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In Victorian Britain rags were not only associated with the inadequate clothing of the poor, they were also viewed as a valuable commodity, widely collected for recycling into paper. This essay examines rags as simultaneously despised and precious objects, tracing the connections between Victorian accounts of poverty, the industrial recycling of rags into paper, and the redemption narratives created by Charles Dickens about rescued children. A supporter of Ragged Schools and champion of rags recycling, Dickens drew on the idea of the transformation of dirty rags into clean paper in his representations of ragged children. To him, the recycling of rags indicated the civilizing forces of modernity, and reading Dickens's representations of ragged children in this context reveals how cloth recycling became a paradigm for society's duties towards destitute children. This essay explains Dickens's juxtaposition of ragged children with references to rag-dealing in his novels; by this means he suggested that street children, like their ragged clothing, were capable of being purified and transformed into social usefulness. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper will examine how the physical reality behind Tallis’s illustrations can be illuminated to explore the commercial, domestic and social dimensions of Tallis’s London. It will explore the range of material culture available, and how this can be used to analyse interior space, in particular through English Heritage’s Architectural Study Collection. Two preliminary case studies will investigate the future potential for looking behind the façades of early Victorian London. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the phenomenon of scissors-and-paste journalism in the Victorian periodical press and specifically the movement of texts from the United States into Britain. In the nineteenth-century press, exchange editors and subeditors worked for periodical publishers by reading through the daily mass of print and selecting appropriate material to fill blank space in their own periodical. While some newspapers and magazines worked within an exchange network of agreed syndication, other periodicals reprinted works without the permission of authors or publishers. I argue that this technique is actually a more complex phenomenon than the typical ‘cut-and-paste’ method, familiar in existing scholarship, whereby editors lifted whole articles verbatim. I examine examples of scissors-and-paste journalism in theLadies’ Treasury(1857–1895), where, under Eliza Warren Francis’s direction, the magazine reproduced didactic narratives and prescriptive journalism from a wide range of American periodicals. I show that an editor, or likely, Eliza Warren Francis, modified texts in such a way as to anglicize the text, so that it reads within a British vernacular. Despite these language changes, the moralizing message remains constant in both articles. For the editor of theLadies’ Treasury, ‘cut-and-paste’ was actually a three-step process of cut, revise, and then paste the results without full acknowledgement or permission. To put the practice plainly: steal it, change it, and print it. Incorporating women’s periodicals and prescriptive literature into examinations of the transatlantic circulation of ideas and information, this research uncovers an important cultural pattern through the spread of this particular type of journalism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

My article recovers a forgotten moment in the history of popular fiction criticism – the late Victorian advent of what I term occultic literary criticism – to challenge the persistent anxiety thesis that continues to dominatefin-de-sièclestudies. In the late 1890s, the close friends, writers, bibliophiles, and, for varying amounts of time, practising occultists Arthur Machen and A. E. Waite used their literary criticism to champion the ecstatic occult potential of mass-circulated popular fiction, insisting that the penny dreadful, the newspaper story, and the popular picaresque as exemplified in Charles Dickens’sThe Pickwick Papers(1836–37) represented coded versions of ancient mystery tradition rituals. The cheap popular texts could offer to readers, writers, and collectors the kind of joyous direct encounter with the unseen world that sacred texts no longer could. The pair’s conviction that ecstatic occult initiation was just as, if not more, attainable through popular exoteric texts as through their restricted esoteric counterparts offers an important corrective to contemporary understandings of both the late-Victorian reception of popular fiction and of the reach and constituency of the occult revival. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The late-nineteenth century saw private book collecting gain a renewed respectability and cultural cachet as a leisure pursuit for the upper- and middle classes. This paper examines representations of collectors in the literature belonging to a new genre of writing which emerged for the ‘book-hunter’: a late-Victorian variant of the book-collecting passion which could encompass aesthetes and antiquarians as well as aspiring amateurs of more moderate means. It will show how, during the 1880s and 1890s, this particular type of collecting practice was used rhetorically in a range of printed material to venerate ‘gentlemanly’ book-buying, in contrast to feminine forms of engagement with old books in particular. In spite of women's comparative lack of advantage in the market for antiquarian editions, however, I argue that such a critique would not have been articulated so forcefully had women not been taking a determined interest in rare books. Evidence from central London booksellers during this period suggests that a variety of women were making antiquarian collections of their own. Male bibliophiles who denigrated female book-buyers in the periodical press were attempting to partially invent a homosocial tradition of collecting in order to distance their own pursuit from what they saw as the more emasculating elements of modern consumerism. This was a response not just to developments in contemporary print culture, but also to the growing appreciation of second-hand goods of all kinds among affluent female consumers with aesthetic and literary tastes shaped independently of male judgments. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]