Abstract In 1847, Southampton’s Philip Klitz (1805–1854) added two ‘blackface’ ballads to a cultural craze reflecting that year’s British tour by the white American minstrel troupe, the ‘Ethiopian Serenaders’, and their imitators, the ‘Ethiopian Harmonists’. I show how Klitz and his fellow composers reflected and fed a potent stereotype, circulating songs in the bourgeois home that adversely affected the British perception of African Americans by sustaining racist themes and images in the popular-cultural imagination. Notwithstanding the negative impacts for black residents and visitors in Britain at the time, minstrelsy is also widely understood to have exerted considerable cultural influence throughout the nineteenth century. Among investigations of how the Victorian arts constructed race, few give music the significance it holds in this interpretation of how black caricature functioned in a post-abolition British context through the medium of music and musical orientalism in Victorian drawing-room ballads. This case study of previously neglected musical repertoire details an important episode in the history of ‘blackface’ minstrelsy, showing how racial attitudes formed within British domestic spaces during the late 1840s were affected by those of the popular stage in ante-bellum America.
{"title":"Sounding Slavery in the Victorian Drawing Room: The ‘Blackface’ Ballads of Philip Klitz","authors":"Roger Hansford","doi":"10.1093/jvcult/vcad013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcad013","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In 1847, Southampton’s Philip Klitz (1805–1854) added two ‘blackface’ ballads to a cultural craze reflecting that year’s British tour by the white American minstrel troupe, the ‘Ethiopian Serenaders’, and their imitators, the ‘Ethiopian Harmonists’. I show how Klitz and his fellow composers reflected and fed a potent stereotype, circulating songs in the bourgeois home that adversely affected the British perception of African Americans by sustaining racist themes and images in the popular-cultural imagination. Notwithstanding the negative impacts for black residents and visitors in Britain at the time, minstrelsy is also widely understood to have exerted considerable cultural influence throughout the nineteenth century. Among investigations of how the Victorian arts constructed race, few give music the significance it holds in this interpretation of how black caricature functioned in a post-abolition British context through the medium of music and musical orientalism in Victorian drawing-room ballads. This case study of previously neglected musical repertoire details an important episode in the history of ‘blackface’ minstrelsy, showing how racial attitudes formed within British domestic spaces during the late 1840s were affected by those of the popular stage in ante-bellum America.","PeriodicalId":43921,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Victorian Culture","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-08-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136349475","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}
Throughout its serial run, Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers (1836–7), was repurposed hundreds of times by the provincial press. From acting as innocuous filler material to making strategic political statements, provincial newspaper editors evoked, excerpted and adapted Pickwick as quickly as Dickens was penning the instalments, showing a keen responsiveness to political topicalities relevant to their reading communities. This article contends that these types of journalistic re-use benefit from being read collectively as a form of remediation, defined by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin as ‘the formal logic by which new media refashion prior media forms’. It argues that these remediations are vital to understanding the politics of the provincial press because they became one method through which provincial newspapers articulated a localised response to the national political debates that raged following the 1832 Reform Act. As well as reflecting the political priorities of specific communities, these remediations nuance our understanding of Pickwick’s popularity by drawing attention to aspects of its construction that lent themselves to re-use. While explicit engagement with party politics is conspicuously absent from Pickwick, provincial editors capitalised upon this generality and imbued their re-workings of the serial with a partisanship that Dickens himself avoided, while using his name to substantiate and authorise their own pieces. In this respect, these remediations invite us to place Pickwick at the heart of political debate in the papers, by foregrounding the close relationship between newspaper politics, serial literature, and provincial identity in the 1830s.
{"title":"‘Be a gen’l’m’n and a Conserwative Sammy’: Political Remediations of the Pickwick Papers in the Provincial Press (1836–1837)","authors":"Kathleen Holdway","doi":"10.1093/jvcult/vcad030","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcad030","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Throughout its serial run, Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers (1836–7), was repurposed hundreds of times by the provincial press. From acting as innocuous filler material to making strategic political statements, provincial newspaper editors evoked, excerpted and adapted Pickwick as quickly as Dickens was penning the instalments, showing a keen responsiveness to political topicalities relevant to their reading communities. This article contends that these types of journalistic re-use benefit from being read collectively as a form of remediation, defined by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin as ‘the formal logic by which new media refashion prior media forms’. It argues that these remediations are vital to understanding the politics of the provincial press because they became one method through which provincial newspapers articulated a localised response to the national political debates that raged following the 1832 Reform Act. As well as reflecting the political priorities of specific communities, these remediations nuance our understanding of Pickwick’s popularity by drawing attention to aspects of its construction that lent themselves to re-use. While explicit engagement with party politics is conspicuously absent from Pickwick, provincial editors capitalised upon this generality and imbued their re-workings of the serial with a partisanship that Dickens himself avoided, while using his name to substantiate and authorise their own pieces. In this respect, these remediations invite us to place Pickwick at the heart of political debate in the papers, by foregrounding the close relationship between newspaper politics, serial literature, and provincial identity in the 1830s.","PeriodicalId":43921,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Victorian Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-08-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41746653","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}
Literary critics often cast the English university novel as a traditionalist relic of the nineteenth century, one largely defensive of Oxbridge classics and masculinity. Yet the subgenre was a more subversive cultural nexus of sorts: an attempted reconciliation of novel form with the era’s emerging and optically illusive technologies. These Bildungsromane, largely or exclusively set at universities, value letting undergraduates stare at and learn to enjoy outdoor vistas. In turn, they frequently compare those college landscapes to illusory devices like panoramas and magic lanterns. The fictions thus represent a struggle to bridge conventional Oxbridge education with innovative outdoor learning, and Romantic natural aesthetics with a visual subjectivism more akin to the early modernists. The essay begins by linking the so-called visual turn of nineteenth-century studies with the fewer book-length accounts of university fiction. The paper’s second section then defines natural versus what I call illusory prospect gazing in English culture; where the former involved staring at outdoor vistas for pleasure, the latter offered this through indoor and often unsettlingly virtual landscapes. Finally, the essay turns to university novels, which combine both forms of prospect gazing for students’ educative benefits. While earlier fictions liken college grounds to panoramas, later ones grow fascinated with photographic, phantasmagoric, and kaleidoscopic vistas. We can begin to re-evaluate the university novel, then, as one of the era’s new optical technologies: it taught undergraduate characters and readers alike to visually enjoy and distrust their surroundings, and to confront the Romantic legacies and dizzying futures of novel form.
{"title":"Trick of the Eye: Prospect Gazing, Illusion, and the University Novel","authors":"J. Bunzel","doi":"10.1093/jvcult/vcad028","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcad028","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Literary critics often cast the English university novel as a traditionalist relic of the nineteenth century, one largely defensive of Oxbridge classics and masculinity. Yet the subgenre was a more subversive cultural nexus of sorts: an attempted reconciliation of novel form with the era’s emerging and optically illusive technologies. These Bildungsromane, largely or exclusively set at universities, value letting undergraduates stare at and learn to enjoy outdoor vistas. In turn, they frequently compare those college landscapes to illusory devices like panoramas and magic lanterns. The fictions thus represent a struggle to bridge conventional Oxbridge education with innovative outdoor learning, and Romantic natural aesthetics with a visual subjectivism more akin to the early modernists. The essay begins by linking the so-called visual turn of nineteenth-century studies with the fewer book-length accounts of university fiction. The paper’s second section then defines natural versus what I call illusory prospect gazing in English culture; where the former involved staring at outdoor vistas for pleasure, the latter offered this through indoor and often unsettlingly virtual landscapes. Finally, the essay turns to university novels, which combine both forms of prospect gazing for students’ educative benefits. While earlier fictions liken college grounds to panoramas, later ones grow fascinated with photographic, phantasmagoric, and kaleidoscopic vistas. We can begin to re-evaluate the university novel, then, as one of the era’s new optical technologies: it taught undergraduate characters and readers alike to visually enjoy and distrust their surroundings, and to confront the Romantic legacies and dizzying futures of novel form.","PeriodicalId":43921,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Victorian Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-08-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41545132","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}
Florence Nightingale rose to fame early in 1855 at a time when provincialism was assuming unprecedented importance in Victorian culture. The London papers The Times and the Illustrated London News linked Nightingale to the typically provincial domain of the parish and the home: her public image reflecting the wish to extend domestic comfort to soldiers, adrift on foreign land and neglected by uncaring military authorities. Nightingale’s campaigns to improve soldiers’ conditions then galvanized the charitable enthusiasms of households across Britain and its colonies, as the public sent contributions ranging from knitted slippers to bedsheets repurposed as wound dressings on ships to the Crimea. Nightingale subsequently introduced army reading rooms stocked with works of regional and provincial fiction, either as actual volumes or as instalments in periodicals such as Household Words, to bring the imaginative connections between the parish and the Scutari hospitals closer still. While recent work by Stefanie Markovits and Holly Furneaux has shown how the cultural lives of ‘home’ and ‘the East’ were closer than previously thought, I contend that two distinctively provincial features of Nightingale’s place within the conflict have not been sufficiently recognized. First, Nightingale drew on gendered notions of the home and domesticity that were crucial to the provincial as it gained appeal and meaning during the middle of the century. Second, in facilitating imaginative connections between soldiers and the reading public many thousands of miles away, Nightingale showed that the provincial operated most effectively at distance, where its effects were felt most strongly among an increasingly dispersed and fragmented nation.
{"title":"Florence Nightingale and the Provincial Response to the Crimean War","authors":"J. Memel","doi":"10.1093/jvcult/vcad033","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcad033","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Florence Nightingale rose to fame early in 1855 at a time when provincialism was assuming unprecedented importance in Victorian culture. The London papers The Times and the Illustrated London News linked Nightingale to the typically provincial domain of the parish and the home: her public image reflecting the wish to extend domestic comfort to soldiers, adrift on foreign land and neglected by uncaring military authorities. Nightingale’s campaigns to improve soldiers’ conditions then galvanized the charitable enthusiasms of households across Britain and its colonies, as the public sent contributions ranging from knitted slippers to bedsheets repurposed as wound dressings on ships to the Crimea. Nightingale subsequently introduced army reading rooms stocked with works of regional and provincial fiction, either as actual volumes or as instalments in periodicals such as Household Words, to bring the imaginative connections between the parish and the Scutari hospitals closer still. While recent work by Stefanie Markovits and Holly Furneaux has shown how the cultural lives of ‘home’ and ‘the East’ were closer than previously thought, I contend that two distinctively provincial features of Nightingale’s place within the conflict have not been sufficiently recognized. First, Nightingale drew on gendered notions of the home and domesticity that were crucial to the provincial as it gained appeal and meaning during the middle of the century. Second, in facilitating imaginative connections between soldiers and the reading public many thousands of miles away, Nightingale showed that the provincial operated most effectively at distance, where its effects were felt most strongly among an increasingly dispersed and fragmented nation.","PeriodicalId":43921,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Victorian Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-08-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46337949","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":"Afterword: Provincialism at Large","authors":"S. Rennie","doi":"10.1093/jvcult/vcad034","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcad034","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43921,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Victorian Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45858197","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 argues that the rise of the provincial novel in Britain during the 1860s set loose a radically democratizing aesthetic of everyday discriminations. The article suggests – through examples from the works of Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot – that provincial fiction embodies an aesthetics of what is termed ‘middleness’: a means of reading in which the social, cultural and geographical middle became an object of careful evaluative judgment. The article examines the aesthetic affordances of this form in relation to Sianne Ngai’s exploration of the category of the ‘interesting’. It places this practice of attention to the common and the dull in contrast to Matthew Arnold’s contemporaneous critique of provincialism as the chief weakness at the heart of English culture as it moved towards democracy. If Arnold’s mission in his critical essays was to establish a global standard of taste – collective agreement grounded in the judgement of what was ‘the best that has been thought and known in the world’ – then provincial fiction effected another sort of aesthetic community: one that valued the common and the dull.
{"title":"Middleness: Provincial Fiction and the Aesthetics of Dull Life","authors":"R. Livesey","doi":"10.1093/jvcult/vcad029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcad029","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article argues that the rise of the provincial novel in Britain during the 1860s set loose a radically democratizing aesthetic of everyday discriminations. The article suggests – through examples from the works of Elizabeth Gaskell and George Eliot – that provincial fiction embodies an aesthetics of what is termed ‘middleness’: a means of reading in which the social, cultural and geographical middle became an object of careful evaluative judgment. The article examines the aesthetic affordances of this form in relation to Sianne Ngai’s exploration of the category of the ‘interesting’. It places this practice of attention to the common and the dull in contrast to Matthew Arnold’s contemporaneous critique of provincialism as the chief weakness at the heart of English culture as it moved towards democracy. If Arnold’s mission in his critical essays was to establish a global standard of taste – collective agreement grounded in the judgement of what was ‘the best that has been thought and known in the world’ – then provincial fiction effected another sort of aesthetic community: one that valued the common and the dull.","PeriodicalId":43921,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Victorian Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-07-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44625662","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 introduction situates the contributions to the New Agenda in the context of an apparent resurgence of the term ‘provincial’ and ‘provincialism’ in Britain since the Brexit debates and the 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum. It takes the resurgence of provincial thinking as an invitation to explore the cultural history of provincialism in Victorian Britain and the unexpected part it played in the formation of Empire. By revaluing the cultural formation of provincialism through this historical lens the articles in this New Agenda help us see the roots of its power now and the alternative possibilities latent within it. Although provincialism emerged as a fraught and politically charged term during the nineteenth century it was also a means to expand access to print and material cultures to those previously excluded. At the same time as provincialism became a pejorative term in the hands of liberal critics such as Matthew Arnold, nineteenth-century Britain was powered by industry, intellectual enquiry, and newspapers emanating from non-metropolitan towns and cities. The provincial press and provincial fiction are crucial ways in which Victorian Britain represented itself as an entity composed of distinctive constituent regions and imagined itself as an imperial power.
{"title":"Provincialism at Large: Reading Locality, Scale, and Circulation in Nineteenth-Century Britain","authors":"R. Livesey","doi":"10.1093/jvcult/vcad031","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcad031","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This introduction situates the contributions to the New Agenda in the context of an apparent resurgence of the term ‘provincial’ and ‘provincialism’ in Britain since the Brexit debates and the 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum. It takes the resurgence of provincial thinking as an invitation to explore the cultural history of provincialism in Victorian Britain and the unexpected part it played in the formation of Empire. By revaluing the cultural formation of provincialism through this historical lens the articles in this New Agenda help us see the roots of its power now and the alternative possibilities latent within it. Although provincialism emerged as a fraught and politically charged term during the nineteenth century it was also a means to expand access to print and material cultures to those previously excluded. At the same time as provincialism became a pejorative term in the hands of liberal critics such as Matthew Arnold, nineteenth-century Britain was powered by industry, intellectual enquiry, and newspapers emanating from non-metropolitan towns and cities. The provincial press and provincial fiction are crucial ways in which Victorian Britain represented itself as an entity composed of distinctive constituent regions and imagined itself as an imperial power.","PeriodicalId":43921,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Victorian Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-07-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46571853","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":"Thinking Back Through Her Mothers","authors":"C. Gore","doi":"10.1093/jvcult/vcad024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcad024","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43921,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Victorian Culture","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-07-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46204117","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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