October 2009
After your webmaster returned from delivering a series of lectures on new media, hypertext, and their educational and political effects at Universität Bayreuth, Germany, he began laying the groundwork for Spanish and French versions of the site that will be part of a three-year project entitled "Studies on Intermediality as Intercultural Mediation." This project has been conceived, organized, and directed by Professor Asuncion López-Varela Azcarte of the Facultad de Filologia de Universidad Complutense de Madrid and supported by grants from her university and from Madrid (Comunidad de Madrid CCG08-UCM/HUM-3851) and the Ministry of Science and Innovation (Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación MICINN FFI2008-05388/FISO).. After each lexia (or separate document) is translated, two readers will vet it, after which it will appear in the non-English versions of the Victorian Web. Landow created icons once Alfonso Sánchez Moya and Maya Zalbidea Paniagua corrected his suggestions for icons texts. Using Google Translate, he created a draft of a Spanish version of the section containing 34 works of Thomas Woolner, the Pre-Raphaelite sculptor, which Ms. Zalbidea Paniagua then corrected, herself translating the documents on Raffles and John Stuart Mill — the first Spanish text documents to go online! Next, he translated two dozen documents for the Albert Memorial plus the works of Joseph Durham and those of Edward Hodges Baily, best known for his statue on Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square.
Jacqueline Banerjee begins the month with Frampton's statue of Quintin Hogg, William Brodie's of Thomas Graham, Francis Chantrey's George IV and James Watt, John Henry Foley's Field Marshal Lord Clyde, Carlo Marochetti's James Oswald and The Duke of Wellington, John Mossman's of the explorer David Livingstone and the poet Thomas Campbell, Hamo Thornycroft's William Ewart Gladstone. Glasgow architectural sculpture includes Richard Ferris's Faith and Fortitude and Paul Montford's Philosophy and Inspiration.
Her contributions to the architecture section include the following Glasgow buildings and fountains: Alexander Beith MacDonald's The People's Palace and Winter Gardens, several architects' Scottish Temperance League Building, the Doulton Fountain, and the Cameron Memorial Fountain. Her travels produced 11 photos of Cardiff Castle by William Burges.
John Sankey shared his photographs and discussions of Brock's Lister and Sir Richard Temple. Derek B. Scott, Professor of Critical Musicology, University of Leeds, contributes another of his performances of Victorian popular music — the 1894 "If It Wasn't for the 'Ouses in Between".
Simon Cooke took time off from proofing his book on British illustrators that the British Library is publishing to send in introductions to the illustrations of Edward Burne-Jones, Arthur Hughes, Daniel Maclise, George Pinwell, and James Macneill Whistler.
Dr. Albrecht Geck, Privatdozent at the University of Osnabrück, writes to say that his book, Autorität und Glaube (Authority and Faith), in which a Victorian Web image of Tom Tower, Oxford, appears has just been published by Universitätverlag Osnabrück. Dr. Kurt Harris Chair, English Department, Southern Utah University, writes to let us know that he has created a Thackeray site.
Bruce Bumbalough, Watauga, Texasm writes to point out a broken link in the general bibliography section, and Shelley B. Aley, Associate Professor at James Madison University, writes to point out that one of our contributors used a portrait of the wrong Alexander Bain. Thanks.
As of the 19th, the site had 42,857 documents and images.
September 2009
Before setting off for London, George Landow created a section and sitemap for Dombey and Son, adding a brief essay, "Toodle the Railway Man — Occupation as Character." After Marjorie Bloy, Senior Researcher for the Victorian Web back in 2000-2001, wrote to let us know the new URL for one of the sites she had linked, GPL changed 21 documents. Arriving in London, your webmaster took numerous walks around Trafalgar Square and down Picadilly and and High Holborn, ultimately creating photographs and texts for Staple Inn, Waterhouse's Prudential Assurance Building, the Royal Academy, a night view of the National Gallery, and the following sculpture: George Gamon Adams's Charles James Napier, Behnes's Major General Sir Henry Havelock, and the World War I memorial in the Prudential Assurance Building, Toft's The Royal Fusiliers (City of London Regiment) Memorial on High Holburn, and good deal of architectural sculpture. In the process, he created a sitemap for war memorials, reformatting documents in that section and doing the same for the section on the nude in art.
After packing up and moving to Gower Street next to UCL, your webmaster created photographs and accompanying htmls for Sir Richard Westmacott's Duke of Bedford memorial and one of his favorite London buildings — the Arts and Crafts classic Mary Ward House, named after Matthew Arnold's famous novelist-niece and the first school with classrooms for disabled children. A visit to the V&A furnished information about the relations of Art Nouveau and dance, and photographs of Dalou's Bacchanal, a better version of Watts's Clytie, Drury's The Age of Innocence, and two fairy paintings by Joseph Severn and one by Etty. Taking a tour of Buckingham Palace permitted GPL to photograph the rear of the palace, back garden (really lawn), and the lake and create a sitemap for the palace, and while there he was able to take some additional pictures of the magnificent Victoria Memorial. Going to the Saturday food market near London Bridge produced photographs of the Globe Tavern, a 1872 pub, and the iron and glass markets, and walking to that a Spitalfield's Charles Harrison Townsend's Bishopsgate Institute. Walking around central London produced photographs of Sir Francis Chantrey's William Pitt in Hanover Square, statues of Science, Commerce, and Art on 70-71 New Bond Street. The section on iron-and-glass architecture and that on railway stations continues to expand with photographs of the entrance to the old Metropolitan Railway, Liverpool Street and Waterloo Stations (thanks to station reception for granting a photography pass).
When OpenHouse London 2009, which took place on the weekend of the 19th and 20th, permitted access to buildings not usually open to visitors, GPL took a series of photographs of some important churches: A visit to G. E. Street's St. Mary Magdalene in Paddington produced many images of the church, its sculpture, Salviati's mosaics, Holiday's stained glass, and J. N. Comper's Chapel of the Holy Sepulcher with its magnificent reredos and organ. A visit to E. B. Lamb's Parish Church of St. Martin (which Pevsner described as London's "craziest Victorian church") produced another large series. Another series of images made possible by OpenHouse London was Norman Shaw's Hampstead home and studio for Kate Greenaway. Walking from Belsize Park to Primrose Hill to Bloomsbury led to photographs of the Sir Cowasjee Jehangir Fountain in Regent's Park, and a quick ride on the tube to Oxford Circus produced the last series from this trip — an essay and a dozen images about Butterfield's All Saints, Margaret Street — he (almost) hidden treasure. This illustrated essay represents a new approach to putting large numbers of images about a single building or sculpture online: instead of creating an html for every image with approximately the same essay, it uses thumbnails linked to larger images rather than to htmls containing images. Will readers prefer it? Will the smaller number of html documents make it harder to find on Google, Bing, and other search engines?
More photos of stained glass and mosaics to come. . .
Philip V. Allingham and GPL completed the series of 28 illustrations by Fred Barnard for Dickens's biography in the Household Edition. PVA is at work on commentaries.
Jacqueline Banerjee added photographs and accompanying text for Lewis Vulliamy's Law Society, William Burges's Park House in Cardiff, Wales, and John Prichard and J. P. Seddon's Llandaff Cathedral, including stained glass windows by Morris and Burne-Jones and Sir William Goscombe John's statue of James Rice Buckley. Next follow a series on Waterhouse's Lloyds Bank in Cambridge and Edward Buckton Lamb's St. Simon and St. Jude.
David Humphreys, who writes, "when I teach the concept of the self-fulfilling prophecy, I use your image of Pygmalian(sic) and Galatea," kindly corrected the spelling in Gérome's painting to "Pygmalion." Normand Theriault e-mailed to let us know that the image of Tennyson's family tree had gone missing, and GPL replaced the corrupted image. Thanks. On 28 September the site has 42, 551 documents.
August 2009
George Landow spent most of the first two weeks of the month scanning, proofing, formatting, converting notes, and linking the first two chapters of Janet Larson's Dickens and the Broken Scripture, one of the most difficult such web conversions he'd ever done. He also mined Little Dorrit for Dickens's description of the India Docks and his views of the transformative power of Victorian railways and his dislike of medievalism on both aesthetic and political grounds.
As part of his work on Barnard's illustrations of Dickens, Philip Allingham contributed "The best of all Dickens illustrators:" A 1908 Review of A Dickens Picture Book" that summarizes late-Victorian views of the novelists's illustrators. He also sent in scans of a Barnard illustration that accompanied this review and another of George Cruikshank's The Ragged School, Smithfield, which contribution prompted GPL to create a sitemap and bibliography for ragged schools.
Jacqueline Banerjee contributed a review of a new book on London's Changing Riverscape, by Charles Craig and others, also adding photographs and accompanying discussions of Wapping Pier, London, E1, the West India Docks, Chamberlain's Wharf., Metropolitan Wharf, Columbia Wharf, and Oliver's Wharf to our new section on industrial architecture.
Next, she sent in photos and commentaries for monuments and memorial sculptures, including Robert Smirke's Wellington Monument, Goscombe John's Memorial to the Engine Room Heroes in Liverpool, the text for the Port Sunlight Memorial near Liverpool, and the Bellot memorial in Greenwich, by Philip Hardwick (which addition occasioned a great deal of reorganizing of the Hardwick family's index by GPL). She also added photographs of Thornycroft's Alfred the Great, and she and GPL added John Stankey's photographs and discussions of the following sculptures by Thomas Brock: Thomas Hughes, Gladstone, Brigadier General John Nicholson, Sir Rowland Hill, Sir Isaac Pitman, and Edwin Austin Abbey. To close out the month JB sent in and essay and 15 photographs of St. Fin Barre's Cathedral in Cork, Ireland, and following her two near-perfect templates GPL created the last 13 htmls.
Michael Philips, who wrote to inform us that he "produce[s] video guides of buildings and landmarks for www.iGuidez.com," invited us to link to his 120 videos of Belfast, such as this one for Lavery's Pub. Henry Reichold writes to inform readers of the Victorian Web about his detailed view of the Albert Memorial.
Ruth Howard, Curator, Vale and Downland Museum, writes for permission to use Dicky Doyle's The Battle of Ashdown that serves as an illustration in Tom Hughes's The Scouring of the White Horse. Magnús Einarsson write from Iceland for permission to use Tenniel's illustrations for the Alice books in "a sociology textbook" he is writing "for students in secondary school." (Some others also wrote for permission, which was denied, to use our materials for commercial purposes, in large part because we do not want the Victorian Web to compete with for-profit sources of images.
A young man named Todd wrote to "thank you for your Victorian Web website. My teachers touched on the Industrial Revolution as part of our history classes but for some reason or another they didn't explain how truly grim those times were." You're most welcome!
Brad Henry writes to point out that "In the opening sentence of your introductory article, 'this' century should of course be 'the last.' A common error among those of a certain age . . . (and of which I am one, so no offence intended)." None taken . . . and thanks. A quite grumpy Denis Green wrote to point out multiple typos in a scanned document — it seems the wrong version might have gone online erasing the proofread one. Michael Wyman writes with corrections to our essay on toy theatres and a citation to Google Books. Nancy Koester, Ph.D., writes to correct information about Annie Field. Thanks to all.
On August 31 theVictorian Web had 41,969 documents.
July 2009
Since both George Landow and Jacqueline Banerjee were on cruise ships during the last week of June — Banerjee on a cruise around the UK and Landow making his way from Nice to Paris by way of the River Rhône from Arles to Avignon, Lyons, and Tournon — little new material went online, but both took many photographs. GPL added a series of 10 photographs of Lyon's gothic revival Basilica de Notre Dame de Fourvière and its sculpture and another six of l'Église Saint-Ambroise in Paris. After finding two fifteenth-century sculptural allusions to Genesis 3:15's "bruising the serpent's head" in Viviers, he added them to the religion section under typology and created a new sitemap for that image so important to Hopkins and Browning. Similarly after coming upon Paul Auscher's 1904 Felix Potin Building on the Rue de Rennes in Paris, he added it to the section on Art Nouveau architecture and then created a new sitemap for it.
GPL's second visit in less than a year to the magnificent Musée d'Orsay — yes, a dirty job but someone's got to do it — added to the material on Art Nouveau design, including three examples of Hector Guimard's ironwork, another of his wooden chimney surround plus furniture by Van de Velde, Biegas, and Eckmann, and a wonderfully goth belt buckle featuring a bat.
After the Dutch architect and architectural theorist Lars Spuybroek kindly sent along a copy of his The Architecture of Continuity (Rotterdam, 2008), GPL, who is in the process of writing a brief essay on Spuybroek as a twenty-first-century Neo-Ruskinian, composed "Lars Spuybroek on the principles of Art Nouveau, " "Why Art Nouveau 'had to be short-lived'," and "Gaudí led the gothic away from revivalism."
JB's first July contribution took the form of identifying one of GPL's photographs taken a few years ago as Edinburgh's Buccleuch and Geyfriars Free Church of Scotland. Next came new photographs of Goscombe John's Edward VII and John Gibson's Suffer Little Children to Come to Me plus a new work by Gibson — his monument to Margaret Sandbach. Other works of sculpture include Joseph Durham's Florizel and Perdita and his Monument to Prince Albert overlooking the harbour, St Peter Port, Guernsey, which last contribution prompted GPL to put up his photograph of the original cast, which stands on a much more elaborate base near Royal Albert Hall; he then reorganized the Durham home page. She also sent in photographs on Francis Derwent Wood's Psyche and Fiametta and Sir William Goscombe John's William Edward Hartpole Lecky, M.P. and J. H. Foley's O'Connell Monument, plus a series of photographs of Fowler and Baker's Forth Bridge in Scotland accompanied by an essay. Let us not forget her series on the wonderful Glasgow School of Art!
JB's additions to the architecture section include 14 photographs of St. Matthew's Church on Guernsey and accompanying essay, St. John the Baptist and St. Augustine Church in Dublin, St. Colman's Cathedral in Cobh, Ireland, the Campanile at Trinity College, Dublin
On Fiammetta and half a dozen other photographs Ruth M. Landow, a new contributor, used her Photoshop skills to remove distracting backgrounds. Thanks!
Frank M. Turner, the John Hay Whitney Professor of History at Yale and the Director of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, contributed a long, detailed, and very favorable review of Shanyn Fiske's Heretical Hellenism: Women Writers, Ancient Greece, and the Victorian Popular Imagination. Jessica Courtney contributed "The development of the English language following the Industrial Revolution," which GPL formatted and edited. Thanks to Dr. Catherine Watts, Principal Lecturer, School of Language, Literature and Communication, University of Brighton, for recommending this essay.
Christina Beardsley, whose biography of F. W. Robertson the Lutterworth Press (UK) will publish, offered additional information and a correction that GPL added to our biography of the famous Anglican minister. Thanks!
Dr. Albrecht Geck, Privatdozent at the University of Osnabrück, Germany, wrote for permission to use our scan of Eastlake's drawing of Tom Tower, Oxford, for his book Authority and Faith "on the correspondence between Pusey and Tholuck," which Vandenhöck & Ruprecht in Göttingen will publish this September. Casey Reas of UCLA Design Media Arts writes to request permission to use "your photo of a Jacquard Loom" in FORM + CODE in Design, Architecture, and Art, which Princeton Architectural Press will publish in September.
By the 27th the site had 41,817 documents.
June 2009
After Jacqueline Banerjee sent in a photograph of a London-built hansom cab, pointing out that we had no sitemap for transportation, Landow created one, added his own photo of the York-London mail coach, and created a sitemap entitled "Omnibuses, Coaches, Carriages, and Other Horse-Drawn Vehicles," to which he linked four documents containing passages in which coaches play a significant role from Dickens's Pickwick Papers, Martin Chuzzlewit, and Bleak House.
Philip Allingham completed most of the task of scanning all 61 plates and related images of Fred Barnard's illustrations of David Copperfield and creating HTML documents for each plate: Allingham scanned all the images, GPL resized, straightened, and otherwise adjusted each image and also created an HTML template, which PVA then filled out. Extensive commentaries come next!
JB, who reviewed of The Statues of London, by Claire Bullus and Ronald Asprey, sent in some images of more recent sculptures as well as those of Stephen Poyntz Denning's painting entitled Queen Victoria, Aged 4, Sir John Steell's sculpture of Allan Ramsay, The Hub, Edinburgh, which has a Pugin spire; the National Portrait Gallery; and Burlington House in Piccadilly. JB sent in Punch cartoons on the subjects of bicyclists and the exclusion of women from universities.
She did not neglect London: the site now boasts new photographs of and essays about London's Old Bailey plus Frederick W. Pomeroy's two sculptures for it: Fortitude and Truth flanking a recording angel above the City of London Arms, and Justice.
JB also continued her series of photographs of Liverpool architecture and sculpture and accompanying essays, including those for with several on St. George's Hall, The Picton Reading Room, The Walker Art Gallery.and The William Brown Library and Museum (now the World Museum). The additions from Liverpool to the sculpture section include bas reliefs on the façade of St. George's Hall by Conrad Dressler and Thomas Stirling Lee, and John Warrington Wood's three works for the Walker Art Gallery — Michelangelo, Raphael, Queen Victoria visiting Liverpool in 1851.
Dr Neil S. Sturrock, Vice-Chairman CIBSE Heritage Group, kindly shared with us a great deal of new material on building services engineering, including a history of St. George's Hall and a heavily illustrated essay, "David Boswell Reid's Ventilation of St. George's Hall, Liverpool" (the world's first air-conditioned building) and others on Reid, including a biography and a study of his work on the Houses of Parliament. GPL then created sitemaps for both St. George's and this pioneering engineer.
Emily Doran writes from the Royal Academy of Arts in London to announce J. W. Waterhouse: the Modern Pre-Raphaelite, an exhibition running from 27 June to 13 September.
Annette Magid writes to invite papers for her Wilde session at the 2010 Northeast Modern Language Association meeting in Montreal
Eleanor Scoones, Assistant Producer at Silver River (an independent television production company in London making a new 4-part series on the history of the Grand Tour for Channel 4), wrote for — and obtained — permission to use GPL's photograph of the frieze on the Athenaeum Club: "We will be filming at the Parthenon in Greece and whilst there we would like Kevin McCloud to refer to a small black and white print of the photograph as he explains that the AthenaeumÕs frieze was copied from the Parthenon."
Angela Hazelton writes to point out that the url for one of our external links to material about the Great Exhibition had changed. Jennifer Green similarly points out that the link to a Carnegie-Mellon site on feminism no longer works and suggested another instead. Amanda Bierly wrote while I was on the way to Avignon that a typo in Terpening's biography of Richard Strauss gave an incorrect date. Thanks!
May 2009
Your webmaster created a sitemap for cultural institutions in London and edited a number of student essays for the site, including David Goff's "On Process and Persistence: Visions of Time in Pre-Raphaelite and Decadent Works," Olivia Harding's essay about fantasy ("The Ordinary and The Extraordinary"), Matthew Surka's "Pip Learns to Reject the Goddess of Getting On," "Surprizes and Surprizers in Great Expectations and Jane Eyre, " and "Celebrity, the Victorian Audience, Dickens, and Ruskin," Elizabet Piette's "London in Wilde and Dickens," "Life in Nineteenth-Century Prisons as a Context for Great Expectations," and Brian Alexander's "'Breach of Promise of Marriage': Miss Havisham and a late-Victorian lawsuit." After Joshua Vogel pointed out a broken link in the Freud section, I fixed it and reformatted the entire section.
As of the 25th, the site contained 41,325 documents and images.
Philip Allingham continued writing extended commentary on the illustrations by Phiz for Nicholaus Nickleby, and he also added an essay on Phiz's thirtieth plate for Martin Chuzzlewit.
Jacqueline Banerjee added "Women's Religious Orders in Victorian England," and she and GPL wrote "The Conventual Life and Victorian Culture." She also provided photographs of No. 17, Park Village West in Camden, London, which first housed these sisterhoods. In addition, she created a series of photographs and accompanying essays aboout items related to Crystal Palace Park in south-east London — eight of the Italian Terraces, three more of the Dinausaur Court, and another three of Woodington's bust of Sir Joseph Paxton. Next, JB provided photographs and text for Waterhouses's North Western Hotel and a discussion of the accompanying Lime Street Station, Liverpool, as well as the Crystal Palace Station in SE London.
Marie O'Brien, Collections Manager of the Saco Museum in Maine kindly provided a photograph of part of H. C. Selous's panorama illustrating Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. John Sankey shared with us a list of Brock's sculpture.
Luca Garuti, who is currently "studying at the University of Verona, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literature," kindly e-mailed to point out that the documents for plates 6 & 7 in F. G. Kitton's illustrations of Dickens's The Mystery of Edwin Drrod had different text but the same image. Thanks!
April 2009
As of the 27th, the server tells me that we have 41,040 documents. Your webmaster spent much of the month preparing student work for the site and reorganizing and adding to the Beardsley section after receiving Yelena Primorac's "Illustrating Wilde: An examination of Aubrey Beardsley's interpretation of Salome."
Jacqueline Banerjee added two bas-reliefs at the foot of Nelson's Column: Woodington's The Battle of the Nile, and Watson and Woodington's The Battle of Cape St Vincent plus the Lewis Vulliamy's façade at the Royal Institution.
Pascal Debout of the Institut Charles Darwin International in Metz, Franz, writes to announce a Charles Darwin exhibition at the Park of Bagatelle in Paris from 29 May to the end of October 2009. Simon Cooke, who wrote his doctoral thesis on Henry Courtney Selous, contributed enough material to create an entire section for this important illustrator, including more than a dozen plates, biography, and a series of essays.
David Goff contributed A Mirror for Salome: Beardsley's The Climax, Athena's Gaze: Klimt and the Divine Artist, and "The Laws of Artifice: Aesthetic and Ego in Against the Grain." Steven De Luccia contributed Body as Metaphor in Dowson's "Nuns of the Perpetual Adoration", Mortality and Modernity Invade the Landscape [in Klinger's etchings]," and "Straddling the Margins of Society."
Mo Heard announces a 2010 essay contest on the subject of the magic lantern, shadow theatre, optical philosophical toys, panoramas, and dioramas.
Tony Willicombe of Penarth, Wales writes to remind us that Alfred Russel Wallace was a Welsh rather than an English naturalist. Trevor Brock, the minister of Great Victoria Street Baptist Church in Belfast, writes to correct the misidentification of photos of St. Patricks's Roman Catholic Church, and Paisley Mann writes to let correct a date in the DuMairier section. A reader identified only as Ferdi points out a typo in a date. Anne Rawkstar write from Malaysia to correct the Malay names of buildings in Kuala Lumpur. Thanks!
March 2009
The month began with 40, 572 documents on the site and ended with 40851 — these numbers thaks to Aloysius Tay Wee Kwok, IT Manager, University Scholars Programme at National University of Singapore, who kindly configured the main server to send weekly reports. George P. Landow and his students have created an annotated version of Carlyle's "Signs of the Times."
Phlip Allingham continues his commentaries on Copping's illustrations to Dickens's works.
Jacqueline Banerjee reviews Jeremy Paxman's The Victorians: Britain through the Paintings of the Age (2009) and the new third edition of Macmillan's London Encyclopaedia. In addition, she provides a series of photographs and commentaries on Morris's Red House and on the Palm House in Sefton Park, Liverpool, and a commentary on Richard Dadd's The Fairy-Feller's Master-Stroke. Her continuing work on sculpture includes a biography of Baron Henri-Joseph-François de Triqueti plus several of his sculptures, Flaxman's statue of Robert Burns, the Coade Lion on Westminster Bridge, new photographs of Gilbert's Queen Alexandra Memorial plus photographs and information about two works in London's Royal Insitution — J. H. Foley's statue of Michael Faraday and Thomas Woolner's medallion of John Tyndall.
Dr Hilary Grimes wrotes from Edinburgh Napier University to announce a new Robert Louis Stevenson Website. Deepti Kapoor writes suggesting linking to his site, which contains information of Jewish and Christian notions of passover as context for Rossetti's watercolor of that subject. Evelyn Rosenthal provided photographs of Teulon's St Stephen's Church, and Phil Beauchamp allowed us to use his photographs of George Heywood Sumner's sgraffiti in St Mary's Church, Sunbury.
David Goff contributed, "Burne-Jones and the Divine Unity," a discussion of one of Burne-Jone's late designs for a stained-glass nativity, "Companions for the Soul: Solitude and Kinship in [Christina Rossetti's] "The Thread of Life," and "Time and its Relics: Dante Rossetti's 'The Burden of Nineveh.'" Stephen Deluccia wrote "Setting, Perspective, and Context in The Annunciation, St Margaret's Church, Rottingdean," and Christina Rossetti's fragmentation of self
Rev. Simon Wooodley, the current rector of Bemerton, George Herbert's parish, writes to correct the spelling of the town in Dyce's painting of the poet in his garden there. Thanks!
February 2009
George P. Landow adapted several chapters from Gertrude Jekyll's works, including several dozen photographs, to create material on technology in the home, including Rushlight: How the Country Poor Lit Their Homes, The Evolution of the Fireplace, What the housewife used to cook meals: fireplace hangers, pot cranes, fire and cup dogs, tongs and other implements plus a section on rural working-class housing with an essay, "Cottages and Farms, especially in Old West Surrey." In addition, he created a section in photography containing a selection of her work in that medium plus several articles adapted from her writing about agricultural labor: ""From Hand Labour to Machine Work in agriculture": Work and New technologies in the Victorian Era," "Harvesting Corn," "Dibbles, Flails, and Wooden Ploughs," and "Country Occupations: Mowers, Sawyers, Cider-Makers, Copse-Cutters, Hurdle-Makers, Heath-Turf Cutters."
Philip V. Allingham scanned, partially formatted, and wrote the introduction and captions for both 14 illustrations Harry C. Edwards created for the American publication of Hardy's "Mastr John Horseleigh, Knyght" and the 30 illustrations Harold Copping created for Dickens's works.
Jacqueline Banerjee began the month by contributing Godfrey Sykes's monument to William Mulready at Kensal Green cemetery and Sir John Steell's bust of Florence Nightingale, as well as some more work on the public sculpture of Liverpool: Charles Bell Birch's sculptures of Major-General Earle and Disraeli, Sir Thomas Brock's Gladstone Memorial, Sir George Frampton's memorial statues for Canon Thomas Major Lester, Sir Arthur B. Forwood, and William Rathbone, Albert Bruce-Joy's Alexander Balfour, and Frederick William Pomeroy's Mgr. James Nugent and replicas in Liverpool of two famous London statues — Sir Alfred Gilbert's Eros and Frampton's Peter Pan.
Her contributions to the architecture section include a series on Liverpool: The Albert Dock and its Traffic Office (soon to be the home of the International Slavery Museum Research Institute and Education Centre) along with Gladstone's birthplace and other houses in Rodney Street, Liverpool.
Derek B. Scott, Professor of Critical Musicology at the University of Leeds, sent in his performance of "Ben Bolt," the song Trilby sings in DuMaurier's novel of that name. Anna Twomey sends in a description of her research on "the culture of working-class autodidacts," asking readers of VW for any suggestions (her e-mail address appears in her project description).
Students in Landow's courses at Brown University created several dozen essays and questions sets for George MacDonald's Phantastes and Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. David Goff contributed "Stopped in Motion: The Individual in Egg's Travelling Companions, "Truth and Falsehood in Ruskin's Modern Painters," and "Time and its Relics: Dante Rossetti's 'The Burden of Nineveh'" while Stephen DeLucia contributed "The interplay of form and content in 'The Palace of Art'" and "Symbolism Prefiguring Typology in The Girlhood of Mary."
Some time ago Vara Neverow sent along a copy of her Harcourt edtion of Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room, which used several of our images. Julie F. Codell, Professor of Art at Arizona State University, writes to report a batch of bad links that her students encountered in the list of Pre-Raphaelite associates. Thanks!
The month ended with 40,572 documents on site.
January 2009
George P. Landow began the month by sending an updated copy of the site to our mirror at Nagoya University, Japan, which Professor Mitsu Matsuoka has administered for the past few years. By the 26th 40,026 documents resided on the site. Some news related to the Victorian Web: After your webmaster decided to take offline its sister site, Postcolonial Literature and Culture www.postcolonialweb.org, Professor Yew Kong Leong [lyew at nus.edu.sg] volunteered to run the site on servers to which he has access. Those university teachers from Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United States who kindly wrote when the site disappeared will be very grateful. Thanks Leong!
GPL, prompted by the new section on Gertrude Jekyll (see below), used several of her books, including Old West Surrey (1904), to create long-needed material on housing for the rural working classes ("Cottages and Farmhouses"), rural clothing, including documents with Jekyll's photographs of the countryman's smock, countrywomen's headgear, and pattens, footwear to raise one above the mud. Hannah B. Higgins sends along a copy of her new The Grid Book (MIT Press), which contains GPL's photograph of a Jacquard loom.
Philip Allingham contributes a brief essay to accompany Fred Barnard's Mrs. Gamp, on the Art of Nursing, an illustration to Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit, plus commentaries on two illustrations of the same novel by Phiz. He also wrote a detailed discussion of the wrapper for serial issues of David Copperfield, examining how Phiz created his pictorial introduction to a novel about about which the novelist had uncharacteristically told him very little.
Jacqueline Banerjee sent in multiple photographs of Thomas Thornycroft's equestrian statues in Liverpool of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert; John Gibson's Suffer Little Children to Come to Me, Alexander Munro's bust of Josephine Butler accompanied by a biography of this important campaigner for women's rights, and Augustus Welby Pugin's gothic revival hall chair. Continuing her indefatigable proofreading, she caught a number of damaged images, errors, and inconsistencies.
Ray Sachs sent in the latest news on the Crystal Palace Campaign accompanied by both an 1864 plan of the park containing the palace plus a half dozen images of the master plans submitted to Bromley Council's Planning Development Committee. C. Aitchison Hull writes from the UK to notify our readers of her new site on the Victorian painter, Frederick Lee Bridell, and she also shared from her new book about Bridell a passage about the Anglo-American circle in Rome that included the Brownings. Vince Ciricola writes to let us know that his site to which his essay, "Sadi Carnot and the Conservation of Energy" links, has moved.
Christopher Arnander shared with us material about Gertrude Jekyll from his Jekyll Estate site, which enabled GPL to create a section for this painter, nature writer, and enormously influential garden designer to which which GPL added bibliographies and an essay, "Gertrude Jekyll's Word Painting."
Andrew Pinder, who writes from the U.K. to correct a factual error in the caption accompanying our photograph of Hangman's Cottage in the Hardy Gallery, also contributed an essay about the chronological setting of Hardy's "The Withered Arm, his views of capital punishment, and the Swing Riots of 1830" and The Dynasts: Dated, Durable, Defiant — A Performance Poet's Perspective.
Melisa Klimaszewski, Assistant Professor, Department of English, Drake University, and author of a forthcoming biography of Wilkie Collins, correctly identified the text inscribed on Holman Hunt's deathbed portrait of Charles Allston Collins as an edited excerpt from Charles' own A New Sentimental Journey (1859).
Dave Kruger points out a typo in Browning's "A Toccata of Galuppi's." Paula M. Krebs, Professor of English at Wheaton College, e-mailed with the information that two links in "Why did the British Empire expand so rapidly between 1870 and 1900?" had broken. Erl Johnston writes from Belfast to provide information about three Belfast buildings: he identifies one of our photographs as the former Diocesan Offices for the Church of Ireland designed by Lanyon, Lynn & Lanyon, points out that Samuel Stevenson designed the Technical Institution, and explains that it has been discovered that the Scottish Provident Institution is constructed of Glasgow Blonde sandstone. Thanks!
December 2008
The most important news of the month — indeed of the past several years — is that, despite long-standing promises from the university's outgoing president, the new administration of the National University of Singapore has stopped both funding and sponsoring the Victorian Web and its two sister sites. The disappearance of our Singapore server might reduce our hits by one third until readers use our main server in New York. The manually updated mirror in Nagoya, Japan, remains online, however.
Jacqueline Banerjee wrote a substantial three-part essay on Hans Christian Andersen and the Victorians, which includes "Hans Christian Andersen and His Victorian Translators," "The Power of "Faerie": Hans Christian Andersen as a Children's Writer," and "The Impact of Hans Christian Andersen on Victorian Fiction." She also contributed photographs and discussions of Woolner's statue of John Stuart Mill, Brock's statue of Millais, and a biography of S. S. Teulon and a photograph and discussion of his St. Stephen's, Hampstead; in addition, she wrote text to accompany images by others of both Teulon's Elvetham Hall, Hampshire, and St Mary's Church, Sunbury.
James A. W. Hefferan, the Frederick Sessions Beebe '35 Professor in the Art of Writing Emeritus, Dartmouth College, reviews James O'Rourke' Sex, Lies, & Autobiography: The Ethics of Confession. Michael Rectenwald, Ph.D., Master Teacher of Writing at New York University contributed two long essays related to Victorian science: "Darwin's Ancestors: The Evolution of Evolution" and "The Construction and Deconstruction of Science in Middlemarch." Gary William Crawford writes to announce his online peer-reviewed journal, Le Fanu Studies. Peter Nicolson from Australia writes to suggest we link to his poetry and culture site; and we now link to his material on Elgar.
John Wexler of Edinburgh points out that "the spelling-checker gremlin has managed to subvert 'Sohrab and Rustum': the word 'Knesset' appears twice in place of the word 'know'st' (or conceivably 'kenst')." ("Know'st" is in fact correct.) Thanks!
November 2008
The month began with your webmaster in Singapore and Dr. Banerjee just back from Central Europe, and together, beginning with her essay entitled, "The Gothic Revival in Central European Architecture," they created a series of several dozen photo documents on St Vitus Cathedral in Prague and Budapest's Parliament House, Church of St. Matthias, and the Fisherman's Bastion. Next, GPL, who serves on the editorial board of the UK-based online journal Neo-Victorian Studies, created a section on this subject largely based on materials about relevant works of A. S. Byatt, Peter Carey, Jean Rhys, and Graham Swift that formerly resided in The Postcolonial and Postimperial Literature and Culture site (www.postcolonialweb.org), which I have taken offline, plus a few new ones about Michael Cox and Jasper Fforde. As of 31 November, the site had 39,743 documents, the increase of more than 500 due in large part to this migration of Neo-Victorian materials from the sister site.
Jacqueline Banerjee wrote "A Marvellous Man," a long, important review of Rosemary Hill's God's Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain. She also sent in scans of illustrations from the appendix of the 1872 edtion of Eastlake's A History of the Gothic Revival, including the interior of Butterfield's All Saints, Margaret Street, William Burges's Warehouse on Thames Street, London and his unexecuted design for a fountain plus Philip Speakman Webb's Worship Street row of shops. In addition, she contributed photos and documents for Sir Arthur Blomfield's St. Alban's Church in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Savi Munjal from the University of Delhi sent in a second contribution — Taming Heterotopia — The Spatio-Temporal Politics of Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton.
Brad Fruhauff writes from Loyola University in Chicago to notify us about two bad links in the Bleak House section, one created by the disappearance of an external site and another by my reformatting Johnson's book on Dickens. Douglas Golding, a guide at St Andrew's cathedral, Sydney, writes to correct the misidentification of St Mary's catholic cathedral as St Andrew's. Marion Durnin, a research student at Trinity College Dublin, pointed out that Samuel Carter Hall's reminiscences of Macaulay were mistakenly credited to his wife. Thanks!
October 2008
Funny how things come in pairs! immediately after I received an e-mail from Annie Pasqua, who wrote the music, lyrics, and libretto of Tess The New Musical, which has its own website, James Hyland wrote from London that he "will be performing in a new stage version of Hard Times (which [he] jointly adapted and devised from the novel by Charles Dickens) at the Warehouse Theatre, London (adjacent to East Croydon Train Station) from Friday 24th October to Sunday 16th November [more information including the production's website].
Your webmaster's travels to Singapore (where he gave a talk on The Victorian Web) and Vietnam produced interesting comparative materials, including series on both Saigon's 1886 Buu Dien Thanh-Pho [City Post Office] for the section on iron and glass and J. Bourad's Cathedral of Notre-Dame for that on the Gothic Revival. His weeks in Singapore allowed him to photograph (or rephotograph) a series of buildings embodying colonial versions of both Gothic and Classical Revivals: Classicism in the Straits Colonies appears, for example, in Raffles Hotel (where Kipling, Conrad, and Maugham stayed), the Singapore Cricket Club, Stamford House, the Singapore National Museum, Asian Civilizations Museum (formerly Government Offices), Old Parliament House, Victoria Memorial Hall (includes Old Town Hall), and even the characteristicaly Singaporean architectural form of the shophouse. St. Andrews Cathedral and the chapel of the former Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus, on the other hand, represent the Gothic Revival, and Lau Pa Sat Festival Market a rare surviving example of elaborate colonial iron-and-glass architecture.
Jacqueline Banerjee contributes a long, detailed essay on styles in domestic architecture before setting off for Eastern Europe. Before she did so she sent in a series on The Conservative Club.
Patrick Nicholas writes from Orvieto, Italy, to correct a typo in the Wilde section. Thanks! We ended the month with 39,050 documents.
September 2008
Your webmaster, who voyaged to Porto, Portugal, to deliver the keynote address about this site — "When a Wiki is not a Wiki: Twenty Years of the Victorian Web" — at a computer science conference, WikiSym2008, encountered several buildings of Victorian interest, including the Livraria Chardron, a three-floor bookshop with a gothic revival decorative scheme inside and out, and an equally amazing railway station that abuts directly against a mountain! A visit to Paris on the way home produced photographs of the another structure originally built to serve as a railroad station, Musée d'Orsay — formerly the Gare d'Orsay; these pictures include the iron-and-glass roof and exterior sculpture. Photographs of works at the d'Orsay and one of Guimard's famous entrances to the Paris Métro led to creating a new section on Art Nouveau, which includes not only links to the older sections for both jewelry and metalwork but also new ones on European architecture, including Antoni Gaudí's famous Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Famila and Casa Milà "La Pedrera," and his city park plus Puig i Cadafalch's Casa Ametller (all in Barcelona), a series on Osvald Polivka and Antonin Balšánek's Municipal Building in Prague and buildings in Budapest; the works from Prague and Budapest had earlier appeared in the section on British and European Aesthetes, Decadents, and Symbolists, to which links to the Art Nouveau sitemap and bibliographical items have been added. The Art Nouveau section also includes new material on furniture and interior design, such as François-Ruper Carabin's elaborate sculptural bookcase and Pierre-Adrien Dalpayrat Mantelpiece. We ended the month with 38,662 documents and images, according to the automatic script created by Aloysius Tay Wee Kok for our server.
Philip Allingham, who has contributed somewhat less than usual these last few months because he has been finishng his book on illustraton, sent in seven lovely photographs of Mai Dun Hill Fort [Maiden Castle], Dorset, and an accompanying essay explaining how Hardy alludes to this landscape in The Mayor of Casterbridge. He followed these Hardy-related photographs with two each of Hangman's Cottage and Maumbury Rings, Dorchester.
Jacqueline Banerjee contributed a good deal of material on Victorian architecture, including photographs and accompanying essays for several country houses: Pugin's Scarisbrick Hall in Lancashire and Albury Park in Surrey, Chartwell in Kent, Polesden Lacey in Surrey, and Wotton House also in Surrey. In addition, she wrote five important general essays: "The Great Housing Boom," "Country Houses," "Homes in the City and Suburbs, "Architectural Trades and Professions," and "Architectural Books, and Professional and Trade Journals" plus Gordon Square, Bloomsbury." Next, she created a series of essays and photographs about Bedford Park, London, an early version of the garden suburb, by Richard Norman Shaw, and E. J. May, and others, including homes, The Tabard Inn, St Michael and All Angels, and Martin Travers's stained glass St Michael slaying the dragon over the City.
Dr. Linda Wilson, Tutor, Open Theological College, University of Gloucestershire, provided enough materials on Marianne Farningham (1834-1909) to create a new section for this religious novelist.
Thanks to Benedict Heal of Newport Pagnell, Bucks., for pointing out a broken link in the sitemap for C. R. Ashbee and to Russell Perkin, Professor of English, Saint Mary's University, Halifax, N.S., Canada, for suggested that we include Thackeray in the list of famous Victorians who attended English public schools since his attendance was alrady mentioned in the Dr.Banerjee's "The Public School Experience in Victorian Literature."
August 2008
Thanks to Erin Sinesky Lovett of W. W. Norton, who sent along an advance copy of Michael Cox's The Glass of Time — a real page turner in the form of a Neo-Victorian sensation novel that GPL quickly read and reviewed. GPL also reformatted E. D. H. Johnson's The Alien Vision of Victorian Poetry as well as most of the Previctorian section of the site.
Philip Allingham wrote a biographical introduction for Archibald Standish Hartrick, who illustrated Thomas Hardy's "A Changed Man."
Jacqueline Banerjee contributed more photographs and essays on Cambridge, including a series on the the screen wall, King's College by William Wilkins and Sir George Gilbert Scott's St John's College Chapel and Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, whose restoration by Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc inspired Scott. The amount of material on this university prompted GPL to create a new sitemap for it.
Dick Sullivan contributed "Matthew Arnold, "The Scholar Gipsy," and the Cumnor Hills."
David Page, Editor of the Kipling Journal, writes to announce the site's "New Readers' Guide to the works of Rudyard Kipling" and to inform readers of Victorian Web about "our searchable text-only archive of the Kipling Journal (other than the latest eight issues). Our Society recently decided to make this archive available to everyone, rather than just to members."
July 2008
This month ended with the site containing 38,112 files, having begun with 37,948 and your webmaster in Porto, Portugal, where he gave the opening talk at a one-day conference about wikis. While exploring the city's extraordinarily steep hilly streets, he came upon the Mercado do Bolhão, an example of nineteenth-century iron-and-class architecture. After adding some photographs of this market to our collection of British examples, GPL reorganized the sitemap for iron-and-class structures. The Maas Gallery catalogue for the 2008 summer exhibition provides images of works by many artists, some new to the site, such as Joseph Mosley Barber, Hercules Brabazon Brabazon, Charles Herbert Goetze, Henry Moore, Augustus Edwin Mulready, Maud Naftel, Emily Stannard, and George Winchester, as well as those whose works have already appeared here, including engravings by Herkomer, Head of a Man by Frederick Sandys, Saving of a Soul by James Smetham.
Jacqueline Banerjee began the month with a series of photographs and accompanying essays on sculpture, including H. H. Armstead's Founder's Fountain at King's College, Cambridge, E. H. Baily's William Wilkins, William Theed's Bust of an Unknown Woman, Richard Westmacott's William Pitt, and R. J. Wyatt's The Nymph Ino and the Infant Bacchus. Later she sent in the beginnings of a new series on the University of Cambridge, including several on George Basevi's Fitzwilliam Museum and Waterhouse's Red Building and college library at Pembroke College, as well as Pomeroy's Cromwell at St. Ives and Madingley Hall, a sixteenth-century English country house in Cambridgeshire extensively reconstructred by J. A Gotch, brother of the symbolist painter. Victorian restoration, here Gilbert Scott's, also provided the point of interest in her nine images of Ely Cathedral. She also compared brickwork on William Tite's Windsor & Eton Riverside Station, Datchet Road, Windsor, with the brickwork on the brick diapering on the Bishop's Palace at Ely.
Andrew Churchill and Tamsin Williams of the Watts Gallery, write with the welcome news that "the 3rd Watts Symposium will take place on 26 and 27 February 2009 at Guildhall, London and St Paul's Cathedral, and the Maas Gallery generously sent a beautiful catalogue along with their announcement of the summer exhibition it accompanied. Lexi Stuckey, MA candidate, University of Central Oklahoma, contributed a biographical introduction for Anna Eliza Bray, a cousin of Christina Rossetti who wrote novels and books on folklore. Dick Sullivan contributed two of his characteristically thoughtful essays — Matthew Arnold and the Twenty-first Century and Cardinal Newman and The Dream of Gerontius. Matt McGuire sent in a commentary on Thackeray's decorative initial P for Chapter 4.
Brad Fruhauff, Loyola University Chicago, notified your webmaster about broken links. Helen Small of Pembroke College, Oxford, writes to point out that in one essay Mary Elizabeth Braddon has somehow become Margaret Elizabeth Braddon! David Wilson writes from Switzerland to correct a few howlers in a discussion of Morris's "The Tune of Seven Towers." Richard J. L. Senior, a dscendant of Edwin Chadwick, wrote to correct an erroroneous date. Thanks to these attentive readers!
June 2008
Your webmaster spent the first ten days of the month adding photographs and text from Robert Bowman's Sir Alfred Gilbert and the New Sculpture, the catalogue of an exhibition that opened on 4 June at the Fine Art Society, London. This treasure trove of Victorian sculpture contained images of works not previously in The Victorian Web, such as Albert Toft's Maternity, Alfred Gilbert's Watts, Alfred Drury's Elsie Doncaster, Edgar Bertram Mackennal's Truth, Thomas Brock's Frederick, Lord Leighton, Kathleen Scott, Baroness Kennet's Laus Deo, Hamo Thornycroft's Warrior Bearing a Wounded Youth from the Field of Battle, The Bather, and The Stone Thrower plus new information and superior photographs of works already on site, such as Gilbert's magnificent St. George, Comedy and Tragedy, Icarus, An Offering to Hmen, and works by other sculptors (Dick, Onslow Ford, Leighton,Thornycroft).
Philip V. Allingham contributed "Michael Faraday's Popular Science Lectures, Percival Leigh, and Charles Dickens: Science for the Masses in Household Words (1850-51)" plus transcribing two of Leigh and Dickens's popularizations of the great scientist's lectures: "The Laboratory in the Chest" and "The Chemistry of a Candle."
Jacqueline Banerjee created several series of photographs and accompanying documents about Knightsbridge buildings that exemplify the dominant style of upscale domestic architecture in the 1880s and '90s, including eight of J. J. Stevenson's buildings on Pont Street, six of H. A. Peto and E. George's 52, Cadogan Square, and a Norman Shaw-like mansion block, as well a series on the mid-century row houses on Chalcot Square She also added introductions to Peto and George and wrote an essay on that popular combination of Queen Anne and Netherlandish architecture known as Pont Street Dutch.
Dick Sullivan continues his series of essays on The Persistence of the Victorians: Things Remembered and Things Forgot with "Vaughan Williams and The Lark Ascending," "The Last of the Victorians:June 2008," "Laurence Binyon (1869-1943)," "Sir Edwin Landseer Lutyens OM (1989-1944." Gordon D. S. Maddock, an Old Blundellian himself, contributed plans of Old Blundell's School to the Blackmore gallery.
May 2008
May began with 36,825 documents and images on the site; it increased to 37,456 by the 26th. After reading S. N. Behrman's delightful Portrait of Max, your webmaster contributed "Max on Music Halls," "Max Beerbohm creates a great fuss: the reaction to 'A Defence of Cosmetics,'" and a comparison containing parodies by both Punch and Lewis Carrol of a poem by Isaac Watts; he also added brief passages from Behrman on Beerbohm's caricatures, the Great MacDermott of music hall fame, and "Oscar Wilde's Arrogance."
Traveling to London to celebrate his forty-second wedding anniversary enabled your webmaster to meet with British contributors and with Jacqueline Banerjee, our U. K. editor. The sun shone — well, some of the time, thus is London, after all — permitting many photographs, including many of housing for rich and poor: the home on Cadgan Square that G. E. Street designed for himself as well as houses there by J. J. Stevenson and R. Norman Shaw. Other homes for the well-off include Philip Webb's for George Howard, a large Tudor Revival building in Herbert Crescent as well as several streets of high-end row houses, such as Palace Gardens Terrace, Belgrave Squuare, Cadogan Place, Flask Walk (Hampstead). Hampstead, which in Victorian times had a large working-class population, provided images of Willow Cottages, homes originally inhabited by watercress gatherers; The Flask, a local public house; and The Wells and Camden Wash Houses and Baths, which served whose homes had no running water. GPL also created a new sitemap for retail shops, arcades and other commercial buildings to which were linked photographs of B. Flegg, Saddle & Harness Maker and James Smith & Sons, the famous store for umbrellas and canes. He also began a new section on architectural sculpture, which thus far consists chiefly of a dozen bas reliefs, and several trips to the V&A produces images of works by Baily, Brock, Dalou, Gilbert, Stevens, Toft, Tweed, and Westmacott. In addition, GPL's walks around London produced photographs of statues of David Livingstone, Ernest H. Shackleton, and Robert Stephenson.
Philip Allingham sent in a portrait of Ruskin from the 1892 Illustrated London News, three plates for "To Please His Wife", and six for Hardy's "Wessex Folk."
Jacqueline Banerjee contributed a series of eight photographs and accompanying text about H. A. Darbishire's Holly Village, Highgate, North London created for Angela Georgina Burdett-Coutts as well; Sir James Pennethorne's 1832 houses in Park Village West; photographs of works by Burne-Jones, and additional details of Boehm's statue of Queen Victoria at Windsor. St George's Cathedral (Pugin), the Imperial War Museum (the old "Bedlam"), the New London Synagague, an essay on Victorian Judaism, and the a series on houses in Park Village houses, No. 1-7 by Charles Lee, James Pennethorne, John Nash, and his office.
Some additons to the new British and European Aesthetes, Decadents, and Symbolists materials: Ryan Wong contributed "Klinger, Symbolism and the Bizarre," Paul O'Leary McCann "Max Klinger's Incubus: The Dead Mother," and GPL created sections on Böcklin and Delville.
Don Harvey of Newport Beach, California, sent in several corrections for the text of Tennyson's "Ulysses." Susan A. Davi, Head, Collection Development, University of Delaware Library, corrected a misspelling on the list of Pre-Raphaelite web resources. The Reverend Ian Carmichael, Farmington Fellow, Harris Manchester College, Oxford, UK, corrected a real howler in the essay on William Whewell — two repeated paragraphs. Thanks!
April 2008
The month began with the site having grown to 35,819 documents. For his his seminar on Pre-Raphaelites, Aesthetes, and Decadents, your webmaster created a section on the paintings of Gustave Moreau, who is hardly a Victorian, and as part of that section he wrote an essay comparing this painter to the Pre-Raphaelites. At this point, GPL decided to enlarge the existing materials on the Aesthetes and Decadents, creating a new section on British and European Aesthetes, Decadents, and Symbolists that, since it no longer solely concerns English artists and writers, has a very different appearance than the rest of site with its green and yellow color scheme. To provide comparisons to British Victorian architecture, GPL also began a site on nineteenth-century American buildings, the first section of which comprises a half dozen styles of domestic architecture. [This link takes you to his favorite American Victorian home in Providence.]
The Huysmans project continued as Valerie Hsiung, who contributed "Baudelaire Bound by Naturalism in 'Metamorphoses of the Vampire'" created on annotations for plainsong and for the various exotic flowers to which Des Esseintes refers, including Cypripedium, Nepenthes, and Anthurium. She also wrote "In the Verge of the Unknown: Blackness, Space and Mood in Khnopff's In Fosset. An Evening." Paul O'Leary McCann created annotations for Fecamp Abbey and the Maurists as well as for various jewels mentioned in the text; Richard Stein, who wrote "The Decadent Greek Sphinx: Drtikol, Khnopff, Bernard, and von Stuck," provided notes on Saint Vincent de Paul and Rubens and The Feast of Herod, his verson of the Salome story. Seicha Turnbull wrote annotations for The Golden Ass of Apuleius and Paul Verlaine. Ryan Wong contributed annotations on Jan Luyken, a late seventeenth-century Dutch lithographer who life and work fascinated Hysman's protagonist, and The Psychomachia of Prudentius.
Jacqueline Banerjee reviewed Sybil Oldfield's Jeanie, an "Army of One": Mrs Nassau Senior, 1828-1877, The First Woman in Whitehall, and she also provided a biography of the illustrator Joseph Pennell (1857-1926) plus a dozen plates and commentaries from his series of drawings of London. She also contributed sets of photographs with commentary of Sir Joseph Edgar Boehm's bronze statue of Queen Victoria at Windsor and John Graham Lough's Stephenson Memorial, Newcastle.
Brian Elliott, webmaster of Christ Chuch in Esher, Surrey, sent in two photographs of the recently restored Walker organ, and Yaakov Eisenberg of New York corrected the transcription of James Clerk Maxwell's "Molecules." Antiquariaat Jan Meemelink, Den Haag ('s-Gravenhage ) The Netherlands, kindly permitted us to reproduce an 1855 plate of the Nepenthes to use as an illustration in the Hysmans project described above. Terry Scarborough, Professor of English, Okanagan College, Kelowna BC, Canada, contributed "Science or Séance?: Late-Victorian Science and Dracula's Epistolary Structure," and Matt Macguire, M. A. Candidate, Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England, sent in "The Retreated Narrator: Thackeray's Showman in Vanity Fair"
Dawn Carroll, E-Public Relations Officer for the National Museums Liverpool, writes to announce the Walker Art Gallery exhibition, Art in the Age of Steam, which includes Manet's The Railway (The Gare Saint-Lazare) and Egg's The Travelling Companions as well as many other major works; the exhibition runs from 18 April to 10 August 2008.
March 2008
Using Gimp (GNU Image Manipulation Program, free graphics software downloaded from the internet), your webmaster added blue skies to a few dozen architectural photographs in which the skies appeared whited out even though many of these images were made on sunny days. He also began the process of converting a web version of Sarah Cutts Frerichs's 1974 monograph on Elizabeth Missing Sewell, a High Church novelist and writer on women's education, for the inaugural Sarah Cutts Frerichs Lecture in Victorian Studies at Brown University's Cogut Center for the Humanities, which will take place on Tuesday, April 15, 2008. He added French and English versions of selected poems by Baudelaire to the materials on the Decadence.
Jacqueline Banerjee, who recently returned from India, sent in the first products of her travels — a life of A. O. Hume accompanied by photographs of the home of this graduate of the University of London who began as a colonial administrator and ended as founder of the Indian National Congress and famous ornithologist. She folowd this with "Home from Home: The Victorians in Simla," which are accompanied by a series of photographs of both landscape surroudning this summer capital of British India as well as Victorian buidings there: Christ Church, St. Michael's Cathedral, and Gaiety Theatre. Prompted by this new material, GPL reated a new section on British India, adding to the site material from the Postcolonial Web and images of landscape, buildings, people, and events from th New York Public Library site.
The month began with Dick Sullivan sending in an essay on John Clare, the Northamptonshire Peasant Poet, and "Sadness and Salvation: Six Victorian Poems," which begins with a discussion of one of Clare's poems. A few days later e-mail brought a review by Sharon Aronofsky Weltman of Oliver S. Buckton's Cruising with Robert Louis Stevenson: Travel, Narrative, and the Colonial Body. Rita Harris of Oxford has permited us to add her photographs and commentary about Margaret Giles's The Tortoise Boy (or Boy on a Tortoise). Tony Bentley wrote in with an explanation of the Duke of Wellington's original family name and to correct a statement about the number of children in his family.
Alpha S. from Shelton, Connecticut, writes to point out that contrary to the statement in the 1894 edition of his works, which is on this site, Edward Lear was the twentieth and not the twenty-first or twenty-one children. Bennie (BT) Robinson III writes to point out a typo. Thanks!
February 2008
The site has 35,409 documents and images as of 25 February. Charles L. Eastlake's A History of the Gothic Revival (1872), a treasure trove of information and beautiful images of architecture in this style, provided pictures and extensive commentary about churches and public buildings by James Brooks, William Butterfield, Benjamin Ferrey, George Goldie, A. W. N. Pugin. G. E. Street, and Alfred Waterhouse's Assize Courts, Manchester and New Buildings at Balliol College, Oxford The material added included not only churches but also country houses, such as those by William Burges, W. E. Nesfield's Cloverly Hall in Shropshire, J. L. Pearson's Quar Wood in Gloucestershire, W. Porden's Eaton Hall, J. Pritchard 's Eatington Park, Richard Norman Shaw's Leyes Wood in Sussex, A. Salvin's Scotney Castle, Sussex, W. White's Humewood in Ireland, and T. H. Wyatt's Orchardleigh Park in Somersetshire. Eastlake also provided entire chapters on Ruskin's importance and Pugin's biography, as well as shorter pieces on a range of relevant subjects, including Walter Scott's influence, the Gothic as a particularly functional style for domestic architecture, Barry and the Houss of Parliament. and material for an essay about the opposition to the style by both Evangelicals and Roman Catholics.
Judy Neiswander's e-mail about the Library of Congress's online collection of copyright-free images (see below) prompted GPL to create the html documents for numerous buildings and scenes, including Elmes and Cockerel's St George's Hall, Lime Street, Liverpool, Hardwick's Great Royal Western Hotel, Scott's restorations (Chester Cathedral, St Botolph's Church, Boston, Lincolnshire), Cambridge colleges (Jesus, St. John's), technology (water wheel, railways, windmill, steam paddlewheeler Boadiciea, and a steam tug towing a sailing ship), and resorts (Bath, Blackpool, Bognor, Brighton, Buxton, Herne Bay).
After GPL told Mark Bernstein, head of Eastgate Systems (www.eastgate.org — a firm with pioneerng hypertext and organization software), about the Library of Congress's online collection of copyright-free images, he suggested that the New York Public Library also had a site with much valuable visual materials, too, and he was certainly right! To begn with, GPL created two large sections of more than a dozen documents each of plates from the Audsley brothers' Polychromatic decoration as applied to buildings in the mediaeval styles and George Audsley and James Lord Bowes's Keramic Art of Japan — books with enormous value for study of the Medieval Revival and the Cult of Japan. The NYPL also provides images of British cavalry in India after the 1857 uprising and six images of British troops in the Crimean War, plus coats of arms of famous British public schools, such as those for Eton and Rugby, as well as various cities.
Philip Allingham provided materials to open a section on Eliza Lynn Linton, including an introduction to her life and works, a chronology, a list of the many periodicals in which she published, and a dozen illustrations by Arthur Hopkins for her novel, The Atonement of Leam Dundas. In addition, he completed a major project, scanning more than 60 illustrations by Fred Barnard of Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit and creating captions and commentaries.
Jacqueline Banerjee contributed three photographs of Joseph Durham's Matilda Fountain, and her multi-part essay on Victorian crime (accompanied by a photograph of Francis Galton's portable fingerprint kit and an illustration of hooligans from Walter Besant's East London) prompted the creation of a new section on crime in the age of Victoria. In addition, she provided photographs of George Gilbert Scott and Francis Skidmore's Hereford Screen (now in the V&A) and an essay on Skidmore, whose work she also identified on the Albert Memorial. Her other contributions involving works in the V&A include photographs and essays on Burne-Jones's tapestry Angeli Ministrante and glass panels, Penelope and Chaucer Asleep plus Rossetti's stained glass version of Wedding of St George and the Princess and Frampton's sculpture, Mother and Child. Other contributions include a photograph of a memorial plaque to the orientalist painter John Frederick Lewis in St. Mary's Church, Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, a memorial by Sir Francis Chantrey in the same church that enabled the creation of a section for a sculptor today perhaps best known for his gift to the Tate, and a 16-part collection of photographs and essays on Street's St James the Less, Westminster.
Judy Neiswander writes to inform readers of the Victorian Web that the Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Online Catalog is treasure trove of copyright-free images on all subjects. GPL and JB have already found more than a dozen late-nineteenth-century photographs of bridges, landmarks, and monuments. Dick Sullivan contributed "Some Thoughts on an Old Classic of English Studies: Mysticism in English Literature (1913) by Caroline F. E. Spurgeon (1869-1942) and essays on Edward Fitzgerald and Rubaiyat as well as A.C. Benson. Matthew Koyle sent in "George W. M. Reynolds: An Enigma in Print." Michael Miller writes to inform us that he has collected his Elgar reviews online. Margaret Loose, University of California, San Diego, writes to point out that www.emilybronte.org.uk now takes one to a commercial site discussing digital cameras!
January 2008
Your webmaster began the new year by scanning and editing two sermons by Robertson that compare Roman Catholic, Puritan, and Broad Church conceptions of baptism, and writing a review of Tim Barringer's excellent Reading the Pre-Raphaelites. Looking through some photographs of buidings in Hong Kong taken five years ago, he found several of both the Cathedral of St. John and Sir Aston Webb's Supreme Court building. This last item brought to three the number of buildings by Webb — enough to create a section for this architect, who also designed the façade of Buckingham Palace and the Cromwell Road portion of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Continuing through his photo archives, he came upon images of a number of churches in colonial Singapore: the Anglican St. Andrews Cathedral, the Armenian Church of Saint Gregory the Illuminator, the Roman Catholic Cathedral of the Good Shepherd, Chapel of the Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus, and Church of Sts. Peter and Paul. A 2002 trip to Australia similarly produced photographs of St. Andrew's Cathedral and the Observatory and Time-ball Tower in Sydney.
Philip V. Allinhgam, working with GPL, has created a section containing all 121 of George Du Maurier's brilliant plates for his own novel Trilby. He followed the DuMaurier plates with a dozen illustrations by Arthur Hopkins for Eliza Lynn Linton's The Atonement of Leam Dundas and two for A Rose in June.
Jacqueline Banerjee sent in photographs, captions, commentary, and essays for her continuing series on Victorian architecture: eight on John Johnson's Alexandra Palace and five on The People's Palace, which is now the Queen's Building at Queen Mary University of London; this series includes images of the interior of the Octagon, now the library at Queen Mary. She continued with a set of related photographs and commentary: E. M. Barry's Covent Garden (Royal Opera House) and the adjacent Floral Hall plus Flaxman's statue of Melpomene, the muse of tragedy, on the façade of the Opera House. In addition, she wrote the caption and commentary for two of GPL's photographs of St Paul's, Covent Garden, the "actor's church," and she photographed and wrote about King's Weigh House Chapel, Norham Gardens, and the Great Hall of G. E. Street's Law Courts, including H. A. Armstead's Street memorial.
Marilyn Thomas, Professor of English, Menlo College, shared with our readers the preface to her new book, The Diary: Sex, Death, and God in the Affairs of a Victorian Cleric as well as the final chapter of her biography of F. W. Robertson. Olivia Rickman of the Foundling Museum writes to announce an exhibition about Handel and the Crystal Palace, which will run from 23 November 2007 through 2 March 2008. Luca Montanarella of the European Commission Joint Research Centre writes from Ispra, Italy, to identify the location represented in a painting by Giovanni Costa.
December 2007
Inspired by the biography of Frederick W. Robertson that Marilyn Thomas, Professor of English, Menlo College, sent in, your webmaster created a section for the the liberal Anglican Anglican, including his portrait and material about his comments on Wordsworth, Carlyle, Ruskin, Bulwer-Lyton as well as his strong defence of In Memoriam and thoughts about Elizabeth Gaskell, Charlotte Brontë, and the Contemporary Novel. He then scanned and edited Robertson's sermons, "Religious Depression," "The Shadow and Substance of the Sabbath," and "The Message of the Church to Men of Wealth," and he created a number of brief documents based on Stopford A. Brook's Life and Letters, including "'The evidence of goodness and wisdom in the external world is very questionable': Finding God amid the Cruelties of Nature" and "'There is a tendency now to be very indignant about a poor man's spending Sunday afternoon in a tea-garden': Robertson's Opposition to Sabbatarianism." GPL also added his three photographs from 2002 of the Queen Victoria Building, Sydney, Australia, to the section on iron and glass architevture. He also completed formatting scans provided by Philip V. Allingham of McLenan's illustrations for A Tale of Two Cities and added the passages from the novel that each image illustrated. Finally, after reading Elaine Pagels's The Gnostic Gospels, he wrote "A Pattern Repeated: Roman Catholics, High Church Anglicans, Evangelicals, and Ancient Gnosticism."
Philip V. Allinhgam sent in additional scans of George du Maurier's illustrations for "A Rose in June," which GPL sized and placed in html documents, and PVA scaned and produced html documents for illustrations of seven works of Hardy's short fiction by illustrators including George Lambert, William Hatherell, George Patterson, Arthur J. Goodman, W. B. Wollen, and W. Hennessy.
Jacqueline Banerjee sent in her photographs, captions, and commentary for the Victoria or Burdett-Coutts Memorial Drinking-Fountain and Victoria Park as well as a biography of Sir James Pennethorne, architect and surveyor to the Commissioners of Woods and Forests (later called Commissioners of Works) who designed important buildings, such as the West Wing of Somerset House, parks, and laid out New Oxford Street. She also provided images and descriptions of old Wells & Co. foundry and showroom (East London) and identified late-Victorian commercial buildings at 369-373 and 385-397 Oxford Street (London) that GPL had photographed some years back, and so we could finally put them online.
Lexi Stuckey, MA candidate, University of Central Oklahoma, contributed "Christina Rossetti and Anna Eliza Bray — Fashioning a New Form of Fairy Tale in "Goblin Market"." Leighton Carter contributed Beardsley's Grotesque Cave of Spleen, and Eugene Petracca wrote "The Veiled Countenance: Loss of Self in H. K. Browne's Bleak House" and "If thou hadst looked at me . . . ": Wilde's Picture of Salome. Terence Green, Ph.D. Candidate, Dept. of Political Science, Columbia University, made his second contribution, "Evolution as a Guide to Conduct." Gerrard Roots sent in an announcement of an exhibition of Sidney Paget's Sherlock Holmes illustrations at the Church Farmhouse Museum in London.
Thanks to readers: Judy Neiswander corrected a mispelling in the biography of Pugin. Thanks!
We end the year with 34,253 documents.
November 2007
Despite your Webmaster's pruning orphan and outmoded documents from the site, The Victorian Web has grown to more than 34,000 documents and images. While continuing to reformat the site, your Webmaster spent many hours scanning all the plates by Phiz for Bleak House from his personal copy of the first book edtion and then, using the Project Guteberg etext, adding the passages illustrated and also writing commentaries. Lucy Barnes added commentary on the plate entitled "Attorney and Client" and Leighton Carter wrote "Moody Clues: Hablot K. Browne's The Morning." GPL also worked on George Cattermole's plates for The Old Curiosity Shop from the three-volume first edition of Master Humphrey's Clock, in the process adding that illustrator's image of the audience at Astley's Ampitheatre to Philip V. Allingham's essay on London theaters. He also added his review, "Commodifying the Straw Man" — A Review of Brent Shannon's The Cut of His Coat: Men Dress, and Consumer Culture in Britain, 1860-1904 to which he added images of what men wore from illustrations by Cattermole, Phiz, and du Maurier.
Allinhgam wrote a series of four essays on Dickens's 1842 trip to Montreal and the theatricals he organized (and in which he acted) at the Queen's Theatre. "Dickens in Montreal, 1842" also contains fourteen images, which include both those scanned from contemporary sources and PVA's own photographs.
Jacqueline Banerjee sent in a series of nine photographs of the Grainger Market in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and accompanying text, a history of Harrow School with a dozen or so photographsm, and more photographs of Burne-Jones's home and studio, works by Flaxman, and the new paint scheme of St. Pancras Railway Station.
Lisa Jones of National Museums Liverpool writes to announce Victorian Visions, an exhibition of nineteenth-century photography at the Lady Lever Art Gallery that will run from December 2007 to mid-March the following year. Maagie Wood, Assistant Curator at the Museum of Domestic Design & Architecture at Middlesex University (UK), wrote to let us know that her institution houses the Silver Studio Collection. Florence Boos, current President of the U. S. William Morris Society, writes to inform readers of The Victorian Web that the Society now has an rich website containing information about its scholarly journal, a US Newsletter, links to discussions of Morris in many languages, up-to-date calendars of featured events in the US and UK, and instructions how to join the Society.
October 2007
Your webmaster continued reformatting the site this past month, working wth several hundred documents containig book illustrations and textile designs, and he also created a sitemap for the architecture of the University of London. He formatted and edited various graduate student contributions, such as Lucy Barnes's "Hunt's The Shadow of Death and Rossetti's 'Good Friday': An Unsettling Typology," "The Textual Alice and the Alice of Illustration," "Word and Image in G.M. Hopkins 'The Windhover;'" Leighton Carter's "The Struggle between Form and Content in William Holman Hunt's "Lady of Shalott"," "John Tenniel's Natural Fantasy: The White Rabbit," and "Gerard Manley Hopkins's "Pied Beauty": Word-painting vs. Formal Innovation?" and Eugene Petracca's "Chaste Longing: Illustrations of Rossetti and Millais for the Moxon Tennyson," "Biblical Typology in D. G. Rossetti's 'The Passover in the Holy Family,'" "Inscape/Landscape: Image as Type in the Poetry of G. M. Hopkin," and "Representing Alice: John Tenneil's Collaboration with Charles Dodgson."
Jacqueline Banerjee continues her section on the University of London with eleven photographs and accompanying discussions of the chapel at King's College, London, designed by Gilbert Scott with an interior attributed to the firm of Clayton & Bell. She followed that with photographs and discussions of the interior of the dome of the Wilkins Building at UCL, the Flaxman Gallery it contains, photographs of King's College, an illustrated essay on University of London art collections, and finally a series of eight photographs and accompanying discussions of Sir James Pennethorne's Public Record Office, which now serves as the Maughan Library, King's College London.
Jeanne Farewell contributes Can We Forgive Him? Trollope on America, and Rashmi Sahni, M.Phil candidate at the University of Delhi sent in her four-part essay on Collins's 'detective business': The Moonstone as a Detective Novel."]
Erik Ringmar, who teaches at a university in Taiwan, suggested we link to his The Fury of the Europeans: liberal barbarism and the destruction of the Emperor's Summer Palace, a site containing his "on-going research project on the destruction of the Yuanmingyuan, the Summer Palace of the Chinese Emperor, by British and French troops in 1860."
Thanks to readers: Ed Kranz corrected the text of a Browning poem quoted in a student question set, and Kiran Mascarenhas, The City University of New York, Graduate Center, corrected a typo in the list of authors. David Barbour, a member of the Coleraine Borough Council, wrote to point out that Portstewart, where the novelist Charles Lever briefly practiced medicine, is in Northern Ireland, not England. Mark Schumacher of the Reference Department, Jackson Library, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, pointed out that Georges Cuvier's name was missing its final "s" in several places, and Art Pitchford corrected the name of black kitten in Through the Looking Glass. Thanks to all for their help. Hannah Sheldon-Dean, a student in GPL's Sages, Satirists, and New Journalists seminar, pointed out broken links created by the reformatting of the site.
September 2007
After receiving a copy of the 1905 edition of Bannister Fletcher's wonderful A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method for his 67th birthday — thanks Ruth! — your webmaster created from its many drawings a new section of 100+ documents and images, Medieval English Gothic Architecture — Backgrounds to the Gothic Revival. Having been invited to Edinburgh to give a keynote at a conference organized jointly by the University and ther College of Art, GPL began a section on the city's architecture as well as taking photographs of sculpture by John Steell and others.
Philip V. Allingham joined those of us working on children's literature with his illustrated essay entitled "Julia Horatia Ewing's Jackanapes, a Late-Victorian Best-seller for Children." In addition, he wrote a biography of Randolph Caldecott and added eight of his illustrations.
Jacqueline Banerjee continued her series of essays entitled "Ideas of Childhood in Victorian Children's Fiction" with "The Child Within" and "Issues in Children's Literature," which includes "Regression, sentimentality and morbidity in depicting children," "Eroticizing childhood," and "The entrapment of children." Later in the month she provided eleven drawings of India by Leonard Raven-Hill biography of the illustrator.
In addition to sharing "The Musical Soirée: Rational Amusement in the Home," his essay about Victorian drawing room ballads and parlor songs, Derek B. Scott, Professor of Critical Musicology, University of Leeds, contributed his 15 performances of this musc, including Victorian setting of Poe's "Annabel Lee", "Home, Sweet Home!", and "Woodman, Spare That Tree!", plus two piano pieces, including "The Battle March of Delhi." He also contributed the lyrics to two popular music hall items, "My Old Dutch" and "Macdermott's War Song," which is credited (or blamed) as the source of the word "jingoism." Professor Albert Pionke from the University of Alabama has contributed "Representations of the Indian Mutiny in Victorian Higher Journalism," which he adapted from his book Plots of Opportunity: Representing Conspiracy in Victorian England (Ohio State UP, 2004) and then provided materials for GPL to create a section containing the full texts of a dozen and a half articles published in periodicals including Blackwood's, London Quarterly Review, and the Quarterly Review.
Thanks to readers: Harry McLaughlin updated the URL to his Family Photograph Album site. John Kofron wrote in to point out that the link from the list of authors to Charlotte Brontë had broken; Gordon Byrnes of Clarke University sent in the new URL for the Victoria & Albert Museum's National Art Gallry site, Richard Barnes FRSA, author of a book on the sculptor John Bell, wrote to point out that Bell was in fact the sculptor of the Crimea Guards Memorial itself. Charles Kolb, MD, FRCS, of Manchester (whom your master has known since they played lacrosse together at the University of London), e-mailed several corrections. Victoria Ford Smith corrected errors in Hardy's "Hap," and Sue caught an obvious howler in the biography of Samuel Butler. Whitney Johnson found a broken link on the railways overview. Thanks!
August 2007
Siobhan Lam and your webmaster continued to add material to the new section on children's literature, particularly images from chapbooks and other works, including illustrations from British Victorian magazines for boys and girls. Ms. Lam contributed two essays on Captain Marryat, a biographical introduction, which contains a discussion of Robinsonnades (or adaptations of DeFoe's Robinson Crusoe, including a chapbook one), and "Observing Victorian niceties on a desert island: Captain Marryat's Masterman Ready." In addition, she created essays on "The Rise of Children's Fantasy Literature: The Fate of Moral Tales," "Fairy Tales," "G.A. Henty's Quintessential Adventure Story: Reading One of the 28th," and her introduction to ideas of gender in children's fiction — "Boys will be Boys, and Girls should be Girls."
Meanwhile your webmaster continuing reformatting the site, beginning work on the four thousand documents each in design and illustration sections. Much of GPL's time was spent creating images of sculpture and other objects that readers can rotate 360 degrees, providing the kind of information only available with computing (one often can't examine all sides of objects in museums because they are in cases or in niches). For technical reasons involving server settings, Derwent-Wood's Robert Brough, the first qtvr project (QuickTime Virtual Reality) is currently online outside this site, as are Maraget Giles's Hero, Statue of a Young Woman attributed to Drury, and a For Old Times Sake, a pewter mug from Liberty &. Co. These images work with Firefox and Safari, but I do not know if they do with Internet Explorer. A week was also spent completely reformatting David DeLaura's magisterial Hebrew anf Hellene.
GPL, who gave a talk on Newman and Victiorian religion, spent the 16th through the 19th at the 2007 Bard College concert series and symposium entitled Elgar and His World, which was organized by Leon Botstein (President of Bard and Conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra), Christopher H. Gibbs, and Robert Martin, Artistic Directors, Irene Zedlacher, Executive Director, and Byron Adams, Scholar in Residence 2007. With the kind permission and assistance of Irene Zedlacher and others, your webmaster has expanded the section on Elgar, beginning with a detailed chronology of the composer and contemporary events, "'God Bless the Music Halls': Victorian and Edwardian Popular Songs" by Derke B. Scott, Professor of Critical Musicology, University of Leeds, and "'Right Praise and True Perfection': Edward Elgar and the English Imagination" and "Elgar: From Autodidact to 'Master of the King's Musick,'" both by Byron Adams, Professor of Music, University of California, Riverside.
Jacqueline Banerjee began the month with eight photographs of Smithfield Meat Market and accompanying text and bibliography as well as photographs of hotels in Brighton by John Nash and Alfrred Waterhouse, leading GPL to create a list of Victorian hotels of which we have images as well as a Waterhouse sitemap, which permits readers an additional way of locating the many photographs of his magnificent Natural History Museum. She also sent in a photograph of Margaret Oliphant's grave. JB next contributed three essays on the subject of "Ideas of Childhood in Victorian Children's Fiction": The Child as Innocent," The Child as Sinner, and Orphans, Outcasts and Rebels."
Philip Allingham contributed an essay on Dickens's "Italian Prisoner," the text itself, and scans of a Cruikshank self-portrait, and several other images. Irina Gredina of Tomsk Polytechnic University, Russia, and PVA contributed "Dickens's Influence upon Dostoevsky, 1860-1870; or, One Nineteenth-Century Master's Assimilation of Another's Manner and Vision."
Jennifer Burgess contributes a brief biography of Anna Kingsford, physician, vegetarian, and Theosophist, and a week or so later followed that with material on Kingsford's views on religion and the woman question, and Terence Green, a Ph.D. candidate in Department of Political Science, Columbia University, sent in "Herbert Spencer, Evolution and the Moral Law Within." Jean-Paul Flahaut suggested a link to his Annuaire Histoire — Révolution et Empires. Jon Grant's photograph of All Saints, Nocton provides both another example of Scott's architecture and additional material related to Viscount Goderich, Prime Minister, 1828-29. Sng Jin Soon collaborated with GPL and took two photographs of the Arcade in Providence, RI — an example of iron-and-glass roof that dates from 1828. Bernard Farr e-mailed from Oxford to share his photographs and information about the church of St. Philip and St James.
July 2007
Your webmaster/editor-in-chief continued to add material from the Maas catalogue and completed the html for the studies by Burne-Jones of the Christ the Lord in Majesty mosaic (Rome) now in the collection of the Delaware Art Museum, which is using one of my photos of the completed mosaic for an exhibition. In addition, reformatting the documents on Victorian authors has seen completion.
Jacqueline Banerjee began July with photos and information about Richard Norman Shaw's Albert Court — his influential apartment house (block of flats) adjacent to Albert Hall and near Imperial College. She next sent in a detailed review of the Yale UP volume of essays accompanying the Frith exhibition at the Guildhall and followed that by a biography of the engineer and arms manufacturer William George Armstrong, Baron Armstrong of Cragside (1810-1900) plus photographs of Hamo Thornycroft's monument to him in Newcastle and another of his pioneering Newcastle Swing Bridge. On a lighter note: JB sends in 10 photographs of the Arts and Crafts Black Friar pub.
Philip Allingham sent in an essay about the first of Helen Allingham's illustrations to Far from the Madding Crowd and two about Dickens's residences in Genoa, Italy, the latter accompanied by almost three dozen of his photographs plus two relevant passages from Dickens's Pictures from Italy, all of which GPL formatted and linked.
Siobhan Lam, class of 2008, Brown University, who won a summer Undergraduate Research Assistantship, which GPL is directing, has begun a section on children's literature, thus far providing discussions of both genres of children's reading and modes of publication. Her essays thus far include "Aesop's Fables," "Alphabet books: from grim morality to pleasurable learning," "Nursery Rhymes," "Hornbooks," "Chapbooks," an introduction to periodicals directed at young readers, "Penny Dreadfuls," "Evangelical Tracts and Magazines for Children," "Secular Magazines for Victorian Children," and essays on individual works by George MacDonald. GPL created a sitemap organizing all these materials plus earlier contributions by all three editors, such as JB's eight-part essay on child death and the Victorian novel with discussions of Kingsley and MacDonald, PVA's "Defending the Imagination: Charles Dickens, Children's Literature, and the Fairy Tale Wars," and GPL's "John Ruskin and the Literary Fairy Tale." Prompted by Ms. Lam's work, he also wrote "James Catnach, 'low-class jobbing printer'" and a discussion of Nonsense Literature. This new section also permits bringing together Sally Mitchell's existing discussions of Diana Mulock Craik, David Rand's section on William Brighty Rands, and other contributions.
John Erlen of the University of Pittsburgh Medical School sent in a description and url for his Recent Dissertations on Women's History and Health Care site. Sinead O'Neill, Web Editor for the Belfast City Council site, e-mailed to let us know that Official information about the Palm House is available, and I have added links to it in PVA's material on that pioneering iron-and-glass structure. Laurann de Verteuil, a recent graduate of the University of Glasgow, sent in "Reviving God: a study of Matthew Arnold and Gerard Manley Hopkins religious belief." Tjan Kwang Wei of Singapore contributed a photograph of Masjid Jamek Kedua (the Jamek Kedua Mosque) in Muar, Malaysia. The Victorian Web this month not only received contributions from South East Asia but from South Asia as well, for Savi Munjal, an MPhil candidate and instructor at the University of Delhi, contributed a five-part essay entitled "Imagined Geographies: Representations of the Orient in Three Nineteenth-Century Novels."
Thanks to readers: Connie Tornatore-Loong of Sydney, Australia, notified me of several typos in last month's "What's New"! I must be the world's worst typist: checking the previous sentence a few minutes after I wrote it, I discovered that notified had mysteriously become noptified. On the 13th Christie Riegelhaupt, Editor at ProQuest, wrote to tell us that the link to Conrad didn't work (in reformatting the site, I had forgotten to change "conradov" to "index"). Tan Lay Leng of Singapore, who put me in touch with Tjan Kwang Wei, pointed out that the iron bridge there bears the name "Cavenagh" not "Cavanagh."
June 2007
Aloysius Wee Kok Tay, who is in charge of computer services and labs at the University Scholars Program, National University of Singapore, creates a much improved search tool for the site. Thanks Aloysius! Meanwhile, your webmaster continues the reformatting project begun last December, finally completing work on the 4,400 documents in the section on Victorian painting. At last count, after removing hundreds of duplicate documents, inferior quality images, and the like, the site contained 32,437 documents and images. With the section on Victorian painters complete, it was now time to move works by Ruskin there, a matter of several days' work that involved rescanning some 70 works. Working with the watercolors and drawings Ruskin created throughout his career reveals that he was a better artist than many of those he defended in Modern Painters. Reconfiguring the Ruskin galleries came next, and with it creating a section including images of Ruskin's homes, some accompanied by relevant passages from his autobiography.
While this work was underway, two major contributions involving art arrived: Connie Tornatore-Loong, Assistant Curator of Australian Art, secured permission from Dr. Beresford, Curator of European Art, to include all images from works in Sydney's Art Gallery of New South Wales reproduced in Angus Trumble's Love and Death in the Age of Queen Victoria. Secondly, the Maas Gallery of London sent its latest catalogue, which has already led to the inclusion in VW of works by John Brett, William Etty J. W. Godward, George Howard (9th Earl of Carlisle), Arthur Hughes, Sidney Harold Meteyard, Abraham Solomon, and Simeon Solomon with dozens more to be scanned.
Jacqueline Banerjee started the month off with photos and information about more London theaters, including the Lyric, Garrick, and London Coliseum, which now houses the National Opera, plus the Chelsea homes of Carlyle and Rossetti. Switching gears, JB next writes the next installment of the University of London and the institutions and people closely associated with it — "The University of London and Its Boys' Schools," which she accompanies with photographs of the King's College School (1891). Next follows "Queen's College School and the Ladies' College School" with half a dozen photographs.
Dr Teresa Walker, who teaches in the English Department at Canterbury Christ Church University, Kent, England contributes a biography of Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna. Dick Sullivan writes four essays: Cyril Conolly and the problem of Housman's continuing popularity, an introduction to W. H. Davies, "William Morris: More News from Nowhere," and ".'" Some months earlier Dick has also wrote another of his fascinatng pieces on life in Victorian England with "Victorian Costermongers: 'A Penny Profit out of the Poor Man's Dinner",'" which I omitted from "What's New?" so I'll add it here. Dr. Ron Roizen contributes a six-part study of "God and the English Utilitarians," which includes "Utilitarianism as Part of the English Moral Philosophical Tradition" and an introduction to theistic utilitarians." Connie Tornatore-Loong of the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, contributes a notice of a major exhibition of the works of Sir Edgar Bertram Mackennal, K.C.V.O., R.A., 1863-1931, the great Australian-born sculptor who was the first person from down under to become an RAA biography of Mackennal, description of Deborah Edward's catalogue raisonné, and images of the artist and his work accompany the notice.
Off-site links: Bamber Gascoigne from HistoryWorld (UK) has created an interactive, customizable timeline for items in the Victorian Web using his TimeSearch: Readers can obtain timelines for a range of topics, including art, literarure, history, science, and so on. Peter Joyce also from the Uk wrote in to suggest his Assembled Stories, a commercial site with audio books, many of which are not just the old chestnuts.
Thanks to readers: Angus Wu writes in to point out a broken link caused by the reorganization of the site in the brief essay about the influence of the Crystal Palace upon architecture.
May 2007
Your intrepid webmaster has been working since last December reformatting the entire site with a more elegant design that requires Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Great, lavish thanks are due to Dr. Mark Bernstein, President and Chief Scientist of Eastgate Systems, for making GPL's style sheets function with browsers other than Macintosh Safari. Thank, thank you, Mark! (Any reader interested in a powerful, easy-to-use hypertext system should check out Storyspace, and his Tinderbox is a powerful tool for professional writers. His site also contains a wealth of information about hypermedia, new media, and the fiction and poetry written in electronic environments.) Thus far GPL has completed reformatting the large sections on architecture, gender matters, theater and popular entertainment, stained glass, sculpture, contributors, and Victorian political and social history. The sections on science and technology require a second cycle of formatting and editing, as do the sections on painting, illustration, and individual authors.
Paramvir Sawhney contributes a four-part project, "The Victorians as Olympian Dreamers: The 'Togification' of Britain," which includes a discussions of the emphasis upon authenticity in The Last Days of Pompeii and the myth of the toga. Meredith Moore writes a multi-part exploration of erotic elements in Victorian art, which includes "We Didn't Start the Fire: Discovery of Pompeii's Erotic Art and its impact on Victorian Culture" and discussions of the male and female nude. John P. Nagler adds a six-part investigation of the various means and modes of Victorian classicism, including sections on Leighton, Alma-Tadema, Poynter, Moore, Waterhouse and Bulwer-Lytton. Sally King discusses five paintings by Millais.
Jacqueline Banerjee continues her series of essays on worthies associatd with the University of London, adding Robert Browning, G. K. Chesterton, Francis Galton, and A. E. Housman while providing photographs and text about the Albert Bridge, which leads GPL to create a new sitemap (or list) of bridges designed by English engineers in the UK, Eurtope, and Asia. Th enext week she sent in sets of photographs of a M. E. Braddon memorial plaque" and of St. Mary Magdalene Church, a sixteenth-century edifice that Blomfield altered. Meanwhile Philip Allingham continues working on commentaries for Phiz's illustrations to Martin Chuzzlewit plus an essay on "Dickens's Impressions of the Mississippi valley at Cairo, Illinois, the original of 'Eden' in Martin Chuzzlewit."
Thanks to readers for corrections: Monika Mazurek of Poland writes in to correct an obvious scanning error in Jim Kincaid's book on Dickens: "Barnaby Budge"! Michael Busk of San Francisco corrects a typo in the religion sitemap, and Jon Grant corected a typo in a caption in the bio of Frederick Robinson, Viscount Goderich.
April 2007
PVA contributes "Mary Scott Hogarth, 1820-1837: Dickens's Beloved Sister-in-Law and Inspiration" and "'Taking The Wrappers Off — A Brief Overview of the Covers for the Monthly Serials Published by Charles Dickens, April 1836 to September 1870," and a comparison of the illustrations of Martin Chuzzlewit by Barnard and Phiz. He scans the complete Phiz illustrations for the novel, the text documents for which GPL formats, and he begins his series of in-depth commentaries on each plate.
JB, who writes a biography of the Victorian chemist William Ramsay, sends in photographs and text for Thomas Woolner's John Hunter in Leicester Square and also identified Woolner as the sculptor of the Wordsworth memorial in St. Oswald's Church, Grasmere. She also adds new photographs of Baily's statue of Early Grey and Gilbert's Queen Victoria, and "More on 'The Great Wen': Reviews of Liza Picard's Victorian London: The Life of a City 1840-1870 (paperback ed. 2006) and Jerry White's London in the Nineteenth Century: 'A Human Awful Wonder of God'" (2007).
After a 12-day tour of Eastern Europe, GPL adds photographs of a quadringa from Budapest and other sculpture. He reviews John A. Walker's "Work": Ford Madox Brown's Painting and Victorian Life (2006) and Simon Toll's Herbert Draper, 1863-1920: A Life Study (2003). From the 1899 Studio, he adds a sketch by Herbert Draper, Frampton's St. George, an he also added a dozen images of art nouveau jewelry and Alexander Fisher's crucifix. GPL continues work on converting the site to CSS, completing the sections on architecture and stained glass. He also scans and edits a number of illustrated articles from 1898 and 1899 issues of The Studio:
- a Baillie Scott's furniture and metalwork for the New Palace, Darmstadt
- the paintings of Byam Shaw
- the Scottish sculptor James Pittendrigh MacGillivray
- Mr. Arthur H. Mackmurdo and the Century Guild
- Mortimer Menpes' home and studio in the Japanese Style
- the sculpture, painting, and other work of W. Reynolds-Stephens
Marjie Bloy continues to add letters to her section on previosuly unpublished letters. Paramvir Sawhney discusses the use of classical versus contemporary costume in Victorian sculpture and the dream topos in late-nineteenth-century painting, and Sara King contributes "'Immortal Music:' Ernest Dowson's 'Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae sub Regno Cynarae'" and "Visual Harmony: Albert Joseph Moore's The Dreamers" while Meredith Moore writes "Albert Moore, Art for Art Sake, and The Quartet, a Painter's Tribute to Music" and "Medea Misrepresented," a discussion of one of Herbert Draper's paintings. The Victorian Web now has 32,057 douments and images.
March 2007
JB creates a series of photographs and commentary concerning St Paul's Parish Church, Brighton, with its Pugin windows and John Hardman Powell's brass lectern.
PVA contributes The Names of Dickens's American Originals in Martin Chuzzlewit After the Dahesh Museum of Art in New York grants permission to do so, GPL adds The Marble Work (Le Travail du Marbre) by Jean-Léon Gérôme and Joseph, Overseer of Pharaoh's Granaries by Sir Laurence Alma Tadema.
Dick Sullivan contributes "Continuity and the Power of Place: Kipling as Children's Author" and Brian Eschrich contributes "The Rossettis and the Metaphysics of Spiritual Experience." GPL continues converting the site to CSS and completes the section on sculpture after Dr. Mark Bernstein, President of Eastgate Systems, solves some problems with the style sheet for vertical plates.
February 2007
PVA reviews two volumes in the The Broadview Literary Texts Series:Lady Audley's Secret (2003) and Jack Sheppard (2007) and among his many contributions are the following: "The Dualistic Chronological Setting of Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewitt," "The Costuming and Set Design of Plays Adapted from Dickens's Christmas Books: Realisations of the Illustrations". He and GPL add two dozen illustrations of Victorian pantomime. Other contributions include "The Origin of 'I've got to see a man about a dog."
JB contributes a series of essays and brief biographies, including "Frederic William Farrar," "Henry Morley," "Frederick Denison Maurice," "James Clerk Maxwell," and "Charles Wheatstone as well as an illustrated multi-part history of the University of London, including an introduction, "The Founding Colleges," "The University of London and Women Students," "Opening the Doors of Higher Education," and various photographs. She also send in a photograph of the Albany, home at different times to Bulwer-Lytton, Macaulay, Gladstone, and others, and accompanying text.
GPL uses the Project Gutenberg text of Bulwer-Lytton's The Last Days of Pompeii to create an e-text of the novel for VW and then a section on the novel containing materials about narration, characterization, gender, political and religious themes and photographic illustrations. John P. Nagler contributes "A Hint of Sedition in The Last Days of Pompeii;" Paramvir Sawhney adds an essay about authenticity in the novel, "Nothing changes under the sun." He also edits a section of Charles Reades Hard Cash, which he entitles "A History of Early Railways — Technological Innovation and Resistance to them." After Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwehtu, New Zealand, grants permission to include them in VW, GPL adds Teresina by Frederick Lord Leighton and In the Wizard's Garden by George Dunlop Leslie. GPL continues creating style sheets and converting the site.
Dick Sullivan contributes a biography of James Thomson and "Poison Mixed With Gall," an introduction to his The City of Dreadful Night, a brief biography of Camille Jullien, and "'Nothing Will Beat the Old Times': A Victorian Dialogue."
January 2007
PVA contributes a series of essays on Dickens's The Chimes, including "The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells That Rang An Old Year Out and a New Year In," "The "Forgotten" Christmas Book, The Chimes (1844): Novella and Dramatic Adaptation," Prologue to Mark Lemon and G. A. A'Beckett's Adaptation of "The Chimes" by Charles Dickens (1844)."
JB writes a short biography of the great pioneer of medical careers for women, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson. Suzanne Hesse, a faculty member of Chemeketa Community College, contributes "The Victorian Ideal Male Characters in Jane Eyre and Villette." GPL continues creating style sheets and converting the site.
December 2006
PVA adds "The Rediscovery of Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835-1915) — 'Queen of Sensation'" and Katy Crane contributes "Anti-Semitism in the works of E. Nesbit." JB provides a dozen photographs and text of the beautiful Morris/Burne Jones stained glass windows in St. Margaret's Church, Rottingdean and writes a joint review of Rosemary Ashton's 142 Strand: A Radical Address in Victorian London and Lee Jackson's A Dictionary of Victorian London. GPL continues creating style sheets and converting the site.
November 2006
JB, who reviews John Batchelor's Lady Trevelyan and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and Deborah Cohen's Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions, also provides images and information about Victorian Brighton — its station, clocktower, and the Victoria Fountain as well as photographs and text for her "Kipling in Rottingdean, Sussex (1897-1902)"
Daniel Block adds "Romance and the Female Poet in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh."
GPL, who begins the ardous process of converting VW's 31,000 documents to CSS, scans, edits, and adds "Mrs. S. C. Hall on Thomas Babington Macaulay," drawing upon Project Gutenberg, creates a VW version of Macaulay's The Lays of Ancient Rome, to which Sally King and John P. Nagler later add discussion questions. He also contributes various brief essays on the aesthetes and decadents, including "The Grosvenor Gallery and the Aesthetic Movement," "Is There Such a Thing as Decadence?," Charles Baudelaire and Decadence," and "Aesthetes, Decadents, and the Idea of Art for Art's Sake."
October 2006
PVA contributes a series of essays, including "The Conclusions of Lady Audley's Secret and The Mystery of Edwin Drood: Was Dickens Thinking of Using Braddon's Solution?"
JB adds a brief history of Kensal Green cemetery, London, and a dozen photographs of the graves of some well-known Victorians buried there plus a photograph George Meredith's writing chalet on Box Hill, Surrey, and other images, including the dramatic roof of the London Hippodrome. She also provides a dozen photographs and text for a sequence on Sir George Gilbert Scott's sumptuous India and Foreign Offices, Whitehall, London.
Daniel Block adds "Christina Rossetti's 'Song' ('When I am dead, my dearest') and Wordsworth's 'A Slumber Did my Spirit Seal,'" and Paramvir Sawhney adds "Apotheosis and selfhood in Christina Rossetti's 'The Thread of Life'." Erin Frauenhofer contributes a question set, "I Can Tell You About Rossetti's 'May,'" and Lydia Gidwitz contributesd another Scars: The Plight of Women in Rossetti's 'A Daughter of Eve.'" GPL writes "The British East India Company — the Company that Owned a Nation (or Two)" and with PVA adds a series of images from the Illustrated London News, including East India Company's Thames Goods-shed (1852)
September 2006
PVA contributes "The Cinematic Adaptations of The Mystery of Edwin Drood: 1909, 1914, 1935, and 1993; or, Dickens Gone Hollywood."
JB, who reviews Judith Flanders's Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain, provides images and information about the memorial cloisters at the Watts Gallery, Compton, Surrey; Dr Jenner's statue and the Italian Gardens in Kensington Gardens; Sir Alfred Gilbert's memorial to Queen Alexandra (with commentary and discussion by GPL), and Francis Derwent Woods's memorial to the Machine Gunners' Corps, also in London; the little-known interiors of William Burges at Milton Court, Dorking, Surrey; and Sir George Gilbert Scott's unpretentious Holy Trinity Church, Wescott, in Surrey. A discussion, "St Albans Cathedral and Abbey Church: A Case History in Victorian Restoration," focussing on the domineering Lord Grimthorpe. A review of Judith Flanders's Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain.
Daniel Block discusses "Central Metaphor of Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus," and Alison Fanous adds Embracing Life and Death in "A Better Resurrection" and "At Home" by Christina Rossetti.
Dick Sullivan contributes "Forgetting Obvious Things: The legacy of the Victorian?"
August 2006
By the 28th, the site had 28,164 documents, and quite a few additional ones came in afterwards during the last few days of the month. Philip V. Allingham, our Contributing Editor from Canada, attended a Dickens conference in Belfast and while there took many photographs of the city, including series on the Prince Albert Memorial Clock Tower, the Customs House, the Calder Memorial Fountain, the Old Town Hall, St. George's Church, the The Scottish Temperance Building, Ulster Hall, and several pubs (The Crown Bar, Bittles Bar, and The Botanic Inn); all Victorianists must respect the sacrifices PVA made to take these last photographs. Upon his return to Canada, Professor Allingham also contributed words and text for a wide variety of material from The Illustrated London News, including articles on Irish Emigration, Disraeli, French fashion, the arrival of the Nineveh sculpture at the British Museum, the inhumanity of Pentonville Prison's silent system, North American railroad passenger cars, and several dozen plates depicting the Great Exhibition of 1851. GPL creates html documents for all this material and new sections on Belfast, pubs, as well as for other cities and towns.
Jaqueline Banerjee, our indefatigable Contributing Editor from the U. K., adds photographs, text, and bibliographies for two main areas, sculpture in and around Hyde Park, London, and architecture and sculpture from Esher, a small village in Surrey, where Queen Victoria attended church before her ascension to the throne and to which she was always generous. JB created groups of photographs and texts on Christ Church and St. George's Church, the water fountain Queen Victoria donated to the town and the monument for her Diamond Jublilee plus John Williamson's various monuments — that for Prince Leopold and Princess Charlotte of Belgium, the Duke of Albany, and the tomb of Vicount and Vicountess Esher — as well as Susan Durant's Memorial for King Leopold of Belgium.
Her photographs include Alexander Munro's Boy and Dolphin, and Richard Westmacott's Wellington Monument (Achilles) plus John Nash's Marble Arch, Richard Westmacott's England, Ireland and Scotland, E. H. Baily's Naval Warrior with Justice and Pleace and Plenty and the Wellington (or Constitution) Arch and Adrian Jones's Angel of Peace Descending on the Chariot of War, Decimus Burton's Hyde Park Gate with John Herring's Martial Frieze.
Ellen Moody contributes a second essay on Trollope — Trollope's Comfort Romances for Men: Heterosexual Male Heroism in his Work. Dick Sullivan opens a new section of Victorian authors with Pooter and the Mudlarks: An Orwellian View and followsw it with his substantial essay, "Mr Pooter: an Alternative Point of View". JB, who contributes "The Seaside in the Victorian Literary Imagination," photographs Richmond Lock, London.
GPL reviews Kate Colquhoun's "The Busiest Man in England:" A Life of Joseph Paxton, Gardener, Architect, and Visionary, and, adding passages from Colquhoun, reorganizes the botany section in science. Inspired by JB's contribution of photographs of Hadrian's Wall, GPL creates a section on Northumbria to which he adds several dozen illustrations and texts from J. M. Bruce's classic Roman Wall (1867). Drawng on a catalogue contributed by the Maas Gallery, London, GPL adds plates and accompanying texts for paintings and drawings, including works by William Etty, Luke Fildes, J. R. Herbert, Phil May, Emily Mary Osborn, William Bell Scott, and G. F. Watts. Continuing to expand the Arnold section, GPL adds essays on his political views on subjects including the evolution of his beliefs, his distrust of aristocracy, and the limits of his liberalism. He also contributes "The British East India Company — the Company that Owned a Nation (or Two)" and photographs of Feodora Gleichen's Artemis Fountain, Adrian Jones's St. George Slaying the Dragon (Cavalry Memorial),
July 2006
Jaqueline Banerjee continues to create materials on the north of England, contributing a section on Whitley Bay, North Tyneside, a Victorian resort made possible by the railway, and a series of photographs and commentaries on structures important in the history of techonology and society, including a six-part series on Central Station, Newcastle ("the first covered station in the world"), and others on stations at York and Durham. Turning to matters ecclesiastical, JB provides photographs and commentaries for Pugin's St. Mary's Catherdral, Newcastle, Victorian restorations and additions of the Cathedral Church of St Nicholas, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Henry Woodyer's St Martin's Church (Surrey), and Durham Cathedral. She also photographs Gilbert's statue of Queen Victoria in Newcastle and Earl Grey's Column by Bailey.
PVA and GPL select and edit various student essays on Wilde, Hardy, and Dickens as well as John McLenan's two dozen illustrations of A Tale of Two Cities that appeared in Harper's Magazine, to which PVA also writes an introduction. PVA also scanned, edited, and converted to html, Henry Morley's 1851 essay on China in Household Words.
GPL writes essays on (1) Clive Wilmer and Ruskin, (2) Tom Brown at Oxford and (3) Hughes's The Scouring of the White Horse and adds Richard Doyle's illustrations to this last work. GPL creates a new section on Eton College including a dozen essays and more than two dozen images of the school by artists including E. D. Brinton, F. L. Briggs, and Sydney P. Hall. He adds a similar one on Rugby and other public schools that include lists of their alumni discused in the Victorian Web. GPL also creates a section on Thomas Arnold, containing a dozen essays about the great Broad Churchman as well as one of his sermons. Finally, he adds images and text provided by (1) The G. F. Watts Gallery and (2) Peter Nahum; these last include paintings and watercolors by J. D. Watson and others. He reorganizes and adds to the section on iron and glass in Victorian architecture and also creates sitemaps for various architectural types, including churches and post offices.
Dick Sullivan contributes "The Poetry of A. E. Housman: A Personal View," a biography of the poet," on essay Postman's Park and the Painter, George Frederic Watts, to complement JB's series of photographs, and a comment on Ruskin by A. E. Housman. Matt Christensen contributes " An Alternative Interpretation of Christina Rossetti's 'Goblin Market'," and Sonja Mayer sends in an essay on Jane Eyre.
Aloysius Tay, the chief computer technician at the University Scholars Program, National University of Singapore, installs software that automatically synchronizes the Singapore mirror with the main server in New York, which he also runs.
June 2006
By the end of the month the the Victorian Web had 27,255 documents and images. Marta Miquel Baldellou of the University of Lleida, Spain, contributes a four-part study of the relationship of Bulwer-Lytton and Poe. Tom Kinsella writes an introduction to Victorian trade book bindings in the form of a review of Edmund King's book on the subject. Jacqueline Banerjee, now Contributing Editor of the Victorian Web for the UK, contributes photographs of the statue of Rowland Hill, inventor of the penny post, St. Andrew's Church, Surbiton, and material on Charterhouse School (whose alumni include Richard Crashaw, Richard Lovelace, Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, John Wesley and William Makepeace Thackeray). She accompanies these with a series of photographs of the school buildings designed by Sir Philip Charles Hardwick, Sir Arthur Blomfield, and Sir Giles Gilbert Scott. GPL, who creates a new section for Victorian education, creates a section on Thomas Hughes, author of Tom Brown's Schooldays, and writes a set of essays on the novel.
Dick Sullivan contributes essays on Victorian Rhyming Slang and Victorian Back Slang and well as "Portrait of a Victorian — A Washerwoman's Daughter" and Stained Glass and Gaslight — Darkness, Smog, and a Little Light in Victorian Cities. Othmar Plöckinger from Salzburg, Austria sends in the musical setting of Christina Rossetti's "Song" ["When I am dead"] that he composed and, with three other musicians, performed. GPL writes Victorian Doubt and Victorian Architecture, adds new architects to the architecture overview,
PVA creates a set of essays on the Opium Wars with China, leading GPL to expand the section on Victorian addictions. He also writes "Early and Mid-Victorian Attitudes towards Prostitution."
May 2006
Jacqueline Banerjee contributes photographs and documents about Postman's Park and the memorial plaques it contains plus three photographs of Milan's Galleria di Vittorio Emmanuele II, which becomes part of GPL's section on iron and glass in Victorian architecture. He also creates a section for Decimus Burton and re-organizes material on domestic architecture and architecture in the Straits Colonies. GPL creates a list of contributors to the site and adds a section on Burma (Myanmar) to the site. Stuart Currie, a PhD Candidate at the University of Worcester, contributes "George Whyte-Melville, Vampirism, and the Crimean War" and a discussion of "Why there was so little Crimean War fiction." Dick Sullivan adds "Reflections on Lady Butler's The 28th Regiment at Quatre Bras," which explains how people who lived through the Korean War might experience this military painting very differently from Ruskin or the artist, and, prompted by some of George Orwell's remarks, "The Cornhill Magazine — Fees for Writers in 1860."
April 2006
s of the end of March, the Victorian Web has grown to 26,891 documents and images. This month turns out to mark not only our largest number of visitors thus far — around 18 million — but also the most abundant major acquitisions of new material, the overwhelming majority of it from contributors in the UK; authors in New Zealand, Canada, and the U. S. also contribute essays. To begin with, GPL scans, converts to html, and links to materials throughout the the site Dick Sullivan's Navvyman, a book first published in 1983 that provides a fascinating history of the men who built Britain's canals, tunnels, and railroads. Sullivan's book contains much information about social, religious, and labor history and creates a kind of tipping point in certain areas, allowing GPL to create overviews (or sitemaps) for a range of subjects, including Evangelical Christianity and alcoholism and add to several link-lists related to technology. During this month
Jacqueline Banerjee also contributes a brief biography of Angela Burdett-Coutts, the great Victorian philanthropist who was the first woman to receive a peerage, which leads GPL to add many links to this biography in documents about Dickens, Collins, the Crimean War, education, and women's history. Dr. Banerjee also contributes "Thomas Hardy's Poetry: The London Years." JB, who has become a major source of valuable visual documentation, sends in many photographs, including a series on the Lake District, the railway waterpoint near St. Pancras Station, The St. Pancras Workhouse, Camden Lock and the nearby canal, and the Burdett-Coutts Memorial Sundial.
Two other contributors from England provide material for sections on new authors: David Blackmore's chronology and biographical essay on R. D. Blackmore, the author of Lorna Doone, permits the creation of a section on him, which he later expands with a list of works, three reviews from contemporary periodicals, and a gallery of images related to the author, including portraits and photographs of places associated with him. Near the end of the month, Karen Devlin's contributions similarly permit the creation of a new section on an author — the poet and novelist Mary Coleridge, a direct descendant of the Romantic poet with that last name.
April also sees the arrival of material that begins a dialogue: Dick Sullivan's "Hopkins and the Spiritual" prompts GPL to write "Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Difficulties of Victorian Poetry" and J. T. Best's ingenious reading of "Porphyria's Lover" occasions 'Porphyria's Lover' — A Case study in what counts as evidence and where the ambiguities arise in dramatic monologues."
Drawing upon Dick Sullivan's Old Ships, Boats & Maritime Museums (1978), a copy of which the author sends to GPL, he creates a series of documents on Victorian ships and ship design, including "Cambria — a Thames River Spritsail Barge" and "Brunel's Great Britain, one of the most important steam ships ever built" with texts by Sullivan. (Sullivan also identifies or provides information about the subjects of photographs sent in by other contributors.)
March 2006
Jacqueline Banerjee contributes series of photographs on Leighton House and other artist's homes. GPL scans, edits, and puts up various parts of Justin McCarthy's 1872 long essay on Bulwer-Lytton, including "Two Points of Superiority over Dickens and Thackeray" and "'His range was so wide': The Genres of Bulwer-Lytton's Fiction" as well as his entire essay on Charles Kingsley and his discussion of Thackeray's characters. Gordon Weaver contributes "Arthur Conan Doyle as Defender of the Unjustly Accused," a study of Victorian racism, injustice, and Conan Dyle's part in securing justice at last. Annalise K. Walker of British Columbia, Canada (who at 80 is perhaps our oldest contributor) sends in "On Trollope's Barchester Series," and PVA composes "Essay Topics for Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest."
February 2006
London Photos, a commercial photo library, generously shares twenty beautiful photographs with the Victorian Web (an example: Tower Bridge). Jackie Banerjee, who has recently contributed essays, sends in her own architectural photographs, including those of Gilbert Scott's St. Mary Abbot's Church, Kensington, St. Mary the Virgin (Surrey) by G. E. Street, and Tower House by William Burges. PVA adds essay topics about Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge. GPL writes a brief discussion of the navvy or construction worker based upon information sent in by a Gerry Newby.
January 2006
Christopher S. Nassaar, Professor of English Emeritus, American University of Beirut, contributes the "Pater in Wilde's The Happy Prince and Other Tales and A House of Pomegranates." Ian S. Pettigrew shares material from his site on radical and artisan poets as well as providing links to the original, often rare texts. Dr. Roy H. W. Johnston contributes essays on science and empire in Victorian Ireland. Jacqueline Banerjee writes a series of essays on Richard Jefferies, include ones on his word-painting, relation to ancient greece, and his contributions to Victorian science-fiction, our first essay, I believe, on that genre.
GPL, who continues to add to the sections on railways, ships, canals, engineering, inventors, and the Great Exhibition of 1851 also creates new sections of photographs of Oxford, York, and the Lake District (some he took 40 years ago!), and individual cities. He also adds to the materals on Victorian architecture by Street, Butterfield, and others. Galen Frysinger contributes several dozen photographs from his travels around the U. K., including those of Bath and the Lake District. PVA creates a biography of George Cattermole, the watercolourist, illustrator, and painter, and GPL scans this artist's illustrations for The Old Curiosity Shop from his copies of the first bound edition and creates html documents to accompany them. GPL creates a sitemap and introductory essay for the Arts and Crafts Movement.
December 2005
Robert L. Nelson, MD, contributes "The Price of Bread: Poverty, Purchasing Power, and The Victorian Laborer's Standard of Living." Christopher S. Nassaar, Professor of English Emeritus, American University of Beirut, contributes the "The Problem of the Jewish Manager in The Picture of Dorian Gray," "Wilde's Salomé and the Victorian Religious Landscape." PVA contributes "The Imperial Context of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins's 'The Perils of Certain English Prisoners'"
GPL expands materials on railways, adding essays on "British Railways compared to American Railroads — Two Nations separated by a Common Ocean and a Common Language," "Railways and Victorian Literature," "Railways in Victorian Fiction — The Effect upon the City," "Railways in the Victorian Landscape," "Victorian taste, industrial design, and Victorian locomotives," and "Railway Mania." He also adds half a dozen sections on inventors and engineers based on Samuel Smiles Self-Help (1859), Charles Reade's History of Early Railways from Hard Cash, Dickens on the Transformative Power of Victorian Railways.
GPL also greatly expands the section on the Great Exhibition of 1851 and also adds photographs and graphic images of Victorian railways, engineering, the Crystal palace, housing, and street scenes containing sections of landscape and city views, including sections of his photographs of Lancashire, the Lake Country, the Peak District, and added to the section of Victorian cities and towns.
November 2005
PVA adds an essay "The Missing Chapter by Wilkie Collins: 'The Prison in the Woods'" plus the edited text. GPL creates a section on the metalwork of Gilbert Bayes and pictures of an art nouveau copper pitcher by J. Sankey and Sons, a section on iron and glass construction, and material on Victorian sculpture and painting.
October 2005
PVA and GPL create section of more than 40 plates for Dickens's Dombey and Son and 15 for his Christmas books. GPL scans, edits, and puts up a long biography of William Brighty Rands, an essay on Newman's attitude toward preaching, and a review of Alfred and Arthur.
September 2005
Joseph Ugoretz contributes "The Pitchman and the Protègée: Oral Performance Art in Bleak House." PVA and GPL create section on illustrations of Dickens's nonfiction. James Sexton contributes "Dickens's Hard Times and Dystopia." PVA contributes "Thomas Hardy's 'Nobody Comes' — Text and Reading Questions."
August 2005
GPL adds photographs of London clubs. Hamilton Beck contributes "Mark Twain on the Crimean War." David Rands shares materials from his William Brighty Rands Site to create a section including 40 poems for this once-popular Victorian author. James L.Spates contributes his edited version of "Ruskin in Milan, 1862": A Chapter from Dark Star, an unpublished biography of John Ruskin" by Helen Gill Viljoen; Van Akin Burd contributes an introduction to this text as well. PVA contributes "Edward Bulwer Lytton's A Strange Story." PVA and GPL create a section on A. A. Dixon's Illustrations for the Collins Pocket Edition of A Tale of Two Cities (1905)
July 2005
PVA contributes reading and discussion questions for Hardy's "Afterwards." GPL adds a series of photographs of London sculptural monuments, including those for various Arctic expeditions. Mike Mesher contributes photographs of a lamp based on Edward Onslow Ford's Dancing.
June 2005
PVA creates a large series of essays on Edwin Drood, its illustrations, anmd dramatic adaptations and "Great Expectations in Film and Television, 1917 to 1998" as well as adding H. M. Brock's illustrations for Great Expectations,
May 2005
GPL reviews Francine F. Abeles's edition of The Political Pamphlets and Letters of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, Lawrence W. Crider's In Search of the Light Brigade, and Aileen Fyfe's Science and Salvation: Evangelical Popular Science Publishing in Victorian Britain. PVA and GPL create section on John McLenan's Harper's weekly illustrations of Great Expectations. Jennifer Kingma Wall contributes "Love and Marriage: How Biographical Interpretation affected the Reception of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's 'Sonnets from the Portuguese.'" GPL creates "Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) and Contemporary Politics."
April 2005
PVA and GPL create section on Luke Fildes' book and magazine illustrations, including several dozen plates from The Mystery of Edwin Drood and Charles Lever's Lord Kilgobbin. PVA write essays on Fildes' biography and his relation to Dickens. Students in English 171, Sages, Satirists, and New Journalists, Brown U., create new discussion questions for twentieth-century heirs of the Victoran sages — Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Annie Dillard, and Sarah Suleri. Julia Kuehn contributes five essays on Maria Corelli.
March 2005
Students in English 171, Sages, Satirists, and New Journalists, Brown U., create new discussion questions for Carlyle, Ruskin, and Thoreau as well as Beerbohm and Wilde. GPL bases new sections for Mrs. Hemans and G.P.R. James on Samuel Carter Hall's 1871 biographies of them and also adds his biography of Thomas Hood to the materials on that poet.
February 2005
GPL creates a new section on fantasy illustration, including new work by Aubrey Beardsley, Frederick Sandys, and Laurence Houseman as well as two dozen works by Rudyard Kipling and 70 by Henry Justice Ford. GPL also adds paintings by Holman Hunt, W. B. Richmond, Thomas Seddon, Millais, and others, and with the permission of the Bard Graduate Center he creates a new section of the design materials on Roman and Etruscan revival jewelry. Jenny Woolf, author of a recent book on Lewis Carroll, contributes articles on him and on using Victorian bank accounts as research material.
PVA contributes several essays on approaches to the epic and adds texts of Arnold's "The Buried Life,"
January 2005
GPL creates a large new section on paintings of the Middle East and also adds new works of Alma-Tadema, Waterhouse, and many other Victorian artists.
December 2004
PVA reviews Audrey Jaffe's Scenes of Sympathy: Identity and Representation in Victorian Fiction.
Brown University undergraduate and postgraduate students contribute essays on Swinburne and Rossetti, Millais, the late Pre-Raphaelites, Hopkins, and Ben Sullivan '05, Mesa State College, adds an essay on MacDonald's Lilith.
November 2004
Beginning mid-month, GPL begins seven-week process of standardizing footer icons, links, and decorative initials. He contributes a brief discussion of Benjamin Disraeli and Anti-Semitism and the text of Swinburne's "Dolores" and photographs of Burne-Jones's mosaic program for St. Paul's within the Walls, Rome. PVA contributes the text of Arnold's "Sohrab and Rustom" and a series of essays about it as well as the texts of "The Song of the Shirt" by Thomas Hood and Browning's "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister" and "A Toccata of Galuppi's," and a contemporary portrait of A. H. Hallam. GPL greatly enlarges the sections on decorative arts. Brown University undergraduate and postgraduate students create discusison questions and essays on Swinburne, Rossetti, Morris, and Victorian decorative arts, including furniture, textiles, jewelry, ceramics, metalwork, and individual designers.
October 2004
PVA reviews Harry E. Shaw's Narrating Reality: Austen, Scott, and Eliot. Brown University undergraduates add discussion questions and brief essays for the works of Christina Rossetti, Dante RossettiJohn Ruskin, and Edward Burne-Jones.
September 2004
GPL adds material on Victorian railway locomotives and rolling stock. Brown University undergraduates contribute brief essays and discussion questions about Hunt, Millais. PVA reviews Caroline Levine's The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt.
August 2004
PVA, who creates introductions to Household Words and All the Year Round, contributes a brief biography of Emily Brontë plus the text of her "Song" and reading questions for it. He also adds a biography of Robert Louis Stevenson and Sonnet 43 from E. B. Browning's Sonnets from the Portugese. GPL adds more than 40 plates from Willy Pogány's magnificent book-length edition of Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner." George Gardiner Wood sends in some corrections and additions to the biography of George MacDonald.
July 2004
Working with GPL, Sarah Eron '05, Victorian Web Research Assistant, creates a section on Coverntry Patmore, which includes material on his relation to Hopkins, Tennyson, and Plato as well as critical essays on The Angel in the House, The Unknown Eros, and other poems. Drawing upon Project Gutenberg e-texts, GPL creates full web versions of The Angel in the House and The Victories of Love. PVA contributes reading questions for Gaskell's "The Half-Brothers" and Wilkie Collins's "A Terribly Strange Bed" as well as W. S. Gilbert's biography and the text of his "The Yarn of the 'Nancy Bell'" plus reading questions for it.
June 2004
GPL reviews Lauren Goodlad's Victorian Literature and the Victorian State and Joseph Bizup's Manufacturing Culture: Vindications of Early Victorian Industry.
May 2004
PVA and GPL create a new section of the Dickens gallery -- "Dickens's homes and other places associated with him," and they add a set of documents on an 1861 dramatic adaptation of Great Expectations.
April 2004
GPL contrbutes "Tennyson's influence on T. S. Eliot" and creates a new section on Domestic Victorian and Edwardian Stained Glass, based contributions from Matt Clarkson of the Antique Glass Studio (UK); he adds links to Punch illustrations to the biography of Richard Cobden. PVA contributes discussion questions for Thomas Hardy's "The Melancholy Hussar of the German Legion."
Students from Lakehead University, Canada, contribute half a dozen essays on Hardy's fiction; students from Brown U. contribute question sets on Thomas Carlyle's On Heroes, Lewis Carroll, Lord Dunsany; Tennyson's In Memoriam.
PVA and GPL add 48 new plates from Punch at mid-century
March 2004
PVA and GPL complete a new section on illustrators of Great Expectations containing several hundred documents and images relating to seven artists; PVA contributes "The Serial structure of Hardy's The Return of the Native;" Students from Brown U. contribute question sets for Aurora Leigh; GPL creates a section on Judaism in Victorian England
February 2004
GPL creates section for Lord Dunsany. Students from Brown U. contribute question sets on Jane Eyre and George MacDonald.
January 2004
PVA and GPL create sections on William Hatherell's 12 illustrations for Hardy's Jude the Obscure and a another dozen by George Du Maurier for Hardy's A Laodicean; PVA creates extensive discussions of each of the plates. PVA adds discussion questions for Hardy's "The Ruined Maid." GPL creates a web translation of "Tristram Shandy and the Comedy of Context," which has appeared in print several times, most recently in a German collection of essays on Sterne. He also contributes "The Victorian Invention of the Modern Company."
December 2003
Catherine Hay contributes "Mother's love -- Maternal projection in Hopkins and and Swinburne;"
November 2003
Alan Jackson contributes an essay on William Knibb, Jamaican missionary and leader of the antislavery movement. PVA adds "The Victorian Short Story: A Brief History"
October 2003
PVA and GPL create the "Thomas Hardy Gallery -- Places Important in His Life and Writings," containing 32 modern photographs and 41 contemporary ones.
September 2003
GPL creates a section on Holman Hunt's book illustrations and adds six plates from the Moxon Tennyson to the Clarkson Stanfield sitemap, and equal number to that for J. C. Horsley, four for Rossetti, five by Thomas Creswick, and 18 by Millais.PVA contributes a section containing 11 illustrations with extensive commentary on James Abbott Pasquier's plates for Hardy's A Pair of Blue Eyes; "The Wife Sale in The Mayor of Casterbridge;" The Return of the Native as Sensation Fiction;" a review of David Thacker's 2001 adaptation of Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge; eight sets of discussion questions for Hardy's The Return of the Native; "Eustacia and Clym as Tragic Heroes in The Return of the Native;" "Egdon Heath as Another Character in The Return of the Native." Brown students create reading questions for Tennyson's early poetry.
August 2003
Marjorie Bloy creates a section on ninetneenth-century riots and civil disorders containing a dozen documents. Joachim Dagg, Abteilung für Entomologie, Institut für Phytopathologie und Pflanzenschutz, Göttingen, contributes "Herbert Spencer's Anticipations of Natural Selection" and "A Metaphor for Herbert Spencer's Explanatory System ." Gregory Bungo contributes "Irony in Thomas Malthus' 'Essay on Population'"
July 2003
GPL creates a section on Victorian artist-designed postcards based on the relevant section of Anthony Guneratne and James A. Findlay's Modernism for the Masses. PVA contributes his series of essays on James Abbott Pasquier's illustrations for Thomas Hardy's A Pair of Blue Eyes and his essay on Hardy's "source" for the heroine of that novel. He also wrote "Applying Modern Critical Theory to Robert Browning's 'My Last Duchess'" and a brief introduction to modern literary theory.
Richard Kelly, Lindsay Young Professor of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, contributes several chapters from his published books, including "Through Bergson's Looking-Glass," "Scrooge," "Washington Irving and Dickens's A Christmas Carol," and "George du Maurier: The Satiric Artist" plus a list of recent editions of A Christmas Carol. Richard Patterson of Melbourne, Australia, contributes material on "The Cost of Living in 1888" found in Victorian periodicals.
Richard Austin contributes the soundfiles of him reading the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins.
June 2003
PVA contributes an essay on illustrations of Hard Times and W. Hatherell's illustrations to an early version of Jude the Obscure.
May 2003
Thomas Halloran, who is creating a section on Ireland for the sister Postcolonial Web, contributes "'An Éirinneach nó Sassanach tú?' -- Are You Irish or English?" -- a response to Paul Gough's "Why Ireland wasn't a Colony." Members of English 151 ("Fantasy and Realism in Victorian Literature"), Brown University, contribute essays on authors read in the course. Philip V. Allingham provides five co-operative learning projects for Dickens's Hard Times and six for A Christmas Carol as well as his transcription of Dickens's essay from Household Words, "Frauds on the Fairies". Hugh Jones of Canada contributes "15041 Private Joseph L. Vince, Royal Canadian Regiment."
April 2003
Members of English 151, Brown University, contribute reading and discussion questions for Tennyson's Idylls, Trollope's The Warden, and various works by John Ruskin. Philip V. Allingham continues his series of close readings of individual plates by Hatherell for Jude the Obscure, completing them in May.
March 2003
Philip V. Allingham adds his transcription of Dion Boucicault's Dot, an adaptation of Charles Dickens's second Christmas Book, The Cricket on the Hearth. Members of English 151, Brown University, contribute reading and discussion questions for North and South and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh and individual poems by Robert Browning.
February 2003
Members of English 151, Brown University, contribute reading and discussion questions for MacDonald's Phantastes and for various works by Thomas Carlyle
January 2003
Members of English 151, Brown University, contribute reading and discussion questions for the Alice Books.
December 2002
The Web Initiative Grant from the National University of Singapore ends and with it the Senior Research Fellowships of Marjorie Bloy and Tamara Wagner, who have contributed so many important materials to the Victorian Web, as did John van Whye, who left Singapore in November.
George P. Landow completes a web-version of Michael Steig's classic Dickens and Phiz.
Philip V. Allingham and George P. Landow create a section on adaptations of Victorian fiction in drama, cinema, and television, including contemporary illustrations of theatrical adaptations of Dickens. They also create a section on Victorian Pantomime, which includes W. S. Gilbert's essay on the subject. Tamara Wagner creates new sections on Catherine Hubback and Catherine Gore.
November 2002
Marjorie Bloy completes an eighty-document section on Victorian workhouses and Poorlaw. Tamara Wagner contributes multi-sectioned essays on Victorian utopian novels and on divorce laws in Wilkie Collins's novels. GPL adds 100 illustrations by Phiz scanned by PVA, who also contributes the text of Fox Cooper's 1860 dramatic adaptation of A Tale of Two Cities and an essay on Dennis Potter's 1978 television adaptation of Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge.
October 2002
George P. Landow and John van Whye carry out a major reorganization and rationalization of the folder structure of the Victorian Web, which should be invisible to users but which makes maintaining our 18,500 documents easier. Working with photographs and caption material by PVA, Charlotte Pabst-Kastner, and Sarah Bird Wright, GPL creates a gallery of pictures related to Thomas Hardy and his novels.
September 2002
Patrick Regan contributes material for sections on two poets -- Stephen Heath and Robert Buchanan -- which include primary texts, and D.P. O'Connor contributes an essay on Bartle Frere to the history section.
August 2002
PVA creates materials on the novelist Charles Lever and commentary on Phiz's two-dozen illustrations of Lever's novel, Barrington. He also adds plates and commentary on Walter Paget's illustrations for Hardy's The Pursuit of The Well-Beloved.
July 2002
John Bell Young sends in a notice of the recording of Richard Strauss's musical adaptation of Tennyson's Enoch Arden.
Marjorie Bloy completes her massive sub-web on the Crimean War. Marianne Thormahlen's essay on Sarah Ellis and the Brontë pseudonyms added. A new member of the Victorian Web Books section: Sally Mitchell's Diana Mulock Craik. New illustrations by George Cruikshank are added to PVA's introduction and biography.
Chosen for Best of History Web Sites. More Fred Walker illustrations added by PVA.
May and June 2002
Using several dozen images from P. Neill Ralley's Stained Glass Photography site that he shared with the Victorian Web, GPL created a new section that thus far includes works by Ford Madox Brown, Sir Edward Burne-Jones, Henry Holiday, William Morris, and Philip Webb.
Dr John van Wyhe, Senior Research Fellow for the Victorian Web, wrote overview pages for evolution, progress and natural laws, man, astronomy, geology, medicine, a new overview of phrenology and a new bibliography. In addition he created biographies for the following figures in Victorian science: Louis Agassiz, Charles Babbage, William Buckland, G. Campbell, Duke of Argyll, George Combe, Robert Chambers, G. Cuvier, Charles Darwin, Thomas Edison, Charles Lyell, Richard Owen, William Whewell, and John Tyndall. Additional biographies were commissioned for Samuel Butler, J.B. Lamarck, James Clark Maxwell and J.D. Hooker, and all existing documents in the science section were edited and updated.
Sections on science and religion and science publishing were commissioned from Aileen Fyfe; new pages on physics by Chris Haley and a new section on botony by Jim Endersby.
John scanned and formatted the following primary texts: Charles Babbage's Ninth Bridgewater Treatise (1837); The Reign of Law (1860) by G. Campbell, Duke of Argyll; J.C. Maxwell's "Molecules" Nature (Sept. 1873); John Tyndall's Address Delivered before the British Association Assembled at Belfast (1874), and the following works by Darwin: Autobiography and An historical sketch of the progress of opinion on the origin of species.
Further books were aquired by permission: Cuvier's Discours sur les révolutions de la surface du globe, et sur les changemens qu'elles ont produits dans le règne animal (3rd French edn 1825). Discourse on the revolutionary upheavals on the surface of the globe and on the changes which they have produced in the animal kingdom. (1825); anonymous review of Essay on the Theory of the Earth, The British Review and London Critical Journal (vol. V 1813); anonymous review of Essay on the Theory of the Earth, Edinburgh Review, January 1814); Poetry and Medicine: W. E. Henley's In Hospital add an intro, bibliographical data and move; Jenkin Fleeming's "Review of Darwin's The origin of species" The North British Review, June 1867, (46) pp. 277-318; Richard Owen's Review of Darwin's Origin of Species, Edinburgh Review, 1860 (3), pp. 487-532. Additional primary texts were scanned by David Clifford: Herbert Spencer's 'Development Hypothesis' (1852); A.R. Wallace's On the Law which has Regulated The Introduction of New Species (1855), and Cuvier's Elegy of Lamarck.
May 2002
John van Wyhe, who fixed some 3000 broken links, also created a section on Victorian engravings of Cambridge from Atkinson's Cambridge described and illustrated: being a short history of the Town and University (Macmillan, 1897).
April 2002
GPL reviews the autobiography of one of the major figures in Victorian studies -- Richard D. Altick's A Little Bit of Luck: The Making of an Adventurous Scholar.
Marjorie Bloy puts the finishing touches on her important new heavily linked section in the history materials on twenty-seven British Prime Ministers.
Philip V. Alligham reviews Lillian Nayder's Unequal Partners: Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Victorian Authorship (Cornell U. P., 2001). New section on reviews of contemporary criticism and scholarship.
March 2002
VW wins award from TagTeacher.net. and World's Greatest Websites. Philip Allingham contributes essays on individual illustrations by Phiz of Tale of Two Cities, the lost Franklin expedition, and The Search for the North-West Passage: 1497-1845. Chosen for World's Greatest Websites
E-texts added for Max Beerbohm's "A Defence of Cosmetics" and "Diminuendo," Richard La Gallienne's "The Boom in Yellow," and Oscar Wilde's "The Decay of Lying." Brown students contribute extensive reading and discussion questions for these works.
February 2002
Harry Richard Stelling, Associate Professor Emeritus, Augustana College, contributes "A Five Day's Walk," an essay about Carlyle.
Marjorie Bloy adds biography of David Ricardo.
Brown students contribute extensive reading and discussion questions for Carlyle, Thoreau, and Ruskin.
January 2002
"What's New in the Victorian Web" created.
Dr. Marjorie Bloy and Dr. John van Whye take up their positions as Victorian Web Research Fellows. Dr. Bloy creates a biography and list of works for Thomas DeQuincey and then adds an e-text of Confessions of an English Opium Eater.
Sections addded on the following artists:
- William J. C. Bond
- William Davies
- Myles Birket Foster
- Alfred William Hunt
- Sir Edwin Landseer
- John Wright Oakes
- David Roberts
- Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal
- Frederick Smallfield
Many new works by Edward Burne-Jones, Frederic Lord Leighton, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and others. "3 Plates by George Du Maurier for Trilby (1894);" "The Implicit Theme in the Works of Thomas Hardy."
December 2001
Philip V. Allinghan arrives for three weeks as the first Victorian Web Fellow.
A new section on Sir Walter Scott in the Previctorian materials; "William James Linton (1812-97), Master of Wood Engraving and Radical Republican;" Helen Paterson Allingham's 1874 illustrations, with commentary, of Hardy's Far From The Madding Crowd. Introductory materials on Hardy's fiction: physical setting, chronological setting, narrative voice, audience and serial structure. "Why Read the Serial Versions of Victorian Novels?"
New online Victorian texts: Tim Linnell, a descendant of the artist, contributes his scanned text of A. T. Storey's The Life of John Linnell, published in London by Bentley and Son in 1892.
November 2001
Victorian and Edwardian Postcards; Hardy and the visual arts -- his works illustrated by ten artists. "How to read a Novel -- Some Places to Begin." "An Introduction to The Illustrated London News;"
October 2001
New online Victorian texts: Walter Pater's The Renaissance. John McDonnell contributes the electronic text, including scanned images, of the anonymous London Characters and the Humourous Side of London Life. With Upwards of 70 Illustrations, which the London firm Stanley Rivers & Co. published in 1871. Nathalie Chevalier of Paris contributes London, a volume of Victorian photographs circa 1880.
New Victorian Web Book: Chris R. Vanden Bossche's Carlyle and the Search for Authority (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1991).
"London Buildings and Monuments illustrated in the Victorian Web" -- Victorian and modern photograph. Materials on Edmund J. Sullivan, including his introduction to Carlyle's Sartor Resartus and his 79 illustrations to it.
September 2001
New Victorian Web Book: Josef L. Altholz's The Liberal Catholic Movement in England: The "Rambler" and its Contributors, 1848-1864 (London: Burns and Oates, 1962).
August 2001
An overview (sitemap) for Victorian painters (eventually) containing one hundred artists and schools. "Image, Allusion, Voice, Dialect, and Irony in Thomas Hardy's 'The Oxen'."
June 2001
New Victorian Web Book: Barbara T. Gates' Victorian Suicide: Mad Crimes and Sad Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Presss, 1988).
May 2001
New Victorian Web Book: James R. Kincaid's Dickens and the Rhetoric of Laughter (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971).
Materials on Michael Balfe, Victorian opera singer and composer.
April 2001
New Victorian Web Books: Chin Liew Ten's Mill on Liberty (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980) and Peter L. Shillingsburg's Pegasus in Harness: Victorian publishing and W. M. Thackeray (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992).
Materials on the book illustrator, Alfred Parsons.
March 2001
New Victorian Web Book: James R. Kincaid'sTennyson's Major Poems: The Comic and Ironic Patterns (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975).
Section on the Industrial Revolution. "Theodore Wratislaw"
February 2001
New technology section; Sections on the following illustrators: Hubert von Herkomer,
January 2001
"Technologies of Nineteenth-Century Illustration;" Materials on the following illustrators: Joseph Syddall, Edward and Thomas Dalziel
"Hardy's The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid -- Short Story, Novel, or Novella?" "Best-Selling Victorian Novels, 1837-1861."
December 2000
Materials on the following illustrators:
- James Watson Dawson, Arthur Hopkins, Ernest Borough-Johnson, John Leech, Charles S. Reinhart,
- Daniel A. Wehrschmidt.
"Imagery in Conrad and Hardy;" "Philip Goulding's Dramatic Adaptation of The Mayor of Casterbridge;" "Tartarean Imagery of Hardy's The Return of the Native;" "Punch, or the London Charivari (1841-1992) -- A British Institution;" sections on Harrison Ainsworth,
November 2000
"Cotton versus Silk: Sigfried Gideon on Social Class and Mechanization;" "Water-Powered Drop Forge, Abbeyville, Lancashire;" "Sensation Novel Elements in Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge;" "The Serialised Novels of Thomas Hardy, 1872- 1895." Subwebs on Wilkie Collins and Charles Reade, Robert Louis Stevenson
October 2000
New Materials: Johns Stuart Mill section; materials on Herbert Spencer and Victorian psychology, including Alexander Bain. "British Victorian and Edwardian Theatre: A Bibliography."
Last modified 31 October 2009