Search

IN THE VICTORIAN TIME WOMEN WERE NOT ENCOURAGED TO SEARCH FOR SELF-FULFILLMENT OF INDEPENDENCE. THEY WERE TAUGHT TO BE SUBMISSIVE TO THEIR FATHERS OR HUSBANDS AND TO DEDICATE THEMSELVES TO THEIR DUTIES. THOMAS HARDY IS KNOWN TO BE INFLUENCED BY THE ENGLISH COUNTRYSIDE, ESPECIALLY WESSEX WHICH HE INCORPORATED IN MANY OF HIS NOVELS, AND TESS OF THE D'URBERVILLES IS ALSO SET THERE. HE WAS A VICTORIAN REALIST WHO TRIED TO DEPICT THE SOCIAL CONSTRAINTS ON THE LIVES OF THOSE LIVING IN VICTORIAN ENGLAND, HE ALSO CRITICIZED BELIEFS RELATING TO MARRIAGE AND RELIGION, WHICH LIMITED PEOPLE'S LIVES. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THIS PAPER WILL BE CONCERNED WITH THE DEVELOPMENT OF FEMINISM THROUGHOUT THE 19TH CENTURY OF THE ENGLISH LITERATURE, DISCUSSING THE SOCIAL AND CULTURAL PERCEPTION ON THIS TOPIC. THE 19TH CENTURY WAS ONE OF THE MOST SIGNIFICANT PERIODS OF THE BRITISH HISTORY, NEVERTHELESS IT WAS A CENTURY OF CHANGES FOR WOMEN. THROUGHOUT THE 19TH AND 20TH CENTURIES, LITERATURE HAS DEVELOPED AS WELL AS THE SOCIETY AND THE POSITION OF WOMEN WITH RESPECT TO MEN. THIS PERPETUAL FIGHT FOR EQUALITY BETWEEN MEN AND WOMEN HAD A STARTING POINT AND THIS WAS THE SUFFRAGETTE MOVEMENT. THERE HAS BEEN A GRADUAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE FEMINIST MOVEMENT THROUGHOUT THE CENTURIES. THEREFORE, THE WORD "FEMINISM" CAN EVOKE NEGATIVE OR POSITIVE MEANINGS FOR THOSE WHO TRY TO DISCOVER ITS ROOTS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on recent scholarship about the cultural significance of material life in the nineteenth century, this article attends to Charles Dickens's representation of domestic interiors and household furnishings in Our Mutual Friend, and reflects on the agency of material objects in shaping Victorians' moral life. A close examination of the variations in different characters' furnishings and their morally destructive or constructive consequences reveals that, while domestic furnishings are more often used as ways for boasting vanity or schemes for entrapping trust, they influence people's moral life by inducing different performances of domesticity. It argues that the way of possessing things actually constitutes part of the Victorian social discipline, which, by encouraging proper ways of possessing and using domestic things, domesticates men and women to be household heads and housewives complying with bourgeois home values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although Susan Hill has become a prolific writer of ghost narratives in the last decades, it was at a particularly momentous stage of her life as a woman writer that she published The Woman in Black (1983), which is considered her first ghost novel. Evoking the Victorian past, The Woman in Black engages intertextually with Victorian novels within the Gothic genre. The character of the Woman in Black comprises features pertaining to different Victorian Gothic archetypes, such as the ghost, the vampire, and the double. Some of the traits pertaining to these literary archetypes echoed Victorian anxieties about aging that are recovered and reinterpreted in Hill's novel. Furthermore, in analogy with a Gothic romance, the encounter between the narrator as a young man, Arthur Kipps, and a spectral aging woman, the Woman in Black, unleashes the hero's process of coming of age, which he recollects in his old age as he is writing his narrative. Narratological features pertaining to the Gothic genre, like the use of a frame narrative that blends past and present, underscore the dynamics of aging, since processes of interrupted aging and premature aging disrupt the boundaries that conventionally distinguish life stages. This article approaches Hill's The Woman in Black as a contemporary ghost novel that evokes and subverts Victorian discourses of aging and gender, at the same time that, from a contemporary perspective, it vindicates the figure of the Victorian fallen woman as an aging mother. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a letter from the great Victorian man of letters Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) to François Guizot (1787–1874), the de facto premier of France, recently discovered in the Archives Nationales in Paris. In the letter, Carlyle requests Guizot's help in procuring visas for two of his friends, the exiled Italian revolutionaries Giovanni and Agostino Ruffini, who were hoping to visit their mother in France. The letter serves as an entry point into a wider consideration of the relationships between Carlyle, Guizot and the brothers Ruffini, all of which have been overlooked in the existing scholarship on Carlyle. In particular, the article provides an English translation of Giovanni and Agostino's significant accounts of their relations with Carlyle (and his wife Jane), originally written in Italian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Plants are organisms whose great biological distance from humans has aroused cultural interest as powerful and/or dangerously unfamiliar creatures, especially during the Victorian period. «The Flowering of the Strange Orchid» (1894), by Herbert George Wells, tells how an orchid collector is attacked to near death by his latest acquisition. The plant attacks the human with its «tentacle-like aerial rootlets», like a vampire feeding on his blood. However, Winter-Wedderburn is saved by his housekeeper, and the plant dies instantly. The story is written at a historical moment of great fascination with orchids and carnivorous plants. Literarily, the story has numerous comparisons to great characters, such as Medusa and her tentacles, Dracula, Carmilla, and even IT. At the same time, it is a story with a strong plant science content, dealing with aspects such as the mechanisms used by orchids to obtain nutrients, their flowering, the importance of «hunting» for the survival of carnivorous plants or the biology of parasitic plants. In conclusion, Wells' story makes an important critique of the way man relates to nature using literary fiction and the cutting-edge plant science knowledge of his time.

Based on folk tales of Northern European nations, Arnold’s poems ‘The Forsaken Merman’ (1849) and ‘The Neckan’ (1853), both tell a story of human women who marry sea creatures, mermen, and replace their home on the land with the mermen’s underwater world. By crossing the boundaries between their worlds, they cause numerous problems, most significantly the tension resulting from their different religious beliefs. In ‘The Forsaken Merman’, Margaret, the merman’s wife, fearing that her soul will be damned because of her marriage to a pagan, decides to rejoin the human world on the most important Christian holiday, Easter. In ‘The Neckan’, in order to comfort his wife, the Neckan goes to the human world to find a priest who would be willing to baptise him, but he is rejected because he is a ‘monster’ who cannot be saved. The paper will examine the way in which Arnold’s poems reflect the fears of the Victorian era as well as his own anxieties. This will be accomplished by comparing the two opposite worlds of the poems – the human world of everyday activities, rules, laws, and expectations; and the mermen’s home, the mysterious, colourful, and peaceful world of sea-beasts. In addition, the paper will analyse the reversal of traditional gender roles and re-examine literary, cultural, and social stereotypes. The paper will also attempt to find a connection between the main topics of these poems and Arnold’s life and career of a poet and literary critic.

In her new book on the function of cynicism, Helen Small defines a positive role that cynicism can play in the liberal articulation of the very ideals and norms that cynicism affronts. She provides this "strategic cynicism" with a nineteenth‐century lineage including Friedrich Nietzsche, Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, and Thomas Carlyle. This review essay identifies some problems in the concept of strategic cynicism, drawing on Hegel's understanding of intentional action. Strategic cynicism is ultimately a role‐playing (or impersonation) of cynicism by normativity on its own behalf. As Small conceives norms, they are vulnerable to cynicism because they are stranded and without immanent grounding. Turning to Henry James's novel The Awkward Age, this essay shows how cynicism can be answered not by pointing to better intentions, but only by what we discover retrospectively, from the consequences of how things turn out, our commitments to be. The essay ends with a consideration of the dysfunction of liberal responses to Donald Trump's cynicism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Larq Journal for Philosophy, Linguistics & Social Sciences is the property of Republic of Iraq Ministry of Higher Education & Scientific Research (MOHESR) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In 1842, The Ecclesiologist, a publication dedicated to the development of church architecture, suggested that 'to restore is to revive the original appearance ... lost by decay, accident, or ill-judged alteration.' This sentiment informed the restoration of countless medieval churches over the nineteenth century and ultimately triggered the foundation of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB); the body that would shape twentieth-century conservation philosophy. This article suggests that a number of recent church schemes in London illustrate a growing shift away from orthodox conservation principles towards creative restoration. Three Anglican churches that are currently undergoing a programme of refurbishment will be examined to shed light on emerging practices. Though none of the refurbishments have attempted to recreate the original church, all three have foregrounded the original shell and plan and, in doing so reflect The Ecclesiologist's position that 'we must, whether from existing evidences or from supposition, recover the original scheme of the edifice, as conceived by the first builder ... ' This article explores the factors that are influencing new approaches in church refurbishments, reading these against nineteenth-century debates on conservation and restoration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of the American Institute for Conservation is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The alabaster wall monument to Robert Claudius Billing, Suffragan Bishop of Bedford, placed in the crypt of St Paul's Cathedral, commemorates the life and service of a Victorian cleric known for his work in the overcrowded parishes of east London. Supplied by Powell and Sons, a London-based glassmaking firm that made stained glass and mosaics as well as reredoses and tablets, the monument echoes the architectural style and decoration of the iconic building in which it is placed, as well as showcasing a new vitreous mosaic material known as opus sectile that the firm innovated and marketed as suitable for both wall and floor decoration. The striking opus sectile portrait of Billing preserves an image of the deceased, and together with the accompanying epitaph demonstrates the affection and high esteem in which he was held in the Diocese of London and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tabitha Aykroyd, Martha Brown, Nancy and Sarah Garrs were just a few of the very many girls and women working as domestic servants in early Victorian Britain. The main purpose of this article is to analyze the precise context and conditions in which they were employed in Haworth Parsonage, where the Bronte sisters lived for most of their lives (1820-1855), and the influence that they had on the well-being of this famous family and on the imagination and literary activity of the sisters. Aspects connected with the following will be explored and problematized: the value and respect that the Brontes attributed to or showed these domestic laborers and their work, including sharing in their tasks and duties; brief but useful connections of these figures with the sisters' own professional activities as middle-class women (namely, when serving as teachers and governesses themselves); and also comparison with some relevant literary representations of the figure and role of the "female servant" in the Brontes' novels. A complementary purpose is of a more transatlantic nature: to compare their earlier British domestic context with Louisa May Alcott's later American one, and their literary representations of the female servant with Alcott's own extensive treatment of that neglected figure in some of her fictional works. The justification for this comparison does not lie so much in the known influence that the works written by the Brontes, in particular Charlotte's, had on Alcott, but more in their sharing of very similar concerns as regards this topic, in spite of very specific (transatlantic) differences that can be revealing of their respective attitude towards servitude. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Philologist / Filolog: Journal of Language, Literary & Cultural Studies is the property of University of Banja Luka, Faculty of Philology / Univerzitet u Banjoj Luci, Filoloski Fakultet and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The Victorian era in Britain was characterized by an emphasis on "respectability" which formed a part of the domesticity ideology that treated the home as a place created for women. Proper, respectable behaviour was a function of belonging to the middle class. A significant number of savoir-vivre guides published contemporaneously informed the reader not only about receiving guests but also about courtship and marriage. The subject of the article is a close reading of these etiquette guides and the Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine letter section, which frequently addresses issues of courtship and marriage. The analysis of the texts using rigid gender roles as presented in the guides and the comparison of them with the letter section of the magazine shows that young readers expressed their independence and assertiveness in trying to contest these rules. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Victorian literature course, 'Victorians Reading Religion', relocates the religious friction of the 19th century, focusing less on scientific threats, crises of faith, and schisms within Victorian churches, and more on how the shifting religious landscape of 19th-century British culture prompted Victorian thinkers to renegotiate their approaches to reading. Using Olive Schriener's Story of an African Farm (1883) as a prime example, attending to these overlapping iterations of religious experience offers us three correlated opportunities: firstly, it helps students loosen the identity categories they might otherwise consistently apply too tidily. Secondly, it reintroduces literature as a space in which they can evaluate morality. Finally, centring religion in literary studies prompts students to recognise the ways in which the work we do in a literature classroom is itself religious. Together, these pedagogical opportunities produce occasions for metacognition that help students articulate the value of humanistic study in the increasingly instrumentalised landscape of higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Significant nationwide consequences across the building sector arose from the Apollo Theatre ceiling collapse investigation relating to fibrous plaster suspended ceiling fabrication. This continues to be an acute issue as owners and developers attempt to resolve health and safety, risk and conservation of culturally significant fragile fabric. Fibrous plaster remains a problematic historic construction material because of its prevalence across the country, where it flourished particularly between the late 19th and early 20th centuries in theatres, hotels, music halls, churches and other public buildings, but also production and installation in current building works where typically very similar methods and materials continue to be used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article utilises a unique collection of life-writing manuscripts to reconsider generational difference, father/daughter relationships, and autobiography in nineteenth-century England. Although stemming from a family tradition of life writing, Martha Ann Howlett's late-Victorian memoirs render a critical image of her upbringing and promote a vision of social and financial independence for the next generation of women. These memoirs sit in contrast to her father Samuel Burt Howlett's 'present' to Martha Ann—his series of autobiographical volumes composed during her childhood—which borrow from multiple modes of life writing that prevailed in the early Victorian era. This collection, which has never been studied before, permits an understanding of complex and composite father/daughter relationships as told through life writing. Sustained comparative study of the two interconnected examples of life writing reveals the opposing narratives of continuation and disruption in the family's record. These manuscripts ultimately demonstrate the importance of generational thought to life writing's power to self-define, and expose the gendered (though contested) understandings of work, creativity, education, and family contained within relational archives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Berta Ruck’s interwar romance novels address contemporary anxieties about the changing role of women in Britain after 1918. Ruck’s novels focus both on the modern woman in contrast to the Victorian woman, and the extent to which modernity and the new freedoms wrought by the First World War emancipated women from the traditionalisms of the pre-war period. Over the course of the interwar period, however, Ruck began to question whether young women were embracing the full potential of their new freedoms or if they were trading one kind of conformity for another. Ruck challenges young women to dispense with unnecessary labels – mods versus the conventional woman – that prevent women from understanding and embracing their true selves. Ruck delays the expected happy ending until the protagonists reject the performative modernity of societal expectations – a journey centered around new employment and courtship rituals that came to define the modern woman – and arrive at a true understanding of self, accomplished by embracing sincerity and emotional honesty.

This article reads Charlotte Brontë's letters documenting her sister Emily Brontë's experience of tuberculosis in late 1848, considering how the correspondence has cultivated a one-sided account of Emily's final months. Rereading the letters analytically, I argue that the differences between the sisters that Charlotte articulates gravitate around her implicit conception of the "good" consumptive, with Emily's resistance positioning her unfairly as a "bad" patient. Informed by Roy Porter's conception of "patient centred", I read against the grain of Charlotte's letters to challenge dominant accounts of Emily's illness and death. I suggest that when considered contextually and from Emily's point of view, Charlotte letters offer alternate ways to understand Emily's experience of tuberculosis and her behaviour in her final months. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, many scholars have drawn a distinction between procedural and programmatic secularism. Procedural secularists seek to build communities wherein 'competing concepts of the good life' are afforded opportunities for expression. Programmatic secularists seek to limit the influence of religion within the public sphere. The 1870 Education Act created a network of Board schools across England and Wales. In accordance with the Cowper-Temple Clause, religious education in Board schools would be non-denominational in character. Students would be taught Bible passages and hymns, but would not be taught any denominationally specific aspects of Christian doctrine. This development stimulated a controversy between the defenders of non-denominational education and those who believed that state-sponsored non-denominational education threatened the existence of voluntary schools. The debates that ensued are often characterised as sectarian in nature. However, they can alternatively be seen as negotiations of the proper definition and the proper parameters of religious freedom and toleration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For most of the nineteenth century, letterpress design in Britain followed conventions established in the pre-industrial era, paying little attention to matters of colour, form, and display. Decorative typefaces competed with a profusion of type ornaments, leaving job printing, especially, with no visual logic in its composition. In the final decades of the century, however, some Victorian printers began to search for aesthetic principles that could do two things: reform letterpress design, and teach the public to embrace this new style of composition. Their search led printers to the tenets of design reform, popularized by Henry Cole and his coterie of artists and designers at mid-century. While design reformers discussed printing solely in terms of factory-produced commodities on which designs were stamped (fabrics, wallpapers, tiles, etc.), the principles guiding their notions of morally- and economically-uplifting visual display were well-suited for adaptation to letterpress design. Key to the dissemination of these ideas throughout the printing trade became a globe-spanning project called the Printers' International Specimen Exchange. For nearly twenty years, reform-minded printers near and far exchanged letterpress specimens with each other via the PISE. This effort united participants in a global fraternity of fellow-tradesmen, popularized new technologies and printing techniques, and spread the gospel of design reform. In this way, the PISE became a nineteenth-century grammar of typography, a sourcebook of design principles and exemplary practices that turned letterpress printers toward the horizon of professional graphic design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of RumeliDE Journal of Language & Literature Research / RumeliDE Dil ve Edebiyat Araştırmaları Dergisi is the property of RumeliDE Uluslararasi Hakemli Dil & Edebiyat Arastirmalari Dergisi and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Collecting ancient furniture — or furniture thought to be ancient — for display in 'romantic interiors' proliferated in 18th-century Britain; such pieces became so popular that by the 1840s it was easy to purchase generic examples across the country. This essay explores the output of George Shaw (1810–76), a particularly industrious early Victorian antiquary, who, besides working as an architect, restorer and supplier of Gothic-style interiors, also peddled fake ancestral furniture made for specific victims. He claimed his modern forgeries were from the time of Henry VII or Henry VIII, and this essay demonstrates how they were indebted to his long-term antiquarian research into medieval architecture, heraldry and woodwork. Some of Shaw's forgeries, particularly those for the 4th duke of Northumberland, have been considered at length recently; however, this essay demonstrates that our understanding of his corpus is far from complete given the recent emergence of his until now forgotten work for the Mosleys of Rolleston Hall in Staffordshire. It also shows how the family's important collection of ancient furniture, some of it gifted by Elizabeth I, had a direct influence upon his work, and that we should consider him to be a more significant figure in the history of Victorian furniture and forgery than we currently understand him to be. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Matthew Arnold was one of the poets who paid special attention to youth and the dynamics of youth culture in the Victorian era. Living in an era that stimulated modern times, Arnold produced writings that can be classified as historical records, although not factual, of society's reactions to the fundamental social and cultural changes of the time. The literary arena was particularly affected, as the Victorian era marked the beginning for poets and artists alike to shed the romantic spirit that they had breathed into their works and adapt to the technological and industrial realities around them. This article explores Matthew Arnold's poem entitled “Youth and Calm”. The poem explores a stream of consciousness that contemplates “the youth" and their dreams. This study aims to uncover the meaning of the poem based on its textual composition without correlating it with Arnold's other works. Using theoretical phenomenology tools to dissect language phenomena and the Freudo-Lacanian method in interpreting the theme, this study led to the revelation that the poem talks of “death” as a symbolically repressed object. Matthew Arnold merupakan salah satu penulis puisi yang menaruh atensi lebih pada pemuda dan juga dinamika kebudayaan muda-mudi pada era Victoria. Hidup di dalam yang era mendasari kultur modern, Arnold menghasilkan karya-karya yang dapat diklasifikasikan sebagai catatan historis, meskipun tidak faktual secara absolut, terkait reaksi masyarakat dalam menghadapi perubahan sosial dan kultural yang begitu mendasar di kala itu. Terlebih dalam arena literatur, kehadiran era Victorian merupakan awal penanda bagi penyair dan produser seni lainnya untuk mulai menanggalkan jiwa romantisme yang mereka hembuskan pada tiap karya dan beralih pada realita teknologi dan industri di sekitar mereka. Dalam artikel ini, puisi Matthew Arnold yang ditelaah secara mendalam berjudul “Youth and Calm”. Puisi tersebut mengeksplorasi arus pemikiran yang berisikan kontemplasi terhadap figur “pemuda” dan apa yang mereka impikan. Penulisan ini bertujuan untuk menggali makna puisi berdasarkan komposisi tekstualnya dan tanpa menghubungkannya dengan karya Arnold lainnya. Menggunakan paradigma fenomenologi untuk membedah struktur kebahasaan serta Freudo-Lacanian dalam menginterpretasi tema menghasilkan sebuah makna bahwa “Death” atau kematian merupakan objek yang secara simbolis dipendam oleh subjek youth yang dibahas pada puisi ini.