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Date: 29 August 2003 00:00 -0500
From: Automatic digest processor <[log in to unmask]>
To: Recipients of VICTORIA digests <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: VICTORIA Digest - 27 Aug 2003 to 28 Aug 2003 (#2003-30)
There are 13 messages totalling 435 lines in this issue.
Topics of the day:
1. question re: married woman's freedom of movement (2)
2. Great Expectations criticism
3. married women's freedom of movement
4. victorian criminals
5. concerning the readership of Victorian novels. (3)
6. Waverly pen, Russell and Allen, little dynamite machines (3)
7. CFP: Re-Imagining the Ancient World in C19 Britain (10/15/03; 1/30/04)
8. Nineteenth-Century Fashion
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Date: Thu, 28 Aug 2003 09:50:52 +0100
From: Judith Flanders <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: question re: married woman's freedom of movement
I agree with Anne Whitfield, that the question of women not being
allowed to walk alone has been hugely exaggerated. I think that the
problem has been created by making it too general: Were women permitted
to walk out alone? In actuality, it was a series of smaller questions:
Where could women walk out alone? What kind of women? What social class?
What milieu were they expecting to walk in?
Certainly women in London expected to go shopping by themselves:
Marion Sambourne, the wife of Punch illustrator Linley Sambourne, took
the tube from her Kensington home to go to Knightsbridge, Bayswater or
the West End to shop. Once the ABCs and Lyons' Corner Houses arrived,
ladies made a day of it, coming into the centre of town to shop and meet
their friends for lunch or tea. The daughters of John Marshall, the
surgeon, who lived in Savile Row, in the 1860s were careful when they
walked out alone to avoid 'clubland' around St James's, but by the 1870s
this was all colonized as shopping (and therefore women's) territory. It
was not only married women, or middle class women: in fiction Hetta
Carbury, in The Way We Live Now (1875), an upper class girl, takes the
tube.
Lower down the social scale, women walked out alone even more:
Frances Mary Buss, founder of North London Collegiate (1850) in the
1840s walked from Camden to Harley Street and back to go to evening
classes. Molly Hughes in her autobiography describes going to school and
back every day on her own, and is even sent to Cornwall from London by
train by herself. In fiction again there are many examples of women and
girls walking alone: Marian in Gissing's New Grub Street (1891) walks
and takes the omnibus as a matter of course from the British Library
home to Camden, then in the evening to visit friends. Bella Wilfer in
Our Mutual Friend walks alone all the time, and is only noticed when she
goes to the City -- because there are no women there.
On the other hand, Beatrix Potter in her diaries, never seems to have
gone anywhere without someone, and rarely strayed far from home in any
case. When she went with her parents to the theatre one night, when she
was 18, she describes being stuck in traffic, so they went a different
route: 'Extraordinary to state, it was the first time in my life that I
had been past the Horse Guards, Admiralty, and Whitehall, or seen the
Strand and the Monument.'
My feeling from this is that it was upper class girls in cities who
did not walk alone (whereas they did in their 'own' country districts).
Fiction has mostly concerned itself with these girls -- i.e. Trollope's
heroines are, for the most part of the extreme upper end of the middle
classes, or entirely of the upper classes -- and therefore this has
become understood as the norm, whereas in fact it was the norm only for
a very small group of women in a small set of circumstances.
To read more: The Times had a correspondence on the possibilities of
walking out alone, in late 1860 and early 1862; Eliza Lynn Linton wrote
on the same subject in Temple Bar, April 1862. Erika Diane Rappaport's,
Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of the West End (Princeton
University Press, 2000) has a certain amount on the subject.
Best
Judith Flanders
[log in to unmask]
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 28 Aug 2003 09:07:55 -0300
From: Rohan Maitzen <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Great Expectations criticism
A colleague working on Peter Carey's _Jack Maggs_ has asked me to recommend
criticism on _Great Expectations_, especially (though not exclusively)
anything related to "portable property" or to "the prevalence of ghosts and
appariations" in the novel. She has already searched the MLA Bibliography
but suspects that among the many citations she may not be picking up the
most relevant or important; she also wonders about book chapters, which
wouldn't turn up on the index. I haven't read up on _GE_ in a long time;
does anyone have suggestions about criticism of the novel they have come
across lately or remember as being especially suggestive, in general or on
the topics of portable property or ghosts?
Suggestions should probably come to me, not the list. I'll pass them on to
my colleague. Thanks for any help!
Rohan Maitzen
Dalhousie University
[log in to unmask]
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 28 Aug 2003 01:34:19 -0400
From: Herself <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: married women's freedom of movement
> Anne Whitefield said:
> Married women were allowed to walk alone, and
> contrary to popular belief so was unmarried women. I have several primary
> sources of unmarried women travelling and walking alone.
> Unfortunately, I have a great deal of trouble with others who do not think
> as I do, but whether they have read primary sources to back up their
> opinions, well I cannot answer that. I feel most people have taken the
> 'chaperone' issue and blown it out of all proportion. Reading some novels
> written in those times will help clear this issue. One that comes to mind
> is Pride & Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennet walks alone all the time.
Someone else I spoke to about this also cited Austen, but Austen's
stories take place at the turn of the 19th century and I think that a
great deal that was loose and easy in those Hanoverian times
tightened up considerably over the course of the 19th century--only
to relax again at its close. (Women's clothing, for one thing!
Bennet would've raised an eyebrow at Lily Dale's underpinnings, I'm
sure.)
I was thinking vaguely of how, in the various novels of Henry James,
the freedoms of American girls to wander around unattended are always
pointed to by the European characters as evidence of their loose
morals.
I'm also assuming that my setting is important--a married woman might
be able to move about alone in London or any other English town, but
her husband might frown upon her doing so in the Italian countryside.
Hmm . . . I suspect that if I sell it to my readers I can do whatever
I like with this point . . . .
Herself
New York, NY
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 28 Aug 2003 11:16:46 -0400
From: Holly Forsythe <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: victorian criminals
If notoriety and the Victorian definitions of "crime" are the main
criteria, Oscar Wilde is certainly eligible for the list.
Best,
Holly Forsythe, University of Toronto
<[log in to unmask]>
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 28 Aug 2003 19:06:39 +0100
From: Susan Hoyle <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: question re: married woman's freedom of movement
Last week I read Trollope's _The Belton Estate_ (with great enjoyment I may
say), which was set (and written?) in the 1860s; at one stage our orphaned
heroine has to travel by gig and train from Somerset to London with her
cousin (who is also her rejected lover) in order to meet her fiancé at the
Gt Northern Hotel at King's Cross. She dines there with the two of them and
then stays at the hotel, where the fiancé is also staying, before departing
with him for Yorkshire. There is obviously much anxiety about doing all
this properly, but it is not stressed -- just mentioned as a natural thing
to be cautious about. It is not exactly what the questioner asked about,
but the episode may repay careful study.
Are we to know who Herself is?
Susan
[log in to unmask]
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 28 Aug 2003 14:30:41 -0400
From: The Menons <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: concerning the readership of Victorian novels.
The subject of male and female readership of novels is discussed in Austen's
own Northanger Abbey.
The use of the novel to explore "problems" as Mrs. Gaskell did, may have
contributed to a wider readership, and as more men became novelists (some
argue) the novel achieved greater intellectual respectability, which may
have contributed to men's willingness to read (and be seen reading) it. You
could look at Gaye Tuchman and Nina Fortin on this: Edging Women Out:
Victorian Novelists, Publishers and Social Change (New Haven, Yale
University Press, 1989).
My impression from reading works about and letters of George Eliot is that
she was read by both sexes (though I cannot offer any statistics) -- again
subject matter and approach may have made the difference.
This seems to me to be a very complicated issue involving the expectations
of publishers and lending libraries, the gender and expectations of
reviewers, intentions of the author, subject matter of the works, etc.
I'd be interested to know of any full-length studies of the subject.
Pat Menon
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 28 Aug 2003 12:10:57 -0500
From: "Susan D. Bernstein" <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Waverly pen, Russell and Allen, little dynamite machines
I am preparing an edition of Amy Levy's 1888 The Romance of a Shop, set in=
=20
London, and would welcome help with any information on the following items=
=20
mentioned in the novel. I can supply more context if needed. Please reply=
=20
directly to me. Thanks.
Susan Bernstein
[log in to unmask]
"like the Waverly pen"
"To Constance, indeed, the change in her friends' affairs may be said to=
=20
have come, like the Waverly pen, as a boon and a blessing."
"Russell and Allen=92s"
[reference to a department store?]
=94little dynamite machines=94
A character says she'll "go like a shot" to an exhibition at the Berkeley=20
Galleries in New Bond Street, and another character replies "Yes, and slip=
=20
little dynamite machines behind the pictures."
"violet lamps instead of red ones"
"An empty hansom cab crawled slowly by. Gertrude noticed that it had violet=
=20
lamps instead of red ones."
The Gaiety:
=93I tried to make Fred come with me to-day,=94 Constance was saying;
=93but= he=20
is dining with some kindred spirits at the Caf=E9 Royal, and then going on=
to=20
the Gaiety.=94
"poets sell wall-papers and first-class honour men sell lamps":
"Don't you know that it is quite distinguished to keep a shop? That poets=
sell
wall-papers and first-class honour men sell lamps?"
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 28 Aug 2003 12:57:41 -0700
From: jane-ellen long <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Waverly pen, Russell and Allen, little dynamite machines
See http://www.gabrielleray.150m.com/ArchiveTextC/LottieCollins.html:
"In 1886 she made her first appearance at the Gaiety Theatre, London,
in the burlesque Monte Cristo Junior (23 December)." Lottie was the
Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-Deay girl.
Don't know the address, but it shouldn't be hard to track down in a
street directory.
---
Jane-Ellen Long
Director, IS and Production
USENIX Association
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 28 Aug 2003 12:43:28 -0700
From: Richard Fulton <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: concerning the readership of Victorian novels.
Kelly J. Mays's excellent essay "The Disease of Reading and Victorian
Periodicals," included in _Literature and the Marketplace_, Ed. John O.
Jordan and Bob Patten (CUP), discusses several aspects of a reading
"controversy" that flowered in the last couple of decades of the 19th
Century. Mays points out that, to a number of critics, men and women alike
were guilty of bad reading (an interesting concept in itself). He also
discusses fears of both gender and class influences on reading ("good"
reading being a masculine attribute). Mays discusses the many aspects of
the issue, including novel reading. It's an excellent piece, and the
bibliography is extremely helpful.
Richard D. Fulton
[log in to unmask]
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 28 Aug 2003 16:14:54 -0400
From: Jamie Ridenhour <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Waverly pen, Russell and Allen, little dynamite machines
Weinreb and Hibbert's London Encyclopaedia puts the Gaiety Theatre in
the Strand, with entrances also in Catherine and Exeter streets. It ran
some operettas and dramas, but specialized in burlesques. The Gaiety
opened in 1868 on the site of the old Strand Music Hall, and was
moderately to very successful until its closure (due to a municipal
improvement scheme) in 1903. It later opened elsewhere as the aptly
named "New Gaiety Theatre."
Jamie Ridenhour
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 29 Aug 2003 09:23:52 +1000
From: Ellen Jordan <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: concerning the readership of Victorian novels.
I can't remember if I said this last time this topic came up but my
impression is that the standard Mudie's novel was intended as "family"
reading, and took the same place in many households that radio and
televsion did later.
On evenings when the family was alone some-one, usually the father, would
read aloud from the book in progress while the rest of the family got on
with other things, sewing, drawing, sorting papers and music, arranging
stamp albums. This seems to have been the custom in the Darwin household,
and was still being practiced in the Streatfeild family in the early 1900s.
While there was specialised literature for men, women, boys, girls and
children, the major novels were expected to have a wide appeal and not
alienate or exclude any of these groups. It is interesting perhaps that
towards the end of the century one gets the emergence of the
men-without-women literature in Kipling, Stevenson, Rider Haggard, which
was to a considerable extent the boys' adventure story (Maine Reid,
Ballantyne, etc.) grown up, whereas the fiction specifically for women had
long been the love story theme of the major novels stripped of all
extraneous business.
Having said this I begin to wonder if the rich, multi-strand nature of the
Victorian novel came from the need to provide something (adventure, humour,
suspense, love interest) for "all the family" rather than appealing to a
particular section.
Ellen Jordan
University of Newcastle
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 28 Aug 2003 19:10:49 -0400
From: "Meilee D. Bridges" <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: CFP: Re-Imagining the Ancient World in C19 Britain (10/15/03;
1/30/04)
CFP: "Re-Imagining the Ancient World in 19th-Century Britain"
An Interdisciplinary Conference hosted by Contexts for Classics, the
Department of English Language & Literature, the Department of Classics,
and the C.P. Cavafy Professorship in Modern Greek at the University of
Michigan
Ann Arbor, Michigan
Friday, January 30, 2004
Deadline for Abstracts: 15 October 2003
In the past twenty years, several scholars have focused broadly on
the ways in which "the Classical tradition" informed the cultural milieu of
19th-century Britain. These studies explore why and how Classical studies
contributed to the shaping and validating of English political ideologies,
social hierarchies, academic institutions, and aesthetic values. However,
this current work also seems to suggest that the 19th-century Britons'
relationship with antiquity derived from an unexamined sense of cultural
heritage, a common ancestry located in ancient Rome and Greece.
This conference seeks to interrogate this relationship between antiquity
and the 19th century: is it still useful to rationalize 19th-century
Classicism as an effect of mythologized national genealogies? How else
might we account for the reception and transmission of Classics in this
period? In what
ways did educators, writers, artists, and musicians engage with the ancient
past? Are there manifestations of this engagement that intimate a greater
heterogeneity of response to antiquity than the term "Classical tradition"
implies?
This international, interdisciplinary conference brings together
faculty and graduate students from various fields within the humanities
(e.g., literature, Classics, history, art history, anthropology, music,
drama) to explore collectively representations of antiquity from the
beginnings of British Romanticism to the early 20th century. Primary in
focus are the ways in which British artists re-imagined the ancient world
in the fine arts: literature (drama, fiction, poetry, or nonfiction); art
(painting, sculpture); architecture; and music. However, the conference
will also encourage dialogue about the ways in which the period re-
considered knowledge of the ancient past through advances in the
professional fields of archaeology, history, philology, anthropology,
ethnology, paleontology, and mythography. Papers may be about the use of
Classical themes or subject matter, translations of ancient texts,
Classical education, and other creative or scholarly representations of
ancient civilizations (including Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and Assyrian
cultures).
Papers should be 15-20 minutes in length. Please send paper proposals
(maximum: two double-spaced pages) by October 15, 2003 to:
Meilee D. Bridges
Department of English Language & Literature
University of Michigan
3187 Angell Hall
Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-1003
By email: [log in to unmask] (attachments welcome)
NB: As abstracts will be reviewed anonymously, please include your title
but no other identifying information on your proposal. Please do include
your name, institutional and email addresses, phone number, proposal title,
and potential audio-visual needs in a cover letter that accompanies the
abstract.
The conference website will provide this call for papers as well as any
relevant updates and further information:
<http://www.umich.edu/~cfc/c19antiquity.htm>. Please contact Meilee D.
Bridges at the email above if you have any questions.
********************************************
Meilee D. Bridges
Ph.D. Candidate
Department of English Language & Literature
University of Michigan
3187 Angell Hall
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
[log in to unmask]
http://www.umich.edu/~bridgesm
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 28 Aug 2003 21:00:04 -0500
From: Tamar Heller <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Nineteenth-Century Fashion
Would anyone be able to give me advice on books about Victorian fashion? I
am trying to locate some basic facts about several Victorian dressmakers,
as well as the journal _Le Follet_, which I know was a fashion journal. As
for the dressmakers, their names are Madame Elise, Madame Descou, Mrs.
Brown, and Mrs. Heath. I've found a lead on Madame Elise--her shop was on
Regent Street and she employed 70-80 workers when in season; Mrs. Brown
seems to have made versions of the most desired French fashions. Any more
information about any of these would be appreciated, as would the
information about your favorite sources on fashion.
------------------------------
End of VICTORIA Digest - 27 Aug 2003 to 28 Aug 2003 (#2003-30)
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