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This book is a study of constructions of masculinity in a range of medical, cultural and Gothic narratives at the fin de siecle. The final decades of the nineteenth century provide a particularly complex set of examples of how the dominant masculine scripts came to be associated with disease, degeneration and perversity. The book first outlines the theories of degeneracy, explaining how they relate to masculinity. It then charts an alternative British tradition of degeneracy as this British context provides a more immediate background to the case histories that follow. The book presents a close reading of Sir Frederick Treves's Reminiscences; Treves's memoirs focus on the issues confronted by doctors working in the late Victorian period. The Whitechapel murders of 1888 are then discussed. The book focuses on how and why the medical profession became implicated in the murders. The murders also suggested the presence of a demonic, criminalised form of masculine control over the East End. Continuing with its focus on medicine, the book discusses medical textbooks on syphilis in the 1880s and how they responded to a shift in attitude towards attributing responsibility for the spread of syphilis. An examination of how London appears as a gendered space in the work of male authors such as Thomas De Quincey, and Charles Dickens, and later Arthur Conan Doyle and Bram Stoker, is presented. Finally, some aspects of Oscar Wilde's trials are also examined as well as a range of his writings.
Since 2005 Tim Burton’s imagination has frequently turned to Victorian-related subjects. Focusing primarily on Corpse Bride (2005), Sweeney Todd (2007) and Alice in Wonderland (2010), this article argues that Burton’s response to (neo-) Victorian culture is a distinctly Gothic one. Unlike other more literary and canonical types of neo-Victorianism it engages with the popular and strongly Gothicised conceptions of the Victorian that emerged through the horror cinema of the twentieth century. It is also Gothic in the way that it self-consciously blends the Victorian with other cultural trends. As a result, rather than offering a strongly theorised, academic view of the Victorians, Burton remediates them for his own aesthetic purposes.
The Victorian era, encompassing the latter six decades of the nineteenth century, was a period by which significant areas of the British Isles had become industrialised and urbanised. Both processes exacerbated the extent of impairing conditions, ranging from industrial injury through the prevalence of debilitating physiological illnesses. Disability and the Victorians: attitudes, interventions, legacies brings together the work of eleven scholars and focuses on the history of disability and, while showcasing the work of a diverse gathering of historians, also gives a flavour of how disability history engages the work of scholars from other disciplines and how they, in turn, enhance historical thought and understanding. Equally, while the focus is on the Victorian era, a time during which society changed significantly, both at the bottom and from the top, it was also a time in which patterns developed that were to have an enduring influence. Therefore, a taste of that enduring influence is presented in chapters that suggest the resilience of Victorian thought and practices in the modern era. Consequently, an underlying aim is to encourage readers to take a broad view, both of ‘disability’ and of Victorian influences and values.
In 1611 the King James Bible was printed with minimal annotations, as requested by King James. It was another of his attempts at political and religious reconciliation. Smaller, more affordable, versions quickly followed that competed with the highly popular and copiously annotated Bibles based on the 1560 Geneva version by the Marian exiles. By the nineteenth century the King James Bible had become very popular and innumerable editions were published, often with emendations, long prefaces, illustrations and, most importantly, copious annotations. Annotated King James Bibles appeared to offer the best of both the Reformation Geneva and King James Bible in a Victorian context, but they also reignited old controversies about the use and abuse of paratext. Amid the numerous competing versions stood a group of Victorian scholars, theologians and translators, who understood the need to reclaim the King James Bible through its Reformation heritage; they monumentalized it.
, learning and aesthetic delight; ‘metamorphosed from a disgusting charnel-house into a delicious flower-garden’, as the burial reformer John Strang argued ( 1831 : 53). While Stephen Sowerby is right to observe that ‘[t]‌o the modern imagination nothing evokes a sense of the Gothic like the eerie romantic melancholy of a decaying Victorian cemetery’ ( 2021 : 467), this chapter points out that these spaces were
This book explores the vogue for home aquaria that spread through Great Britain around the middle of the nineteenth century. The marine tank, perfected and commercialised in the early 1850s, was advertised as a marvel of modernity, a source of endless entertainment and a tool providing useful and edifying knowledge; it was meant to surprise, bringing a profoundly unfamiliar experience right to the heart of the home and providing a vista on the submarine world, at the time still largely unknown. Thanks to an interdisciplinary approach, this book offers an example of how the study of a specific object can be used to address a broad spectrum of issues: the Victorian home tank became in fact a site of intersection between scientific, technological, and cultural trends; it engaged with issues of class, gender, nationality and inter-species relations, drawing together home décor and ideals of domesticity, travel and tourism, exciting discoveries in marine biology, and emerging tensions between competing views of science; due to the close connection between tank keeping and seaside studies, it also marked an important moment in the development of a burgeoning environmental awareness. Through the analysis of a wide range of sources, including aquarium manuals, articles in the periodical press and fictional works, The Victorian aquarium unearths the historical significance of a resonant object, arguing that, for Victorians, the home tank was both a mirror and a window: it opened views on the underwater world, while reflecting the knowledge, assumptions, and preoccupations of its owners.
Available via Gold Open Access under a CC-BY licence  Naval heroism in the mid-Victorian family magazine v 8 v Naval heroism in the mid-Victorian family magazine Barbara Korte If the history of Britain can be seen through the prism of its navy, the history of the Royal Navy can be viewed through the prism of the heroic. Such a view is particularly informative regarding relations between the navy and the nation because heroes and heroisms are constructs through which communities negotiate their identities and their defining ideals and values. Heroes are, as
Our received narrative of the ideology of race needs to be reconsidered. It misconstrues the relationships between nineteenth-century science, race and culture, it overlooks the Victorian language of race relations which constitutes the most substantial legacy of the nineteenth century for the racism of the present, and it has no place for the
measured in terms of my personal insights but through numerical standards carrying such weight that they could be used to place legal restraints on my activity. To understand this, we need to understand the history of spectacle usage in the Victorian period. It is only through analysis of Victorian developments in ophthalmology that we can understand where these normative vision standards have come from, how they are measured and how failures to meet them have come to be corrected through spectacles. The
This collection of essays provides a useful reference, trying to establish an overview of the woman writer in the late Victorian period. It presents three strands or themes: radical writing through the work of Mary Howitt, Eliza Metyard and Jessie Fothergill; writing for and about children through the work of Charlotte Yonge, Louisa Molesworth and Juliana Ewing; and sensation and romance writing through the work of Ellen Wood, Mary Braddon and Rhoda Broughton. It brings attention to women writers who have been barely or only recently begun to be considered. Brian Maidment looks at the way in which Mary Howitt recognised both the ideological functions of mass circulation literature and the importance of literature as a means of social progress. In the essay on Eliza Meteyard, Kay Boardman considers the struggles of Meteyard, who negotiated her place in a fiercely competitive market and how often she felt she had to compromise her artistic integrity in order to make a living. A chapter considers Jessie Fothergill, who grappled with the moral dilemmas of the 1870s and 1880s, while her work highlights the effects of the increasing divergence between serious and popular fiction. Debenham's discussion of Fothergill's novels reveals an original and challenging author who merits further scholarly interest. The focuses on the work of Charlotte Yonge and her exploration of the vicissitudes of family life through the family chronicle. It also explores ideas of staging, scene-setting, role-playing and performance across a range of Mary Elizabeth Braddon's novels.