Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1854–5) contains a structurally and thematically important narrative about moving house that prompts a much-needed recalibration of how we can read representations of domestic labour in Victorian fiction. Gaskell explores how homemaking is changing and perhaps needs to change in a modern, industrial world and how this can be expressed by dramatising the practicalities of house-moving. A close look at the representation of domestic labour – and how it is brought to a crisis through relocation – reveals a hitherto neglected aspect of the novel, while drawing attention to the representation of hands-on housework in Victorian literature. In plotting the practical tasks of house-moving in unprecedented detail, Gaskell renders the general speeding up of daily life concrete and relevant for her target readership. While interpolating practical advice, she also tests out how everyday, domestic challenges could, or should, be represented in fiction. An approach that takes the focus on housework in North and South seriously also resolves the supposed problem that domestic concerns pose in an industrial novel.
{"title":"‘That Was the Blunder’: Moving House in Gaskell’s North and South","authors":"T. Wagner","doi":"10.3366/vic.2022.0454","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/vic.2022.0454","url":null,"abstract":"Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1854–5) contains a structurally and thematically important narrative about moving house that prompts a much-needed recalibration of how we can read representations of domestic labour in Victorian fiction. Gaskell explores how homemaking is changing and perhaps needs to change in a modern, industrial world and how this can be expressed by dramatising the practicalities of house-moving. A close look at the representation of domestic labour – and how it is brought to a crisis through relocation – reveals a hitherto neglected aspect of the novel, while drawing attention to the representation of hands-on housework in Victorian literature. In plotting the practical tasks of house-moving in unprecedented detail, Gaskell renders the general speeding up of daily life concrete and relevant for her target readership. While interpolating practical advice, she also tests out how everyday, domestic challenges could, or should, be represented in fiction. An approach that takes the focus on housework in North and South seriously also resolves the supposed problem that domestic concerns pose in an industrial novel.","PeriodicalId":40670,"journal":{"name":"Victoriographies-A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing 1790-1914","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44470915","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article examines the representation of the poet and novelist Amy Levy (1861–89) after her death, focusing on how her photographic portrait becomes the foundation for her posthumous celebrity. Following her suicide at the age of twenty-seven, Levy's life became surrounded by rumour, as commentators sought to explain why a talented young writer would take her life. While reviewers and memoirists interpret her poetry autobiographically, they also turn to her face as key to her character, following theories of physiognomy. In the process, Levy's image, enshrined in a frontispiece photograph by Montabone, becomes a battleground for various ideological interpretations, as writers including Harry Quilter, Katharine Tynan, and Grant Allen set to work reanimating Levy in order to support their own ideas about female education, genius and ‘madness’, degeneration, and Jewish identity. Allen in particular draws on eugenic theories to transform Levy into a damaging fictional portrait in Under Sealed Orders (1894). This novel, combined with various poetic elegies, co-opts Levy's image in ways that resonate with long-standing notions of doomed Romantic genius and the tragic ‘poetess’, a legacy that has implications not only for Levy's enduring reputation, but also for other late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century women poets that followed in her wake.
{"title":"Reframing Amy Levy: Photography, Celebrity, and Posthumous Representation","authors":"Sarah Parker","doi":"10.3366/vic.2022.0447","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/vic.2022.0447","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the representation of the poet and novelist Amy Levy (1861–89) after her death, focusing on how her photographic portrait becomes the foundation for her posthumous celebrity. Following her suicide at the age of twenty-seven, Levy's life became surrounded by rumour, as commentators sought to explain why a talented young writer would take her life. While reviewers and memoirists interpret her poetry autobiographically, they also turn to her face as key to her character, following theories of physiognomy. In the process, Levy's image, enshrined in a frontispiece photograph by Montabone, becomes a battleground for various ideological interpretations, as writers including Harry Quilter, Katharine Tynan, and Grant Allen set to work reanimating Levy in order to support their own ideas about female education, genius and ‘madness’, degeneration, and Jewish identity. Allen in particular draws on eugenic theories to transform Levy into a damaging fictional portrait in Under Sealed Orders (1894). This novel, combined with various poetic elegies, co-opts Levy's image in ways that resonate with long-standing notions of doomed Romantic genius and the tragic ‘poetess’, a legacy that has implications not only for Levy's enduring reputation, but also for other late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century women poets that followed in her wake.","PeriodicalId":40670,"journal":{"name":"Victoriographies-A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing 1790-1914","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47017449","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article will consider the extent and nature of the celebrity of the Poet Laureate William Wordsworth, who died in 1850. Ostensibly the most famous English poet alive in that year, on his death on 23 April 1850, Wordsworth had been Poet Laureate for just over seven years and had been actively producing verse since 1793. Shortly after his death, his longest poem, now considered a masterpiece of autobiographical epic, The Prelude, was published; one could easily assume that the death of such a major poet coupled with the publication of one of his most significant works would dominate the literary world in that year; yet notices of his death, while widespread, were fleeting in focus, and The Prelude met with a lukewarm reception. This challenges the concept of even a Poet Laureate as a literary celebrity. Nonetheless, as I will show, his name endured as a byword for ‘poet’ in periodicals of the time, and the Wordsworthian pastoral lyric remained an enduring form in periodicals of the year of his death; meaning that Wordsworth as a figure of ‘true poet’ endured even as his personal celebrity had waned.
{"title":"Wordsworth's Death and the Figure of the Poet in 1850","authors":"J. Morton","doi":"10.3366/vic.2022.0449","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/vic.2022.0449","url":null,"abstract":"This article will consider the extent and nature of the celebrity of the Poet Laureate William Wordsworth, who died in 1850. Ostensibly the most famous English poet alive in that year, on his death on 23 April 1850, Wordsworth had been Poet Laureate for just over seven years and had been actively producing verse since 1793. Shortly after his death, his longest poem, now considered a masterpiece of autobiographical epic, The Prelude, was published; one could easily assume that the death of such a major poet coupled with the publication of one of his most significant works would dominate the literary world in that year; yet notices of his death, while widespread, were fleeting in focus, and The Prelude met with a lukewarm reception. This challenges the concept of even a Poet Laureate as a literary celebrity. Nonetheless, as I will show, his name endured as a byword for ‘poet’ in periodicals of the time, and the Wordsworthian pastoral lyric remained an enduring form in periodicals of the year of his death; meaning that Wordsworth as a figure of ‘true poet’ endured even as his personal celebrity had waned.","PeriodicalId":40670,"journal":{"name":"Victoriographies-A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing 1790-1914","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43068488","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Laurence Hutton (1834–1904) was an American author, critic, and editor who later became a lecturer in English literature at Princeton. Today he is best remembered for leaving the University a remarkable collection of life and death masks that he spent many years accumulating and researching. This body of casts reveals a vital element of Hutton's collecting praxis: his belief that death was a critical (perhaps even the critical) component of enduring celebrity. Death masks – a wax or plaster cast taken posthumously from a person's face – were executed for a number of reasons: scientific, artistic, or intensely personal. In all cases, though, there was a desire to preserve a hypothetically objective likeness of an important person, marking a shift between the perceived binary of life and death. While the death mask facilitated a sense of proximity to the celebrity body, Hutton was driven to flesh these faces out with an array of ephemera, including portraits, autographs, photographs of graves, strands of hair, and even casts of their hands. For Hutton, this triangulation figured as an attempt to capture a physical closeness to the bodies of departed celebrities, an urge he articulated explicitly in his unpublished writings. This article offers a new lens through which to consider celebrity mementoes – as relics in which the ‘imprint’ of the individual is sought and as icons through which we attempt to materialise celebrity.
{"title":"Behind the Mask: Death Masks, Celebrity, and the Laurence Hutton Collection","authors":"Anna Maria Barry, Verity Burke","doi":"10.3366/vic.2022.0445","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/vic.2022.0445","url":null,"abstract":"Laurence Hutton (1834–1904) was an American author, critic, and editor who later became a lecturer in English literature at Princeton. Today he is best remembered for leaving the University a remarkable collection of life and death masks that he spent many years accumulating and researching. This body of casts reveals a vital element of Hutton's collecting praxis: his belief that death was a critical (perhaps even the critical) component of enduring celebrity. Death masks – a wax or plaster cast taken posthumously from a person's face – were executed for a number of reasons: scientific, artistic, or intensely personal. In all cases, though, there was a desire to preserve a hypothetically objective likeness of an important person, marking a shift between the perceived binary of life and death. While the death mask facilitated a sense of proximity to the celebrity body, Hutton was driven to flesh these faces out with an array of ephemera, including portraits, autographs, photographs of graves, strands of hair, and even casts of their hands. For Hutton, this triangulation figured as an attempt to capture a physical closeness to the bodies of departed celebrities, an urge he articulated explicitly in his unpublished writings. This article offers a new lens through which to consider celebrity mementoes – as relics in which the ‘imprint’ of the individual is sought and as icons through which we attempt to materialise celebrity.","PeriodicalId":40670,"journal":{"name":"Victoriographies-A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing 1790-1914","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41989038","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Henry James was well known for his anxieties about the Victorian celebrity industry, and his particular concerns about posthumous intrusions into the lives of literary icons. Yet, at the same time, he betrayed a necromantic fascination with the private affairs of those authorial greats who predeceased him. This fascination spills over into three of his late Victorian tales: ‘The Aspern Papers’ (1888), ‘John Delavoy’ (1898), and ‘The Real Right Thing’ (1899). Through their representations of affective objects, sacralised spaces, and living conduits to the dead, these stories explore the sensory and intellectual pleasures that arise from auratic encounters with deceased literary celebrities. Although the tales remain ambivalent towards the prospect of posthumous exposure, I argue that they nevertheless understand the allure of ‘haptic fandom’, and consequently demonstrate a tacit sympathy towards individuals’ desires for communion with the illustrious dead.
{"title":"Auratic Encounters with Posthumous Literary Celebrity in Henry James’s Late Victorian Tales: Desiring the Dead","authors":"C. Boyce","doi":"10.3366/vic.2022.0448","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/vic.2022.0448","url":null,"abstract":"Henry James was well known for his anxieties about the Victorian celebrity industry, and his particular concerns about posthumous intrusions into the lives of literary icons. Yet, at the same time, he betrayed a necromantic fascination with the private affairs of those authorial greats who predeceased him. This fascination spills over into three of his late Victorian tales: ‘The Aspern Papers’ (1888), ‘John Delavoy’ (1898), and ‘The Real Right Thing’ (1899). Through their representations of affective objects, sacralised spaces, and living conduits to the dead, these stories explore the sensory and intellectual pleasures that arise from auratic encounters with deceased literary celebrities. Although the tales remain ambivalent towards the prospect of posthumous exposure, I argue that they nevertheless understand the allure of ‘haptic fandom’, and consequently demonstrate a tacit sympathy towards individuals’ desires for communion with the illustrious dead.","PeriodicalId":40670,"journal":{"name":"Victoriographies-A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing 1790-1914","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45774627","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article traces the emergence of the ‘Dolly Varden’ dress, a brief sartorial craze that rose to prominence shortly after Charles Dickens’s death in 1870 and which remained in vogue until 1873. Inspired by the lively heroine of Dickens’s historical novel Barnaby Rudge (1841), the Dolly Varden dress was a specific type of polonaise. Its appearance on the fashion market thirty years after the text’s initial publication is intriguing, yet only a handful of academic works have considered the significance of this sartorial style. Existing scholarship has tended to focus on the fashion trend’s connection with nostalgia and the expansion of commodity culture in the late nineteenth century. Contrary to these viewpoints, this essay argues that Dickens’s celebrity and his untimely death precipitated the trend for such a gown. Seeking to reframe the dress as a particular form of parasocial interaction, this article aims to reposition the women that wore it as active and autonomous fans. Considering the cultural and sartorial ends to which the Dolly Varden dress has been appropriated is significant, this essay argues, because it illustrates the iterability and enduring popularity of Dickens’s characters, whilst also contributing to our collective understanding of the influence of the death of a celebrity figure in the late nineteenth century.
{"title":"Dickens, Death, and the Dolly Varden Dress","authors":"Danielle Mariann Dove","doi":"10.3366/vic.2022.0446","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/vic.2022.0446","url":null,"abstract":"This article traces the emergence of the ‘Dolly Varden’ dress, a brief sartorial craze that rose to prominence shortly after Charles Dickens’s death in 1870 and which remained in vogue until 1873. Inspired by the lively heroine of Dickens’s historical novel Barnaby Rudge (1841), the Dolly Varden dress was a specific type of polonaise. Its appearance on the fashion market thirty years after the text’s initial publication is intriguing, yet only a handful of academic works have considered the significance of this sartorial style. Existing scholarship has tended to focus on the fashion trend’s connection with nostalgia and the expansion of commodity culture in the late nineteenth century. Contrary to these viewpoints, this essay argues that Dickens’s celebrity and his untimely death precipitated the trend for such a gown. Seeking to reframe the dress as a particular form of parasocial interaction, this article aims to reposition the women that wore it as active and autonomous fans. Considering the cultural and sartorial ends to which the Dolly Varden dress has been appropriated is significant, this essay argues, because it illustrates the iterability and enduring popularity of Dickens’s characters, whilst also contributing to our collective understanding of the influence of the death of a celebrity figure in the late nineteenth century.","PeriodicalId":40670,"journal":{"name":"Victoriographies-A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing 1790-1914","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42335912","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Arthur Conan Doyle's spiritualist interests are often viewed today as idiosyncratic for a medical professional and anachronistic for the late Victorian era. However, historians of the era recognise that there was widespread fascination at this time in the possibility of communicating with the dead and the development of extraordinary mental powers like telepathy. Conan Doyle studied medicine in Edinburgh where the study of mesmerism and its role in therapy continued for much longer than the rest of Britain. The university and medical school produced most of the major names of British medical mesmerism including the physician James Braid, who coined the term hypnotism. By the late nineteenth century, there were many distinguished physicians and scientists who shared Conan Doyle's spiritualist views. The Society for Psychical Research (SPR) was the elite London association that investigated these possibilities using a scientific methodology. Hypnotism and the trance state were important tools in this study. Over the course of his thirty-six-year membership, Conan Doyle's convictions strengthened. The backdrop of Edinburgh and mesmerism is key to Conan Doyle's story ‘ John Barrington Cowles’ (1884) , while the scientific investigation of hypnotism described in The Parasite (1894) relies upon his experiences with London's SPR based in Dean's Yard, Westminster, and Hanover Square in Mayfair.
{"title":"Arthur Conan Doyle in Mesmeric Edinburgh and Hypnotic London","authors":"G. Bates","doi":"10.3366/vic.2021.0436","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/vic.2021.0436","url":null,"abstract":"Arthur Conan Doyle's spiritualist interests are often viewed today as idiosyncratic for a medical professional and anachronistic for the late Victorian era. However, historians of the era recognise that there was widespread fascination at this time in the possibility of communicating with the dead and the development of extraordinary mental powers like telepathy. Conan Doyle studied medicine in Edinburgh where the study of mesmerism and its role in therapy continued for much longer than the rest of Britain. The university and medical school produced most of the major names of British medical mesmerism including the physician James Braid, who coined the term hypnotism. By the late nineteenth century, there were many distinguished physicians and scientists who shared Conan Doyle's spiritualist views. The Society for Psychical Research (SPR) was the elite London association that investigated these possibilities using a scientific methodology. Hypnotism and the trance state were important tools in this study. Over the course of his thirty-six-year membership, Conan Doyle's convictions strengthened. The backdrop of Edinburgh and mesmerism is key to Conan Doyle's story ‘ John Barrington Cowles’ (1884) , while the scientific investigation of hypnotism described in The Parasite (1894) relies upon his experiences with London's SPR based in Dean's Yard, Westminster, and Hanover Square in Mayfair.","PeriodicalId":40670,"journal":{"name":"Victoriographies-A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing 1790-1914","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43787012","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Yohei Igarashi, The Connected Condition: Romanticism and the Dream of Communication","authors":"A. Shastri","doi":"10.3366/vic.2021.0439","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/vic.2021.0439","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40670,"journal":{"name":"Victoriographies-A Journal of Nineteenth-Century Writing 1790-1914","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2021-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44637543","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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