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":null,"pages":null},"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":null,"pages":null},"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":null,"pages":null},"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":null,"pages":null},"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":null,"pages":null},"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}
{"title":"Ophelia’s Bathtub Boogaloo","authors":"Melissa L Gustin","doi":"10.1093/jvcult/vcad026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcad026","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43921,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Victorian Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-07-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44592814","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":"Notes on Contributors","authors":"","doi":"10.1093/jvcult/vcad042","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcad042","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43921,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Victorian Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135811967","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}
Entomologists and proponents of insect food have often seen in Vincent M. Holt’s Why Not Eat Insects? (London: Field & Tuer, 1885) the work of a precursor. Holt’s plea to consume insects in Victorian Britain, as an aid to address food poverty and diversify Western diets, certainly resonates with the environmental and social predicaments of the twenty-first century. However, the text and the context of this publication have not been fully examined. The book has attracted comparatively little attention from historians who are yet to unravel why and how Holt could raise the very question ‘why not?’ This article aims to bridge this gap, with a close reading of the sources and the language deployed by Holt, who heavily relies on European travel writings to make his case. Relocating Why Not Eat Insects? in this context throws into relief how issues of class and colonialism were constitutive of a wider discussion about eating insects in English-speaking prints in the nineteenth century. To explore this, the article also investigates responses from readers in the 1880s and 1890s, through reviews published in the British Isles, Australia, and the United States. Ultimately, examining these aspects alerts us to the dangers of celebrating Holt as a pioneer of insect food and an inspiration for the twenty-first century, for Holt partook in what Lisa Heldke terms ‘cultural food colonialism’, which we are at risk of reproducing when using his text uncritically and without regard to its social and colonial context.
{"title":"Palatable Bugs for the Victorians: Entomophagy, Class and Colonialism in Vincent M. Holt’s Why Not Eat Insects?","authors":"Elodie Duché","doi":"10.1093/jvcult/vcad022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcad022","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Entomologists and proponents of insect food have often seen in Vincent M. Holt’s Why Not Eat Insects? (London: Field & Tuer, 1885) the work of a precursor. Holt’s plea to consume insects in Victorian Britain, as an aid to address food poverty and diversify Western diets, certainly resonates with the environmental and social predicaments of the twenty-first century. However, the text and the context of this publication have not been fully examined. The book has attracted comparatively little attention from historians who are yet to unravel why and how Holt could raise the very question ‘why not?’ This article aims to bridge this gap, with a close reading of the sources and the language deployed by Holt, who heavily relies on European travel writings to make his case. Relocating Why Not Eat Insects? in this context throws into relief how issues of class and colonialism were constitutive of a wider discussion about eating insects in English-speaking prints in the nineteenth century. To explore this, the article also investigates responses from readers in the 1880s and 1890s, through reviews published in the British Isles, Australia, and the United States. Ultimately, examining these aspects alerts us to the dangers of celebrating Holt as a pioneer of insect food and an inspiration for the twenty-first century, for Holt partook in what Lisa Heldke terms ‘cultural food colonialism’, which we are at risk of reproducing when using his text uncritically and without regard to its social and colonial context.","PeriodicalId":43921,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Victorian Culture","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2023-06-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46430686","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：