---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------
Subject: VICTORIA Digest - 19 Aug 2004 to 20 Aug 2004 (#2004-73)
From: "Automatic digest processor" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Sat, August 21, 2004 6:03 am
To: "Recipients of VICTORIA digests" <[log in to unmask]>
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
There are 19 messages totalling 585 lines in this issue.
Topics of the day:
1. Eliza Cook (5)
2. The Victorians' conversational English (was: The Pearl_ and Victorian
sexuality)
3. Query: Regency & Victorian ideas of female equitation
4. Introduction + Film/Entertainment Query (2)
5. Class stereotypes (was Introduction + Film/Entertainment Query) (5)
6. Silas Marner; Re: Introduction + Film/Entertainment Query
7. Film/Entertainment Query--Class Division
8. Victorian festival
9. Can You Forgive Her?/Apologia Pro Vita Sua
10. Pork & Grindstone Blowout
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Fri, 20 Aug 2004 15:40:21 +1000
From: bradley nitins <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Eliza Cook
Dear All,
A request for help. Latlly I've been searching the NRA for any collections
to do with Eliza Cook but i think i'm missing something obvious as i have
found nothing of any substance as of yet. So far i've only found passing
mention to certain 'Autographs' of her's from the 'Manchester Literary
Club', but nothing else, i know there must be more, perhaps i could rely
on the aggregated wisdom of the list?
all the best
Bradley
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 20 Aug 2004 08:46:21 +0100
From: Judith Flanders <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: The Victorians' conversational English (was: The Pearl_ and
Victorian sexuality)
John McWhorter (a linguist at UC Berkeley) has just published (or is = about
to publish: I'm reading a proof) a new book called 'Doing Our Own Thing: =
The
Degradation of Language and Music, and Why We Should, Like, Care'. The
introduction looks at Edward Everett, the speaker at Gettysburg with
Lincoln, and discusses the difference between formal and informal =
language
in the 19th century -- from a linguistics points of view, certainly, not = a
historical one, but very interesting all the same.
Best
Judith Flanders
[log in to unmask]
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 20 Aug 2004 09:03:47 GMT
From: Lesley Hall <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Eliza Cook
.been searching the NRA for any collections
> to do with Eliza Cook but i think i'm missing
something obvious as i have
> found nothing of any substance as of yet.
Isn't there a Location Register to Lit Mss of the
C19th - published by the University of Reading? -
however, entries from this would, I think, be cited in
NRA.
However, unless you have knowledge (e.g. from
citations in other works about Cook to primary ms
sources) that there are papers I don't think there are
grounds for assuming that papers 'must' exist (an
archivist writes).
Lesley Hall
[log in to unmask]
www.lesleyahall.net
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 20 Aug 2004 08:08:12 -0400
From: Sally Mitchell <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Eliza Cook
I would second Lesley's comment about papers by remarking that single
women who left no heirs or disciples also left no one to gether material
and deposit it somewhere; and that (further), people in general save
correspondence they've received only if the writer is already well-known.
By the time any of Cook's friends died, her papers were probably of no
value to any repository. And (thirdly), many Victorians asked friends to
burn their letters rather than saving them.
That said, letters to local history collections and county record offices
in any of the places Cook lived, and especially the neighborhood where her
family originated, sometimes turn up information that is not in any
published list.
Sally Mitchell, English Department, Temple University: [log in to unmask]
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 20 Aug 2004 08:33:45 -0500
From: Ellen Moody <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Query: Regency & Victorian ideas of female equitation
Although it's this text is not specifically about female horseriders,
Edward Austen-Leigh's enjoyable _Recollections of the early days
of the Vine Hunt_ is a mine of information about what hunting was
like in the first two decades of the 19th century. He brings out
how different it was from what hunting became later: it was less
formalized and therefore less competitive, more local, and there
were fewer "mores" in place. The text has been reprinted recently in a
set of four volumes whose title includes Austen Papers. I
believe the publisher is located in Bath and the name is something like
Thoemmes Press.
I hope this helps,
Ellen Moody
[log in to unmask]
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 20 Aug 2004 09:52:07 -0400
From: Andrea Kaston Tange <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Introduction + Film/Entertainment Query
I second Kristan Tetens point that a festival format can make it
inadvertantly all too easy to reiterate stereotypes of Victoriana rather
than delve into the complex or uncomfortable aspects of the period.
However, I can also imagine that if you are interested in having something
like a film series, it might be difficult to find films that don't
generally pretty things up--or at least focus on upper/middle-class
life--when depicting the Victorian period. One thing I've had good luck
with in classes is to have a discussion with students about their
preconceptions/knowledge/assumptions about the period, particularly
focusing on the issue of domesticity, and then to screen some portion of
the BBC 4-part series "1900 House." (It's available on the PBS website to
buy for about $30.) In case you aren't familiar with it: as an
experiment, a 20th century family was chosen to live in a London townhouse
that had been renovated back to its 1900 condition; they were all excited
about wearing costume-y clothes and having a great adventure, but a month
or so into the experiment, there are great scenes of them keeping kids
home from school just to get the laundry done, taking cold baths since the
stove-water heater isn't working, etc. It's hardly a depiction of a whole
culture, but I find it goes a long way towards getting students to think
more deeply about the complexities of everyday life rather than simply
romanticizing the past. And they never cease to be amazed at how much
*work* was involved just in feeding, clothing, and cleaning a family.
The mother at one point has a mini-breakdown over all the work she has to
do, hires a servant to help her, and then can't get her 20th-century
sensibility around the notion of having someone else cleaning her house,
so fires her again. At least it's a good jumping-off point to talk about
some issues of class relations, the ideal of the Angel in the House, and
women's cultural positions (depending on how much these screenings are
going to be accompanied by conversations). The series is 4 hours total,
so you might consider it for your TV section. Good luck!
Andrea Kaston Tange
Eastern Michigan University
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 20 Aug 2004 10:46:26 -0400
From: Michael Wolff <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Class stereotypes (was Introduction + Film/Entertainment Query)
On this matter of appropriate depictions of Victorian life, I've been
frequently concerned about our neglect not so much of proletarian or
"lower class" Victorians but rather of what the Salvation Army Booths
called the "submerged tenth" (and Marx the lumpen proletariat). We
usually depend on Mayhew-like portrayals of slums and both urban and rural
backwaters that were sometimes unvisited or, from embarrassment, un- or
under-described. There are, to be sure, some (easily available?) verbal
versions of "My Boyhood in the [poorest part of town]". But are there any
visual
representations--let alone any on film? I have a wonderful pamphlet from
about 1976 by Jack Simmons, "Life in Victorian Leicester", with some
marvelous street photographs of working-class groups but the people all
seem decently dressed and many of them carry evidence of their work.
Where are the people from Leicester's most disease and crime infested
districts or from the Seven Dials in London or the Gorbals in Glasgow (if
those are right spots to ask about)? What were their literacy rates? How
did they "articulate" themselves?
Sorry about the length of this--a gusher from a long suppressed curiosity!
Michael Wolff
[log in to unmask]
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 20 Aug 2004 11:13:34 -0400
From: Michael Wolff <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Silas Marner; Re: Introduction + Film/Entertainment Query
I was waiting for someone else with perhaps a more recent experience than
mine, but I remember Ben Kingsley's wonderful performance in what was a
version that (naturally enough perhaps for film) neglected much that
wasn't in the main thread of Silas's life--the Casses, the Lammeters. My
memory suggests that this film ought always to be accompanied by the text.
Michael Wolff
[log in to unmask]
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 20 Aug 2004 13:02:17 -0400
From: "Elisa E. Beshero-Bondar" <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Film/Entertainment Query--Class Division
Thanks, everyone, for the excellent suggestions--Keep them coming! My
film screening list is much more substantial now.
In particular I want to respond to Kris Tetens, who makes an excellent
point that the events I listed here would likely perpetuate a
stereotypical, rose-colored view of the Victorians. It occurs to me that
it would be interesting to have a group of students stage a ball or some
grand occasion, and in the building opposite or lurking outside have
another group mill about as factory workers, as well as beggars and
prostitutes.
I've been to one meeting for this planning group, and it's interesting
that the first entertainment ideas that we collectively came up with were
all about fancy dress and propriety--And most of us also felt that the
students would find these events incredibly boring!
Actually, I think most of our students would enjoy documenting the era
more realistically-- If counter-culture is still alive and well, I would
think some of them would enjoy being a slouching ne'er-do-well *in the
face* of the tightly buttoned up. And certainly, focusing on class
separation and poverty issues would make the events more attractive and
interesting, and worthwhile as an educational exercise. Thank you very
much for your ideas, Kris!
Elisa Beshero-Bondar
University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg
[log in to unmask]
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 20 Aug 2004 11:19:35 -0500
From: Mary Lenard <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Victorian festival
Elisa,
For TV series, I want to second (or third!) the recommendation of the BBC
version of Gaskell's _Wives and Daughters_. Andrew Davies, the adapter of
this miniseries also wrote the screenplays for the TV versions of _Vanity
Fair_, _Middlemarch_ mentioned by other people, as well as these
non-Victorian productions: _Pride and Prejudice_ (starring Colin Firth and
Jennifer Ehle), a version of _Emma_ starring Kate Beckinsale, and the
version of _Moll Flanders_ that stars ER's Alex Kingston as Moll. If I'm
remembering correctly, you already have his most recent adaptation, _The
Way We Live Now_, on your list. In my opinion, Davies is a superb screen
adapter, who seems to have the ability to plug into the most important
ideas in each of these huge novels, and make his adaptation adhere to
these ideas/themes. It's so wonderful to see an adaptation done by
somebody who understands and appreciates the works he's adapting. I am a
HUGE fan of his work!
As far as activities go, if you're really interested in doing dancing, you
might want to contact the Dickens Project at UC Santa Cruz. I believe
that they put on Victorian dancing lessons as part of their annual Dickens
Universe, and might have some tips on how to do it.
Cheers
--
Mary Lenard
English Department
University of Wisconsin-Parkside
900 Wood Road
Kenosha, WI 53141-2000
(262) 595-2644
FAX (262) 595-2271
"People mutht be amuthed." Charles Dickens, Hard Times
Quoting Automatic digest processor <[log in to unmask]>:
> There are 17 messages totalling 597 lines in this issue.
>
> Topics of the day:
>
> 1. Introduction + Film/Entertainment Query (13)
> 2. The Victorians' conversational English (was: The Pearl_ and Victorian
> sex...
> 3. _The Pearl_ and Victorian sexuality
> 4. Query: Regency & Victorian ideas of female equitation
> 5. The Victorians' conversational English (was: The Pearl_ and Victorian
> sexual
>
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 20 Aug 2004 18:20:32 +0100
From: Jill Grey <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Class stereotypes (was Introduction + Film/Entertainment Query)
Michael Wolff writes -
....I have a wonderful pamphlet from about 1976 by Jack
Simmons, "Life in Victorian Leicester", with some
marvelous street photographs of working-class groups but
the people all seem decently dressed and many of them
carry evidence of their work. Where are the people from Leicester's most
disease and crime infested districts.....?
---------------------
As one of those addicted genealogists with ancestors in Leicester Borough
(though not one of the irritating breed that shouts 'Howzat! Got her!' on
coming across a great aunt on a library microfilm) I've found some
illuminating accounts of working class Leicester people in The Life of
Thomas Cooper (Chartist) and in Tom Barclay's Memoirs and Medleys : the
Autobiography of a Bottle Washer (Leicester 1934). Barclay's parents were
victims of the Irish potato famine of 1848 who settled in the part of
central Leicester that filled up with Irish immigrants during the 1850s
and 1860s whose lives he describes in some detail.
There are examples of the kind of photograph of slum housing and its
inhabitants that you seem to be looking out for in Working-Class Life in
Victorian Leicester, ed: Barry Haynes, (Leics. Libraries and Information
Service, 1991) which is based on the annual reports of the Leicester
Domestic Mission and written by Joseph Dare between 1846 and 1877 as well
as detailed accounts of life in the slums.
I've been fortunate in finding a photograph (dated 1890) of two of my
Irish great grandparents and their children who fetched up in Leicester
during the early 1850s and who had evidently dressed in their Sunday best
for the occasion. Great Grandmother wears what appears to be a crisp,
ironed pinny and sits, towering over her husband, with a trug of peas on
her lap. They were very poor. He worked in a shoe factory. You can see the
marks of poverty on his face and in the children's expressions (no
sentimentality whatsoever intended) and the attention of a photographer
can't have been cheap, but the family lived next to allotments by the
railway line where her own trophy-winning peas might have earned a free
photograph.
I'm sure there are unpublished photographs of the kind you mention in
local record offices. I've seen several published ones in the Batsford
series of Victorian & Edwardian photographs for individual counties which
are now out of print but fascinating to browse through.
Jill
[log in to unmask]
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 20 Aug 2004 19:23:14 +0100
From: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Class stereotypes (was Introduction + Film/Entertainment Query)
Michael Wolff asked if there were any visual representations of the
"submerged tenth". What about Gustave Doré's illustrations to "London: a
pilgrimage" (1872)? Can we assume that they were more-or-less drawn 'from
life'? Matthew Sweet used the opium den picture to illustrate the chapter
"Last Exit to Shadwell" in his jolly "Inventing the Victorians", but it's
a while since I read it and I can't remember whether he was lumping Doré
in with the writers whose reliability he was challenging or accepting it
as valid documentation.
Simon
[log in to unmask]
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 20 Aug 2004 14:30:08 -0500
From: "M. Jeanne Peterson" <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Eliza Cook
A useful alternative (or supplementary) avenue to information about Eliza
Cook might be her will. If she had a will, it might shed light on
household, attitudes, connections, etc. Many women by the 1880s were
leaving wills, which are available at Somerset House. Absent a will,
Letters of Administration would at least tell you the size of her estate.
Hope this helps in your research.
Jeanne Peterson
Indiana University, Bloomington
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 20 Aug 2004 15:27:02 -0400
From: Heather Morton <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Can You Forgive Her?/Apologia Pro Vita Sua
Hi,
I'm wondering if any dedicated Trollope scholar happens to know what month
in 1864 Trollope began Can You Forgive Her? I am wondering about a
possible connection with Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua which was
published from April to June (although there were earlier texts associated
with the controversy). I know that Trollope's novel was based on an
earlier play, The Noble Jilt, so I am particularly curious about when he
decided on a title.
Thanks,
Heather Morton
University of Virginia
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 20 Aug 2004 15:22:12 -0500
From: tom prasch <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Class stereotypes (was Introduction + Film/Entertainment Query)
On Fri, 20 Aug 2004, Michael Wolff wrote:
> On this matter of appropriate depictions of Victorian life, I've been
frequently concerned about our neglect not so much of proletarian or
"lower class" Victorians but rather of what the Salvation Army Booths
called the "submerged tenth" (and Marx the lumpen proletariat). We
usually depend on Mayhew-like portrayals of slums and both urban and
rural backwaters that were sometimes unvisited or, from embarrassment,
un- or under-described. There are, to be sure, some (easily available?)
verbal versions of "My Boyhood in the [poorest part of town]". But are
there any visual representations--let alone any on film?
There are a wide range of such representations, both graphic and, by
midcentury, photographic. Keep in mind that Mayhew himself used extensive
illustration, some of it "based on" daguerreotypes by Beard, some more
conventional graphic work; that John Thomson, camera in hand, explicitly
followed in Mayhew's footsteps a quarter century later. Broadly,
photographs of this sort come in four broad categories: illustrations to
tracts of one sort or another arguing for social reforms (ranging from Dr.
Barnardo's before-and-after photographs, or the simpler sketches Barnardo
tracts tended to use, to the photos accompanying Jack London's plunge
"into the abyss" at century's end, or Jacob Riis on this side of the
pond); photographs accompanying arguments for urban renewal which, in
documenting dire living conditions, sometimes, albeit largely
incidentally, document the living as well (Annan's images of the closes of
Glasgow started out this way; D. B. Foster's work in Leeds fits this type;
similar stuff in Birmingham, London, probably lots of other places);
photographs (or graphic images) that looked to urban street culture for
"picturesque" subjects, ala the still-thriving "Cries of London" visual
genre (which, for example, informed many of Beard's and Thomson's choices
of subject); and then the (rather harder to track down or to develop full
accounts of) work of itinerant photographers (Mayhew already documents one
such) working among urban communities, probably not for financial reasons
plying the lowest ends of the working class, but certainly coming
increasingly close by century's end.
With that, however, a warning: such images cannot be taken as simple
documents of conditions, but must be evaluated in terms of what we know of
their production, and of the aims and attitudes of their producers. This
is perhaps self-evident in graphic representations, artist's hand
intervening and all that, but it is worth emphasizing that, despite all
the "pencil of nature"/"transcript of the real" discourse of Victorian
times, and the contemporary echoes of same, photographic representations
did have their own conventions, imbedded their own biases, and all the
rest. Photographers select subjects, usually posed them, worked according
to conventions of pictorial compostion drawn from visual predecessors; in
the darkroom, they used a range of techniques, including artifice such as
composition printing and doctoring negatives, to reinforce the impressions
they aimed to achieve. They presented their images in contexts (textual
accompaniment, etc.) that further predetermined the ways in which they
would be seen. In sum, it makes a difference to know as much as possible
the circumstances of production in order to correctly evaluate an image.
For more, see my dissertation...
Tom Prasch
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 20 Aug 2004 14:00:24 -0500
From: Les Bailey <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Class stereotypes (was Introduction + Film/Entertainment Query)
It may not provide an extended display of C19 misery, but the BBC's
production of Bleak House some years ago gives one a good glimpse of
London's pollution and the poor.
Les Bailey
English Department
Saint Martin's College
Olympia, WA 98503
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 20 Aug 2004 23:18:02 +0100
From: Malcolm Shifrin <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Eliza Cook
Alas, wills, birth certificates, etc, are no longer to be found at the
beautiful Somerset House. The new locations can be found at:
http://www.somerset-house.org.uk/links/
though where the Public Record Office (PRO) is mentioned, this is now the
National Archives at:
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/familyhistory/wills/default.htm
Hope this saves a bit of time.
Malcolm
--
Malcolm Shifrin
Victorian Turkish baths
A not-for-profit educational project in the UK
[log in to unmask]
Visit our website
http://www.victorianturkishbath.org
----- Original Message -----
From: "M. Jeanne Peterson" <[log in to unmask]>
Many women by the 1880s were
> leaving wills, which are available at Somerset House. Absent a will,
Letters of Administration would at least tell you the size of her
estate.
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 20 Aug 2004 20:58:51 -0700
From: Sheldon Goldfarb <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Introduction + Film/Entertainment Query
Two list members have kindly informed me, off list, that the recent film I
was thinking of about a Victorian gentleman transported to modern-day
America was 2001's Kate & Leopold, starring Meg Ryan.
I wonder if there are other examples of films or stories in which
Victorians are transported into the present day.
Sheldon Goldfarb
[log in to unmask]
------------------------------
Date: Sat, 21 Aug 2004 10:05:08 +0930
From: jeff Nicholas <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Pork & Grindstone Blowout
Could this be run again please
Dear List members,
I have come across a reference to what was known as a PORK &
GRINDSTONE BLOWOUT.
We believe it to be some kind of celebratory dinner which occurred in
1838. What is not know is just what the guests were likely to be eating.
Any references to such events or likely menu items would be most
appreciated.
Regards to all
Dr Jeff Nicholas
14 Newcombe Ave
West Lakes Shore
South Aust 5020
I use alltheweb for my search engine
--
------------------------------
End of VICTORIA Digest - 19 Aug 2004 to 20 Aug 2004 (#2004-73)
**************************************************************
|
