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Date: 20 June 2003 00:00 -0500
From: Automatic digest processor <[log in to unmask]>
To: Recipients of VICTORIA digests <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: VICTORIA Digest - 18 Jun 2003 to 19 Jun 2003 (#2003-169)
There are 8 messages totalling 251 lines in this issue.
Topics of the day:
1. "old 'ooman"
2. re netnanny software
3. Victorian attitudes toward the mentally retarded
4. interracial marriage and Romantics (3)
5. music halls (was: photography and recognition) (2)
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Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2003 09:28:35 +0100
From: =?iso-8859-1?q?Sunie=20Fletcher?= <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: "old 'ooman"
--- Duncan Hasell <[log in to unmask]> wrote: I'm
> > haunted by a recollection of a Dickens character
> who refers to "the old
> > 'ooman" but can't remember who it is.
If memory serves, isn't it Mrs Toodle in _Dombey and
Son_ whose husband, the railwayman, calls her 'Polly,
old 'ooman'?
Sunie Fletcher
University of Exeter
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Yahoo! Plus - For a better Internet experience
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Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2003 19:24:26 +1000
From: Lucy Sussex <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: re netnanny software
I recently found a reasonably urgent message had ended up in someone
else's trash, probably because the firewall/netnanny objected to the
last three letters of my surname.
Mutter, considering pseudonym.
Lucy Sussex
--
Lucy Sussex
Writer, Editor, Researcher
'Of course I draw from life - but I always pulp my acquaintance before
serving them up. You would never recognize a pig in a sausage' -
Frances Trollope
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2003 11:16:49 +0100
From: Chris Willis <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Victorian attitudes toward the mentally retarded
Hi!
> [Read "i-diot" without the hyphen. This University has software that
> will not permit transmission of forbidden words. Evidently this word
> is considered hate speech. Soon perhaps the words will be removed
> from the dictionaries here also.]
Presumably the i-diot who wrote the software didn't want anyone to use words
that might describe whoever instituted this daft policy!
There's a short story by Connie Willis that satirises this kind of attitude
beautifully. It's about a literature teacher who's forbidden to teach
*Macbeth* because it contains references to witchcraft, or *Romeo and
Juliet* (under-age sex), or *Othello* (racism), or *The Merchant of Venice*
(anti-Semitism). The list of forbidden texts gets longer and longer, and she
ends up with the complete works of Shakespeare being boiled down to only one
teachable line!
Dragging myself back to the subject of mentally retarded people in Victorian
literature (and about time too!), isn't there a mentally retarded character
in Braddon's *Aurora Floyd* who's referred to as "daftie" or "softie"?
Braddon also wrote a book entitled *Oscar Bertrand; or, The Idiot of the
Mountain" which has a mentally disabled protagonist. It's the sequel to
*The Black Band*, and was serialised in *The Halfpenny Journal* in 1863-4.
According to Jennifer Carnell's biography of Braddon, the title *The Idiot
of the Mountain* was taken from an 1861 melodrama by WE Suter. Now there's
two texts unlikely to be taught at the University of Oregon!
It's interesting to compare Braddon's attitude to mental illness in her
earlier and later novels. *Strangers and Pilgrims* which she wrote after
her own breakdown, is very understanding and sympathetic towards people with
mental illness, as compared to the rather cruder treatment of the subject in
her earlier work such as *The Trail of the Serpent* and *Lady Audley's
Secret*.
All the best
Chris
================================================================
Chris Willis
[log in to unmask]
http://www.chriswillis.freeserve.co.uk/
"I think all women, unless they are absolutely asleep, must be feminists up
to a point." (Ruth Rendell, The Guardian, 3 August 2002)
Historians Against War
http://www.historiansagainstwar.org/
Campaign Against Compulsory ID Cards
http://www.liberty-human-rights.org.uk/issues/id-cards.shtml
================================================================
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Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2003 09:12:28 -0400
From: Sally Mitchell <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: interracial marriage and Romantics
The standard narrative about East India Company officers (military or
civil) and women of India is that marriage and other relationships were
common until the early 18th century and thereafter "forbidden." Or, as
C.J. Hawes puts it in *Poor Relations: The Making of a Eurasian Community
in British India 1773-1833* relatively few Company officers were married
to anyone, but a large number of their wills leave money to Indian women
and/or children. It further appears that a fair number of these children
(at least) disappeared invisibly into the British population. Another
historical (rather than literary) source would be Ronald Hyam's *Empire
and Sexuality: The British Experience*
Sally Mitchell, English Department, Temple University: [log in to unmask]
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2003 14:20:49 GMT
From: Lesley Hall <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: interracial marriage and Romantics
> The standard narrative about East India Company
officers (military or
> civil) and women of India is that marriage and other
relationships were
> common until the early 18th century
Early C19th, surely? There is a recent book, which has
been widely mentioned in the press and has just come
out in paperback, but which I haven't yet read, _White
Mughals_ by William Dalrymple, about a specific case
of interracial marriage in the late C18th, but I think
has some wider context as well.
It was not just marriages, but there does seem to have
been a convention (as I recall from my long-ago days
working at the India Office Records and looking up
wills, etc) that even when it was 'concubinage'
provision would be made for the woman and in
particular for the offspring, into the early C19th.
(Or maybe the particular case I recall was of a
particularly conscientious and humane man, even if he
did have children by 2 native women... plus marrying
an Englishwoman later in his career)
Lesley Hall
[log in to unmask]
www.lesleyahall.net
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2003 15:52:08 +0100
From: Michel Faber <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: music halls (was: photography and recognition)
Further to my post a couple of days ago as follows:
> [T]he golden age of music halls was actually the
> 1880s to the 1930s. Before that time (eg, in Mayhew's 1840s),
> musical entertainments for the working classes were much more
> likely to be held in taverns and other small venues of that kind.
While searching for something else I have chanced across a
newspaper article about Wilton's Music Hall, "the world's first
purpose-built music hall". While I have it here in front of me I may
as well type out the salient details for anyone who's interested in this
distinctly Victorian phenomenon.
In 1850, entrepreneur John Wilton bought the Prince of Denmark
public house in Grace's Alley just off Cable Street in Whitechapel.
There was a tiny performing space at the back. He then bought the
houses on either side and
"in 1858, used the land at the rear of the buildings to build a
proper music hall.
With a 300-gas-jet chandlier, gilded barley-twist columns and a
beautiful balcony, Wilton's Music Hall was a veritable palace in the
grim East End streets. Early music hall was a mixed bag of classical
and popular music, comedy and dance. Wilton attracted pioneering
performers of all kinds: the first black opera company played there
and the can-can made its London debut, before promptly being
banned as obscene.
As the music hall as an art form expanded and became more
commercial, Wilton's was gradually forgotten. Bigger music halls
opened and Wilton himself retired. It finally closed in the 1880s,
later being used as a methodist mission and a rag warehouse before
being boarded up altogether."
The restored hall has recently been used as a venue for productions
of Kurt Weill's 'Silverlake' and Britten's 'The Turn of the Screw'
Best wishes,
Michel Faber
[log in to unmask]
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2003 11:12:22 -0400
From: Sally Mitchell <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: interracial marriage and Romantics
Sorry -- that should have been early 19th century, not early 18th century
-- in other words, sometime in what literature knows as the "Romantic"
period.
Sally Mitchell, English Department, Temple University: [log in to unmask]
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 19 Jun 2003 19:49:22 +0100
From: Malcolm Shifrin <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: music halls (was: photography and recognition)
There is also Chris Willis's illustrated and bibliographed Wilton's Music
Hall website at:
http://www.chriswillis.freeserve.co.uk/wiltons.html
--
Malcolm Shifrin
[log in to unmask]
The Victorian Turkish Bath Databank
(A not-for-profit educational project in the UK)
http://www.victorianturkishbath.org/
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End of VICTORIA Digest - 18 Jun 2003 to 19 Jun 2003 (#2003-169)
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