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Date: 03 July 2004 00:00 -0500
From: Automatic digest processor <[log in to unmask]>
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Subject: VICTORIA Digest - 1 Jul 2004 to 2 Jul 2004 (#2004-24)
There are 14 messages totalling 529 lines in this issue.
Topics of the day:
1. examples of mild parental discipline
2. History of Victorian studies (was Victorian conduct) (5)
3. Deronda and Cohen (2)
4. Descriptions of rape
5. Victorian conduct (and experience)...
6. How Interdisciplinary was Victorian studies (was history of) (2)
7. Courtyard housing in Manchester
8. query: West African apprenticeship
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Date: Fri, 2 Jul 2004 09:11:44 +0100
From: Judith Flanders <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: examples of mild parental discipline
What is 'typical' of punishment is of course no easier to answer about
the Victorian period than it is of our own.
It may be useful to compare Harriet Collins' journal with Elizabeth
Gaskell's diary of her daughter Marianne's early days (in Private
Voices: The Diaries of Elizabeth Gaskell and Sophia Holland, ed. J. A.
V. Chapple and Anita Wilson, Keele, 1996). She too was very mild in her
punishments, and what we would think of as 'modern' in her belief that
the child came first.
By contrast, Marion Jane Bradley (unpublished diary, British Library,
Add MSS 3766 a-b) wrote: 'I tried to make our children fill their proper
subordinate places in the family -- Father always to be first
considered, their arrangements to be subject to his...', and she whipped
her child when he was three. Louise Creighton (Memoir of a Victorian
Woman, ed James Thayne Covert, Bloomington, 1994) herself had been
punished (about mid-century) by being put in a dark cupboard, but
punished her own child who played with fire and a knife by holding his
hand to the grate and cutting his finger with a knife, adding 'I never
whipt any child'.
Then there are the autobiographical/quasi-fictional reports: Kipling
in Baa-Baa Black Sheep, Samuel Butler in the Way of all Flesh. But how
typical they were is hard to say. As early as 1856 the British Mothers'
Journal was advising parents that 'The great agent in executing family
law is love.'
A long-winded answer meaning, 'I don't know'.
Best
Judith
[log in to unmask]
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Date: Fri, 2 Jul 2004 10:25:21 +0100
From: Chris Willis <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: History of Victorian studies (was Victorian conduct)
Hi!
Kathleen wrote:
> As for not caring about events prior to my grandparents' era, I'm sure I'm
> not alone when I say, I don't care if it's old dirt, traditional dirt,
> obscure dirt, defunct dirt, or dirty dirt. Dish. I'm all ears.
Hear, hear! I can't resist commenting that the fact that we're all studying
the Victorian era seems to prove that we all care greatly about events prior
to our grandparents' era :-)
And the amazing popularity of tv history programmes would seem to indicate
that we're not alone in our interest.
All the best
Chris
================================================================
Chris Willis
[log in to unmask]
www.chriswillis.freeserve.co.uk/
"One can't help coming to the conclusion that politicians have a feeling
that they have a kind of divine right to tell lies" (Agatha Christie,
*Passenger to Frankfurt*)
Guantanamo Human Rights Commission - http://www.guantanamohrc.org
================================================================
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Date: Fri, 2 Jul 2004 10:36:47 +0100
From: Chris Willis <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: History of Victorian studies (was Victorian conduct)
Hi!
Daniel wrote:
> I'd love to know what was so wintry about 1984--and if
> spring ever came.
Winter 1984 in the middle of the miners' strike. As I don't want to get too
political, I'll forbear from commenting on when (or even if) spring ever
came, except to say that it certainly never came for the miners, and the
results are with us to this day.
By the way, one advantage of studying the Victorian era is that it's often
easier to get hold of objective material and/or government papers than it is
for more recent eras such as the 1980s. A lot of this is due to the
thirty-year rule, which can make the modern historian's life somewhat
difficult - we Victorianists have a lot to be thankful for!
All the best
Chris
================================================================
Chris Willis
[log in to unmask]
www.chriswillis.freeserve.co.uk/
"One can't help coming to the conclusion that politicians have a feeling
that they have a kind of divine right to tell lies" (Agatha Christie,
*Passenger to Frankfurt*)
Guantanamo Human Rights Commission - http://www.guantanamohrc.org
================================================================
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Date: Fri, 2 Jul 2004 09:19:39 -0400
From: Sally Mitchell <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: History of Victorian studies (was Victorian conduct)
OK Michael, I'll jump in, and in public, too, instead of privately.
When I started graduate school (rather late, after doing other things) I
knew that I was really interested in what I now know is called social
history, but in my undergraduate (or at least at my undergraduate school),
history was war, politics, and foreign policy: it had no people except
great leaders, and certainly no women. As someone who had been reading
19th century bestsellers, both British and American (many of them
inherited from my grandmother) for fun, I figured that studying literature
was how to find out about people. That was not yet quite true when I began
in the late 1960s, though, and when I discovered RSVP, *Victorian
Studies*, and you (Michael) at the Minneapolis RSVP conference whatever
year that was) I knew where I belonged: I absolutely define myself as
interdisciplinary (though some people act suspicious when I sit on
dissertation committees in the history department) and I wouldn't have it
any other way.
Sally Mitchell, English Department, Temple University: [log in to unmask]
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Date: Fri, 2 Jul 2004 11:02:15 EDT
From: Susan Hoyle <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: History of Victorian studies (was Victorian conduct)
Dear Michael
I am answering your latest appeal, although I do not think that my
experience will be of any particular value to your purposes. Relevant,
yes, but only in what I assume to be its commonness.
As a mature student in 1978, redundant after a teacher-training college was
closed in a round of such cuts, I started a PhD at Birkbeck College London.
This was before the days of any specific training for graduate students in
history (I speak only of England here), and I certainly had none. My first
degree had been awarded eleven years earlier, in PPE (Philosophy, Politics
and Economics, at Oxford): as things went in the sixties, pretty
multidisciplinary. Despite this degree, I had always thought of myself as
a historian and had done my very best to pursue PPE as a history degree.
No one had seemed to mind or even notice.
What a shock then to find when I started to work on Early Victorian Ideas
of the Future and wanted in this connexion to read novels and poems as
well as statistical reports and social philosophy that there were serious
doubts expressed to me whether my work counted as history. On the one
hand, I felt what we would now call very cutting-edge; on the other, I
felt a little foolish; and on my ever-useful third hand, I was indignant.
Of course it was history.
My failure to complete this research was not owing to having been at some
sort of interdisciplinary crossroads (a crossroads I scarcely recognized).
It had more to do with a lack of urgency on the part of the institution (a
then common situation) and changes in my own life. When I returned to PhD
study in the mid-nineties, this time looking at nineteenth-century
witchcraft (and again did not complete, but that's another story) I was
gratified to find that at least there was no debate about whether it was
history or indeed whether that mattered.
hth
Susan, writing detective stories now
[log in to unmask]
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Date: Fri, 2 Jul 2004 11:29:50 EDT
From: Susan Hoyle <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Deronda and Cohen
Daniel Hack, Alison Booth and Pat Menon for their illuminating replies to
my query.
Susan
[log in to unmask]
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Date: Fri, 2 Jul 2004 10:43:07 -0500
From: Michael Flowers <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Descriptions of rape
Fictional descriptions of rape could be either more, or less explicit
depending on the context of the reproduction of the text.
In Ellen [Mrs Henry] Wood's 'The Parson's Oath' as it appeared in
her 'Argosy' magazine (1880) the motive for a shooting of a young woman is
quite puzzling. Here is the relevant passage:
"Brassy hiccuped out that he had, one night, had a desperate quarrel with a
girl in his house at the Rill; and at last got so mad that he shot her,
though he never meant to kill her."
However, if the original anonymous periodical version of the story is
examined, a fuller (and more honest) account emerges. The same passage in
1855 reads:
"Brassy hiccuped out that he had, one night, decoyed a girl into his house
at the Rill, and ill-used her; and afterwards, when he swore he'd marry
her, she burst out with such a flood of despair and scorn and loathing,
that it drove him mad, and he put a bullet through her."
I'm not sure if this is the sort of thing you are interested in, but I
think it does show that Wood's 'sensational' short tales, especially the
versions printed before her name became known, can be just as interesting
as her more well-known novels.
Hope this helps
Michael
www.mrshenrywood.co.uk
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Date: Fri, 2 Jul 2004 11:53:27 EDT
From: Susan Hoyle <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Deronda and Cohen
In a message dated 02/07/2004 16:30:09 GMT Daylight Time, [log in to unmask]
wrote "Daniel Hack, Alison Booth and Pat Menon for their illuminating
replies to my query"
but what she meant to appear was: "Thank you very much to Daniel Hack,
Alison Booth and Pat Menon for their illuminating replies to my query."
Susan, stumbling through the Celtic twilight...
[log in to unmask]
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Date: Fri, 2 Jul 2004 11:52:41 -0100
From: Gail Savage <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: History of Victorian studies (was Victorian conduct)
I have been following Michael Wolf's efforts to elicit responses on the
impact of Victorian Studies (the journal and the interdisciplinary
approach), and inspired by Sally Mitchell I wanted to put in a word or two.
As a stubbronly independent undergraduate at the University of Texas in the
late 1960s, I cobbled together what now I realize was an interdisciplinary
approach to my own education, mostly by simply changing majors when some
requirement got in the way of what I wanted to do. In the end I graduated
in 1969 as an English major, without a clue about what I wanted to do next,
except I wanted to keep reading books, but I was too naive and unsure to try
to leave Austin or to formulate a plan to prepare myself for an academic
career. The English Department, filled with wonderful scholars but very
large, did not appear to be very interested in me, so the History Department
took me in, and I studied British history under Standish Meacham. He
encouraged me also to study under William Goetzman, who was a preeminent
figure in American Studies, and that is where I became acquainted with the
"studies" approach. I knew right away that this is what I wanted to do, but
I wanted to do it in the context of 19th century English history and
literature. Professor Meacham was happy to encourage me, and with this
frame of mind, reading "Victorian Studies" and attending and presenting to
the regional Victorian Studies conferences became a crucial influence and
support for work I have undertaken since. I took my graduate degrees in
history and have always taught in history departments, so in the years since
then I have been become more deeply rooted in that disicpline. I still read
literature as part of my research agenda, but it has struck me that the
openness to interdisciplinarity that characterized those years has been
succeeded by a more rigorous insistence on particular theoretical approaches
within the disciplines that has tended to squelch the excitement and play of
crossing disciplinary boundaries. But it is that sense of excitement and
play that I associate with Michael Wolf's journals and the big tent of
Victorian Studies.
Gail Savage
History Department
St. Mary's College of Maryland
[log in to unmask]
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 2 Jul 2004 10:10:48 -0700
From: Peter Wood <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Victorian conduct (and experience)...
As someone whose graduate work was in the field of Artifical
Intelligence and its educational applications (all the good jokes on this
subject have long since been made), and being therefore totally unqualified
to speak with the authority of training or experience on this topic, may I
quote someone I once read: "If I want to know what happened, I read a
history; if I want to know what *really* happened, I read a novel; if I want
to know how it felt, I read a poem."
Peter Wood
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 2 Jul 2004 13:50:31 -0400
From: Patrick Scott <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: How Interdisciplinary was Victorian studies (was history of)
My point was in a sense academic--to explain the phenomenon (limited
response) that Michael observed. I think it is true, not just a
debating point, that disjunctures or boundaries within scholarship on
the Victorian period are now more between generations than between
disciplines.
As to Michael's original question: yes, even in the late 1960's, there
was still a sense of countering the academic mainstream in doing
interdisciplinary (more usually cross-disciplinary) studies--using and
drawing on economic history, sociology, history of science, history of
philosophy, architectural history, religious studies, education. The
issues tended to be the issues of the 1945 British election--class,
education, colonialism, working conditions, to a lesser extent health,
family change, belatedly sexual behavior. The (tenurable) space for
doing this had been provided by a recognized refereed journal, Victorian
Studies, which provided a reference point for those placing articles of
similar general orientation in other diusciplinary or less
well-established journals.
But much of this inter or cross disciplinary work was one
directional--the post-Scrutineers of English borrowing from other
fields, but unable to give significantly in return. Sure, some friendly
nice historians and philosophers and sociologists would give talks
wrapped in a favorite literary text; but overwhelmingly it was people
who started from English who wrapped or framed or prefaced their case
about a literary text in concepts or contextual/intertextual narratives
drawn from what looked to be less flaky disciplines. And for many
Victorianists in the decade after the founding of VS, as for many
cultural studies-oriented Victorianists now, the gold standard remained
discussion of a work already recognized to be canonical; then it was
perhaps Bleak House, Mary Barton, Culture & Anarchy hor the Origin of
Species, while now it is Jane Eyre, Goblin Market, Cassandra, Jekyll &
Hyde, and Dracula.
The shock of Michael's RSVP and VPN before its move to respectability
as VPR was its denial of the canon as a investigative framework.
Contrast the perspective of Houghton on the Victorian Mind with the
fluid anarchy or at least mind-boggling complexity of Michael's Pearls
from the Golden Stream. In the early days of VS itself there was space
as I recall for Sir Charles Tennyson to write provocatively (from a
rather narrow basis of general knowledge and with a blithe disregard of
the sociology of sport) on the way the British empire spread sport
through the empire, as metaphor for imperialism as culture with a small
rather than a large C. And I remember an extraordinary issue based on
the British court-case about the obscenity of My Secret Life--more like
say the old Partisan Review than a regular academic journal issue. But
the hallmark essays of VS even in the 60's were already ones like
Geoffrey Best's article on the background in charity reform to
Trollope's The Warden or one on the symbolism of dirt in Our Mutual
Friend. The most solid historical articles (I remember one on the
Jamaica Rising and another on the religious censius of 1851) could in
fact have appeared in say Historical Journal, though they included the
impact of their subjects on or references to their subject in canonical
literary texts, as a kind of polite gesture to their interdisciplinary
hosts.
And it was possible (as Michael ruefully suggests) to lose out
professionally by taking the interdisciplinary non-English side of
things too far. I remember being interviewed at a recently-founded
British university in the late 60's, which had an interdisciplinary
(hist/lit/phil) first-year course with a unit on Victorian education;
they read Hard Times, Tom Brown's Schooldays, Culture and Anarchy, and
the Idea of the University.
Clearly it would not have been discussible whether one might instead or
even as well have students read blue books on factory conditions, or on
elementary education, 'strange' novels like Eric or Little by Little
rather than Tom Brown, let alone question the privileging of the
literary by Arnold and Newman.
I was not unhappy to find a job instead at a university with a more
traditional literary-historical currriculum, because paradoxically that
provided just as much opportunity to work across disciplinary borders as
were promised by the more recent set-up, and the libraries were much
better.
I think Michael is right that there was resistance or snootiness from
English depts to Victorian Studies, esp from faculty who had established
their careers as New Crirtics and saw Victorian Studies as resurrecting
the kind of historical study done by their graduate mentors and that
they themselves had evaded. They were particularly resistant to the
expansion of focus to study minor writers (and we used to study a lot of
minor male writers then, all now pretty well lost again). They tended
to be most snooty about the study of Victorian middle-class and
provincial small-c culture; the influence of Asa Briggs particularly
kept deflecting attention to Leeds or Sheffield or Birmingham or
Liverpool, and how seriously could even a post-Arnoldian critic take
scholarship on Birmingham? Even Marxians tended to dislike actual
Victorian cities that differed from the ideal types of London and
Manchester. My bet is that Michael is right that such resistance and
snootiness factored in to hiring, tenure and promotion.
But there were two different degrees of innovation or subversion in
Victorian Studies, as there still are in cultural studies. The kind of
study that draws on, makes use of, sources and ideas from another
discipline, wbut was still recognizable as simply adding new
perspectives on mtexts, authors, problems already recognized as
legitimiate, was easily recuperable. The kind that foregrounded the
potential in Victorian Studies for decentering, upsetting, or
destabilizing traditional perspectives, proved less institutionally
assimilable. My coevals at the Leicester Victorian Studies Center
would hatch cod research proposals for a Center for Victorian
Lower-Middle Class or Nonconformist or Inner-Suburban or Respectability
Studies, as a kind of therapy for what got squeezed out from
consideration not only by English departments but to some extent by the
founding generation of Victorian Studies itself. The generation of
1945, as we used to call those who then filled so many of the more
influential positions in British humanities departments, wrote some
wonderful books and essays, but they were wonderful perhaps not so much
because they had a consistent theory or agenda of interdisciplinarity as
because they wrote from rich and allusive minds, with a strange mixture
of irony, exuberance, and even sentiment. The quite different, deeper
challenge of RSVP and Michael's own work was widely applauded by the
founding generation, but seldom I think wholly understood.
Patrick Scott
Director of Special Collections,
Thomas Cooper Library,
& Professor of English,
University of South Carolina,
Columbia, SC 29208, USA.
Tel: 803-777-1275
Fax: 803-777-4661, attn Dr Scott
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 2 Jul 2004 15:00:18 -0400
From: Michael Wolff <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Courtyard housing in Manchester
----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Wolff" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Friday, July 02, 2004 2:58 PM
Subject: Re: Courtyard housing in Manchester
Have a look at G. F. Chadwick, "The Face of the Industrial City: at
Manchester" in Vol. 1 of Dyos and Wolff, "The Victorian City" and the nearly
60 photographs and maps that follow it.
Michael Wolff
[log in to unmask]
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Date: Fri, 2 Jul 2004 15:25:09 -0400
From: Sally Mitchell <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: How Interdisciplinary was Victorian studies (was history of)
Actually I forgot this until reading the last couple of posts, believe it
or not. But in addition to the curious looks I get now from some people in
the history department when serving on one of its dissertation committees,
one of the people who voted against my tenure in the English department 20
years ago (fortunately on the minority side) wrote in the "comments" space
of the anonymous vote sheets we were allowed to see "we need a
*literature* scholar."
Sally Mitchell, English Department, Temple University: [log in to unmask]
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 2 Jul 2004 16:27:26 -0500
From: Richard Floyd <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: query: West African apprenticeship
Could List-members confirm for me the details of the end of the
apprenticeship of former slaves? I believe legislation was passed in Apr.
or August 1837, and became effective either 1 Apr. or 1 Aug. 1838--five
years ahead of the date originally settled on. Is this correct? and if
so, was it Apr. or Aug.?
Also, does anyone know off the top of the head how exactly the #20,000,000
compensation was disbursed--e.g. one lump sum, installments over two
years, or five years, or something else?
Any wisdom on these details would be much appreciated. Thanks--
-------------
Richard Floyd / [log in to unmask]
-------------
http://artsci.wustl.edu/~rdfloyd/index.htm
Department of History
Washington University
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End of VICTORIA Digest - 1 Jul 2004 to 2 Jul 2004 (#2004-24)
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