When Jude the Obscure (1895) was published as a single volume novel, Hardy added the biblical epithet ‘the letter killeth’ to the title page. In Jude and across his works, Hardy revels in moments in which literacy seems to undo itself. This article traces Hardy’s attempts to ‘kill the letter’ through non-standard engagements with orthography as part of a larger proto-modernist approach that destabilizes the fixity of meaning. There are several concerns linked to the growing primacy of literacy that appear time and again in Hardy’s novels, specifically: the alternative literacies of the lesser educated, semiotic multiplicities, and the transformative potential of spelling mistakes. I suggest that Hardy’s treatment of these themes demonstrates a sustained effort to ‘kill the letter’ and challenge the assumption of progress made by the various educational reforms that had taken place in the latter half of the nineteenth century.
{"title":"Killing the Letter: Alternate Literacies and Orthographic Distortions in Jude the Obscure","authors":"Louise Creechan","doi":"10.1093/jvcult/vcac034","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcac034","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 When Jude the Obscure (1895) was published as a single volume novel, Hardy added the biblical epithet ‘the letter killeth’ to the title page. In Jude and across his works, Hardy revels in moments in which literacy seems to undo itself. This article traces Hardy’s attempts to ‘kill the letter’ through non-standard engagements with orthography as part of a larger proto-modernist approach that destabilizes the fixity of meaning. There are several concerns linked to the growing primacy of literacy that appear time and again in Hardy’s novels, specifically: the alternative literacies of the lesser educated, semiotic multiplicities, and the transformative potential of spelling mistakes. I suggest that Hardy’s treatment of these themes demonstrates a sustained effort to ‘kill the letter’ and challenge the assumption of progress made by the various educational reforms that had taken place in the latter half of the nineteenth century.","PeriodicalId":43921,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Victorian Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-05-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41378982","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Mirror, Mirror on the Wall”: Elizabeth Barrett Browning Version 2.0","authors":"Shantanu Majee","doi":"10.1093/jvcult/vcac041","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcac041","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43921,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Victorian Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-05-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48583363","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The ABCs of Fame Culture in an ‘Age of Reform’","authors":"Joshua Dight","doi":"10.1093/jvcult/vcac040","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcac040","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43921,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Victorian Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-05-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42543281","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
While Quaker plainness has encapsulated multiple positive meanings such as piety, worldliness and even human equality, many were attentive to its rootedness in social discipline and surveillance. Drawing on nineteenth-century assessments of Quaker plainness, both in journals and fiction, this article explores the dynamics of self-fashioning and performance that are exposed to be an important part of these bodily experiences of Quaker plainness. Plainness is not only self-disciplining but also controls the social and visual dynamics of displaying, seeing, and interpreting the body. Sarah Stickney Ellis’s Friends at Their Own Fireside: Or, Pictures of the Private Life of the People Called Quakers (1858) provides an intriguing account of the private experiences of plain Quaker women and their resistance to forms of social control and scrutiny. I use the context of this novel to examine the subjective experience of Quaker women as wearers of plain dress in ways that expose their agency and involvement in observing and adhering to these codes rather than completely or obliviously succumbing to social authority and control. The exploration of female plainness in this novel, as I will argue, confounds the notions of discipline attached to Quaker plainness, and instead brings to light women’s agency in navigating their identity and personal space in such a context.
{"title":"Performing Plainness in Sarah Stickney Ellis’s Friends at Their Own Fireside: Or, Pictures of the Private Life of the People Called Quakers","authors":"M. Albassam","doi":"10.1093/jvcult/vcac042","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcac042","url":null,"abstract":"While Quaker plainness has encapsulated multiple positive meanings such as piety, worldliness and even human equality, many were attentive to its rootedness in social discipline and surveillance. Drawing on nineteenth-century assessments of Quaker plainness, both in journals and fiction, this article explores the dynamics of self-fashioning and performance that are exposed to be an important part of these bodily experiences of Quaker plainness. Plainness is not only self-disciplining but also controls the social and visual dynamics of displaying, seeing, and interpreting the body. Sarah Stickney Ellis’s Friends at Their Own Fireside: Or, Pictures of the Private Life of the People Called Quakers (1858) provides an intriguing account of the private experiences of plain Quaker women and their resistance to forms of social control and scrutiny. I use the context of this novel to examine the subjective experience of Quaker women as wearers of plain dress in ways that expose their agency and involvement in observing and adhering to these codes rather than completely or obliviously succumbing to social authority and control. The exploration of female plainness in this novel, as I will argue, confounds the notions of discipline attached to Quaker plainness, and instead brings to light women’s agency in navigating their identity and personal space in such a context.","PeriodicalId":43921,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Victorian Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-05-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44160714","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Inconsistency is the Key: Unravelling the Relationship between Victorian Penny Fiction and Radical Politics","authors":"Anna Gasperini","doi":"10.1093/jvcult/vcac038","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcac038","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43921,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Victorian Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-05-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45214983","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In 1849, a Liverpool newspaper printed a letter about an encounter with a lascar who was selling hymn sheets. The same newspaper had recently reported the arrest of someone similar for drunkenness and the letter writer, a migrant from Wales, confronted the hymn seller angrily in Welsh. To his surprise, the man responded in the same language and eventually confessed to being from Anglesey rather than Bombay. Much about the incident is unclear. Had the hymn seller coloured his skin? Why did he regard passing as an Indian as a useful sales technique? Why was the letter writer angry and why did he confront the man in Welsh? Did the incident even happen? Attempting to answer such questions can provide pointers to much wider historical issues. A ‘small history’ of this incident offers an opportunity to explore the dynamics of class, language and race in the middle of the nineteenth century. The incident reveals the anxieties the middle classes had around their position and whether their goodwill was being exploited by the poor. It points towards the impact of racism on people of colour and the significance of ethnicity for white migrants too. The incident also illustrates how the working classes and people of colour were not without agency, however they were thought about by those whose attitudes and power shaped their lives. Yet all these interpretations rest on a degree of supposition and the article concludes that historians too can engage in a degree of deception in their writings.
{"title":"Humbug and a ‘Welsh Hindoo’: A Small History of Begging, Race and Language in Mid-nineteenth Century Liverpool","authors":"M. Johnes","doi":"10.1093/jvcult/vcac033","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcac033","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In 1849, a Liverpool newspaper printed a letter about an encounter with a lascar who was selling hymn sheets. The same newspaper had recently reported the arrest of someone similar for drunkenness and the letter writer, a migrant from Wales, confronted the hymn seller angrily in Welsh. To his surprise, the man responded in the same language and eventually confessed to being from Anglesey rather than Bombay. Much about the incident is unclear. Had the hymn seller coloured his skin? Why did he regard passing as an Indian as a useful sales technique? Why was the letter writer angry and why did he confront the man in Welsh? Did the incident even happen? Attempting to answer such questions can provide pointers to much wider historical issues. A ‘small history’ of this incident offers an opportunity to explore the dynamics of class, language and race in the middle of the nineteenth century. The incident reveals the anxieties the middle classes had around their position and whether their goodwill was being exploited by the poor. It points towards the impact of racism on people of colour and the significance of ethnicity for white migrants too. The incident also illustrates how the working classes and people of colour were not without agency, however they were thought about by those whose attitudes and power shaped their lives. Yet all these interpretations rest on a degree of supposition and the article concludes that historians too can engage in a degree of deception in their writings.","PeriodicalId":43921,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Victorian Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-05-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47548183","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The alabaster wall monument to Robert Claudius Billing, Suffragan Bishop of Bedford, placed in the crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral, commemorates the life and service of a Victorian cleric known for his work in the overcrowded parishes of east London. Supplied by Powell and Sons, a London-based glassmaking firm that made stained glass and mosaics as well as reredoses and tablets, the monument echoes the architectural style and decoration of the iconic building in which it is placed, as well as showcasing a new vitreous mosaic material known as opus sectile that the firm innovated and marketed as suitable for both wall and floor decoration. The striking opus sectile portrait of Billing preserves an image of the deceased, and together with the accompanying epitaph demonstrates the affection and high esteem in which he was held in the Diocese of London and beyond.
位于圣保罗大教堂地下室的贝德福德选举权主教Robert Claudius Billing的雪花石膏墙纪念碑，纪念一位以在伦敦东部拥挤的教区工作而闻名的维多利亚时代神职人员的一生和服务。这座纪念碑由总部位于伦敦的玻璃制造公司Powell and Sons提供，该公司生产彩色玻璃和马赛克，以及复制件和平板电脑，与它所在的标志性建筑的建筑风格和装饰相呼应，并展示了一种被称为opus sectile的新型玻璃马赛克材料，该公司对其进行了创新和营销，认为其适用于墙壁和地板装饰。Billing引人注目的作品《扇形肖像》保留了死者的形象，并与随附的墓志铭一起展示了他在伦敦教区及其他地方受到的爱戴和高度尊重。
{"title":"‘A man greatly beloved’ and Immortalized in opus sectile Powell & Sons, Monument to Robert Claudius Billing (1899)","authors":"Jasmine Allen","doi":"10.1093/jvcult/vcac025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcac025","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The alabaster wall monument to Robert Claudius Billing, Suffragan Bishop of Bedford, placed in the crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral, commemorates the life and service of a Victorian cleric known for his work in the overcrowded parishes of east London. Supplied by Powell and Sons, a London-based glassmaking firm that made stained glass and mosaics as well as reredoses and tablets, the monument echoes the architectural style and decoration of the iconic building in which it is placed, as well as showcasing a new vitreous mosaic material known as opus sectile that the firm innovated and marketed as suitable for both wall and floor decoration. The striking opus sectile portrait of Billing preserves an image of the deceased, and together with the accompanying epitaph demonstrates the affection and high esteem in which he was held in the Diocese of London and beyond.","PeriodicalId":43921,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Victorian Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-05-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47886734","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sculpture and Faith at St Paul’s Cathedral, c. 1796-1914: W. F. Woodington, The Gospel of St Luke (1862): Enlisting the Bible","authors":"M. Giebelhausen","doi":"10.1093/jvcult/vcac022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcac022","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43921,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Victorian Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-05-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42504655","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article considers John Bacon’s marble monument to one of eighteenth-century British colonialism’s most important protagonists, William Jones (1746–1794). A prodigious scholar of Indian languages, religions, and laws, as well as a Supreme Court judge in Bengal, Jones epitomized early orientalism, promoting the study of Indian cultures as a means of facilitating the East India Company’s ‘governmental’ regulation of colonial subjects in its own interests. However, by the time this monument was erected, that vision of British India was becoming a thing of the past, gradually replaced by a more self-consciously imperializing, Anglicizing approach. Reading the monument both with and against the grain, this article argues that the tensions inherent in the orientalist attitude towards India are registered within the monument itself, especially in the relationship between its statue of Jones and the Hindu imagery on its pedestal. For while that imagery pays tribute to Jones, especially through its iconographical depiction of Vishnu, the Hindu god of justice and protection, it is dominated by the undemonstrative yet emphatically present figure of an Indian woman, seemingly the monument’s sole visual reference to a colonized human subject. Existing somewhere between human and sculpture, and between human and divine, she resists meaning and knowledge, troubling the monument’s semantic clarity and commemorative purpose.
{"title":"A Vishnu-Come-Lately: John Bacon’s Monument to William Jones (1799)","authors":"S. Monks","doi":"10.1093/jvcult/vcac027","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcac027","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article considers John Bacon’s marble monument to one of eighteenth-century British colonialism’s most important protagonists, William Jones (1746–1794). A prodigious scholar of Indian languages, religions, and laws, as well as a Supreme Court judge in Bengal, Jones epitomized early orientalism, promoting the study of Indian cultures as a means of facilitating the East India Company’s ‘governmental’ regulation of colonial subjects in its own interests. However, by the time this monument was erected, that vision of British India was becoming a thing of the past, gradually replaced by a more self-consciously imperializing, Anglicizing approach. Reading the monument both with and against the grain, this article argues that the tensions inherent in the orientalist attitude towards India are registered within the monument itself, especially in the relationship between its statue of Jones and the Hindu imagery on its pedestal. For while that imagery pays tribute to Jones, especially through its iconographical depiction of Vishnu, the Hindu god of justice and protection, it is dominated by the undemonstrative yet emphatically present figure of an Indian woman, seemingly the monument’s sole visual reference to a colonized human subject. Existing somewhere between human and sculpture, and between human and divine, she resists meaning and knowledge, troubling the monument’s semantic clarity and commemorative purpose.","PeriodicalId":43921,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Victorian Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-05-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44018786","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This roundtable comment piece raises questions about the significance of materials, subject matter and form, and location and display to interpretations of W. F. Woodington’s 1862 Genesis panel at St Paul’s Cathedral. The panel was commissioned as an adjunct to the Wellington Memorial, and depicts the conclusion of the first military engagement in the Bible, the Battle of the Vale of Siddim. It features 18 human figures, three sheep, and two cows, and is inscribed with a passage from Genesis 14. 20. My comment piece reconceptualizes the panel as an assemblage bringing together many worlds, human and non-human, alongside the worlds of faith which were the impetus for the roundtable. It brings together biblical subject matter with the commemoration of military heroes; Italian marble quarry workers; the racially charged material of white marble; memories of sheep on their way to slaughter at Smithfield market; archaeological discoveries; the figure of Sodom in Victorian culture, and classical sculptural form. It asks how these varied geographies, time periods, and contributors to this object, human and non-human, might shift or mediate our understanding of this frieze as something more than an adjunct to a memorial to a military hero.
{"title":"Sculpture, Faith, and the Many Worlds of Victorian Sculpture: W. F. Woodington, Genesis (1862)","authors":"Kate Nichols","doi":"10.1093/jvcult/vcac029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcac029","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This roundtable comment piece raises questions about the significance of materials, subject matter and form, and location and display to interpretations of W. F. Woodington’s 1862 Genesis panel at St Paul’s Cathedral. The panel was commissioned as an adjunct to the Wellington Memorial, and depicts the conclusion of the first military engagement in the Bible, the Battle of the Vale of Siddim. It features 18 human figures, three sheep, and two cows, and is inscribed with a passage from Genesis 14. 20. My comment piece reconceptualizes the panel as an assemblage bringing together many worlds, human and non-human, alongside the worlds of faith which were the impetus for the roundtable. It brings together biblical subject matter with the commemoration of military heroes; Italian marble quarry workers; the racially charged material of white marble; memories of sheep on their way to slaughter at Smithfield market; archaeological discoveries; the figure of Sodom in Victorian culture, and classical sculptural form. It asks how these varied geographies, time periods, and contributors to this object, human and non-human, might shift or mediate our understanding of this frieze as something more than an adjunct to a memorial to a military hero.","PeriodicalId":43921,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Victorian Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-05-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46083434","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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