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Date: Tue, 28 Jan 2003 00:00:19 -0500
From: Automatic digest processor <[log in to unmask]>
Reply-To: VICTORIA 19th-Century British Culture & Society
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Subject: VICTORIA Digest - 26 Jan 2003 to 27 Jan 2003 (#2003-26)
To: Recipients of VICTORIA digests <[log in to unmask]>
There are 24 messages totalling 655 lines in this issue.
Topics of the day:
1. automata (6)
2. "London's Past Online" bibliography
3. Balmanns
4. Mrs C E Humphry ("Madge" of 'Truth')
5. "bantam thunderer"
6. Victorian Literature and Culture Seminar schedule
7. CFP: North American Victorian Studies Association Inaugural Conference
(4/14/03; 10/17/03-10/19/03)
8. help with George Eliot quote
9. the celebrated traveler Raymond
10. <No subject given> (2)
11. re automata and Ruskin (2)
12. Darwin's friction gloves
13. Retraction and apology
14. delirium tremens
15. DT's in Victorian fiction (2)
16. DT's in Dickens
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Date: Sun, 26 Jan 2003 21:53:57 -0800
From: Sheldon Goldfarb <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: automata
Perhaps picking up on Mill's warning against turning human beings into
machines, Oscar Wilde, in "The Soul of Man under Socialism," calls for
machines to take over the unpleasant work of society:
After deploring the fact that people have to sweep slushy street crossings,
and commenting that "Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt,"
Wilde says that "All work of that kind should be done by a machine."
He adds: "All unintellectual labour, all monotonous, dull labour, all labour
that deals with dreadful things, and involves unpleasant conditions, must be
done by machinery. Machinery must work for us in coal mines, and do all
sanitary services, and be the stoker of steamers, and clean the streets, and
run messages on wet days, and do anything that is tedious or distressing.
... Under proper conditions machinery will serve man. There is no doubt at
all that this is the future of machinery; and just as trees grow while the
country gentleman is asleep, so while Humanity will be amusing itself, or
enjoying cultivated leisure--which, and not labour, is the aim of man--or
making beautiful things, or reading beautiful things, or simply
contemplating the world with admiration and delight, machinery will be doing
all the necessary and unpleasant work."
Sheldon Goldfarb
[log in to unmask]
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 26 Jan 2003 23:32:11 -0600
From: Patrick Leary <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: "London's Past Online" bibliography
Since last spring, Heather Creaton of the Centre for Metropolitan
History at the Institute of Historical Research has been directing a
project called "London's Past Online," which seeks to create a free online
database of published material on the Greater London area from Anglo-Saxon
times to the present. The first fruits of that project have just been made
public as part of the Royal Historical Society Bibliographies, which have
themselves recently mutated into a free (for the time being, at least)
online version. Researchers working on any aspect of London's
nineteenth-century history will probably want to do some searching and
browsing in this new bibliographical resource, which can be found at
http://www.rhs.ac.uk/bibl/london.asp
The "search form" makes it easy to restrict your search by specifying the
date range of the period covered, as well as by subject, words in title,
etc. The RHS bibliographies as a whole can likewise be searched at
http://www.rhs.ac.uk/bibl/ These bibliographies, like the London ones,
are particularly rich in local, specialist, and privately printed
publications that some others miss, and are helpfully subject-coded.
-- Patrick
_____________
Patrick Leary
[log in to unmask]
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 27 Jan 2003 10:49:40 -0000
From: Paul Lewis <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Balmanns
Can anyone help me with information about Robert Balmanns of the Freemason's
Tavern, Queen Street near Lincoln's Inn in London in 1823? I have reached a
blank.
Paul
Paul Lewis
web www.paullewis.co.uk
tel 07836 217311
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 27 Jan 2003 14:32:39 +0000
From: Mary Ann Tobin <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Mrs C E Humphry ("Madge" of 'Truth')
In reply to Don Blandford's plea for resources, I can offer a name of an
individual whose dissertation is a edition of one of Mrs. Humphrey's novels.
Tom Walsh is a Ph.D. candidate at Duquesne Unversity in Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania. Unfortunately I have no email, home address or phone
information, but he can be contacted by writing to him at DU.
Tom Walsh
Department of English
Duquesne University
600 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15282 USA
I will forward a copy of the plea to our department secretary, who can
personally pass it along to Tom.
I hope this helps,
M A Tobin
--
s/Mary Ann Tobin
Duquesne University
Department of English
600 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15282
[log in to unmask]
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 27 Jan 2003 08:38:57 -0500
From: Lowell Frye <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: "bantam thunderer"
"The Thunderer" was the name given to John Sterling's father, Edward
Sterling, editor of the
Times. Any chance that "bantam Thunderer" was an ironical diminutive?
Lowell T. Frye
Professor of Rhetoric & Humanities
Hampden-Sydney College
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 27 Jan 2003 10:38:07 -0500
From: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Victorian Literature and Culture Seminar schedule
Announcing the spring 2003 schedule of the Victorian Literature and Culture
seminar at the Humanities Center, Harvard University:
Tuesday, February 11th, 6 p.m.: Helen Small (Oxford University), "The Debt to
Society: Dickens, Fielding, and the Genealogy of Independence"
Tuesday, March 11th, 6 p.m.: John Plotz (Brandeis University), "What's Wessex?
Hardy's Boundary Problems"
Wednesday, April 9th, 6:30 p.m.: Kevin McLaughlin (Brown University), topic TBA
Thursday, April 24th: Andrew Miller (Indiana University), time and topic TBA
Seminar meetings are held in the Humanities Center, at the Barker Center, 12
Quincy Street, Harvard University. All interested faculty, students, and
members of the public are welcome to attend.
Further information about the April seminars will be circulated when it becomes
available. Direct questions to seminar co-chairs John Picker
([log in to unmask]) or James Buzard ([log in to unmask]).
__________________________________________________________
John Picker
Department of English and American Language and Literature
Harvard University
161 Barker Center
12 Quincy Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
[log in to unmask]
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 27 Jan 2003 09:42:39 -0500
From: Anna Jones <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: automata
Similar to the quote from J.S. Mill is this passage from Gaskell's North and
South about the failure of the mill workers' strike: "The workmen's
calculations were based (like too many of the masters') on false premises.
They reckoned on their fellow-men as if they possessed the calculable powers
of machines, no more, no less; no allowance for human passions getting the
better of reason, etc...." (Book II, Ch. 3).
Seems like all the references we're coming up with relate to the anxiety
about/distaste for mechanized labor (sort of Metropolis prefigured). There
must be some that have a different take--if not more positive, at least more
uncanny/creepy, but I'm drawing a blank.
AMJ
Anna M. Jones
Assistant Professor
Department of English
University of Central Florida
Orlando, FL 32816
[log in to unmask]
407-823-3406
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 27 Jan 2003 15:34:52 +0000
From: James Evans <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: automata
Carlyle's 'Signs of the Times' is a long diatribe about the 'Mechanical Age'
and its pernicious automatisation of all aspects of human life. Good gloss
on this article in Leo Marx's 'The Machine and the Garden.' Many scientific
developments towards a mechanistic understanding of the human nervous system
in the 1840s and 1850s; Carpenter's paper 'On the Mutual Relations of the
Vital and Physical Forces' (published some time in 1840s) is quite
interesting in this connection.
James Evans
_________________________________________________________________
Surf together with new Shared Browsing
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------------------------------
Date: Mon, 27 Jan 2003 10:42:53 -0500
From: North American Victorian Studies Association <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: CFP: North American Victorian Studies Association Inaugural Conference
(4/14/03; 10/17/03-10/19/03)
INDIANA UNIVERSITY VICTORIAN STUDIES PROGRAM
And
VICTORIAN STUDIES
Present
the Inaugural Conference of
THE NORTH AMERICAN VICTORIAN STUDIES ASSOCIATION
October 17-19, 2003
Indiana University, Bloomington, IN
PLENARY SPEAKERS:
NANCY ARMSTRONG (BROWN UNIVERSITY)
GARRETT STEWART (UNIVERSITY of IOWA)
JUDITH WALKOWITZ (JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY)
Seminar Leaders: James Eli Adams (Cornell University)
Amanda Anderson (Johns Hopkins University)
James Epstein (Vanderbilt University)
Herbert Tucker (University of Virginia)
Special Panels Organized by
Ian Burney, James Buzard, Deborah Cohen, Ian Duncan,
Eileen Gilooly, Elaine Hadley, Philip Harling, Philippa Levine,
Sharon Marcus, Rohan McWilliam, John Plotz, Yopie Prins
As well as by the following organizations:
The Dickens Project, the Historians of British Art, INCS, the
Midwestern Victorian Studies Association, and the Victorian
Interdisciplinary Studies Association of the Western United States.
Special exhibitions and tours arranged by the Kinsey Institute and
the Lilly Rare Book Library
THE NORTH AMERICAN VICTORIAN STUDIES ASSOCIATION (NAVSA) has been
established to provide a wide-ranging forum for the discussion of the
history, literature, art, and culture of the Victorian period. Our
goal will be to further the interests of Victorianists in the
profession: encouraging press and journal editors to participate in
our annual conferences; facilitating the networking of Victorianists
across regional and national borders; and initiating web-based
archival projects to make Victorian texts more easily accessible.
Annual conferences will bring together Victorian scholars from
across the United States and Canada.
We are accepting proposals for panels and for individual papers on
all subjects within the study of Victorian history, literature, art,
and culture.
Hard Copy Paper Proposals (200-400 words) and one-page CVs by April 14, 2003 to
NAVSA conference
Andrew Miller and Ivan Kreilkamp
Department of English
Ballantine Hall 442
Indiana University
Bloomington, IN 47405
Please do not send complete papers. Include your name, institutional
and email addresses, and proposal title in the cover letter that
accompanies the proposal; do not include your name on the proposal
itself. Finished papers should take 15 minutes (20 minutes maximum)
so as to provide ample time for discussion following each panel.
Direct queries to [log in to unmask] or [log in to unmask]
Conference Website:
http://www.purdue.edu/NAVSA/Conferences/2003/2003Conference.html
NAVSA website:
http://www.purdue.edu/NAVSA
NAVSA email: [log in to unmask]
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 27 Jan 2003 16:17:44 +0000
From: Nicola Bown <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: automata
Anna Jones wrote:
> Seems like all the references we're coming up with relate to the anxiety
> about/distaste for mechanized labor (sort of Metropolis prefigured). There
> must be some that have a different take--if not more positive, at least more
> uncanny/creepy, but I'm drawing a blank--
For a positive view of automation/automata, what about this from Andrew Ure's
The Philosophy of Manufactures (1835) (discussing the invention of the factory
system):
'The main difficulty did not, to my apprehension, lie so much in the invention
of a proper self-acting mechanism, for drawing out and twisting cotton into a
continuous thread, as the distribution of the different members of the
apparatus
into one co-operative body, in impelling each organ with its appropriate
delicacy and speed, and above all, in training human beings to renounce their
desultory habits of work, and identify themselves with the unvarying regularity
of the complex automaton. To devise and administer a successful code of factory
discipline, suited to the necessities of factory diligence, was the Herculean
enterprise, the noble achievement of Arkwright.' (London: Charles Knight, 1835,
p. 15)
It's the idea of the human operative 'identifying' him/herself with the machine
that I find so fascinating in this passage. Ure, of course, is a proselyte for
the factory system and the economic benefits of mechanisation.
Nicola Bown
Birkbeck College
[log in to unmask]
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 27 Jan 2003 10:26:20 -0800
From: Laura Vorachek <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: help with George Eliot quote
In an article I was reading this morning, the author writes that George
Eliot "expresses elsewhere" the following:
"The expression of a common feeling by a large mass of men, when the feeling
is one of good will, moves me like music."
The author does not mention where the quote originally appears. Any
suggestions on where I should start looking?
Thanks,
Laura Vorachek
University of Wisconsin-Madison
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 27 Jan 2003 11:27:23 -0500
From: "Hughes, Lynn" <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: the celebrated traveler Raymond
I wonder if this rings a bell with anyone:
For a book I am editing, I am trying to pin down a reference to
"Raymond, the celebrated European traveler." This was in a book written
in the US in 1846. The celebrated Raymond is cited as the source of an
anecdote about an encounter with bandits in the Pyrenees.
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 27 Jan 2003 16:56:07 +0000
From: Kiera Chapman <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: <No subject given>
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Dear All-
I've been asked to teach a personal selection from the second Slater volume
of Dickens's Journalism, *Gone Astray* next week, and was wondering how
other listmembers have successfully guided undergraduate level students
through this material. The problem really is which pieces to select- they
all seem so pertinent and interesting! I'd really appreciate any advice on
the ways that others have approached this task, on which pieces really
interest undergraduates, and particularly on any successful ways of pairing
*Gone Astray* with other pieces of mid-Victorian newspaper writing (Sala
et al; I don't want to introduce too much extra material, but some pieces
for comparison or contrast might be illuminating).
Cheers-
Kiera Chapman
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------------------------------
Date: Mon, 27 Jan 2003 12:08:38 -0500
From: Herbert Tucker <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: automata
>Nicola Bown's citation from Andrew Ure seems right on point, as does her
>comment:
>
>It's the idea of the human operative 'identifying' him/herself with the
>machine
>that I find so fascinating in this passage. Ure, of course, is a proselyte for
>the factory system and the economic benefits of mechanisation.
The earlier inquirer will be more fully answered if we can next adduce
texts that actually *imagine* this idea, so as to give a bodily force to
the ideational identification with the machine. I have nothing more
suitable to offer now than a couple of places in Browning's poetry where
the athletically working body in transit is essentialized by effort to
something mechanical -- whose representational analogue occurs in the
driving, driven prosody: "How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix"
(1845; horsemanship), "Pheidippides" (1876; marathon).
No amount of further or better contribution along this line can alter the
fact that "mechanical" was in the main a pejorative term, and notion, for
mainstream Victorian literature in any genre.
Herbert Tucker
Department of English
219 Bryan Hall
University of Virginia 22904-4121
[log in to unmask]
434 / 924-6677
FAX: 434 / 924-1478
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 27 Jan 2003 09:14:58 -0800
From: Peter O'Neill <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: re automata and Ruskin
In light of Nicola Bown's reference to Andrew Ure's proposing that "workers
identify themselves with the unvarying regularity of the complex automaton," it
may be fitting to juxtapose this idea with an eloquent passage from Ruskin's
*The Nature of Gothic." Clearly, Ruskin hopes that the worker can become a
"thinking being," instead of what he calls an "animated tool":
"You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make
both. Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise
and perfect in all their actions. If you will have that precision out of them,
and make their fingers measure degrees like cog-wheels, and their arms strike
curves like compasses, you must unhumanize them. All the energy of their
spirits must be given to make cogs and compasses of themselves. All their
attention and strength must go to the accomplishment of the mean act. The eye
of the soul must be bent upon the finger-point, and the soul's force must fill
all the invisible nerves that guide it, ten hours a day, that it may not err
from it steely precision, and so soul and sight be worn away, and the whole
human being be lost at last--a heap of sawdust, so far as its intellectual work
in this world is concerned....On the other hand, if you will make a man of the
working creature, you cannot make a tool. Let him but begin to imagine, to
think, to try to do anything worth doing; and the engine-turned precision is
lost at once. Out comes all his roughness, all his dulness, all his
incapability; shame upon shame, failure upon failure, pause after pause: but
out comes the whole majesty of him also; and we know the height of it only when
we see the clouds settling upon him. And whether the clouds be bright or dark,
there will be transfiguration behind and within them."
Peter O'Neill
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------------------------------
Date: Mon, 27 Jan 2003 17:43:13 -0000
From: Jill Grey <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Darwin's friction gloves
My thanks to all who wrote with replies to my query about Dinnefords'
Friction Gloves. Very helpful.
Jill Grey
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 27 Jan 2003 18:26:28 +0000
From: Nicola Bown <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: re automata and Ruskin
Peter O'Neill's quotation from Ruskin proves only too well the truth of Herbert
Tucker's observation: the machine was mostly imagined by those in opposition to
it. This strand is nicely coinciding with me preparing a class on the condition
of England debates -- with their trenchant condemnations of the human effects
of mechnisation -- for this evening. I'm forcefully struck by the way the pen
was wielded so powerfully by the factory system's opponents that their views
seem 'natural' (to use one of the key words in their arsenal), whereas the few
celebrations of mechanisation one can find seem so alien, brutal and heartless
-- precisely the view one finds in anti-mechanical writing.
--
Nicola Bown
Birkbeck College
[log in to unmask]
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 27 Jan 2003 18:47:35 +0000
From: Mary Ann Tobin <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Retraction and apology
I apologize to the list for passing on incorrect information earlier today.
Mr. Walsh of Duquesne University is engaged in an edition of a work of Mrs.
Humphrey Ward, not Mrs. Humphrey as I indicated earlier.
I apologize for any scholarly heart pounding I may have erroneously caused.
M A Tobin
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 27 Jan 2003 18:52:04 -0000
From: Susan Hoyle <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: automata
There may be some useful leads in Humphrey Jennings _Pandemonium
1660-1886: The Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers_
(Papermac 1995).
Susan Hoyle
[log in to unmask]
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 27 Jan 2003 14:12:12 -0600
From: Natalie Schroeder <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: <No subject given>
I have a student who is looking for examples of delerium tremons in
Victorian novels. She has come up with a number on her own, but is looking
for more. Can you help anyone?
Thanks,
Natalie Schroeder
University of Mississippi
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 27 Jan 2003 21:08:30 -0000
From: Michael Flowers <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: delirium tremens
Ellen [Mrs Henry] Wood's novels have several examples. The most obvious is
in her anti-temperance first novel "Danesbury House." There is another fine
example in her novella 'Sandstone Torr", collected in "Johnny Ludlow: Fourth
Series". This story has recently been made available as an etext by the
West Midlands Literary Heritage Website. You can find this by following the
link on my etext page. http://www.mrshenrywood.co.uk/etext.html
If I can think of any other examples, I'll let you know.
Michael Flowers
www.mrshenrywood.co.uk
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 27 Jan 2003 18:14:35 -0500
From: "Cathrine O. Frank" <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: DT's in Victorian fiction
Has your student included _The Tenant of Wildfell Hall_ and Arthur
Huntingdon's death-bed scene?
Cathrine O. Frank
University of Cincinnati
[log in to unmask]
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 28 Jan 2003 10:56:32 +1030
From: Kerryn Goldsworthy <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: DT's in Dickens
At the risk of suggesting the obvious, Jenny's father - 'Mr Dolls' - in
*Our Mutual Friend* is quite a detailed and protracted fictional treatment
of advanced alcoholism (including the DTs, of course).
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: Mon, 27 Jan 2003 17:43:58 -0700
From: Carol Martin <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: DT's in Victorian fiction
"Janet's Repentance" in George Eliot's Scenes of Clerical Life.
Her publisher, John Blackwood, found the scene distasteful (to say the least).
He frequently felt that George Eliot was too frank in this work, which appeared
serially in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine July to November 1857. After the
story was published, he wrote to George Henry Lewes that he wished he had
"pressed George Eliot more to curtail or to indicate more delicately the
Delirium Tremens scene. It is too naked and the shudder with which one turns
from the picture is too much akin to disgust. He [sic] does push his Theory of
qualifying any description by its truth too far" (George Eliot Letters
2:394-95).
Carol Martin
Boise State University
Boise, Idaho
[log in to unmask]
------------------------------
End of VICTORIA Digest - 26 Jan 2003 to 27 Jan 2003 (#2003-26)
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