late-Nineteenth-Century Dress.” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide Spring 2002 . Turkle, Sherry, ed. Evocative Objects:Things toThink With. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2007. Wiley, George, ed. The Poems of James Montgomery. Sheffield: Hallamshire, 2000. • Fire Escape Jen n ifer Bla ir • The term “fire escape” seems to describe an action rather than a thing.An “escape” is an event, a motion, a traversal beyond some sort of constrictive place or situation. Scientifically speaking, “fire” is an event too. Put the two terms together, however, and we find ourselves with something that counters what each one signifies individually: a“fire escape,” at least as we know it today, is a structure fixed to or within a building. It does not move and is hardly an event, since it carries on its service of providing the means of escape even in the absence of fire. In theVictorian period of fire-escape design, however, it had not yet been decided that fire escapes should be structures that stayed still, functioning as “escapes” only by providing an apparatus upon which people could leave burning buildings by means of their own self-propelled movements (walk- 53 Victorian Things: Blair ing, descending stairs, etc.).There were escapes of this sort in the nineteenth century, escapes that most often took the form of iron staircases and balconies fixed to building exteriors. But there were also several others in use at this time that were designed on the principle that the fire-escape structure itself should do the moving, with—and sometimes even instead of—the people. In the Burrows Escape, for example, building inhabitants were lowered to the ground inside a wire basket attached to ropes on a pulley system.The basket would travel from window to window to pick up passengers—around five at a time—before delivering them to safety on the ground. Halifax, Nova Scotia, city planner Edward Henry Keating praised the Burrows Escape in an 1883 report of his tour through the northeastern U.S., where he investigated new fire safety measures to bring back to Canada. Keating provided the illustration given here in order to “show more explicitly the manner of attaching and operating this form of fire escape which the Inspector of Buildings has approved of and considers the best and cheapest appliance for saving life yet invented” (26). Keating saw the Burrows Escape at Riggs’ Hotel inWashington, where there was a basket installed on each of the building’s four sides (Keating 25). Hotels were of particular concern for fire-escape designers because the occupants would always be unfamiliar with the building.They might also be, as the New The Burrows Escape. Illustration from Edward Henry Keating, Fire Departments,Fire Apparatus,and Fire Escapes,A Report on...

“Vox Populi, Vox Vulgari”: Pro Se Representation in Victorian Popular Legal Culture

“Vox Populi, Vox Vulgari”: Pro Se Representation in Victorian Popular Legal Culture

“Vox Populi, Vox Vulgari”: Pro Se Representation in Victorian Popular Legal Culture

“Vox Populi, Vox Vulgari”: Pro Se Representation in Victorian Popular Legal Culture

Braddon's Haunting Memories: Rape, Class and the Victorian Popular Press

This article draws out the class-based functions of genre by contrasting “penny bloods” with the Victorian middle-class sensation novel. In the penny fiction, the threat of rape is pervasive and yet obscured by the genre's surfeit of spectacle, which absorbs the rape threats into the novel's broader scope. The heroine threatened with rape in Mary Elizabeth Braddon's The Black Band (1862) exhibits little psychological response to her two abductions, and the events seem to be quickly forgotten once the moment is past. The memory of trauma, however, is transposed onto other elements of the plot. The penny blood's play between generic codes functions as a sleight of hand to de-emphasize the reality of sexual violence.

The Events of June 1848: the ‘Monte Cristo’ Riots and the Politics of Protest

Theatrical riots are usually dismissed as occasions during which aesthetic reactionaries battled reformers over stylistic issues of little relevance to pressing and immediate social concerns. Yet how true is this? What were the real issues which boiled over at such apparently confined and innocuous occasions as the Old Price Riots at Covent Garden in 1809, the Paris Ernani riot of 1830, the visit of a celebrated English actor which sparked the New York Astor Place riot in 1849, or the first night of a play which brought about the Playboy riots in Dublin in 1907? The complex social and cultural tensions on such occasions clearly operated during the two days of disturbance which came to be known as the Monte Cristo riots in London in 1848, and there are curious modern parallels. Victor Emeljanow is Professor of Drama at the University of Newcastle, Australia. His full length works include Anton Chekhov: the Critical Heritage, Victorian Popular Dramatists, and, with Jim Davis, Reflecting the Audience: London Theatregoing, 1840–1880 (University of Iowa Press, 2001), which was recently awarded the Society for Theatre Research's Book Prize for 2002.

The Popularity of Popular Delusions: Charles Mackay and Victorian Popular Culture

The Popularity of Popular Delusions: Charles Mackay and Victorian Popular Culture

The Devil himself: villainy in detective fiction and film

Devil Himself: An Introduction by Stacy Gillis Vicarious Villainy and the Burden of Narrative Guilt by Jan-Melissa Schramm Why Does Hortense Walk Barefoot Through the Grass?: Ambivalent Hierarchies of Intimacy in Bleak House by Janet Levison From Foreign Perculiarities to Fatal Resemblance: Detecting Villainy in Women in White by Natalka Freeland Female Moriarty: Arch-Villainess in Victorian Popular Fiction by Chris Willis Philanthropies, Villainies and The Speckled Band: Conflict of the Imperial and the Anti-Imperial in Arthur Conan Doyle's Story and Play by Catherine Wynne Political Appeal of Fu Manchu by Peter Christensen Case Closed: Scapegoating in British Women's Wartime Detective Fiction by Kristine Miller Shadows and Doubts: Hitchcock, Genre and Villainy by Rowland Hughes Why Don't They Just Shoot Him?: Bond Villains and Cold War Heroism by Deborah Banner Gothic Villainy: P.D. James and the Horror of Modernity/Ruth Rendell and the Utopian Sublime by Susan Rowland Villainy and the Life of the Mind in Sayers and Byatt by Helen Taylor Alone and Vulnerable in the Terrible Dream: Contagion and Technology in the Early Scarpetta Novels by Gerard Collins Devil Herself? Fantasy, Female Identity, and the Villainess Fatale in Margaret Atwood's Robber Bride by Ann Heilmann Getting Away with It: Villainy in Usual Suspects and Se7en by Philippa Gates Whoever Fights Monsters: Serial Killers, the FBI and America's Last Frontier by Linnie Blake

The Story of Nature: Victorian Popularizers and Scientific Narrative

At the end of the nineteenth century, the Reverend Henry Hutchinson (1856-1927), a popularizer of geology, commented on the explosion of popular science works produced by journalists writers rather than by professional scientists. Never before was there such a profusion of books describing the various forms of inhabiting the different countries of the globe, or the rivers, lakes, seas that diversify its scenery, he de clared in the preface of his Extinct Monsters. Popular writers have done good service in making the way plain for those who wish to acquaint themselves with the structure, habits, histories of living animals. But he complained thatin their admiration for the living, popular science authors had neglected the innumerable host of creatures that once trod this earth (ix). This is where Hutchinson made his contribution, pub lishing a series of popular works during the nineties on dinosaurs other forms of ancient life, including The Autobiography of the Earth (1890), Extinct Monsters (1892), Creatures of Other Days (1894), Prehis toric Man Beast (1896), Primeval Scenes (1899). Since the ordinary public cannot learn much by merely gazing at skeletons set up in museums, Hutchinson aimed to clothe their dry bones with flesh suggest for them backgrounds such as are indicated by the discoveries of geology; in other words, to endeavour, by means of pen pencil, to bring them back to life (xi). Hutchinson revived these ancient monsters by reading for his audience the story to be found in the fossil record. Every bone has its meaning, Hutchinson asserted, and every skeleton can be made (in the hands of competent anatomists)

The visual theology of Victorian popularizers of science. From reverent eye to chemical retina.

This essay examines the use of visual images during the latter half of the nineteenth century in the work of three important popularizers of science. J. G. Wood, Richard Proctor, and Agnes Clerke skillfully used illustrations and photographs to establish their credibility as trustworthy guides to scientific, moral, and religious truths. All three worked within the natural theology tradition, despite the powerful critique of William Paley's argument from design set forth in Charles Darwin's Origin of Species (1859). Wood, Proctor, and Clerke recognized that in order to reach a popular audience with their message of divine wonder in nature, they would have to take advantage of the developing mass visual culture embodied in the new pictorial magazines, spectacles, and entertaining toys based on scientific gadgets emblematic of the reorganization of vision. But in drawing on different facets of the emerging visual culture and in looking to the images produced by the new visual technologies to find the hand of God in nature, these popularizers subtly transformed the natural theology tradition.

Book Review: After Foucault: Performing Dickens for the Twenty-First Century, after Dickens: Reading, Adaptation and Performance, Dickens, Novel Reading, and the Victorian Popular Theatre

Book Review: After Foucault: Performing Dickens for the Twenty-First Century, after Dickens: Reading, Adaptation and Performance, Dickens, Novel Reading, and the Victorian Popular Theatre

Marketing knowledge for the general reader: Victorian popularizers of science

During the second half of the 19th century, science journalists and not professional scientists established many of the traditions of contemporary popular science. For the first time, there was an explosion of publications in popular science, as the rise of a mass reading public and new printing technologies combined to create a viable market that could be exploited by publishers. As professional scientists were trying to edge women and Christian clergymen out of science, a new space opened up for those with little or no formal training to forge careers in science journalism. These popularizers of science developed new narrative techniques and drew on vivid visual images to present audiences with stories of a natural world of wonder and divine activity.

REVIEWS

Journal Article REVIEWS Get access DEBORAH VLOCKDickens, Novel Reading, and the Victorian Popular Theatre Pp xii+226 (Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture 19) Cambridge Cambridge University Press, 1998 £35 SOS ELTIS SOS ELTIS Brasenose CollegeOxford Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of English Studies, Volume 51, Issue 203, August 2000, Pages 499–501, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/51.203.499 Published: 01 August 2000

Disease, Desire and the Body in Victorian Popular Women's Novels

Disease, Desire and the Body in Victorian Popular Women's Novels

Dickens, Novel Reading, and the Victorian Popular Theatre (review)

Objecting to Foucault's "unexamined belief in the interiority of modern culture" (2), Deborah Vlock attempts to demonstrate that Victorian writers saw the world, and the Victorian public read novels, "through the lens of popular [theatrical] performance. In other words, the 'drama' was not supplanted by the novel in the nineteenth century [as Foucault and David Miller assume] but merged with it" (3). Victorians frequently encountered fiction through public or family readings, she notes, and even when they read privately, they experienced the book as an "imaginary text," created by "idioms and gestures and a whole range of signifiers established by popular entertainment" (6). Because the "reading skills" of Victorians "were cultivated in the theatre" (91), we ought to envision them "not as isolated, curled up on a window seat in the privacy of the sitting room, as D. A. Miller has suggested, but sitting in a theatre, the imagination's playhouse, with a book in one hand and an eye and ear on the stage" (192).

Deborah Vlock. Dickens, Novel Reading, and the Victorian Popular Theatre. (Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 1998. Pp. xii, 226. $54.95. ISBN 0-521-64084-9.

Deborah Vlock. Dickens, Novel Reading, and the Victorian Popular Theatre. (Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 1998. Pp. xii, 226. $54.95. ISBN 0-521-64084-9. - Volume 32 Issue 1

Reviews

Journal Article Reviews Get access Penny Dreadfuls and Boys' Adventures: The Barry Ono Collection of Victorian Popular Literature in the British Library. By ELIZABETH JAMES and HELEN R. SMITH. London: The British Library. 1998. xxii + 122 pp. £30. 00 cloth, ISBN 07123 45280. DAVID FINKELSTEIN DAVID FINKELSTEIN Edinburgh Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Library, Volume s6-21, Issue 4, December 1999, Pages 391–392, https://doi.org/10.1093/library/s6-21.4.391 Published: 01 December 1999

Fun without Vulgarity:

Fun without Vulgarity:

Mrs. Riddell and the reviewers: A case study in Victorian Popular Fiction

(1994). Mrs. Riddell and the reviewers: A case study in Victorian Popular Fiction. Women's Studies: Vol. 23, No. 1, pp. 69-84.

Aspects of Neglect: The Strange Case of Victorian Popular Education

More has been researched and written about education in Victorian England than in any other period, and the majority of it has been about popular education. Yet we have neglected it. Most of what has been written has in fact disguised our neglect and ignorance of it. This is not just a question of 'gaps' that need to be filled, of historical inattention. It is a more basic question of the kind of historical enterprise in which we have been engaged. Judgements about historical 'neglect', of course, depend on assumptions about what is, could be, or should be known. They entail definitions of the area, purpose and value of study. Such judgements and definitions are ideological statements. My interest in our 'neglect' of Victorian popular education, in the nature of the historical definitions involved, and in related questions of ideology, arise from difficulties in my current research. In making a judgement about the apparently most explored area and period of English, education, I am inevitably making a judgement about the direction of the history of education-though I am here confining myself to the nineteenth century, and to the education of the poor. I cannot avoid outlining the personal research situation out of which this discussion arises, or the main thrusts of previous investigations in this field. In outlining these situations I cannot avoid discussing the reasons for them, and the theoretical and historiographical issues which they raise. The themes that have attracted the most attention in Victorian popular education have been those of policy formation and legislation, commissions and committees, the provision, control and administration of education, and the changing shape of different 'levels' of education-elementary and technical, infant and adult, and 'types' of educationboard and voluntary. Some attention has been paid to the broader 'context' of educational decisions and functions-notably that of the churches and the radical and labour movements, and the nature and extent of literacy. Studies have been national and (especially in the case of theses and dissertations) local-with a vast amount of (mainly unpublished) work on local school boards and local institutions. The most researched and discussed areas can be summarized as: the school boards, the voluntary school system, and the development of a national system of administration (focusing on Kay-Shuttleworth and the Committee of Council, Robert Lowe and the Revised Code, Forster and the 1870 Education Act, the politics of the school board era and the events leading up to the I902 Education Act). Attention has also been paid (again, largely in unpublished work) to pressure groups, from the Central Society of Education in the i83os to the bodies campaigning for public education in the late I84os and i85os, the National Education League of the late I86os, and the socialist organizations of the last decades of the century.l It seems a well-surveyed field, and it has produced such publication peaks as Brian Simon's first two volumes of 'Studies in the History of Education' which encompass the Victorian period (I960, I965), John Harrison's Learning and Living 1780-1960 (I96I), Mabel Tylecote's The Mechanics' Institutes of Lancashire and Yorkshire before 1851 (I957)