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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 sets out to establish a contextual understanding of the body of work created by the little-researched amateur photographer Andrew Begbie Ovenstone (1851–1935) and to problematize the status of the Victorian amateur photographer in the Scottish Photographic tradition. Whilst acknowledging the generally accepted 'social documentary' characteristics of the Scottish photographic tradition, this paper argues that because they were less motivated by a moral or social agenda, amateur photographers like Ovenstone offer us a more nuanced perspective on late-Victorian society. One of the primary questions to be addressed is the extent to which Ovenstone's photographs conform to convention and how far they show signs of an original perspective. Glasgow's burgeoning sense of cultural identity, the prevailing attitude of Empire including notions of 'self-fashioning' and 'othering', as well as the didactic propensities of the photographic magazines of the day all had an important influence on the Victorian amateur photographer. Ovenstone's photographs indicate the effect of these powerful forces. However, alongside the forces of convention, Ovenstone reveals himself to have been a genuine experimentalist. He kept two sets of albums, one of which reveals the 'public' amateur photographer who adhered to the conventions, tastes and aspirations of the day, whilst another set of more 'private' albums reveal a photographer of distinctive and original characteristics. The paper questions the narrow ascendent canon within the Scottish Victorian photographic tradition and shows that the role of the amateur photographer outside of that tradition is still undervalued and under researched. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we geocode the residences of nineteenth-century Brompton residents to the level of the building in order to argue that literary sociability and propinquity – leading to face-to-face interaction with writers, editors, artists, actors, and publishers – may have played a more important role in the formation of women's literary careers than scholars have yet recognized. Taking the popular novelist and poet Dinah Craik as our case study, we argue that the walkability as well as the informal and inexpensive literary sociability of the area made Brompton a fertile ground for the early careers of nineteenth-century women writers. Following Alan Liu's work in Critical Infrastructure studies, we attempt through mapping to reanimate connections that have been lost to time, establishing the importance of Brompton as a literary, artistic, and intellectual neighbourhood in the nineteenth century, and of propinquity in supporting the careers of women writers. Expanding on Sarah Bilston's recent work on the suburbs as fertile grounds for the careers of Victorian women writers, we add a spatial dimension to Robert Darnton's well-known print network, placing the private home, a site of literary sociability, as a central node in public print networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the work of a group of Railwaymen Poets, whose verse has been collected as part of the Piston, Pen and Press project. It explores their writings both as part of an emerging theme of accident and loss poetry surrounding the railways in Victorian culture but also more specifically as interrelated texts produced by workers sharing common experiences. Whilst many wrote about all manner of subjects, not just the railway accident, public fascination with accident reporting allowed them to both pursue their literary endeavours and also to use poetry as a form of catharsis. Their poetry, this paper argues, should be read as a collective expression of emotion around the dangerous and loss-ridden nature of their work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In our introduction, we establish the original conference context of the 15 following position papers, emphasizing that the papers represent a conversation between participants, each of whom had been allocated a single monument from St Paul's Cathedral in the period between c. 1796 and 1913, to think about the memorial's visual and material richness and complexity, as well as its immediate and wider cathedral location, and broader discursive contexts. We map out the historiographical contexts of the papers, within the contexts of sculpture studies, studies of church monuments, interdisciplinary studies of the nineteenth century, and histories of Victorian Christianity – and especially Anglicanism – as it intersects with other world religions, and seeks to evangelize both at home and abroad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is a truism that Victorians were prudish about pregnant bodies. Interrogating this assumption, this paper provides a case study of one of the century's most public pregnancies: that of Queen Victoria with her first child. It tracks press speculations about and discussions of Victoria's pregnancy from weeks after her 10 February 1840 marriage to Princess Victoria's 21 November birth. During this period, Victoria's body was subject to relentless press scrutiny, ranging from speculations about possible pregnancy shortly after marriage to comments about her sex life with Albert. In summer 1840, concern shifted to possible miscarriage after an unsuccessful assassination attempt and the need for a regency if she died in childbirth. Finally, Princess Victoria's birth prompted surprisingly detailed descriptions of Victoria's labour and delivery as well as speculations about when the child was conceived. Victorian periodicals demonstrated awareness of their own coverage, accusing other papers of 'grossness' and objecting to the 'minute particularity' of accounts of her labour. Repeatedly invoking delicacy even as they detailed Victoria's body, the national press captures the stakes of writing about the queen's 'interesting condition'. Clearly, it was not impossible for Victorians to speak about pregnancy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1895, the crime-writing duo of L. T. Meade and Clifford Halifax, MD, published 'A Doctor's Dilemma' in The Strand Magazine. In it, the young physician Arthur Feveral describes a recent influenza outbreak which has left an 'extraordinary sequel... My health is gone—my nerve has deserted me'. Influenza plays a central role in this fiction, but Feveral's story is simply one of many – documentary and fictionalized – that populate the pages of late nineteenth-century British periodicals. The 'Russian' influenza pandemic of 1889–1894 was the last great European outbreak of the nineteenth century, leaving in its wake such widely discussed neurological effects (neurasthenia, psychosis, and melancholy) that they earned their own nosography: 'influenza nervosa'. This paper examines the pandemic's enduring cultural and biosocial impact through the framework of sequelae – chronic conditions arising in the aftermath of acute illness. Drawing on medical case histories, criminal reports, illness narratives, and works of fiction, it explores how the Victorians taxonomized and theorized such long-term effects of infectious disease. First, sequelae became a category separate from 'complications', vital to broader preoccupations with prolonged illness, uncertainty, and moral and bodily weakness and degeneracy, and the Victorians scaffolded around it notions of vigour and debility, difference, predisposition, and heredity. Second, they domesticated and repurposed colonial and tropical theories of hygiene as explanatory frameworks. Through close readings of 'long influenza' in the clinic and in fiction, this paper also frames the kinds of narratives which gained especial purchase, and the sufferers deemed both susceptible and sympathetic. Finally, it argues that the acute phase of infectious anxiety gave way to a longue durée of sequelae, and that Victorian responses provide critical insights and warnings for our own era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction to the 'Spaces of Irish Catholicism' Roundtable argues that applying the concept of 'space' to nineteenth-century Irish Catholicism has the potential to offer significant new insights to our understandings of Irish Catholicism and the lives of ordinary Irish Catholics, but also to Victorian Studies and religious history more generally. In particular, it contends that the nature of Irish Catholicism in the later nineteenth century was such that examining its many different spaces offers a valuable means of enacting Peter Andersson's plea to uncover the 'backstage' of the Victorian period. In describing the eight diverse papers that comprise the Roundtable, the introduction argues that a previously identified dichotomy between the 'poetics of space' and the 'politics of space' within the religious realm may need to be rethought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Institutional records suggest that the grounds for anxiety about insanity in late-nineteenth-century India were many and varied. Amongst other causes, one might have been rendered insane by sunstroke, fever, head injury, strong drink, and inherited tendency, the loss of money, grief, jealousy, anger, sexual excess, excessive joy, or (perhaps disturbingly) excessive study. 1 With such a panoply of anxieties to explore, it is scarcely surprising that Rudyard Kipling's Indian fiction abounds with characters who experience madness of various kinds and degrees. This paper focuses on two short stories collected in Kipling's 1888 volume Plain Tales from the Hills : 'Thrown Away' and 'The Madness of Private Ortheris'. These two stories offer particular insight into madness, its relationship to masculinity, and its consequences for the social order of British India. As Jonathan Saha has pointed out, madness in a colonial context was doubly significant. Since insanity 'could strike anyone, rulers and the ruled, men and women... madness threatened to undermine the colonial racial boundary and disrupt the established norms of masculinity and femininity'. 2 Both 'Thrown Away' and 'The Madness of Private Ortheris' explore or expose a psychological crisis that takes the form of a deviation from gender norms and is resolved by an enforced return to those norms. Reading the stories alongside asylum records, this paper contextualizes their representation of gender and madness and argues that the fiction offers a glimpse of what might fill important gaps in the archival record. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This short methods paper emerges out of the AHRC-funded 'Chronotopic Cartographies' project for the digital mapping of place and space as represented in works of literature. The primary aim of that project was to find a way of mapping and visualizing represented literary worlds for which there is no corresponding real 'ground'. A solution was found in the form of topological graphs which allow for relative rather than absolute mapping (but also permit a relative imaginary map to be lain on top of a pre-existing cartesian form). Using a spatial schema to chunk out the text in terms of chronotopic (time-space) zones enables the generation of a series of visualizations that show different kinds of spatio-temporal constructions in texts. The visualizations are centred upon nodes that consist of chronotopes (e.g. 'the road') as well as locations (e.g. 'road to Geneva'); connections between them of different kinds and toporefs within them (references to other places from this one). The paper will articulate core methods from the project, outlining the stages involved in the process, from marking up the text, using a custom-made schema, through graph generation and into the implications for analysis. This will be illustrated in relation to two Victorian texts: the realist space of Dickens's Oliver Twist ; and the abstract poetic space of Browning's 'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The passage of the Postal Duties Bill in 1840 and the implementation of the penny post expanded the epistolary lives of English men and women, particularly the middle classes, overnight. The affordability of postage, the commercial boom in letter-writing appurtenances, and the increased social pressure for regular correspondence augmented and altered how individuals built all sorts of relationships, especially romantic ones. This paper relies on 45 case studies of middle-class couples' love letters to examine the role of romantic correspondence, particularly during the life-period of engagement, throughout the nineteenth century. Correspondence collections are used to examine how couples negotiated and built intimate relationships as they progressed (or not) towards their nuptials. Not only valued for their written contents, love letters took on talismanic, fetishistic, and embodied properties representing their senders and the relationships they facilitated. Their comings and goings marked time, their length signified depth of feeling, and their presentation reflected intimacy. As romantic culture adapted to progressions in epistolary technology and assigned meaning to its various aspects, correspondence became a venue for individuals and couples to create and explore their emotional, sensual, and sentimental selves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Opportunities to celebrate the success of the firm, its leaders and, by extension, its employees, were numerous in the mid-Victorian period: banquets, dinners and outings, annual gatherings, pleasure trips and excursions, processions around the mills, or ceremonies directly related with the employer's family. The purpose of this paper is to analyse some of these large communal events organized in textile mills in order to better understand the practices and meanings of paternalism on the side of the workers. The first part of this study of paternalism 'from below' explores the feudal structure of paternalism and the complex role played by deference in the large communal events organized in textile factories. The second part, about the large social events organized by captains of industry turned philanthropists, Titus Salt and Samuel Courtauld, examines the display of power in 'the theatre of paternalism' and raises the question of a possible circumvention of the paternalistic model on the part of workers. The last part is about the specificities of laudatory poems praising captains of industry and thanking them for the outings and celebrations they organized for their employees. It analyses how this specific poetical subgenre offers a space for renegotiation of paternalism and social boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the everyday history of one of the groups of auxiliary workers in industrial towns of Britain during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Drawing primarily from journal and newspaper records, this paper examines the work of knocker ups and the ways in which they became intimately tied to the lives of industries and primary industry workers. The paper then focuses on how knocker ups became highly influential in industrial towns through the multifarious jobs they performed – sometimes knowingly and sometimes less consciously. In so doing, this paper challenges the prevailing notion that auxiliaries merely served their primary clients by waking them up, and re-visualizes the position of knocker ups in industrial towns not as mere auxiliaries but as crucial contributors to social, political and economic life as well as partners in law enforcement in a broad variety of circumstances. The findings suggest a need to revise long-standing views of labour in industrial Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents analysis of the memorial to William Hodson in Lichfield Cathedral, designed by George Edmund Street between 1859 and 1862, focusing on the iconography of the monument and way that it was influenced by Muscular Christianity and ecclesiology. The attitude of Hodson and his brother George Hodson, who commissioned the monument, is examined through analysis of the publication that presented Hodson's career to the Victorian public: Twelve Years of a Soldier's Life in India (1859). The memorial raises urgent questions about the future of Victorian cultural heritage as it demonstrably misrepresents a highly symbolic event within British imperial history. Hodson was represented as a hero by Victorian ecclesiologists but is now seen by many as an unscrupulous and ruthless imperialist. This paper will demonstrate that the extraordinary form of the tomb was determined by an alteration to the design: the inclusion of a sculptural panel representing the 'Surrender of the King of Delhi'. This change was instigated by the committee of the Ecclesiological Society headed by A. J. Beresford Hope. The panel turns a relatively peripheral event into a symbolic tableau: the surrender of Indian Islam to British Christianity, a distortion typical of British culture in the aftermath of the Indian Uprising of 1857–1858. The historiography of Hodson's career shows that the tomb has acted as a focus for those wishing to perpetuate a conservative interpretation of Hodson's career. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The field of Victorian Studies has developed in recent years to encompass narratives of the Victorians across a variety of media and cultural forms. Little has been written, however, on the different Victorianisms at play in museums and heritage sites, many of them Victorian in both origin and content. Taking their cue from the literature and theory of Museum Studies and drawing on a professional and academic background in museums, the authors of this paper provide an overview of the present state of museum displays on the Victorians. It is a situation driven by new commercial pressures, funding cuts and blockbuster exhibitions, occurring at the same time as a push for greater access and more diverse narratives. To outline these developments in greater detail, this paper takes examples from a series of case study sites of Victorian-themed museum displays in Yorkshire. It demonstrates that there has been a growing emphasis on narratives that depart from traditional museum presentations of Victorian elites, particularly with regard to class and gender. This can be seen as a positive step in terms of public engagement with diverse Victorianisms, but there remains work to be done. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Charles Dickens’sGreat Expectationsopens with a jolt, as Abel Magwitch – an escaped convict – pounces on the narrator and protagonist, Pip. Despite this rather dramatic introduction, and the pivotal role that he goes on to play in the plot, Magwitch has never been given the sustained critical analysis that he warrants. More often than not he has been treated as one of Dickens’s infamous ‘flat’ characters; a kind of ‘pantomime wicked uncle’, in the words of George Orwell. This is a critical legacy that this paper seeks to redress. Seeing Magwitch as an essential element in Dickens’s critique of mid nineteenth-century society, this paper examines Magwitch’s largely ignored peripatetic and homeless past. By contextualizing Magwitch in his role as a vagrant outsider, and then exploring how this marginal position nuances the cannibalistic appetite he displays in the first pages of the novel, I argue that Magwitch’s violence and ‘savagery’ forms a foil for the more sadistic practices of civilized society. In doing so I position Magwitch at the dark heart of Dickens’s social pessimism, and re-evaluate the culture of cannibalism that we see inGreat Expectations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

One of the more distinctive disabling illnesses common to certain parts of India is lymphatic filariasis. A mosquito-borne viral infection, filariasis often results in severely debilitating swellings and subsequent disability if undiagnosed and untreated, with significant social consequences. Elephantiasis has a unique trajectory in each individual living with it, and can be in equal parts chronic, latent, punctuated and disabling. When Europeans began exploring and eventually colonizing South Asia and the Caribbean, they were fascinated and repelled by this disease. This paper will explore the discourses of contagion and disability around lymphatic filariasis in the colony – and will track how this condition was produced as a racialized contagion. I begin by describing the broader histories of this disease, and how it came to be understood and represented in precolonial texts and art and move on to early modern travellers' descriptions of the disease. I then describe how biomedicine came to understand the disease, and how the filarial body was put on display as material representation of both contagion and disability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The COVID-19 pandemic is revealing the many ways in which infectious disease control is a spatialized enterprise. Stay-at-home orders, travel bans and travel corridors, restrictions on visiting patients in hospitals, and many more regulations, speak to the power of space and place in conditioning the transmission of infectious diseases and the human experiences of them. Such spatializations have an extremely long history but were codified and formalized in the later nineteenth century as knowledge of bacteria, incubation periods, and asymptomatic carriers became more sophisticated. Two developments reflected this in Great Britain. First, the new use of the term 'contact' as a noun and the naming of 'contacts' as a specific population group. Second, the emergence of the 'reception house', a building for people living in overcrowded dwellings who had been exposed to people with infectious diseases but who were not yet showing signs of disease. Drawing on recent scholarship at the boundary of medical history, architectural history and the histories of biopolitics, this paper uses public health reports, architectural plans, and newspapers to reveal the multiple ambiguities of these spaces, where the uncertainties of bacteriological science, the demands of the capitalist labour system, and the rationales of liberal governance coalesced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on Edmund Parkes' Manual of Practical Hygiene, Prepared Especially for Use in the Medical Service of the Army (1864), a text that would become the standard within British military medicine for decades to come. Within Parkes' Manual , I argue, we can see the confluence of three streams of thinking – each beginning in the 1830s and 1840s – that led to a new orthodoxy on race-medicine in the Victorian period. The first flowed from an 'avalanche of numbers', to use Hacking's phrase, concerning military medical statistics, a set of seemingly objective data that made race medically 'real' in a form that had not been evident before. The second was the solidification of fixist conceptions of race after the collapse of what George Stocking called the 'Prichardian paradigm' in British ethnology. The third involved what has become known, in the history of medicine, as the 'doctrine of specific etiology', the idea that the cause of certain diseases was the cause of each of those diseases alone. These three factors together led to a novel set of racial arguments, one that assumed the reality and permanence of race and that explained differences in susceptibility and immunity not, as was common earlier, in terms of climatic habituation, but rather in terms of the fixity and peculiarity of internal differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay discusses the process of re-forming the handwritten manuscripts held in Royal Holloway's Papers of Elizabeth Jesser Reid into a digital archive, Elizabeth Jesser Reid's Correspondence Networks. The letters and the digital archive map complex networks of reform in which Reid was a lynchpin, and show how the work of founding and running Bedford College, a pioneering women's education institution, was enmeshed in a wider culture of reform. I employ Sara Ahmed's idea of 'queer use' to examine connections between this nineteenth-century reform work, the digitization process, and forms of labour (administration, housekeeping, community building, and others) that are devalued in the twenty-first-century university, even as they are essential to knowledge production. I argue that digitization as a 'queer use' of manuscripts can illuminate the university politics of use, then and now, through analysing a letter in which Bedford's education mission conflicted with Reid's antislavery activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines a series of investigations into the activities of women engaged in the provision of paid childcare and collectively labelled with the term 'baby-farmer'. This paper looks at the practice of writers representing themselves as 'baby-farming detectives'. Along with exploring the use of the detective investigation as a stylistic device, it will contend that the strictures it imposed informed the relationship these writers have with paid child-carers. The article also explores how the notion of 'detectives' and 'suspects' spoke of an assumed right to subject working-class women to inspection. It concludes that these detective fantasies were ultimately unsuccessful as they were unable to solve either the cases they encountered, or the symbolic problem of baby-farming, leaving these narratives curiously unresolved and their writers impotent. This article not only seeks to explain how and why the link between pecuniary childcare and infant murder was forged and maintained but asserts that this narrative technique has wider implications for scholars of nineteenth-century culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper shares Andersson’s interest in exploring the ‘backstage’ of Victorian civility and respectability. The adroit media manipulation of high-status leading reformers and their associations and societies, with their often overlapping membership, has accorded them an inflated importance as a representation of the Victorian Age, and can distort our understanding. The argument here begins by problematizing the ways some historians have made use of contemporary statistics and terms such as ‘respectability’ or ‘vice’. For the Victorians these carried multiple meanings and cultural resonances, partially dependent on identities of class, gender, generation, Tory or Liberal political orientation, attitude to faith, and ethnicity. This meant that the complex nuances of understanding attached to activities sometimes labelled as unrespectable ‘vices’ such as drinking, sexual transgression and gambling could make them acceptable in a variety of cultural contexts despite the opposition of vociferous anti-‘vice’ groups. The paper concludes with a brief exploration of the potentiality of visual and digital resources for delving deeper into such issues. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As part of a roundtable response to Peter Andersson's article 'How Civilized Were the Victorians', this paper argues that material culture studies can help us to articulate new historical narratives about the Victorian period. Post-structuralism helped to privilege linguistic analysis to the detriment of direct scrutiny of material culture while approaches aligned to archaeology and anthropology enable us to rediscover the significance of physical matter and those who shaped it. The opportunities for learning how to study material culture are limited but could be enhanced through the heritage sector. As a case study, the paper examines the first selected edition of Tennyson's verse. The covers, layout and design of the book clashed with the poet's ambition of publishing a cheap edition of his poetry for the working classes. The book generated a lot of profit and the selection provides evidence of Tennyson's attempts to be populist and patriotic. The posthumous description of this book, written by the poet's son, misrepresents it as a philanthropic gesture to poor readers while it was in fact a moderately expensive book pitched at middle-class readers. This interpretation of the book is only available though study of the artefact. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper compares the social-exploration literature of radical, mostly Owenite and Chartist, and liberal journalism in the first half of the nineteenth century, though the focus is on the less known 'portraits of the poor' in radical papers. In the paper I argue that against the developing liberal practice of intricately mapping poverty and categorizing the poor, radical papers under-represented particular cases of poverty, using an obfuscating syntax to document the poor. In doing so, radicals differentiated themselves from their middle-class counterparts, primarily as a way to challenge the assumption that poverty was a function of individual error and to turn the public's gaze onto the social causes of poverty. Highlighting the political dimensions of poverty and minimizing the language of 'personal responsibility', radicals demonstrated that the activist agenda concerned itself with the economic and social as much as with the political, even while offering political solutions to economic and social problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This interdisciplinary, historicist-feminist paper (combining literary and art historical perspectives as well as an awareness of historical context and an application of recent feminist theory) explores the feminist affiliations of the Victorian artists Mary and George Watts, focusing specifically on their close friendships with the writer and women’s suffrage supporter George Meredith and the women’s rights worker Josephine Butler. It introduces the Wattses’ own anti-patriarchal conjugal creative partnership before investigating their relationships with Meredith and Butler through a reading of Mary Watts’s unpublished and hitherto untranscribed diaries (which record their interactions) as well as a discussion of George Watts’s paintings (particularly his portraits of Meredith and Butler in his ‘Hall of Fame’). This paper thus offers an unprecedented insight into the Wattses’ personal and professional relationships as well as their progressive socio-political positions, reclaiming them as early feminists who were part of a wider emergent feminist community. This paper’s discussion of the Wattses, Meredith, and Butler provides new perspectives on the connections, works, and views of these public literary, artistic, and feminist figures as well as the ways in which they supported and promoted the women’s rights movement that escalated over the course of the second half of the nineteenth century. It thus offers a fuller understanding of these figures as well as of the rise of early feminism in the Victorian period. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper offers a new examination of the influential women's magazine, theWoman's World (1887–90), and Oscar Wilde's editorship thereof. Previous studies have focused on the magazine's importance as a venue for promoting proto-feminist writing and for enabling Wilde to boost his professional cachet through editorial work, but the aesthetic aims and execution of theWoman's World merit further analysis. The Woman's World reveals how male artists negotiated aesthetics and Aestheticism between themselves within its pages, as well as how they presented it to the publication's assumed audience of women. This paper particularly centres on the magazine's role in establishing the professional relationship between Wilde and Charles Ricketts, later the designer and illustrator of some of Wilde's most important texts, while simultaneously considering how Ricketts's work furthered the artistic and intellectual instruction Wilde hoped to offer the magazine's readers. Case studies of several of Ricketts's illustrations demonstrate the types of visual reading that the Woman's World seemed to espouse, and which worked in tandem with the textual contents to encourage women to develop critical reading skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1832 and 1834, Henry Mayhew and Gilbert Abbot à Beckett produced a weekly twopenny paper called The Thief. As its title suggested, this publication consisted of articles, stories and illustrations extracted, condensed and brazenly stolen from other periodicals, magazines, newspapers and books. Modelled on the format of Le Voleur, an early paper of Émile de Girardin, the great innovator of French popular journalism, scholars of Mayhew have generally treated The Thief as inconsequential hack work, if they even mention it at all. This essay, the first analysis of the paper itself, argues that The Thief is less ‘throwaway’ than it first appears. In satirical fashion, the paper used the methods of the radical press to critique the ‘liberal values’ of useful knowledge and free trade. Mayhew's involvement with The Thief connected him with a vibrant radical underground print culture. Moreover, in its suspicion of middle-class liberalism and of the rhetoric of free trade,The Thief set the thematic tone for much of Mayhew's later work. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay is an initial study of a larger project that seeks to produce a history of the term 'Darwinism'. While it is generally well-known that Darwinism could refer to a variety of different things in the Victorian period, from a general evolutionary naturalism to the particular theory of natural selection, very little has been written about the history of the term or how it was contested at given times and places. Building on James Moore's 1991 sketch of the history of Darwinism in the 1860s, this paper specifically seeks to situate Alfred Russel Wallace's 1889 book Darwinism in the context of a larger struggle over Darwin's legacy in the 1880s. It is argued that Wallace used his authority as one of the founders of evolution by natural selection to reimagine what he called 'pure Darwinism' as a teleological evolutionism, one that integrated the theory of natural selection with an interpretation of spirit phenomena thereby producing a more agreeable and holistic account of life than was previously associated with Darwinian evolution. By considering the reception of Wallace's Darwinism in the periodical press it will be argued further that Wallace's interpretation of Darwinism was generally well received, which suggests that our understanding of what Darwinism meant in the late Victorian period needs to be revisited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores Victorian culture's persistent associations between epilepsy and bodily expenditure to locate the place of the epileptic body within the Victorian 'libidinal economy'. It centres on a reading of Wilkie Collins's Poor Miss Finch (1872) as a highly original meditation on the implications of disability and visibility. In this novel, a reclusive silversmith named Oscar Dubourg curbs his post-traumatic seizures with silver nitrate, a remedy that causes a dark-blue discoloration of the skin. Behind the narrative necessity of this device, I locate an epistemological desire to render the condition of epilepsy visibly evident by saturating (and implicitly racializing) Oscar so that the inside shows through. The sporadic visibility of epilepsy confers a radically unstable identity upon its sufferer, one represented by the fluidity and anonymity of the unshaped silver and gold plates that Oscar moulds in his workshop. These plates inspire rumours throughout the community that Oscar is a counterfeiter. Oscar's valuable metals, along with his health, are stolen in one fell swoop; the thieves brutally attack him, precipitating his traumatic epilepsy. The silver does not disappear, then, but is transmuted into Oscar's affliction; these shifting metaphorical values of silver can be productively read in light of Victorian discourses of pathology, not least the widespread concern about malingerers 'counterfeiting' epilepsy. Can an afflicted body 'pass' as healthy? Can healthy bodies perform affliction? These are questions that Oscar's story raises, with the help of a twin brother who exchanges identities with him in order to retain his fiancée's affections. Collins's sensational marriage plot, peopled with a cast of 'problem bodies', pulls the novel into critical conversation with a nexus of nineteenth-century medical and eugenic discourses dedicated to the surveilling of physical difference and the 'policing' of legitimate and illegitimate disabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Great Expectations (1860–61), Pip and Herbert's formal introduction to each other in London is a rare occasion on which Pip discloses his first name to someone else, and even more unexpectedly, accepts a blacksmith-related nickname with alacrity. Herbert asks Pip to address him on a first-name basis, and Pip, in return, reveals his first name Philip. Herbert dislikes this name, for 'it sounds like a moral boy out of a spelling book'. Instead, he proposes a familiar name 'Handel', namesake of the famous composer. While previous scholarship has extensively explored the various possible connotations of 'Pip' and 'Handel', it has not adequately examined the connection between 'Handel' and Dickens's passing comment on spelling books. This paper examines the complex intertextuality between Dickens's novels and spelling books. For Dickens, the spelling book not only represents an unpleasant type of elementary schoolbook or an undesirable method of teaching; it stands for the arbitrary blend of literacy training and moral cultivation. Although Dickens welcomed both of these undertakings, he objected to the common pedagogical practice of learning to read by memorizing moral tales. As he implies in Great Expectations , a good moral tale should be morally ambivalent and narratively sophisticated. Instead of being memorized and taken for granted like a spelling-book text, it should elicit empathy and encourage idiosyncratic interpretation. The spelling-book mentality is a predicament for a novel writer, and a hurdle in the way of sympathetic reading of a novel. A novel may be moralistic, but it belongs first and foremost to the realm of knowledge and experience, rather than the vacuum of innocence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Directories and town guides provide rather different representations of the town: typically, the former offer a kind of socio-commercial quantification through lists of tradesmen and private residents; the latter unfold qualitative descriptions of key historical and cultural locations and create a topographical picture for the visitor. Tallis’s London Street Views (1838–40) and William West’s History of Warwickshire (1830) both do something rather different. Tallis’s street views are well known: a unique visualization of commercial space; West is less familiar and forms the main focus of my paper. I explore the ways in which he drew on particular facets of Birmingham’s commerce and married this both spatially and architecturally with key cultural infrastructure to create a uniquely Birmingham high street and a particular view of the city as commercial and dynamic yet cultured. I then use this perspective to reconsider Tallis’s street views: to consider the spatial context of high street commercial retailing (the buildings and spaces between shops) and whether these were views of London or a series of different districts within 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]

This essay focuses on Garnet Wolseley’s controversial war instruction manual,The Soldier’s Pocket-book for Field Service(1869). While thePocket-book’s contribution to discussions of reading and soldiers’ education has carved out a significant place for it in Victorian military history, in its day it was constantly contested and undermined by contradictory representations, as a book much talked about but little read. This essay is an exercise in tracing these eccentric reception histories, as an acute reminder that books may well have vibrant intellectual lives without actually being read. To examine the literary and material circulation of thePocket-bookin the late nineteenth century, it draws on archival research in the Macmillan Archive and Wolseley’s private papers to discuss the genesis of the text not just as a compendium of information but also as an object that is handled, carried, and exchanged. I juxtapose these considerations with episodes in the representation of thePocket-book: in an anti-war pamphlet; an anonymous satirical drawing found in Wolseley’s personal scrapbooks; and in Kipling’s short stories about British soldiers in colonial South Asia. In all of these, thePocket-bookis characterized as a dubious, even dangerous text – one that was neither read, nor should be. The examples demonstrate three of the different trajectories through which thePocket-bookemerged as an unread book in the Victorian imagination: through encouragements not to read, rejection, and misappropriation. [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]

Charting recent ‘turns’ in history, towards empathy and ethics, this paper proposes reading Mayhew as a writer. The entry point proposed is Mayhew's What to Teach and How to Teach It: So that the Child may become a Wise and Good Man (1842), a book that charts Mayhew's theories of literacy and language, and of voice and writing. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]