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Date: 19 November 2002 00:00 -0500
From: Automatic digest processor <[log in to unmask]>
To: Recipients of VICTORIA digests <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: VICTORIA Digest - 17 Nov 2002 to 18 Nov 2002 (#2002-317)
There are 9 messages totalling 340 lines in this issue.
Topics of the day:
1. mortality rates
2. Light
3. Conference on fathers
4. 'goblin market'
5. Women on the Streets in the early 1850s
6. Golden jubilees and anniversaries
7. Questions for students, readers and teachers of popular culture (2)
8. "pasha'ed"
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Date: Mon, 18 Nov 2002 09:18:33 +0100
From: neil davie <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: mortality rates
Hello Nancy,
According to historical demographers, the most useful figures are those =
for "cohorts", which chart the survival chances for individuals born in =
different years. For those born in England and Wales in 1831, for =
example, the median age of death was 44 for men and 46 for women. For =
individuals born in 1861, it was 49 for men and 56 for women. It is =
important to take into account both Paul Lewis's point about the problem =
of averages (of those males born in 1831, 28% were dead by the age of =
5), and the importance of regional and occupational variation. It has =
been calculated that "there was ... as great a range of mortality =
experience in England and Wales in the 1860s as there was between that =
of England and Wales as a whole in the 1840s and the 1960s, namely some =
30 years". (Michael Anderson, "The social implications of demographic =
change", in F.M.L. Thompson, ed., *The Cambridge Social History of =
Britain 1750-1950*, vol.3: *People and their Environment* (CUP, 1990), =
pp.20-27).
Best wishes,
Neil=20
Neil Davie, Universit=E9 Paris 7, Paris, France.
([log in to unmask])
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Date: Mon, 18 Nov 2002 05:13:02 EST
From: Judith Flanders <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Light
A late post: Andreas Bluhm and Louise Lippincott's catalogue for the van
Gogh museum's excellent show: 'Light! The Industrial Age 1750-1900, Art &
Science, Technology & Society' (Thames and Hudson 2000) has an invaluable
bibliography, as well as focusing on some very interesting sidelights (no
pun intended).
In addition, many advice books are interesting on light. I'm not near my
notes, but I think Lucy Orrinsmith, in The Drawing Room writes of needing to
'domesticate' (or perhaps 'tame') light once gas arrives.
Best
Judith Flanders
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Date: Mon, 18 Nov 2002 10:15:39 -0000
From: jlb2 <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Conference on fathers
Father Figures: Paternity in the Modern Age
First Call for Papers/Workshops
Helen Rogers and Trev Broughton are planning conference on gender and
fatherhood to be held at Liverpool John Moores University between 30th June
and 2nd July 2003. We would like to hear from scholars working in the field.
Topics for exploration might include
Fatherhood in colonial contexts
Advice for fathers/ ideologies of Fatherhood
Fatherhood and religion
Radical Fathers and fatherhood
Representations of fatherhood (in any genre or medium)
Fatherhood as subjectivity
Fatherhood as practice
Fatherhood and the law (paternity, custody etc.)
Fatherhood and change
Fatherhood and work
Lone, divorced, widowed fathers. Step-fathers and step-fatherhood
Disciplines of fatherhood
Writers/artists as fathers
Fatherhood in Auto/biography and related genres.
grandfathers
family relations
founding fathers
the politicisation of fatherhood
paternalism
theorising fatherhood
fathers and patriarchy
Offers of papers should be sent to Helen Rogers on [log in to unmask] or
Trev Broughton on [log in to unmask] by January 31 2003.
We would also be grateful if you could pass on this message to colleagues
working in the area.
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 18 Nov 2002 10:29:19 -0500
From: herbert tucker <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: 'goblin market'
Here are three good essays (others exist too) on mercantile/monetary
aspects of Rossetti's poem:
Terrence Holt, Men Sell Not Such in Any Town: Exchange in
*Goblin
Market*, *Victorian Poetry* 28 (1990): 51-67
Elizabeth K. Helsinger, Consumer Power and the Utopia of Desire:
Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market, *ELH* 8 (1991): 903-33
Richard Menke, The Political Economy of Fruit: *Goblin Market*,
in
*The Culture of Christina Rossetti* ed. Mary Arseneau et al (1999),
105-36.
> Well, we recently read Christina Rossetti's 'Goblin
> Market' in class. Though I haven't read many critical
> essays on the poem as yet, one question that came to
> my mind while reading it was- Can Rossetti's poem be
> read as a critique of the "money market" i.e. the
> capitalist, economy driven society of the Victorian
> age?
>
> Also, can anyone please suggest some other
> interpretations of the poem, as well as some websites
> where I can find good reference material?
Herbert F. Tucker
Professor of English
(University of Virginia)
NYU in London
6 Bedford Square
London WC1B 3RA
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 18 Nov 2002 17:59:33 +0000
From: =?iso-8859-1?q?Sunie=20Fletcher?= <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Women on the Streets in the early 1850s
For Thomas Tobin & anyone else who's interested...
I looked up the cartoon in question and it WASN'T in
fact from Punch. It's reproduced in Nead, Lynda,
Victorian Babylon (Yale UP, 2000), p63, and the
accompanying details read:
[CJ Culliford] Scene in Regent Street. Philanthropic
Divine: @May I beg you to accept this good little
book. Take it home and read it attentively. I am sure
it will benefit you.' Lady: 'Bless me, Sir, you're
mistaken. I am not a social evil, I am only waiting
for a bus.' Coloured lithograph, c1865. Private
Collection.
--- [log in to unmask] wrote: > Hello, VICTORIAnists.
>
> > There is a wonderful Punch cartoon in which an
> earnest
> > gent is pressing an improving tract upon an
> > unaccompanied woman in the street, who protests 'I
> > assure you sir, I am not a Social Evil, I am
> merely
> > waiting for the omnibus', or words to that effect!
> > I've seen it reproduced more than once - most
> > recently, I think, in Lynda Nead's excellent
> > 'Victorian Babylon', which also (in reply to
> another
> > recent enquiry) has a good section on light.
>
> Might anyone know the exact citation for this
> _Punch_ cartoon? It sounds
> perfectly a propos for a project I'm working on just
> now.
>
> Tom
>
> s/ Thomas J. Tobin, Ph.D., M.S.L.S.
>
> 406 East Tenth Avenue
> Munhall, PA 15120
> dr.tobin @ att.net
> www.engl.duq.edu/servus/PR_Critic/
> www.mathcs.duq.edu/~tobin/cv/
__________________________________________________
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from News and Sport to Email and Music Charts
http://uk.my.yahoo.com
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 19 Nov 2002 09:54:12 +1030
From: Kerryn Goldsworthy <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Golden jubilees and anniversaries
An appeal to the collective omniscience of the list, and an apology in
advance to everyone, especially Patrick, if this turns out not to be a
particularly Victorian question: I am trying, so far with no success, to
track down the origins of the association of silver with 25th, gold with
50th and diamonds with 60th anniversaries. I can find plenty of material on
anniversaries as such and what gifts are appropriate to which year; what I
want to know is _why_, and where these associations originated. I'm
particularly interested in the association of a 50th year with gold.
All help gratefully appreciated,
Kerryn
------------------
Kerryn Goldsworthy
93 Spring Street
Queenstown, SA 5014
AUSTRALIA
Phone: +61 (0)8 8341 0224
Mobile: +61 (0)402 052198
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 19 Nov 2002 08:41:03 +1100
From: Ellen Jordan <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Questions for students, readers and teachers of popular culture
Another two cents worth from some-one who is not a literary critic at all.
It seems to me that what is happening to Victorian fiction now is similar
to what happened to Elizabethan and Jacobean drama after WW2. Before that
time there were 3 dramatists: Shakespeare, Marlowe and Jonson. It was
well-known that there had been lots of others at the time but only real
specialists ever read them. Then gradually some of these were seen as being
of more than anitquarian interest, and by the time I was a student in the
late 1950s the canon had widened and we read some Webster and Beaumont and
Fletcher.
At that time, though, the only novelists from the 1840-1880 period that
figured in courses were Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontes and George Eliot,
and when in the 1960s I began reading the minor women noelists, this was
seen by the Eng. Lit. people I knew as bizarre anitquarianism, though 30
years later when I joined Victoria I discovered that quite a number of
these now had their passionate defenders and were even making their way
onto reading lists.
Another comment. It has been mentioned that Dracula has survived as the
only book by its author continuously in print. It would be interesting to
make a list of the non-canonical books that have survived in this way.
Trollope of course remained teetering on the edge of being canonical, and
Lorna Doone was a school set book for generations, but what of John
Halifax, Gentleman, The Cloister and the Hearth, The Woman in White, and so
on, which seem to have been consistently in print without any particular
academic endorsement?
Ellen Jordan
University of Newcastle
Australia
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------------------------------
Date: Mon, 18 Nov 2002 16:50:03 -0800
From: "Margot K. Louis" <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Questions for students, readers and teachers of popular culture
While I never have room for a _lot_ of popular poetry in my Victorian
Poetry course, I always point out that in the early and high Victorian eras
major poets also wrote "popular" poems and that the kind of distinction
that we automatically draw only begins to develop in the late Victorian era
(and becomes crucial in the Modernist era and again in the time of New
Criticism; it helps to keep up the morale of serious writers in the face of
flagging sales and growing incomprehension, perhaps, and in the 1940s-50s
there's also an element of resistance to the socially aware and
deliberately populist literature that came out of the Depression).
Tennyson and Barrett Browning, for instance, both were very ready to write
what we now think of as "popular poetry" and also (the distinction isn't
always obvious, since these are interlinking groups) as "propaganda," and
one doesn't have to go to the dregs (say, "Riflemen Form" or "What does
little birdie say") to find it. I like to point out that "Come into the
garden, Maud," for instance, became a very popular drawing-room ballad,
though it's also the climactic moment in one of Tennyson's most serious and
complex works.
So (in answer to question 1) it doesn't seem appropriate to talk of
early and high Victorian popular literature, at any rate, as "alternative."
In the late Victorian period male writers in "high" culture were perhaps
less likely to aim at producing anything popular, and Kipling's popularity
was felt to be part of what made _him_ "vulgar"--yet even Swinburne hoped
(vainly) that his "The Armada" might be attractive to schoolboys, in the
way that Tennyson's "The Revenge" certainly was.
In answer to question 2, I'd say popular poetry (and presumably
popular fiction, although I agree with Michel Faber that we need to
consider how these terms are created and why we accept them) does give one
a sense of how large numbers of Victorians thought--of what was widely
acceptable--and this may help us to see where the "major" authors in their
"major" works may stand in relation to "mainstream" culture in their time,
sometimes opposing it, sometimes endorsing it or unconsciously accepting
it. (We need to remember, again, that "major" and "mainstream," like
"popular," are of course tendentious and dangerous terms). It seems to me
that serious students of the period need to know something about all kinds
of literature within the period, in order to develop an informed opinion
about any given text.
Margot K. Louis
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------------------------------
Date: Mon, 18 Nov 2002 21:54:09 -0500
From: "Eileen M. Curran" <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: "pasha'ed"
A culinary and linguistic question: What did "pasha-ed" mean? Curried?
If so, what distinguished pasha-ed from run-of-the-mill curried? NED gives
no use of pasha as a verb (and therefore potential participle); it doesn't
appear in Mrs. Beeton or in an abridged Eliza Acton.
Source: In his Reminiscences (ed. Pollock) for 1820, the actor William
Charles Macready describes gathering after a performance with friends for
"one of our customary and very agreeable symposia--at which pasha-ed
lobsters, champagne- punch, and lively talk prolonged the pleasure of the
evening's triumph, or cheered the gloom of defeat."
Trivia, but it struck me as a curious and interesting coinage. (Try saying
"pasha-ed lobster" a few times, particularly with champagne-punch; anyone
without Macready's command of enunciation would get "posh lobster," or
giggles.)
Eileen
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End of VICTORIA Digest - 17 Nov 2002 to 18 Nov 2002 (#2002-317)
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