Victorian cultural studies

Thomas Hardy’s Wessex novels move in circles: characters retrace their steps, and history repeats itself. The limited geography registers and reflects both movements. At the same time, the novels repeatedly figure choice as binary—limited to two seemingly equivalent alternatives. This essay argues that these apparently disparate features of Hardy’s plots are, in fact, structurally linked. Circular movement and binary choice echo through contemporary cultural artifacts, ranging from popular board games to mathematical and biological theories. Drawing on developments in the mathematical study of probability—the drunkard’s walk and the Markov chain—this essay claims that Hardy’s binary choices generate his characters’ roundabout geographic trajectories, transforming Victorian models for human motion and choice into a formal principle for the novel.

The Colonial Public and the Parsi Stage is the first comprehensive study of the Parsi theatre, colonial South and Southeast Asia’s most influential cultural phenomenon and the precursor of the Indian cinema industry. By providing extensive, unpublished information on its first actors, audiences, production methods, and plays, this book traces how the theatre—which was one of the first in the Indian subcontinent to adopt European stagecraft—transformed into a pan-Asian entertainment industry in the second half of the nineteenth century. Nicholson sheds light on the motivations that led to the development of the popular, commercial theatre movement in Asia through three areas of investigation: the vernacular public sphere, the emergence of competing visions of nationhood, and the narratological function that women served within a continually shifting socio-political order. The book will be of interest to scholars across several disciplines, including cultural history, gender studies, Victorian studies, the sociology of religion, colonialism, and theatre.

In this paper I expand on my work in The Dog in the Dickensian Imagination to argue that the empathetic depiction of dogs that established itself in literature and painting in the late eighteenth century, and continued to develop, represented less a new departure in cultural perceptions of the dog than a return to those that had subsisted before the appearance in England in 1576 of the mechanically-printed, mass-produced and many times reissued Geneva Bible, the Bible Shakespeare read. As the Victorian biblical scholar H.B. Tristram pointed out, ‘the dog is mentioned nearly forty times in Scripture, [but] there is scarcely a single instance in which it is not spoken of with more or less of contempt or aversion’. I draw on texts and images to support my belief that in late medieval and early modern England the stance towards the dog was markedly unbiblical, while the authoritatively expressed ‘contempt or aversion’ made familiar through the Geneva Bible significantly influenced society’s attitudes to dogs in Protestant Britain. From the outset, the adverse effect conflicted with an established and persisting association of the dog with fidelity. The idea of fidelity assumes a connection with us. From the abiding and revivified recognition of this connection evolved the inclination to observe dogs closely, both as a species and as individuals. It is on the association between the ways in which the nature of that connection (or the betrayal of it) are presented before and after the advent of the Geneva Bible that this paper focuses.

The book ‘Ignoble Displacement: Dispossessed Capital in Neo-Dickensian London,’ addresses the relationship between the motifs of capital and empire in Dickens's novels and the confluence of global economy and liberal politics in the Victorian era that remain relevant to our understanding of today’s global financial crisis and the significance it has in maintaining a logic for neoliberal governmentality. This research uses the intellectual frameworks of critical theory and postcolonial studies to addresses themes of globalisation, politics and culture in Dickens's writing as a resource of cultural memory, integral to documenting Victorian Britain's social, economic and political histories. Interpreting this cultural work as a kind of 'archive' of race, nation and ethnicity as was understood by his contemporary reading public, gives us the unique opportunity to examine how they continue to inform British identity and also remain critical to the formation of colonial and postcolonial identities around the globe. The broader themes of this research would lend themselves naturally academic discussions around History, Literature and Culture, Philosophy, Politics, Cultural Studies and Critical Theory.

As Maynooth College celebrates its 225th anniversary, this beautifully-presented volume captures an institution that has held a singular place in modern Irish church history. Delve into the stories, the reminiscences, the history of this alma mater to thousands, as it evolved and re-imagined itself across the four centuries spanning its existence. With contributions by current and former faculty and alumni, including Enda McDonagh, Eamon Martin, Mary O'Rourke, Susan McKenna-Lawlor, Frank McGuinness, Evelyn Conlon, Liam Lawton, Gerard Gillen, and many more.

In Adam Bede, George Eliot explores the way a society divides its members into categories and how these categories contribute to the formation of an individual’s identity. In the mid-nineteenth century authors in the naturalist tradition often discussed this dialogical relationship between individual and society, the specific roles for social gaze, the labeling and degrading. Eliot shows an acute of these labels that no one shapes identity without their influence. According to Nancy Anne Marck, Adam Bede introduces the theme of “emerging social consciousness” where the characters gain broader awareness of human interdependence through an experience of suffering (447). This is particularly evident when examining Eliot’s characters of “lesser fortune.” Once we’ve investigated how Eliot portrays these negative social forces throughout the novel, the labeling and the stigmatization, we will return to how Eliot addresses the larger question permeating her novel of education: how one judg...

В статье анализируются фотографии второй половины XIX в., на
которых представлена связь человеческого тела со спортивными
практиками. Одни фотографии были инструментом для научного
изучения движений тела, другие служили репрезентативным целям
и характеризовали роль спорта в европейской культуре, в частности
как одного из инструментов экспансии европейского образа жизни
на колониальных территориях. Анализ снимков спортсменов
позволил сделать выводы о том, что предпочтение в видах
спорта было также связано с представлениями о соотнесенности
пластических особенностей тела с социальным положением человекав обществе. Автор отмечает неразделимость популяризации
спорта, исследований движения микрочастиц и экспериментов
в области хронофотографии – все эти процессы сформировали
в конце XIX – начале XX в. то представление о движении, которое
было необходимо впоследствии для развития кинематографа. / The article analyzes the photos of the second half of
the 19th century, which present the relationship of
the human body with sports practices. Some photos
were an instrument for the scientific study of body
movements. Others served representative purposes and
characterized the role of sport in European culture,
in particular as one of the tools for the expansion
of the European lifestyle in the colonial territories.
The analysis of pictures of athletes, allowed to
draw conclusions that preference in sports was also
connected with ideas of correlation of plastic features
of a body with social position of the person in society.
The author notes the inseparability of promoting sports,
motion studies of microparticles and experiments in
the field of chronophotography–all of these processes
have formed in the late 19th–early 20th centuries
the vision of the movement, which was necessary
in consequence for the development of cinema.

The paucity of criticism on the photographic evidence of Jack the ripper’s murders is striking and surprising, particularly given that these images amount to one of the  first visual documentations of what are now called sex crimes. Even Robert McLaughlin’s pioneering study The First Jack the Ripper Victim Photographs falls short of adequately decoding what’s really going on in the pictures themselves, in part because he seems less interested in the content of the photographs than in the biographical details of the photographers who created them. This essay hopes to address and correct this interpretive gap. Through a close analysis of the few ripper photographs that still survive, i seek to recover the representational codes governing the visual, spatial, and gender politics of these images. in the  first section i examine the postmortem portraits of the victims. in the second, i explore the continuities i see between the full-body mortuary photographs of the victims and a broader Victorian art aesthetic. in the third and  final section i study closely the single crime-scene photo- graph of the body of Mary Kelly (the ripper’s  fifth victim).

This article examines the dichotomous relationship between racial hierarchies effected by imperial science, on the one hand, and the subversive potential of the scientific knowledge gleaned from the Andaman Islands, on the other, in Victorian Britain. Knowledge about the Andaman Islands and its 'savage' aboriginal tribes had been etched onto British consciousness since the establishment of Britain's naval base in Greater Andaman (present-day Port Blair), in 1789, followed by a century of anthropological, ethnological, zoological and linguistic and explorations into the Andamanese people. When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Sign of the Four began being serialised in 1890, a fantastical knowledge of manners and physiognomy of the Andamanese was remarkably familiar to London, through colonial histories, a wide array of photographs in British periodicals, and iconic clay sculptures of the aboriginals displayed at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition in 1886. While British imperialism wanted to project its inexhaustible scientific and technocratic powers counterpoising them against the untameable and (supposedly) prehistoric life of the Andaman Islands, The Sign of the Four ruptured that discourse. I argue that, in the character of the little Andamanese "hell-hound," Tonga, Doyle presents an example of the failure of imperial scientific prowess to appropriate the savage identity into its racial and hierarchical discourse. Within the seemingly scarce presence of India in the world of Sherlock Holmes, it is deeply consequential that Doyle selected the Andaman Islands as a key location for the origin of his detective plot, as the home of the subaltern Tonga, who preempts the spectrality of the hound-a manifestation of imperial guilt and panic-to come later in The Hound of the Baskervilles.

Communication with the dead is not characteristically associated with the Pre-Raphaelites. However, lodged in the Rare Books Collection of the University of British Columbia is a remarkable diary kept by William Michael Rossetti. It consists of a small series of 27 handwritten folios entitled simply "Memoranda by himself." This diary is a meticulous record of twenty spirit-ualist séances that took place between 1865 and 1868, séances that attracted a number of Pre-Raphaelite artists, their friends, and family members. By 1865 spiritualism was practised widely throughout Britain. Though summoning the dead was by no means a recent preoccupation, it appeared in its modern form in America in the late 1840s, was brought simultaneously to England and the Continent in the early 1850s, and was widely disseminated by the 1860s. It was a highly controversial practice and drew in many famous names, for and against. Elizabeth Barrett Browning was an early convert, Charles Dickens a vigorous opponent, but its adherents ranged from Queen Victoria at one end of the social spectrum to Mary Marshall-poor, vulgar, but hugely eminent as the "washerwoman medium"-at the other. Séances, both public and private, took place throughout the country. Some were spectacular displays of showmanship involving large audiences; some were intimate, devout gatherings, while others took the form of after-dinner entertainment. The social, anthropological, and religious status of spiritualism has been much debated, but one important factor drove people to the darkened room of the medium: the desire to contact a dead loved-one. It was this motive that lay behind the séances in William Michael Rossetti's diary, since many of them were driven by Dante Gabriel Rossetti's desire to reach out to the dead Elizabeth Siddal. Though William was of course present at all the séances, not all were attended by his brother, and the "spirit" of Elizabeth Sid-The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, ns 29 (Fall 2020)

Take a walk on the dark side of the street in this unique exploration of the fears and desires at the heart of the British Empire, from the Regency dandy’s playground to the grim and gothic labyrinths of the Victorian city. Enter a world of gin spinners, sneaksmen and Covent Garden nuns, where bare-knuckled boxers slog it out for dozens of rounds, children are worth more dead than alive, and the Thames holds more bodies than the Ganges. This is the Modern Babylon, a place of brutal poverty, violent crime, strong drink, pornography and prostitution; of low neighbourhoods and crooked houses with windows out like broken teeth, wraithlike urchins with haunted eyes, desperate, ruthless and vicious men, and the broken remnants of once fine girls: a grey, bleak, infernal place, where gaslights fail to pierce the pestilential fog, and coppers travel in pairs, if they venture there at all.

Combining the accessibility of a popular history with original research, this book brings the denizens of this vanished world once more to life, along with the voices of those who sought to exploit, imprison or save them, or to simply report back from this alien landscape that both fascinated and appalled: the politicians, the reformers, the journalists and, above all, the storytellers, from literary novelists to purveyors of penny dreadfuls. Welcome to the 19th century underworld…

This paper explores the notion of homosocial space in the Victorian Era as it pertains to canonicity issues in literature. Homosocial space simply means that space which men set aside, such as in men.s-only clubs or situations such as the relationship of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, in which women play a limited role, if at all. Yet, this notion of men-only spaces created problems for the works vying to become canonical literature.not because of the exclusion of women, but for the ambivalence felt toward this separation of the sexes. Underlying this ambivalence is a fear of homosexuality; yet, these spaces also violate Matthew Arnold.s and Thomas Carlyle.s views toward industry. Often, the men in these novels fail to act, whether heroically or artistically. Matthew Arnold's works "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time" and "The Study of Poetry" usefully navigate the trail toward canonicity, at least for the Victorian Era. Using Arnold's notion and the prevailing social attitudes toward masculinity and enterprise, this paper examines the problems of canonicity for Oscar Wilde's The Portrait of Dorian Gray, E.M. Forster's Maurice, and John Buchan's The Thirty-Nine Steps.

Note: This essay was one of a set commissioned by Two Temple Place in 2021 to begin an ongoing project investigating the building’s history and assist cultural engagement with that history.
William Waldorf Astor engaged in projects aimed at the materialisation of history.  His collection of historic properties, and the enormous volume of possessions from historical figures which he collected, created contexts that whilst owing much to historical accuracy, were also his own romantic creations. Two Temple Place shows that this was even true of his office. Was this desire to materialise his actual and literary journeys not a profound psychological one?

Through examining Cole’s own life and his fascination with the textual and corporeal narratives of anatomy, this paper looks to explore the merging of scientific knowledge, bibliographic expertise and narrative to perform interdisciplinary ‘readings’, simultaneously challenging both the nineteenth-century emergence of subject discipline and the twentieth-century ‘two cultures’ divide.

At the time of his death in 1912, Bram Stoker was preparing for publication three volumes of stories. The first, Dracula’s Guest, saw print in 1914; the second and third never manifested. Old Hoggen and Other Adventures is a tantalising possibility of one of these unrealised selections, and the stories in this volume span the author’s entire career. In reading them, one thing becomes clear: adventure and mystery rival even the gothic in Stoker’s literary heart. Indeed, one will find among these pages many of the same themes found in Dracula: reverence for the dead, the malice of wicked men, black humour, hidden fortunes, daring bravery, exotic locales, a deep love of the sea, and the creeping intrusion of the supernatural.

I’m frequently asked, “From where did you summon the chutzpah to fake Wilde’s voice in your novel, The Unauthorized Letters of Oscar Wilde?”  While a fair, if faintly annoying question, I strive always to give an un-slick answer.
Delivered at  The One Institute, Los Angeles.

Assembling the evidence which points to a group of social reformers led by George Berrnard Shaw using Mass Media Manipulation techniques to create the Jack The Ripper mythomeme, with the East End murders of 1888 being carried out by an organised gang.

Much scholarship on Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus analyzes the use (or overuse) of violence and violent behavior. Literary scholarship on this play includes one glaring gap; there is little to no scholarship on Titus Andronicus and the Victorians. The central reason for this gap lies in the overwhelming Victorian aversion to Shakespeare’s first tragedy. 19th century audiences often espoused an outward veneer of virtue that prevented them from indulging plays that vigorously showcased violence the way that Titus Andronicus did. Reaching a grand total of fifteen murders, this play also touches on themes of rape, dismemberment, bodily mutilation, filicide, and cannibalism. For the “virtuous” Victorians, violent images like these resulted in the overall banning of this play’s production. Or could it be something else?
            Hosting such infamous criminals as Jack the Ripper and Typhoid Mary, 19th century people were not unfamiliar with violence or criminal behavior. Banning a play like Titus Andronicus for its violent themes and imagery seems weak at best. However, this morally upright populace was known for suppressing anything deemed “unsavory.” Therefore, it would make more sense that the play’s thematic relevance would have struck a much stronger chord than its violence. I argue that performances of Titus Andronicus were banned because the types of excessive violence resonated too strongly with Victorian audiences.

St Pancras Hotel and Station were subjects of considerable aesthetic debate during the Victorian Era.  This paper considers the debate over the buildings both individually and together.  Were either or both "Gothic" monuments?  How and why did they appeal to Victorians?

(2019). Tesis doctoral. Universidad de Sevilla.
Programa de doctorado en Estudios Filológicos de la Facultad de Filología. Línea de investigación “Mujer, escritura y comunicación”.
Directoras: Dra. Mercedes Arriaga Flórez, Dra. María Rosal Nadales, Dra. Eva María Moreno Lago.
Tesis completa: 536 páginas.
Tesis reducida: 207 páginas.
La artista británica Evelyn Pickering De Morgan (1855-1919) suele ser ubicada por la historia y la crítica del arte en los distintos movimientos estéticos que tuvieron lugar en la segunda mitad del siglo XIX y los primeros años del XX -Prerrafaelismo, Esteticismo, Simbolismo-, pero nunca desde un enfoque estrictamente feminista, cuando la propia De Morgan fue una feminista confesa y manifiesta y a sabiendas de que, a la hora de abordar sus imágenes, emergen numerosos interrogantes e incongruencias si se pretende abordar sus pinturas desde la misma mirada de los artistas masculinos de la época. Y aunque la influencia de ciertos componentes de estas corrientes son obvias en sus obras, la crítica en general y las escasas estudiosas de De Morgan en particular no se han detenido lo suficiente en examinar hasta qué grado y con qué finalidad la artista tomó tales elementos y qué hizo con ellos. Aquí radica la razón de ser de esta tesis doctoral. la obra estética de Evelyn De Morgan, que es a la vez un proyecto ético (feminista, sororario, humanitario), plantea tantas preguntas que es preciso un cambio radical de paradigma, una mirada completamente otra que sea también una nueva manera de dar respuesta no solo a la producción de una artista concreta, sino a cualquier creadora que sea recuperada y estudiada desde la esfera feminista. Mi trabajo de investigación, como se expone en estas páginas, ha procurado la doble tarea de recuperación e intervención. Recuperamos a Evelyn De Morgan e intervenimos críticamente en su obra a través de un nuevo instrumento teórico y epistemológico, metodológico y didáctico: la iconoginia. Frente al establecido sistema dual del arte victoriano y finisecular que justificó y argumentó la supuesta superioridad masculina a través del discurso de las esferas separadas y de la (re)producción de modelos y antimodelos de identidad femenina, desde el angel in the house a la femme fatale, pasando por la damsel in distress y la fallen woman, De Morgan se mostró como creadora de personalísimas y poderosas imágenes de mujeres y para mujeres, de una iconografía propia, iconoginias de denuncia y crítica contra el dominio masculino y contra la cultura patriarcal, pero también iconoginias de empoderamiento femenino y de sororidad. En esta tesis, analizamos comparativamente las iconografías patriarcales con las iconoginias de Evelyn De Morgan, con el fin de demostrar que fue una artista que se trazó en la esfera del arte un fundamental proyecto feminista, con una nítida perspectiva de género, con conciencia de pertenecer a una genealogía y con voluntad de continuarla, a la vez que proponemos el concepto de iconoginia como nuevo instrumento hermenéutico dentro de la crítica feminista.

Poison, Detection, and the Victorian Imagination-New England. In Poison, Detection and the Victorian Imagination, Ian Burney reconstructs the public, legal, and scientific cultures of poison, highlighting their distinctive. Poison, detection, and the Victorian imagination-Ian A. Burney 'Poison, Detection, and the Victorian Imagination' Asks.-PopMatters Poison, detection and the Victorian imagination Encounters MUP. Poison-it's hardly a new concept. Even in the Victorian era, it wasn't new. From Socrates to Shakespeare, by the time Queen Victoria took the throne, poison Poison, Detection and the Victorian Imagination-Goodreads Poison, detection and the Victorian imagination. Ian Burney. Published by Manchester University Press. Encounters MUP. Looks at the phenomenon of murder Review of Our Precarious Habitat-Yale School of Forestry. Aug 30, 2012. Poison-it's hardly a new concept. Even in the Victorian era, it wasn't new. From Socrates to Shakespeare, by the time Queen Victoria took the Poison, Detection and the Victorian Imagination review This fascinating book looks at the phenomenon of murder and poisoning in the nineteenth century. Focusing on the case of William Palmer, a medical doctor Poison, detection and the Victorian imagination Encounters MUP: 9780719073762: Medicine & Health Science Books @ Amazon.com. 'Poison, Detection, and the Victorian Imagination' Asks, Is Poison the. ABSTRACT This relatively brief book provides a carefully researched and well-written history of the development of the field of toxicology in Britain in the. Poison, Detection and the Victorian Imagination: Ian A. Burney Poison and the Victorian Imagination. an acquaintance, threw up deep-rooted anxieties about poison, detection, and professionalism in Victorian society.

“Mental Health Issues: Alienists, Asylums, and the Mad” traces the developing discipline of psychiatry in the long nineteenth century, or Age of the Asylum, and discusses a broader cultural history of madness with subsections dealing specifically with gender and race, crime, and institutionalization. This chapter begins with an examination of moral treatment and the new asylum movement in England and the US, including Phillipe Pinel, Samuel Tuke, and Dorothea Dix. The second section begins with the quintessential nineteenth-century madwoman, Jane Eyre’s Bertha Rochester, and then discusses African American mental health via W.E.B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk. The third section deals with changing concepts of criminal insanity in the English courts, with special emphasis on major legal cases: the trials of James Hadfield and Daniel M’Naghten. This section also includes a discussion of how medico-legal concepts such as monomania and partial insanity found their way into popular literature through Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories. The final section discusses efforts by ex-patient Elizabeth Packard and reformer Nelly Bly to challenge the asylum system’s excesses and failures, and ends with physician/writer Anton Chekhov’s criticism of the cultural and social power of medical diagnoses in his short story “Ward No. 6.”

Keywords: madness; mental illness; insanity; moral treatment; asylum; psychiatry

When the category of ‘Sensation Fiction’ was first applied as a genre label in the Literary Budget periodical of November 1861, it coined a term for a new species of narrative that was at once innovative, soon-to-be hugely influential, and at the same time the next logical step in a long literary tradition. Much like the opening scene of a bestselling novel, something had happened, was happening, and was going to happen. In publishing terms, the ‘hook’ had been well and truly set, addicting and titillating readers with a chain of withheld secrets and startling revelations. As the name suggests, these books were intended to excite the senses, piling shock after naked shock.

For readers, who were overwhelmingly in favour, and critics, who were not, the concept of the ‘novel of sensation’ coalesced around three English authors. The serialisation of Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White in Dickens’ All The Year Round from 1859 to 1860 (and its subsequent publication as a novel) had quite literally caused a sensation, with readers desperate for the next instalment besieging booksellers. All manner of unlicensed merchandise quickly followed, as well as fashion lines inspired by central characters and even themed tea-rooms. Ellen (‘Mrs. Henry’) Wood’s East Lynne (1861) – a tale of seduction, infidelity, dual identities and murder – was similarly popular and trailblazing, while Mary Elizabeth Braddon, already active in the genre with novels such as Three Times Dead (1860), was shortly to begin her breakthrough serial and masterpiece, Lady Audley’s Secret...

В статье отмечается актуальность медицинской фотографии
XIX века для современной визуальной культуры. Сегодня снимки
медиков, анатомов и пациентов второй половины XIX века
ложатся в основу реконструкции исторической действительности
в ряде широко востребованных фильмов и сериалов. Основное
внимание автор уделяет анализу функционирования фотографии
в области медицинского дискурса о теле в европейской культуре
того времени. Посредством фотоснимка происходила визуализация
болезни, опубликование образов больного тела как маргинального,
ставшего таковым в результате душевного или физиологического
недуга. Также медицинская фотография отражала характер
взаимоотношений медика и обывателя и в известной степени
мифологизировала процессы медицинского вмешательства. / The article notices the relevance of medical photographs
of the XIX century to contemporary visual culture. Pictures
of physicians, anatomists and patients of that time form
the basis for reconstruction of historical reality in a number
of successful films and TV shows of recent years. The
main attention is paid to the analysis of the functioning
of photography in the field of medical discourse about
the body in the European culture of that time. These
photographs turned the human body into a visualization
of the illness and created a negative image of the
marginal body, which became such as a result of mental
or physiological illness. They also reflected the nature of
the relationship between the medic and the layman.

This chapter considers the introduction of the garden cemetery in  1830s/1840s London as part of the wider 19C 'sanitary movement', focusing particularly on the work of George Carden, self-proclaimed 'founder of the system of ex-urban sepulture', and George Walker, the Drury Lane doctor who spent a decade agitating for burial reform in the crowded metropolis.

Controversy about museums’ possession and exhibition of human remains has usually affected those identified as ancestral remains by indigenous peoples. Egyptian mummies, with their long tradition of exhibition, seemed exempt from such considerations until the covering of unwrapped remains in the Egyptian gallery at The Manchester Museum in 2008. The museum’s representatives argued that this covering responded to visitors’ objections, but subsequent widespread protest against the measure suggested that it had been carried out with inadequate public consultation. With reference to the Manchester case, I will present two arguments to expand the scope of current debates about human remains display. The first argument favours the consideration of museum visitors from cultures other than those represented by exhibited remains as legitimate stakeholders in the remains’ management, including consideration of their personal reasons and historical precedents for favouring display. The second argument, which reveals the spurious bases of many objections to Egyptian mummies’ display and demonstrates their derivation from misconceptions promulgated by the media, shows that the grounds for public objections to human remains display should be more critically examined. If perpetuated rather than halted, the display of mummies could be used to actively combat disparaging media stereotypes. Human remains exhibition is not inherently offensive, but can be regarded as such by visitors whose cultural backgrounds fail to prepare them for encounters with the dead. Removing the dead from display avoids engagement with ethics debates rather than facing the challenge of finding ways to respect the dead by facilitating encounters with them.

To most, Charles Darwin's story is simply the birth of the Theory of Evolution. In reality, the story of how Darwin came to this theory, and the many people who would shape his destiny, is itself a story that needs to be told. Like many superhero movies of the 21st century, Darwin has a " back story " , the tale of how Darwin became Darwin. Darwin's story can appeal to many readers on different levels. On the purely academic level the work traces the influence of Alexander von Humboldt, Goethe and Wordsworth, in addition to Erasmus Darwin, on the development of Charles Darwin's theory of natural and sexual selection. On another level is the story of the development of Darwin's imagination and how this enabled his theories to evolve during the Victorian era when it was difficult to express them, yet at the same time in an era which encouraged them. This was a very contradictory time in history indeed. Charles Darwin's Debt to the Romantics is an attempt to mirror Darwin's own narrative, in which, through his imagination, he engages in conversation with the reader on a journey to discover the laws behind the process in which life evolves. These traces in time, moving both backwards into the past and forwards into the future, are like footprints in the sand, some of which get washed away never to be seen again. What drew me to this research was the Romantic notion of the imagination in which the self is so very much a part of Nature. We try very hard to observe nature objectively, but we can never get away from being subjectively part of it at the same time, just through the very act of observing it through our senses or through the act of remembering what we have seen, or think we have seen. And these footprints, or recreated memories of our past, are there for us to see today in fossils or archaeological remains — a mental map of our descent. What makes all of this so Romantic is the almost terrifying or sublime notion that mind has come from matter — that mind evolved and originated from that which was not mind. This is surely one of the greatest mysteries of our very existence — that science, poetry, literature, language, thought and culture have all ultimately evolved from inorganic nature (and this, of course, is only part of the story, as inorganic nature evolved before this).

The ongoing public fascination with Jack the Ripper is all about genre, setting, and the lack of a third act. But the recognisable shape of the character as perceived in modern film, fiction, popular history and tourism was initially created during the media frenzy of 1888. The press understood the Whitechapel killings were a genre piece from the start – The Times immediately making a connection with De Quincey’s essay on murder and Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ (1841), a short story in which two women are brutally murdered by a razor-wielding ape in Paris. Similarly, the Daily Telegraph, in an editorial following a report on the inquest of Elizabeth Stride, lamenting a lack of obvious motive upon which the government might act (their example being Burking in Edinburgh and London and the subsequent Anatomy Act), ended up hinting at werewolves:

we are thus left to weave the merest figments of fancy, and to form unpleasant visions of roving lunatics distraught with homicidal mania or bloodthirsty lust; of abandoned desperadoes wreaking their thirst for slaughter on forlorn and hopeless women, the wretchedest and most pitiable of their sex, to satisfy some inscrutably foul and crapulous vendetta; or, finally, we may dream of monsters, or ogres, and chimeras in the shape of wretched beings who catch from each awful story the contagion of senseless crime, and, out of a horrid imitativeness, repeat the abominable acts which they have seen described.

Walter Dew even recalled that, ‘People allowed their imagination to run riot. There was talk of black magic and vampires...’

ON THE NARRATOLOGY OF JACK THE RIPPER FROM 1888 TO DATE - From: The 19th Century Underworld (Pen & Sword, 2018)

While the expansion of the London Underground coincided with that of the Indian Railways, an Indian psychogeography was quietly emerging in the marginal geographies of the Victorian imperial capital where Indian visitors, travellers, students and migrants gravitated. In their memoirs and chronicles, late-nineteenth-century travellers, Pothum Janakummah Ragaviah, Trailokyanath Mukharji, Fath Nawaz Jang, Behramji Malabari, G.P. Pillai, T.B. Pandian, among others, actively engaged with London’s railway spaces, where they found an access to architectural wonders and a platform for intracultural, transcultural and canonical mimicries to renegotiate their colonial subjectivity. New ways of seeing and recreating London’s railway spaces helped overcome colonial traumas and railway-led economic exploitation in the colony. While neighbourhoods around Baker Street, Bloomsbury and Belgravia assumed an Asiatic character, Indian memoirists learned to inhabit London in a typographical imagination, that this paper defines as Typogravia. Architectural, economic, artistic and literary consciousness overlapped in this typographical space to foreground an independent Indian aesthetic of travelling and selfhood, shaped around London’s railway spaces, which subtly but steadily drove India’s journey towards provincial autonomy.

In this article I pursue two main lines of argument. First, I seek to delineate two distinctive modes of justifying imperialism found in nineteenth-century political thought (and beyond). The 'liberal civilizational' model, articulated most prominently by John Stuart Mill, justified empire primarily in terms of the benefits that it brought to subject populations. Its proponents sought to 'civilize'lthe 'barbarian'. An alternative `republican' model focused instead on the benefits - glory, honour and power above all - that accrued to the imperial state. Less concerned with spreading civilization, its proponents concentrated on fortifying the imperial polity. Second, I offer a 'republican' interpretation of the writings of the historian and public moralist J.A. Froude (1818-94), arguing that he both diagnosed the problems of modern Britain and prescribed imperial solutions to those problems, based on his reading of the fate of the Roman republic.

This paper presents the major findings of the first anthropological study of British and American mummymania, the public fascination with ancient Egyptian mummies, and its associated myth, the mummy’s curse: a belief that those who interfere with Egyptian tombs will be punished. The study incorporates museum based field research, textual sources, film analysis and material culture studies. Originally lay critiques of archaeological ethics, curses were appropriated by the mass media, which reduced public sympathy for them by associating them with evil living mummy characters. Fictional mummies’ abject traits later came to symbolise old age, decay, pollution, death and difference – negative concepts with which museum visitors now associate real mummies. Museum displays inadvertently remind visitors of stereotypes and museums may exploit stereotypes for profit or employ staff who elaborate curse myths. In my view, museums could do more to counter stereotyping by addressing visitors’ predisposition to regard mummies with abhorrence and derision.

This 2012/2013 study looks at corset dimensions and skeletal rib deformation in female remains from three time periods and two locations to understand certain aspects of longevity.  All artifacts and skeletal remains originate from the Early Modern, Victorian, and Edwardian periods.  The corsets are held in the Victoria and Albert Museum, and range in date from 1750-1908.  The data on the skeletal remains are the result of the author’s examination of collections held in the Musee de l’Homme in Paris, France, and the Centre for Human Bioarchaeology at the Museum of London Archaeology (MoL) in London, England.  An anachronistic view of corseted women posits that they lived short and painful lives.  I examine these skeletal remains with an eye toward establishing that rich or poor, young or old, corseted women lived comparatively long lives, and that the corset was not, in itself, a death sentence.  My findings indicate that although women experienced skeletal deformation because of co...

This MA Thesis analyses hundreds of Victorian newspapers, periodicals, pamphlets and other media to investigate how Victorian perceptions of Napoleon I affected perceptions of Napoleon III and vice versa. It is argued that Victorian Britons frequently viewed Napoleon III through the lens of Napoleon I with significant consequences for the legacies of both Emperors today. Through analysis of letters to the editor and newspapers which appealed to all classes of society, this thesis does not produce a history of ‘Great Men’ from the top-down but rather an analysis of how such men were perceived from the bottom up and how popular perceptions helped shape their legacies. Why is it that Napoleon I, once the most hated and feared enemy of Britain, has obtained an almost celebrity-like status in Britain today whilst Napoleon III, the friend of Queen Victoria and champion of the entente cordiale is largely forgotten by the general public? The answer, this thesis argues, can be found in Victorian perceptions of both Napoleons, and in the resulting perceptions of themselves.