VICTORIAN STUDIES最新文献

{"title":"Gestures of Connection: Victorian Technologies of Photography and Visible Mothering","authors":"Andrea Kaston Tange","doi":"10.2979/vic.2023.a911106","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/vic.2023.a911106","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Victorian \"hidden mother\" photographs are portraits of babies in which adult figures are draped with textiles, blocked with furniture, tucked behind a mat, orotherwise (often ineffectively) obscured. Fascination with them habitually turns on their presumed erasure of nineteenth-century women's labor; however, modern assumptions about the production of these photos have shaped consumption of them. This essay locates these images within multiple contexts: the technologies of their production, growingsentimental ideals of middle-class motherhood, and the ways that carework and its cultural (in)visibilities varied widely by gender, race, and class in the period. Arguing thatthe mother figures' persistent presence (not hiddenness) is fundamental to these photographs, this essay makes a case for reading them as revealing intimacies and documenting tenderness rather than evincing erasures.","PeriodicalId":45845,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN STUDIES","volume":"46 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135448357","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Victorian Pilgrimage: Sacred-Secular Dualism in the Novels of Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot by M. Joan Chard (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.2979/vic.2023.a911118","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/vic.2023.a911118","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Victorian Pilgrimage: Sacred-Secular Dualism in the Novels of Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot by M. Joan Chard Thomas Albrecht (bio) Victorian Pilgrimage: Sacred-Secular Dualism in the Novels of Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot, by M. Joan Chard; pp. xii + 156. New York: Peter Lang, 2019, $95.15, $89.20 ebook. In a chapter devoted to George Eliot, M. Joan Chard asserts, \"The path taken by Eliot's characters on their spiritual journeys … leads to a purely humanistic response to life.\" Chard then supplements her images of path and journey with a musical metaphor, \"Scenes of Clerical Life, the starting-point for Eliot's literary pilgrimage, introduces in the manner of an overture the dominant motif which is orchestrated in increasing complexity and [End Page 321] variation throughout [Eliot's] novels until it reaches its fullest expression in the finale, Daniel Deronda\" (111). Chard's metaphors in these sentences are revealing not only about Eliot's literary project as she interprets it, but about her own project in Victorian Pilgrimage: Sacred-Secular Dualism in the Novels of Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot. In the book, Chard takes as her topic the predominant Victorian theme of pilgrimage, which according to these sentences manifests itself in Eliot's novels as an increasing fusion of the spiritual with the humanistic. And as her sentences suggest, Chard complementarily conceives of the oeuvres and literary trajectories of each of the writers she examines (Eliot, Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell) as themselves constituting teleological progressions, a form of pilgrimage. Chard repeatedly traces plot and character trajectories in individual works by Brontë, Gaskell, and Eliot that she argues are cast by those novelists as figurative pilgrimages. Her readings of Brontë generally define these pilgrimages as reconciliations within an individual character's mind of the sacred and the secular. Her readings of Gaskell define pilgrimages as reconciliations within a given social context of an individual character with some form of wider community, while her readings of Eliot define them as reconciliations of the human with the religious. As in the works of Brontë and Gaskell, Eliot's reconciliations fuse sacred and secular, and individual and community. In the works of all three novelists, Chard repeatedly finds versions of pilgrimage that transcend restrictive forms of Victorian dualism and thereby move from states of disconnection to states of reconciliation, from states of rupture to states of union. Chard clearly indicates the broader critical stakes of her readings and of exploring the significance of Christian motifs like pilgrimage within the social, political, and ethical agendas of three fundamentally secular novelists. For instance, Chard's reading of Brontë through the pilgrimage paradigm would rebut commonplace assumptions that Brontë's feminism is founded on her ","PeriodicalId":45845,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN STUDIES","volume":"2016 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135448360","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Charles Kingsley: Faith, Flesh, and Fantasy ed. by Jonathan Conlin and Jan Marten Ivo Klaver (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.2979/vic.2023.a911126","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/vic.2023.a911126","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Charles Kingsley: Faith, Flesh, and Fantasy ed. by Jonathan Conlin and Jan Marten Ivo Klaver Oded Steinberg (bio) Charles Kingsley: Faith, Flesh, and Fantasy, edited by Jonathan Conlin and Jan Marten Ivo Klaver; pp. 284. New York: Routledge, 2021, $170.00, $52.95 paper, $47.65 ebook. In the preface to the new edition of Charles Kingsley's The Roman and the Teuton (1864), published a short while after his death, his close friend and scholar of Comparative Languages Friedrich Max Müller wrote: \"Charles Kingsley will be missed in England, in the English colonies, in America … aye, wherever Saxon speech and Saxon thought is understood. He will be mourned for, yearned for, in every place in which he passed some days of his busy life\" ([Macmillan and Co., 1889], 1). Indeed, the industrious life of the famous novelist and \"polymath\" Victorian Kingsley—with all his inner doubts, contradictions, and controversies—is studied magnificently in this new volume edited by Jonathan Conlin and Jan Marten Ivo Klaver (251). Charles Kingsley: Faith, Flesh, and Fantasy includes fourteen essays (not including a foreword and an afterword) on the different facets of Kingsley's life, delving into his personal life, Christian attitudes, racial perceptions, and of course his celebrated and less celebrated novels. Kingsley was a man of contradictions, a Christian socialist who supported the South during the American Civil War, a fervent Anglo-Saxonist who advocated for racial mixing, and a devoted Christian who supported some aspects of the theory of evolution. Instead of adopting a binary perspective, a recent trend of many works, labelling historical figures or phenomena under the simplistic verdicts of good or bad, the volume presents a far more composite approach throughout. The volume does not shy away from Kingsley's contentious ideas, while also discussing his contribution to Victorian culture and beyond. The question of Kingsley's perception of race is, without a doubt, situated in the heart of these contentious ideas. There is no coincidence, therefore, that Müller praised Kingsley as a symbol of (Anglo-)Saxonism. As evident throughout the volume, [End Page 337] Kingsley's understanding of Anglo-Saxonism or Teutonism includes complex racial, national, and religious identities. Simon Goldhill's chapter underscores this complexity as he shows how Kingsley's Hypatia, or New Foes with an Old Face (1853) lauded the benefits of racial mixing in Alexandria between the Teuton and Roman as the key to racial growth and Christian success. His treatment of the Irish, Norman Vance illustrates, is further evidence of Kingsley's support of racial mixture, claiming that such process may benefit the English. However, as Theodore Koditschek and Goldhill show, this argument for miscegenation did not mean that Kingsley was refuting any notion of Anglo-Saxon superiority. As a liberal scholar, it is argued, Kingsley mediated complex ideas such as race to a larger audience. ","PeriodicalId":45845,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN STUDIES","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135448364","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Fish Pain and Human Sport in Victorian Britain","authors":"Toby Harper","doi":"10.2979/vic.2023.a911108","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/vic.2023.a911108","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Victorian Britons were interested in encounters between humans and fish for many reasons: fishing for sport as opposed to food gathering was expanding rapidly in popularity; fishing was practiced by many different people in many ways around the world; and fish populations were visibly suffering from pollution, overfishing, and terrain modification. This article analyzes the changing meanings of these encounters through addressing the beliefs about fish pain held by Victorian anglers. These beliefs were intertwined with ideas about race, food, civilization, and class. Elite British anglers increasingly understood their relationship with fish and their own capacity to feel pain (and to judge others' pain) as a justification of their place as the managers and stewards of all fisheries, not just those in Britain.","PeriodicalId":45845,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN STUDIES","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135448330","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Cities, Mountains and Being Modern in fin-de-siècle England and Germany by Ben Anderson (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.2979/vic.2023.a911115","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/vic.2023.a911115","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Cities, Mountains and Being Modern in fin-de-siècle England and Germany by Ben Anderson Simon Bainbridge (bio) Cities, Mountains and Being Modern in fin-de-siècle England and Germany, by Ben Anderson; pp. xi + 301. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, $89.99, $69.99 ebook. The development of mountaineering as a leisure pursuit is often seen as driven by the desire to escape both modernity and the city, with its early origins linked to the industrial revolution and urban growth. The poet and pioneering scrambler Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who made the first recorded use of the word mountaineering in 1802, compared himself to the figures of the shepherd and chamois hunter, suggesting a search for a preindustrial, mountain-based identity. However, examining the remarkable period of mountaineering's evolution in Europe roughly a century after Coleridge's groundbreaking exploits, Ben Anderson offers a striking reconceptualization of upland activity, arguing not only that most mountaineers were \"urban people\" who \"lived, worked and spent most of their leisure time in Europe's towns and cities\" but also that they were quintessentially modern (25). In his fascinating and richly detailed study Cities, Mountains and Being Modern in fin-de-siècle England and Germany, Anderson argues that the mountains provided a location for the performance and contesting of different forms of modernity, showing how upland environments were physically and imaginatively shaped by values that came from the cities. Anderson's focus is on Manchester, Munich, and Vienna in the decades leading up to 1914; he brilliantly traces the presence of the mountains in these cities and reveals how their residents took their ambitions to be modern into the high places, particularly the English Lake District and the Eastern Alps. He draws illuminatingly on the archives of several mountaineering and rambling clubs and associations, including those of the Co-operative Holidays Association, the Rucksack Club, the Deutsche und Oesterreichische Alpenverein, Touristenverein \"Die Naturfreunde,\" Oesterreichische Touristen-Club, and Oesterreichische Alpenclub (10). While remaining attentive to local and national detail, Anderson examines how these organizations shared a view of mountaineering and rambling that justified the activities as exercises in self-improvement and progress; ascent facilitated mental and physical strengthening that in turn could regenerate society. Reversing a familiar binary, Anderson shows how mountains became a part of city life through exhibitions and displays in a range of civic environments as well as through the discussions and initiatives of those who climbed the peaks. His writing on the role of Alpine panoramas and landscape reliefs is particularly interesting, describing them as forms that \"promised complete knowledge, and control, of a landscape—these were celebrations (or fantasies) of human sovereignty over self and nature\" (107). Anderson presents this mo","PeriodicalId":45845,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN STUDIES","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135448331","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Evolution, Two Darwins, and the Gestalt Imagining of Edward Lear","authors":"Thomas Dilworth, Michael Crawford","doi":"10.2979/vic.2023.a911109","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/vic.2023.a911109","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract: Edward Lear was in the vanguard of cultural assimilation of evolutionary theory. In what amounts to a gestalt relationship, some of his published \"nonsense\" figures against, and largely derives its meaning from, innovation in the natural sciences. Certain of his works, some not previously interpreted, are specific in their engagement with evolutionists, including Erasmus and Charles Darwin, Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, and Robert Grant. Before and after the appearance of On the Origin of Species (1859), Lear backs one side against another in public debates sparked by evolutionary theory. His implicit engagement with the new biology becomes evident in close attention to the drawings, which are essential components of Lear's innovative hybridization of visual and literary artforms.","PeriodicalId":45845,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN STUDIES","volume":"31 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135448361","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Sounding Feminine: Women's Voices in British Musical Culture, 1780–1850 by David Kennerley (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.2979/vic.2023.a911133","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/vic.2023.a911133","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Sounding Feminine: Women's Voices in British Musical Culture, 1780–1850 by David Kennerley Alisa Clapp-Itnyre (bio) Sounding Feminine: Women's Voices in British Musical Culture, 1780–1850, by David Kennerley; pp. xiv + 220. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2020, $82.00. Part of Oxford's New Cultural History of Music series, David Kennerley's Sounding Feminine: Women's Voices in British Musical Culture, 1780–1850 is a welcome contribution to a series that includes studies on the music of France, Russia, Germany, and so on. British music, and that performed by women, is an especially vital field of study to which many of us over the last thirty years have contributed, answering the call by Nicholas Temperley in his formative 1989 book, The Lost Chord: Essays on Victorian Music, who writes: \"Anyone who has studied Victorian history or literature is likely to be well aware of the presence of music, for it played a prominent part in Victorian life. Yet music has played little part in Victorian studies\" ([Indiana University Press], 1). Kennerley's own important contribution is from a historian's perspective; his thorough investment in the archives of conduct literature, letters, diaries, and musical press brings a rich engagement with women's music often from new, intimately personal perspectives. As he writes, \"[o]ne aim of this book, then, is to pursue these newly emerging links and cross-currents between public and private, professional and amateur worlds, and to do so as part of a wider rethinking of the categories scholars have applied to British musical life, especially in relation to gender\" (12). Voice and sound are central foci as he argues that \"the sound of the voice is always a product of a profound encounter between the body's physical structures and cultural norms\" (3). Chapter 1 focuses on conduct literature that discouraged not only public performances by amateur women singers, but also immodest singing within the home. Chapter 2 considers a vast array of diary entries and personal letters, both of singers and listeners, to suggest, not surprisingly, that class and religious views shaped how one heard female voices. Chapter 3 considers attitudes of musical critics by focusing closely on conflicting reviews of three professional singers: Catherine Stephens, Eliza Vestris, and Giuditta [End Page 352] Pasta. Chapter 4 focuses exclusively on an upper-middle-class, amateur singer named Dorothea Solly. Kennerley uses extensive family papers to examine attitudes held by Solly, and those directed toward her, about singing and life. Chapter 5 returns to examining a wider grouping of women, now from personal papers such as Adelaide Kemble's letters, Clara Novello's singing adaptations (as read through reviews about her), and Marianne Lincoln's own tour diary. Kennerley shows anxieties and battles each experienced in their careers. Kennerley's timeline for the book, 1780 to 1850, is intentional and ends with the hope-fill","PeriodicalId":45845,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN STUDIES","volume":"2016 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135448349","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Oscar Wilde and the Radical Politics of the Fin de Siècle by Deaglán Ó Donghaile, and: Wilde Between the Sheets: Oscar Wilde, Mail Bondage, and \"De Profundis\" by David Walton (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.2979/vic.2023.a911127","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/vic.2023.a911127","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Oscar Wilde and the Radical Politics of the Fin de Siècle by Deaglán Ó Donghaile, and: Wilde Between the Sheets: Oscar Wilde, Mail Bondage, and \"De Profundis\" by David Walton Sos Eltis (bio) Oscar Wilde and the Radical Politics of the Fin de Siècle, by Deaglán Ó Donghaile; pp. x + 250. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020, $110.00, $29.95 paper, $110.00 ebook. Wilde Between the Sheets: Oscar Wilde, Mail Bondage, and \"De Profundis\", by David Walton; pp. x + 251. Lanham and London: Lexington Books, 2021, $111.00, $45.00 ebook. Since the 1980s Oscar Wilde has undergone a critical transformation from a superficial wit whose life merited more attention than his work to a politically engaged, provocative, and influential thinker, and two new books—Deaglán Ó Donghaile's Oscar Wilde and the Radical Politics of the Fin de Siècle and David Walton's Wilde Between the Sheets: Oscar Wilde, Mail Bondage, and \"De Profundis\"—offer valuable and notably different contributions to this ever-growing body of scholarship. Wilde's politics—like every other aspect of his writings—have long been the subject of fierce debate, and Ó Donghaile offers one of the boldest readings to date. He argues that Wilde was a committed and consistent radical progressive, recognized as such by a range of contemporary anarchist and socialist thinkers and activists. Tracing Wilde's critique of capitalism and colonialism from his earliest book reviews through to his final letters from prison, this study brings fresh information and perspectives to bear. Ó Donghaile has a deep and detailed grasp on the Irish context and uses it with great effect in his analysis of Wilde's early play Vera; or, The Nihilists (1883). The play, he argues, was a thinly veiled depiction of British state coercion in Ireland with its engineered mass deaths, imposition of martial law, and suppression of the peasantry, which should be read as a reflection of the Irish Famine of the 1840s and 50s and Land War of the 1880s rather than the depiction of Czarist Russia it purports to be. Detailed and illuminating, Ó Donghaile's interpretation is, however, partial, steering around the play's hesitancies and ambiguities. If the Nihilists are to be read as Fenians, what does their ready embrace of the cynical political operator Prince Paul signify? And [End Page 339] what does it imply when their revolutionary violence exacerbates the Czar's paranoia and leads to further oppression? Consistently informative and often provocative, this study is, however, tactically selective, eliding the elements of Wilde's writings that challenge or complicate its vision of the writer as a committed collectivist anarchist. A chapter on Wilde's fairy tales as a fierce condemnation of imperialist consumption—the environmental damage, colonial exploitation, and cruelty that underpin modern capitalism—centers on attentive close readings of \"The Happy Prince\" (1888), \"The Selfish Giant\" (1888), and \"The Young King\" (1891). Wild","PeriodicalId":45845,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN STUDIES","volume":"5 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135448338","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Aesthetics of Senescence: Aging, Population, and the Nineteenth-Century British Novel by Andrea Charise, and: Aging, Duration, and the English Novel: Growing Old from Dickens to Woolf by Jacob Jewusiak (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.2979/vic.2023.a911134","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/vic.2023.a911134","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: The Aesthetics of Senescence: Aging, Population, and the Nineteenth-Century British Novel by Andrea Charise, and: Aging, Duration, and the English Novel: Growing Old from Dickens to Woolf by Jacob Jewusiak David McAllister (bio) The Aesthetics of Senescence: Aging, Population, and the Nineteenth-Century British Novel, by Andrea Charise; pp. xlv + 194. Albany: SUNY Press, 2020, $95.00, $34.95 paper. Aging, Duration, and the English Novel: Growing Old from Dickens to Woolf, by Jacob Jewusiak; pp. xi + 202. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020, £75.00, $108.00, $29.99, $29.99 ebook. The nineteenth century has long been fertile ground for scholars in the field of literary age studies. The disruption of traditional communities of care by urbanization, the emergence of an economic model that valorized the youthful body, and the development of medical and scientific disciplines that focused on old age all mark this period as one in which discourses of age and aging were being transformed. Two new books on the subject indicate a field that remains in rude health, with both Andrea Charise's The Aesthetics of Senescence: Aging, Population, and the Nineteenth-Century British Novel, and Jacob Jewusiak's Aging, Duration, and the English Novel: Growing Old from Dickens to Woolf offering compelling new approaches to the study of age and aging in nineteenth-century literature. Both books are substantially focused on Victorian literature and culture, though each expands its discussion of aging across period boundaries. Charise traces the influence of Romantic conceptions of age on Victorian novelists including George Eliot, George Gissing, H. Rider Haggard, and Anthony Trollope, while Jewusiak discusses a similarly canonical range of authors including Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, and H. G. Wells before moving forward, in his final chapter, to consider Virginia Woolf's modernist approach to aging. They share a broadly historicist and interdisciplinary approach, with Charise's work in particular drawing on an unfamiliar selection of scientific and medical texts that cast fresh light on the construction of age throughout the nineteenth century. [End Page 354] Charise identifies an \"unprecedented … climate of crisis associated with growing old\" in the period, which first crystallized in the 1798 dispute between William Godwin and Thomas Malthus (xix). This debate ostensibly centered on the issue of population, but as Charise points out it was also fundamentally concerned with antithetical conceptions of age and aging. She describes their dispute (in a characteristically memorable phrase) as a competition between \"the imagined romance of immortality and the observed reality of dwindling food supplies\" and suggests that by recasting aging as a biopolitical problem Malthus initiated a more complex understanding of aging and generationality (2). These new conceptions of age demanded (and shaped) aesthetic representation, and in ch","PeriodicalId":45845,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN STUDIES","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135448341","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Darwin's \"Historical Sketch\": An Examination of the 'Preface' to the Origin of Species by Curtis N. Johnson (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.2979/vic.2023.a911136","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/vic.2023.a911136","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Darwin's \"Historical Sketch\": An Examination of the 'Preface' to the Origin of Species by Curtis N. Johnson Devin Griffiths (bio) Darwin's \"Historical Sketch\": An Examination of the 'Preface' to the Origin of Species, by Curtis N. Johnson; pp. xxvii + 425. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019, $40.95. A big challenge in writing an entire book about any major figure is to break new ground. Take the risky course and attempt to engage their full career? Or pursue a narrower strategy, diving into a smaller and less-studied aspect of their life and work? In Darwin's \"Historical Sketch\": An Examination of the 'Preface' to the Origin of Species, Curtis N. Johnson takes the latter tack with a zeal that sometimes overtakes its subject. The topic is the short, just over six-page \"historical sketch\" that Charles Darwin added as a preface to the fourth American printing of On the Origin of Species (1859), later revised and included in subsequent editions. The historical sketch responded to a range of correspondents who contacted Darwin to point out various earlier contributors to both evolutionary theory and nascent articulations of natural selection. When, over the course of a couple of weeks and after suffering a bout of ill health, Darwin did finally draft a preface in early 1859, he made a quick job of it, often relying on second-hand descriptions to give a sketch of each contributor and their relative priority. Darwin's \"Historical Sketch\" revises that hasty account. Over the course of seventeen chapters, Johnson explores the thirty-five figures cited in various versions of the \"Preface.\" Drawing together materials from the Darwin Correspondence Project, digitizations of Darwin's manuscripts and books, and Mario Di Gregorio and N. W. Gill's careful study, Charles Darwin's Marginalia (1990), Johnson pieces together Darwin's engagement with previous writers. It will prove extremely useful to scholars who want to decode the \"Preface.\" As Johnson explains, Darwin's references are sometimes vague, and many of the figures cited are obscure, their specific contributions unclear. About each previous writer, Johnson asks the same series of questions: How did Darwin encounter this writer? What did he read or know about them? And why did he cite them in this way? At times, Johnson's passion for expounding these mysteries becomes overzealous. Each section works laboriously through all possible answers before finally landing on solutions that often seem self-evident. At other times, Johnson spends disproportionate time speculating on Darwin's motives. Take the treatment of Baden Powell, whose work, Johnson argues, \"may have deserved lengthier treatment,\" and for which, he suggests, Darwin \"may have felt some embarrassment\" (6, 7). This contrasts with the following observation that Powell's work \"was certainly no forerunner of Darwin in terms of the details of his theory\" and by Powell's \"own admission … [was] not offering new ideas\" (9). Why, then, i","PeriodicalId":45845,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN STUDIES","volume":"86 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135448343","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}