Abstract Amelia B. Edwards (1831–1892) was renowned for her profound mastery of Egyptology, possessing a knowledge some said surpassed that of her male counterparts. Her archaeological endeavours in Egypt merged with a vivid narrative approach, evident in seminal works such as A Thousand Miles up the Nile (1877) and her captivating lectures across Britain and America. This harmonious blend of meticulous observation and romantic aesthetics not only carved her niche as a distinguished Egyptologist, but also heralded her as a forerunner in public history, adept at fusing erudite exploration with charming storytelling. Set against the tapestry of the Romantic era, Edwards forged a distinctive narrative, eschewing traditional academic boundaries to imbue her writings with heartfelt sentiment. This article delves into Edwards’ impact on Egyptology’s popularization: from her pivotal 1873 Egyptian sojourn, followed by her compelling lectures, to her personally curated Egyptian collection at home. With an adept fusion of artistic verve and academic rigour, Edwards bridged literature and archaeology. Her legacy signifies a refreshing deviation from orthodox methodologies, presenting a more immersive perspective on ancient Egypt. In stark contrast to the staid styles of her contemporary archaeological peers, she proclaimed herself the only romancer also versed in Egyptology, ardently championing a scientific discourse with broader appeal.
{"title":"Amelia B. Edwards and Romantic Egyptology","authors":"William Bainbridge","doi":"10.1093/jvcult/vcad040","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcad040","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Amelia B. Edwards (1831–1892) was renowned for her profound mastery of Egyptology, possessing a knowledge some said surpassed that of her male counterparts. Her archaeological endeavours in Egypt merged with a vivid narrative approach, evident in seminal works such as A Thousand Miles up the Nile (1877) and her captivating lectures across Britain and America. This harmonious blend of meticulous observation and romantic aesthetics not only carved her niche as a distinguished Egyptologist, but also heralded her as a forerunner in public history, adept at fusing erudite exploration with charming storytelling. Set against the tapestry of the Romantic era, Edwards forged a distinctive narrative, eschewing traditional academic boundaries to imbue her writings with heartfelt sentiment. This article delves into Edwards’ impact on Egyptology’s popularization: from her pivotal 1873 Egyptian sojourn, followed by her compelling lectures, to her personally curated Egyptian collection at home. With an adept fusion of artistic verve and academic rigour, Edwards bridged literature and archaeology. Her legacy signifies a refreshing deviation from orthodox methodologies, presenting a more immersive perspective on ancient Egypt. In stark contrast to the staid styles of her contemporary archaeological peers, she proclaimed herself the only romancer also versed in Egyptology, ardently championing a scientific discourse with broader appeal.","PeriodicalId":43921,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Victorian Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135086965","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}
Abstract In recent years, there has been considerable interest in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cultural practice of Britons wearing indigenous dress, as well as debate as to what motivated people to re-fashion their identity in such radical ways. Typically, these practices have been viewed either as acts of cultural appropriation, or occasionally as acts of solidarity with other cultures. This article focuses on one individual, the antiquarian Egyptologist Sir John Gardner Wilkinson (1797–1875), who wore Turkish dress whilst in Egypt, and was depicted wearing the same dress by the portrait artist Henry Wyndham Phillips, in 1843/44. Despite being reproduced in countless histories of Egyptology, archaeology and beyond, there currently exists no sustained critical analysis of Wilkinson’s relationship with this costume. I contend that Wilkinson’s choice of Turkish dress and his engagement with such clothing was both sustained and complicated. It reflected simple practicalities, but also an awareness of socio-political conditions in Egypt which were inadequately understood at an official level, due to high-handed expectations about how Britons should and should not behave, to bolster Britain’s national image abroad. At the same time, the same clothing could be interpreted differently by other audiences, and Phillips’s painting of Wilkinson – the components of which are identified for the first time – emerges as an attempt at self-fashioning on Wilkinson’s part, to cement his recently acquired status as a recognized authority about ancient Egypt. These concerns are applicable to other western scholars and travellers active in the Near East in the early nineteenth century.
{"title":"Sir John Gardner Wilkinson (1797–1875) in Turkish Dress, at Thebes: The Self-Fashioning of an Antiquarian Egyptologist","authors":"Robert Frost","doi":"10.1093/jvcult/vcad019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcad019","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In recent years, there has been considerable interest in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cultural practice of Britons wearing indigenous dress, as well as debate as to what motivated people to re-fashion their identity in such radical ways. Typically, these practices have been viewed either as acts of cultural appropriation, or occasionally as acts of solidarity with other cultures. This article focuses on one individual, the antiquarian Egyptologist Sir John Gardner Wilkinson (1797–1875), who wore Turkish dress whilst in Egypt, and was depicted wearing the same dress by the portrait artist Henry Wyndham Phillips, in 1843/44. Despite being reproduced in countless histories of Egyptology, archaeology and beyond, there currently exists no sustained critical analysis of Wilkinson’s relationship with this costume. I contend that Wilkinson’s choice of Turkish dress and his engagement with such clothing was both sustained and complicated. It reflected simple practicalities, but also an awareness of socio-political conditions in Egypt which were inadequately understood at an official level, due to high-handed expectations about how Britons should and should not behave, to bolster Britain’s national image abroad. At the same time, the same clothing could be interpreted differently by other audiences, and Phillips’s painting of Wilkinson – the components of which are identified for the first time – emerges as an attempt at self-fashioning on Wilkinson’s part, to cement his recently acquired status as a recognized authority about ancient Egypt. These concerns are applicable to other western scholars and travellers active in the Near East in the early nineteenth century.","PeriodicalId":43921,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Victorian Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135455376","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}
Abstract Beginning with a full text search for the term ‘provincialism’ across all entries in the OED Online, this article tracks ‘provincialism’ through the digitized fiction of the nineteenth century, eavesdropping on the ways in which the term was used in a dataset of references drawn from 165 nineteenth-century novels brought together from the British Library 19th Century Collection and the Hathi Trust Digital Library. The focus is not on a close reading of a small number of novels, a novel subgenre, or iterations of a single novel, but on a close reading of multiple short, references to the term ‘provincialism’ drawn from a large number of nineteenth-century digitized novels. Attention is concentrated on the textually small, the fleeting yet potent uses of the term deployed by nineteenth-century novelists writing in a mass cultural medium with a local and global reach. The findings offer up a relational and multidimensional picture of the term aggregated from the textually small, as it plays out in relation to class, gender, the city, the four nations of the UK, the British Empire and the wider world.
{"title":"“I didn’t know there were so many kinds of people and so many sorts of provincialism in the world’’: Tracking Provincialism Through the Nineteenth-Century Corpus","authors":"Helen Anne O’Neill","doi":"10.1093/jvcult/vcad032","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcad032","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Beginning with a full text search for the term ‘provincialism’ across all entries in the OED Online, this article tracks ‘provincialism’ through the digitized fiction of the nineteenth century, eavesdropping on the ways in which the term was used in a dataset of references drawn from 165 nineteenth-century novels brought together from the British Library 19th Century Collection and the Hathi Trust Digital Library. The focus is not on a close reading of a small number of novels, a novel subgenre, or iterations of a single novel, but on a close reading of multiple short, references to the term ‘provincialism’ drawn from a large number of nineteenth-century digitized novels. Attention is concentrated on the textually small, the fleeting yet potent uses of the term deployed by nineteenth-century novelists writing in a mass cultural medium with a local and global reach. The findings offer up a relational and multidimensional picture of the term aggregated from the textually small, as it plays out in relation to class, gender, the city, the four nations of the UK, the British Empire and the wider world.","PeriodicalId":43921,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Victorian Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135977060","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}
Abstract This article builds upon Bernard Lightman and Peter Bowler’s works on the non-Darwinian nature of Victorian evolution, arguing that while their arguments helpfully reorient our understanding of evolution’s historiography, they underestimate the diversity of evolutionary theory in the Victorian era. Victorian evolution was highly idiosyncratic, as each individual (scientist, author, or reader) interpreted evolution according to his or her own preconceptions, resulting in a myriad of evolutionary theories. To illustrate this diversity, this article examines the work of Andrew Lang, a prolific late-nineteenth-century journalist, anthropologist, and fairy-tale enthusiast. I focus on two of his largely unstudied works to demonstrate how he exposed and critiqued Victorian assumptions about evolution and the origins of the theory. The first work, ‘Higgins, the Inventor of Evolution’ (1897), uses satire to reveal that evolution’s theoretical history was often overlooked in the nineteenth century. The second, The Princess Nobody (1884), is a children’s fairy tale that exemplifies how fairy-tale tropes can help modern readers grasp evolutionary ideas. Significantly, both works recycle older texts that also address evolutionary questions, making Lang a participant in a folkloric tradition of interpreting and critiquing evolutionary theory. Lang viewed evolutionary theory as similar to a mythic story that is told and reinterpreted through the generations. His writing demonstrates that the origins of evolutionary theory are ambiguous, and that traditional fairy tales convey ideas about human origins and kinship with animals that predate Darwin’s studies.
{"title":"The Folklore of Evolution in Andrew Lang’s Writings","authors":"Anna McCullough","doi":"10.1093/jvcult/vcad041","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcad041","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article builds upon Bernard Lightman and Peter Bowler’s works on the non-Darwinian nature of Victorian evolution, arguing that while their arguments helpfully reorient our understanding of evolution’s historiography, they underestimate the diversity of evolutionary theory in the Victorian era. Victorian evolution was highly idiosyncratic, as each individual (scientist, author, or reader) interpreted evolution according to his or her own preconceptions, resulting in a myriad of evolutionary theories. To illustrate this diversity, this article examines the work of Andrew Lang, a prolific late-nineteenth-century journalist, anthropologist, and fairy-tale enthusiast. I focus on two of his largely unstudied works to demonstrate how he exposed and critiqued Victorian assumptions about evolution and the origins of the theory. The first work, ‘Higgins, the Inventor of Evolution’ (1897), uses satire to reveal that evolution’s theoretical history was often overlooked in the nineteenth century. The second, The Princess Nobody (1884), is a children’s fairy tale that exemplifies how fairy-tale tropes can help modern readers grasp evolutionary ideas. Significantly, both works recycle older texts that also address evolutionary questions, making Lang a participant in a folkloric tradition of interpreting and critiquing evolutionary theory. Lang viewed evolutionary theory as similar to a mythic story that is told and reinterpreted through the generations. His writing demonstrates that the origins of evolutionary theory are ambiguous, and that traditional fairy tales convey ideas about human origins and kinship with animals that predate Darwin’s studies.","PeriodicalId":43921,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Victorian Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135412803","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}
Abstract This article investigates the visual representation of Irish Catholicism in mid-nineteenth century genre painting through a close analysis of St Patrick’s Day (1856), a picturesque genre painting by the Scottish artist Erskine Nicol. In doing so, it will explore why artists like Nicol, Frederic William Burton and others chose to equate Irish rural Catholicism with romantic ideas of nature and outdoor ‘primitive’ worship. This tradition of representation will be examined in the context of contemporary Catholic institutional expansion across Ireland following the removal of the legal disabilities known as the ‘penal laws’ in 1829, and the parallel emphasis on the church building as the location of worship, the sacraments, and Catholic devotional life. To date, scholars of Nicol’s oeuvre have tended to focus on Nicol’s representation of an Irish national ‘type’ or ‘character’. My reading of Nicol’s St Patrick’s Day, however, aims to extend the art historical investigation of the signification of the Irish stereotype in Victorian painting, and to examine Nicol’s painting within the interwoven frameworks of national identity and religious identity. This analysis of St Patrick’s Day is rooted in a consideration of both genre and historical context, facilitating new insights into ideas of ‘peasant’ or ‘primitive’ Catholicism as central to mid-Victorian representations of the Irish ‘national character’.
{"title":"Erskine Nicol and the representation of national and religious identities in nineteenth-century Ireland","authors":"Niamh NicGhabhann","doi":"10.1093/jvcult/vcad039","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcad039","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article investigates the visual representation of Irish Catholicism in mid-nineteenth century genre painting through a close analysis of St Patrick’s Day (1856), a picturesque genre painting by the Scottish artist Erskine Nicol. In doing so, it will explore why artists like Nicol, Frederic William Burton and others chose to equate Irish rural Catholicism with romantic ideas of nature and outdoor ‘primitive’ worship. This tradition of representation will be examined in the context of contemporary Catholic institutional expansion across Ireland following the removal of the legal disabilities known as the ‘penal laws’ in 1829, and the parallel emphasis on the church building as the location of worship, the sacraments, and Catholic devotional life. To date, scholars of Nicol’s oeuvre have tended to focus on Nicol’s representation of an Irish national ‘type’ or ‘character’. My reading of Nicol’s St Patrick’s Day, however, aims to extend the art historical investigation of the signification of the Irish stereotype in Victorian painting, and to examine Nicol’s painting within the interwoven frameworks of national identity and religious identity. This analysis of St Patrick’s Day is rooted in a consideration of both genre and historical context, facilitating new insights into ideas of ‘peasant’ or ‘primitive’ Catholicism as central to mid-Victorian representations of the Irish ‘national character’.","PeriodicalId":43921,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Victorian Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135766951","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}
Journal Article Samuel Smiles, Asa Briggs, and Working-Class Leeds Get access Malcolm Chase, Malcolm Chase Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Robert Poole, Robert Poole University of Central Lancashire, UK RPoole@uclan.ac.uk Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Fabrice Bensimon Fabrice Bensimon University Paris Sorbonne-Paris IV, France fabrice.bensimon@sorbonne-universite.fr Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Victorian Culture, vcad036, https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcad036 Published: 04 September 2023
{"title":"Samuel Smiles, Asa Briggs, and Working-Class Leeds","authors":"Malcolm Chase, Robert Poole, Fabrice Bensimon","doi":"10.1093/jvcult/vcad036","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcad036","url":null,"abstract":"Journal Article Samuel Smiles, Asa Briggs, and Working-Class Leeds Get access Malcolm Chase, Malcolm Chase Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Robert Poole, Robert Poole University of Central Lancashire, UK RPoole@uclan.ac.uk Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Fabrice Bensimon Fabrice Bensimon University Paris Sorbonne-Paris IV, France fabrice.bensimon@sorbonne-universite.fr Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Victorian Culture, vcad036, https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcad036 Published: 04 September 2023","PeriodicalId":43921,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Victorian Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135451522","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 essay examines the religious contents of Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1854–1855 novel, North and South, within the context of Apocalyptic literary traditions from Antiquity, and in the literary and historical contexts accessible to Victorians. Inviting this comparison is the character Bessy Higgins, a terminally ill factory seamstress who quotes the Book of Revelation and reports prophetic dreams of some actual merit. By placing this anachronistically apocalyptic voice amid the working poor of her industrial urban setting, Gaskell effects a return to the original political function of the Apocalyptic genre: the vindication of a disenfranchised underclass. Drawing upon examples from Christian and pre-Christian Antiquity, this essay establishes the generic features of Apocalyptic literature as they pertain to its political function, and identifies key points at which Gaskell’s text aligns with them. Though Gaskell does not replicate the genre’s form in full, North and South being a novel rather than a dream-vision, she nonetheless uses the character Bessy to incorporate apocalyptic concepts, images, arguments, and rhetoric into her otherwise realistic narrative of nineteenth-century class struggle. The result, coded in layers of Biblical reference, is an indictment of the capitalist class, comparing them to the sinners who temporarily inherit the Earth in the Apocalypse of John, after the righteous have been purged from it. The final part of this essay further contextualizes Bessy Higgins within the Methodist traditions contemporary to North and South, and within Gaskell’s intersecting religious and political views.
{"title":"‘An Industrial Revelation’ – The Political Apocalyptic in Gaskell’s North and South","authors":"Joseph M Otero","doi":"10.1093/jvcult/vcad037","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcad037","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This essay examines the religious contents of Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1854–1855 novel, North and South, within the context of Apocalyptic literary traditions from Antiquity, and in the literary and historical contexts accessible to Victorians. Inviting this comparison is the character Bessy Higgins, a terminally ill factory seamstress who quotes the Book of Revelation and reports prophetic dreams of some actual merit. By placing this anachronistically apocalyptic voice amid the working poor of her industrial urban setting, Gaskell effects a return to the original political function of the Apocalyptic genre: the vindication of a disenfranchised underclass. Drawing upon examples from Christian and pre-Christian Antiquity, this essay establishes the generic features of Apocalyptic literature as they pertain to its political function, and identifies key points at which Gaskell’s text aligns with them. Though Gaskell does not replicate the genre’s form in full, North and South being a novel rather than a dream-vision, she nonetheless uses the character Bessy to incorporate apocalyptic concepts, images, arguments, and rhetoric into her otherwise realistic narrative of nineteenth-century class struggle. The result, coded in layers of Biblical reference, is an indictment of the capitalist class, comparing them to the sinners who temporarily inherit the Earth in the Apocalypse of John, after the righteous have been purged from it. The final part of this essay further contextualizes Bessy Higgins within the Methodist traditions contemporary to North and South, and within Gaskell’s intersecting religious and political views.","PeriodicalId":43921,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Victorian Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45169048","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}
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":null,"pages":null},"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":null,"pages":null},"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":null,"pages":null},"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}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：