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"The Great Famine in Ireland and Britain's Financial Crisis" by Charles Read and "Dublin and the Great Irish Famine" edited by Emily Mark-Fitzgerald, Ciarán McCabe, and Ciarán Reilly are two books that explore the Great Famine in Ireland. The Famine, also known as An Gorta Mór or the Irish potato famine, occurred between 1845 and the early 1850s and resulted in the loss of around two million lives and a significant decline in Ireland's population. The books examine the economic and political factors that contributed to the Famine, including the British government's response and the impact on Dublin. They also discuss the cultural memory and legacy of the Famine. These books provide valuable insights into this devastating event and its lasting effects on Ireland. [Extracted from the article]

"State Surveillance, Political Policing and Counter-Terrorism in Britain, 1880–1914" by Vlad Solomon is a comprehensive study of high policing in Britain during the late Victorian, Edwardian, and pre-First World War periods. The book examines how the British state dealt with threats from Fenian bombing campaigns, working-class strikers, continental anarchists, and militant suffragettes. Solomon analyzes official records, newspapers, memoirs, and other sources to provide a detailed account of the violent acts and the actions of the police. The book also explores the personal intrigues and rivalries that shaped the development of surveillance organizations like the Special Branch and MI5. Solomon argues that the lack of cooperation with continental police forces and the expansion of extra-legal policing were influenced by British exceptionalism and political factors. However, the reviewer suggests that structural factors and social conditions may have played a role as well. The reviewer also questions the lumping together of working-class radicalism with violent campaigns and raises concerns about the language used to describe strikes in South Wales. Overall, the book offers valuable insights into the development of British policing during this period. [Extracted from the article]

This paper analyzes the history, membership, and rules of the Heath Book Club operating near Wakefield, Yorkshire, in the 1850s in order to gain insight into the lives of readers during the Victorian period. Members included several wealthy landowners, clergymen, and other prominent residents, as well as a few professionals and one tradesman. As members of a book club, readers had access to otherwise hard-to-attain books. As a social network, the book club may have provided additional economic, social, or political returns to the members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the contingent and affective dimensions of genre in Victorian criticism on the ballad. Aesthetic judgments comprise an important part of the historical meta-discourse surrounding literary genres, yet these categories occupy only a marginal position in our present theories of genre. The terms of aesthetic judgment tend to fall out when we tally historical genres' discursive conventions and map their formal and thematic contours. In contrast, Victorian literary criticism's dependence on the language of feeling, not only in describing individual works but also in shaping generic taxonomies, provides an opportunity to consider the ways in which the seemingly irreducible particularities of aesthetic experience meet the generalizing force of genre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reports on late nineteenth-century juvenile literature in Great Britain. Sale and publication of certain boys' periodicals known as 'penny dreadfuls' that allegedly encouraged anti-social attitudes and criminal behavior in the young; Focus of topics on bizarre and supernatural figures.

At the height of the Indian uprising in 1857, two rival London newspapers published portraits on the same day of the man who had become known in Britain as the primary villain of the conflicts: Nana Sahib. These were clearly portraits of two different men. This essay explores why Victorian image-making processes meant that such portraits were presumed accurate, and it traces multiple leads in identifying the men pictured within them. Considering "the villain" as a category steeped in conventions of melodrama, the essay argues that the portraits' conflict with one another did not matter to the British public because such images worked to create certainty amid chaotic reportage of uprising events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses George Henry Lewes's study of living matter in The Physiology of Common Life (1859-60). Despite the physiological materiality of its subject, Lewes's text often discusses states of life that defy clear-cut classification. The process of human aging is a particularly confounding example of life and death's indeterminacy because, as Lewes describes, older age invokes both the physiological and aesthetic intermingling of animal life with stone, petrifaction, and minerality. I argue that Lewes's discussion of aging in Chapter XIII draws directly from the earlier geological research of Charles Lyell and, with brief reference to illustrative examples elsewhere in Victorian writing, I show the ways in which the Lewesian understanding of aging as a state of suspension between animality and minerality is reliant upon and a spur for the nineteenth-century literary imagination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At just after six in the evening on 16 June 1851, a balloon carrying two passengers narrowly avoided crashing into the transept of the Crystal Palace. This near-disastrous balloon ascent was the result of just one of the popular entertainments that sprang up to capitalize on the crowds of visitors to the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations in London in 1851. Despite the fact that on this occasion popular entertainment and didactic recreation almost literally collided, histories of the Exhibition have kept the two separate. It is notable that today the Great Exhibition is most often studied through sources such as Dickinson's Comprehensive Pictures of the Great Fxhibition of 1851 (1852), the Art Journal Illustrated Catalogue (1851), or the Illustrated London News, all aimed at middle-class audiences. However, cheap broadside ballads also commented on the Exhibition and offer alternative perspectives on the event. This paper focuses on these neglected sources and reads them within a broader network of literary and visual sources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that Victorian Shakespeare burlesques reveal an alternate literary history: a movement away from private, novelistic consciousness toward collaborative performance. Many materialist scholars fault post-Romantic critics for casting Shakespeare as a psychological realist and reading his plays as if they were novels. The burlesque treatment of Hamlet's soliloquies, however, suggests a contrary trajectory, challenging the equation of Shakespearean character with psychological reflection. Rather than inaugurating a tradition of interiority, Hamlet's soliloquies generate social speech in works like Gilbert's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, inviting audience participation. The burlesque imperative also inflects novels like Dickens's Great Expectations, turning the internal debate of the canonical literary self into the public dispute of populist entertainment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conceptions of progress abounded in the Victorian period, and works of intellectual history were instrumental in illustrating and interrogating the laws of the progressive development of modern societies. Among the axioms that informed progressive historiography was the 'intellectualist' assumption of the privileged and incremental historical agency of speculation, knowledge, and ideas. This paper considers the role of John Stuart Mill's System of Logic (1843) in shaping an intellectualist paradigm in Victorian liberal historiography. It focuses on Leslie Stephen's methodological reflections in the History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (1876), which it analyzes in terms of a revision of Mill's concept of regulative ideas that suggests how intellectual history was fully caught up in the mid-Victorian 'crisis of reason.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While recent studies of Victorian literary criticism have investigated poetry's place in the periodical press, little attention has been paid to the history of poetry published in large-circulation general newspapers. this essay discusses poetry published in The London Times during the 1860s, examining the literal place of poetry within the newspaper, its themes and formal characteristics, and its relation to authorship. I suggest that reading these poems in relation to their original material context raises theoretical questions about the history of reading, intertextuality, and poetry's function in the public sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses three articles in this special issue arising from the 14th annual November 2016 conference of the North American Victorian Studies Association entitled "Social Victorians" in Phoenix, Arizona, on topics including art galleries, a provincial book club, and reviews of ballads.

Insofar as the field of Anthropocene studies would seem to invite (if not necessitate) large-scale or sweeping approaches like Reno's, Ross's I Charlotte Brontë at the Anthropocene i is counterintuitive inasmuch as it zooms in on the life and works of one Victorian woman. Exploring how "Charlotte Brontë wrote the Anthropocene at the scale of a lifetime", Ross demonstrates beautifully how the Anthropocene as ideational concept and material condition might be generatively evinced by and through small-scale, localized, materially situated methods of inquiry (5). Charlotte Brontë at the Anthropocene, by Shawna Ross; pp. vii + 326. [Extracted from the article]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"The Emergence of Bicycling and Automobility in Britain" by Craig Horner explores the history of cycling and motoring in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain. Horner examines the pioneers who transitioned from cycling to becoming motorists and motor industry entrepreneurs, and documents how motorized vehicles began to gain popularity by 1905. The book highlights the challenges faced by these entrepreneurs, such as legal restrictions, inadequate road infrastructure, and societal hostility towards motorists. It also discusses the shift in the motoring industry after 1905, with the emergence of a new breed of upper- and middle-class consumers. Overall, the book offers a comprehensive analysis of the role of cycling and motoring in shaping British mobility during this period. [Extracted from the article]

Analyzing the dynamics of collection and display in the colonial context, this essay considers the South Asian artifacts collected by Sir Richard Carnac temple, Chief Commissioner of the Andaman and Nicobar islands from 1894-1904. temple exhibited the teak carvings, body adornments, and hunting tools that he amassed throughout his career in his home, the Nash, which became the foundation of his public persona as a triumphant colonial chief, a "shining light" in the emerging discipline of anthropology, and a wealthy, upper-class lord of the manor. the politics of consumption, decoration, and self-creation converge in the Nash, offering a glimpse into how material objects removed from India during the late nineteenth century were consumed in Britain and how domestic display contributed to the formation of British identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the reasons for the keeping the working class of the British Victorian society unaware of the British empire. Contextual reasons for thinking that the working class may not have been affected by imperialism as they are often assumed or implied to be; Reasons for not allowing the working classes to learn more about the British empire; Principle on which the British society was held together.

In this evaluation of provincial Jewish communities, Levene challenges a prevailing view of industrialism: that it severed cherished family ties and replaced them with mere communities of circumstance. Jews in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Charity, Community and Religion, 1830-1880, by Alysa Levene; pp. vi + 248. In it, Levene examines maps, statistics, census data, and communal records to understand social, geographical, and transpatial notions of community among provincial Jews. [Extracted from the article]

"Beyond the Law": The Politics of Ending the Death Penalty for Sodomy in Britain by Charles Upchurch explores the history of the abolition of the death penalty for sodomy in Britain. Upchurch challenges the notion that the period between the eighteenth and late nineteenth centuries was a sparsely documented gray zone in queer history. He examines the political maneuvering and debates surrounding the decriminalization of sodomy in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1861, shedding light on the motivations of key politicians involved. Upchurch also explores the connections between influential thinkers, authors, and politicians in advocating for reform. While some of his connections are speculative, the book provides valuable insights into this neglected period of queer history. [Extracted from the article]

Workers, Unions and Payment in Kind: The Fight for Real Wages in Britain, 1820-1914 Finally, Frank explores the work of the factory inspectors, especially the women, many of whom saw themselves as campaigners for the rights of women workers rather than neutral administrators of state policy. Workers, Unions and Payment in Kind: The Fight for Real Wages in Britain, 1820-1914, by Christopher Frank; pp. xii + 293. [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses the cover of the issue, comments on changes to the journal's staff, and announces that a special issue of the journal will be devoted to Victorianist historicism in the literary criticism field. It notes that the cover of the issue features an image that is entitled “System of Sociolatry” from the book "The Catechism of Positive Religion" by Auguste Comte and translated by Richard Congreve. The departure of journal editors Maureen Hattrup and Stephanie Koscak is also noted.

In the late nineteenth century, the British government in India attempted to quell anti-colonial critique by criminalizing negative affect. This essay explores the relationship between “disaffection” and critique in this period by comparing the trial of the Bangavasi in 1891 (the first attempt to prosecute a newspaper using the law against disaffection) and the trials of Oscar Wilde four years later; it demonstrates how and why both were centrally concerned with sexuality, excessive affect, and the insincerity of affectation, and shows how the key terms operating in each trial circulated between Britain and India in the Anglophone press. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that George Jacob Holyoake quoted George Eliot as part of a particular political strategy, one designed to bring together readers and writers of different classes, religious beliefs, and political affiliations. Holyoake, a lifelong political activist, worked tirelessly to build consensus among diverse and distinct groups, an effort that is reflected in his recirculation of passages by Eliot. Thanks to Holyoake's careful framing, Eliot herself emerges as a dedicated supporter of working-class political movements. By quoting her, Holyoake worked to convince his largely working-class audience that this famous middle-class author was on their side. As quotations traveled across class lines, they helped knit together the political projects of different groups, otherwise divided by class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay responds to current scholarship as it explains the poor person's horror of dissection in the Victorian period as part of a long and complex process of deprivation. Working with the Anatomy Act (1832) and the New Poor Law (1834) as its backdrop, this essay examines three anxieties that were inseparable from the pauper's existence: the social embarrassment attendant on the loss of personal belongings, especially clothes; the humiliation forced upon workhouse inmates by the New Poor Law diet; and the existential foreboding triggered by the prospect of postmortem dissection. It culminates in a consideration of the early works of Charles Dickens, who found in fiction a set of strategies that allowed early Victorians simultaneously to register and to compensate for these anxieties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay analyzes the Kelmscott editions of William Morris's late prose romances in reference to late-nineteenth-century typographical discourses. It identifies on the surface of the Kelmscott works a previously undisclosed record of print craftsmanship: a coordinated effort by Morris and his print workers to prevent textually encoded forms of distraction from accruing on the printed page. In so doing, it engages with past scholarship that has traced the politics of the Kelmscott book to its utopian methods of print production or to its idealized, textually implicit modes of aesthetic perception. Offering a new way of appreciating this politics, it considers the books' coordinated efforts to eliminate distractions as an organized resistance to the misguided technoprogressive logic informing modern print practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Nobody, Somebody, and Everybody" argues that the convergence of the Crimean War, liberal political ideology, and statistical thought created a crisis of accountability in the public sphere in mid-Victorian England, a crisis to which Dickens responded in his journalism by elaborating a rhetoric of indefiniteness through the use of the pronoun "somebody." Statistics produced an abstract order of behavior that described humans en masse, whereas moral traditions framed questions of accountability according to observed behaviors of individual men. This accountability crisis is explored through a reading of Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade" (1854), while Dickens's writing in Household Words is understood as an aspirational solution to this crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay calls attention to the philosophical parallels between British aestheticism--the "art for art's sake" movement founded by Walter Pater in the late 1860s--and a contemporary strain of optimistic evolutionism popularized by iconoclastic mathematician W. K. Clifford in the 1870s. Although evolutionism and aestheticism appear unrelated at first glance, Clifford's and Pater's bodies of work reveal common concerns about the influence of scientific materialism on culture and the place of the individual within the evolutionary process. By tracing these commonalities through the work of Clifford, Pater, and aesthetic poet Mathilde Blind, this essay posits a richer account of the interdependent formation of both aesthetic and evolutionary thought in the late nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author responds to three essays published within this issue: "Surround, Background, and the Overlooked," by Kate Flint; "Cartomania: Sensation, Celebrity, and the Democratized Portrait," by Rachel Teukolsky; and "Champagne in the Shrubbery: Sex, Science, and Space in James Tissot's London Conservatory," by Samantha Burton. Topics include late-nineteenth century visual culture, the use of foreground and backgrounds in art and photography, and technological innovations and popular culture.

William Morris's literary and political writings offer a prescient eco-socialist analysis of extraction capitalism and coal combustion, suggesting a geocritical dimension to what I will call his aesthetics of surface. An early adopter of the position that capitalism is fundamentally incompatible with Earth's ecological balance, Morris was attuned not only to the way that the idea of free exchange obscures the market's remainder of surplus value, but also to the way that the idea of unregulated natural balance denies environmental remainders such as pollution and waste. Morris's aesthetics favor surface and exteriority over depth, registering a value shift away from excavated underground commodities and toward surface resources such as sunlight and air. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reports on Great Britain's first Conference on Victorian Music, held at the University of Leicester from August 31 to September 2, 1979. Gap between high culture music and popular music; Link between music and social mobility; Commercial pressures to produce easily performed music.

In Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh, a naive young protagonist announces his desire to establish a "college of Spiritual Pathology." This essay explores the cultural history and public scandals surrounding ideas of spiritual pathology, which were ignited by the publication of a pamphlet by the Society of the Holy Cross, The Priest in Absolution. The ensuing debates involved territorial battles between elements of the church and the emerging psychiatric profession, while at the same time arousing popular anxieties concerning "unBritish" self-exposure, obscenity, child sexuality, and homosexuality. The controversy also drew an unsolicited, and previously unnoted, response from Lewis Carroll. In questioning the "false analogy" between the priest and the physician, the discussions had significant implications for the construction of a science of self hood prior to Freud. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A response is presented to literary criticisms of the book "Empire in Question," by Antoinette Burton. The author agrees that she addresses the major imperial events in her study courses, analyzes the difficulties associated with teaching Victorian-era history classes, and explores how imperial political culture should be taught to students, citing the reading of "Jane Eyre" as one methodology. She explains how she prepares the Victorian history syllabus for her courses and notes that she will rework her curriculum to reflect the questions raised by these criticisms.

A literary criticism of the book "Empire in Question," by Antoinette Burton is presented. The author discusses how Burton highlights the importance of studying empire, explores how imperial and postcolonial studies relate to Victorian studies, and analyzes Burton's teaching course called "Gender and Colonialism."

Drawing on cultural history and opposing the idea that British visual culture in 1848 has nothing interesting to say about class, politics, and revolution, this article examines a depiction of the London dance-hall Laurent's Casino by Guillaume-Sulpice Chevalier, better known as Paul Gavarni, made to accompany an essay by Albert Smith for the collaborative work Gavarni in London (1849). The image appeared against the backdrop of revolutions abroad, and just weeks after rioting in Trafalgar Square. Reconstructing the location of the casino, the history of the venue, the entertainments enjoyed there, and descriptions of its patrons--the gent and his female counterpart--reveals the dynamic performance of class enacted there, and contemporary reactions to that performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay argues that nineteenth-century Britons came to understand their present as peculiarly 'Victorian' not only by peering into what A. Dwight Culler calls the 'mirror of history,' but also by imagining how they might appear in the 'rearview mirror' of the future (to adapt Simon Joyce's metaphor). H. G. Wells' A Story of the Days to Come, for example, features a twenty-second-century couple whose nostalgia for 'Victorian' times and things derives largely from their reading of what we might call 'Neo-Victorian' fiction. Much more commonly, however, Victorians envisioned themselves from the interestingly fallible perspective not of ordinary denizens of the future, but of scholars much like us, often invoking 'the future student of the Victorian age' or Macaulay's 'New Zealander' and occasionally writing as if they were he. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The politics and aesthetics of nakedness was, for Victorians, both complex and slippery, the result of ambivalent nineteenth-century attitudes toward the unclothed body. this essay argues that such vexed attitudes about nudity and nakedness in Victorian Britain cannot fully be comprehended without reference to the experience of empire. Colonialism's seemingly timeless fascination with indigenous undress provoked a number of questions about human difference, evolution, and the nature of civilization. Analyzing different readings of nakedness in the worlds of science (especially anthropology), high art, and popular culture, this essay examines the enduring association between savagery and the lack of clothing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines a deep-seated Victorian preoccupation with the ways that portable property becomes the vector for the transplantation of national culture and individual identity. It argues that England's empire, the territory Charles Dilke labeled "Greater Britain," was the forcing bed from which cultural portability emerged as a new way of imagining self, community, and nation. A range of Anglo-Indian texts--among them Julia Maitland's Letters from Madras, Emily Eden's Up the Country, and the anonymous 1873 Overland, Inland, and Upland--suggest that self-styled exiles from England cultivated a connection with their fellow expatriates through objects and practices transported to the colonies from England. These mobile containers of Britishness strengthened settlers' bond to their alma mater, even as they reminded them of their distance from home. The long-distance attachments thus reified by cultural portability allowed Anglo-Indians to draw a cordon of inattention that separated them from their Indian surroundings and to engage in the willful fiction that life in India was merely a continuation of the English experience. In this way, portable repositories of mobile memory in Victorian Britain served to unify an otherwise disparate global community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the collaboration between the Young Ireland Movement with Thomas Carlyle. The Young Ireland Movement's goal was to repeal the 1800 Act of Union between Great Britain and Ireland. This objective, on the other hand, was opposed by Carlyle. Writers for the weekly newspaper "Nation" had encouraged readers to disregard religious, political and ethnic differences to create a united Ireland.

Examines the literary-medical relations of morphine habituation among women during the late-nineteenth-century in Great Britain. Gendered politics of morphine, alcohol and self-representation; Narrative feature of iatrogenic hypodermic morphine dependency; Interpretive practices used in medical discourse to diagnose female morphine addicts.

Focuses on the Beard Movement in Great Britain during the Victorian period. Transformation of men's face in the 19th century; Significance of the timing of the change in masculine image; Indications of beards in men in the early 19th century; Objectives of the beard movement; Effect of the beard movement on masculinity in the industrial age.

Examines how men, masculinity and male consumption were imagined in the discourse of the burgeoning commodity culture and fashion industry in Great Britain between 1860 and 1914. Creation of male markets and an appeal to male consumers; Influence of the department store on the growth of male consumption; Increase in the male sartorial awareness.

Examines the metaphors of militarism and imperialism found in the geological works of Roderick Impey Murchison. Profile on Murchison; Background on Murchison's Silurian System of grouping the most ancient fossiliferous strata; Role of the system in establishing the international reputation of British geology.

Points that Conservatives during the Victorian age in Great Britain were known for their support and initiatives towards social reform. Focus on the women's educational reform pushed by Conservatives during the Victorian age; View of society about the role of women in family and society; Success of women in portraying themselves as educators.

Looks at the origin of the British spy novel from 1893 to 1914. Information on Duckworth Drew, an officer of Great Britain Secret Service; Description of several spy novels; Reputation of British secret agents as gentlemen.

Explains the reasons for the lack of attention given by scholars and historians about laundry women and laundry trade in Great Britain in the 17th century. Description of the condition of laundry women; Review of materials that focus on laundry and laundry women; Importance of understanding the condition of laundry trade and laundry women during the period.

Examines the structure and content of Victorian literature courses at undergraduate level in British universities and polytechnics. Anthologies, texts, and selections with which most students are likely to come into contact; Various approaches to the field in relation to what is taught and how; Major novelists, poets, and prose writers whose works are included in a basic course in Victorian literature.