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Media and the British Empire, edited by Chandrika Kaul; pp. xv + 266. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, 47.00 £, $75.00. Chandrika Kaul's edited anthology continues work she [...]

The most sensational art trial in an age of sensational trials, Whistler v. Ruskin (1878) has remained relatively unexamined by scholars. Linda Merrill's book extensively documents and contextualizes the trial. [...]

India by Design: Colonial History and Cultural Display, by Saloni Mathur; pp. xi + 219. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2007, $50.00, $19.95 paper, 29.95 £, [...]

Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain, by Tim Barringer; pp. ix + 379. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005, $65.00, £40.00. Tim Barringer's excellent book [...]

by Dianne Sachko Macleod; pp. xx + 530. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, £65.00, $95.00. This book is a milestone in patronage studies in both its depth and breadth. Providing [...]

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]

Memoirs of nineteenth-century publishers have been read mainly as sources for author biography or for the cultural and economic history of print rather than as literary works in their own right. Yet even as they afforded paradigmatic narratives of commercial success, autobiographies and biographies of Victorian publishers routinely challenged the considerable formal capacities of nineteenth-century Life-writing. The representation of a publishing self was frequently embedded in the textualization of a number of overlapping identities: generational, familial, corporate, civic, authorial, national, and so on. This article sketches the field of Victorian publishers' memoirs to show how Life-writers responded to the changing conditions of bookselling as a profession, forging distinctive stories of middle-class becoming as well as highly wrought models of subjectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]