December 2010
By the twenty-seventh, the site had 49,975 documents. Looking through his library, your webmaster came upon a copy of The Diary of Alfred Domett, 1872-1885 obtained in Oxforfd more than three decades ago. Domett, who was the original of Waring in Browning's “What became of Waring?” provides often fascinating material about Browning's views of his contemporaries, early knowledge of Hebrew, and his surpringingly close relationship with Tennyson. He also includes an anecdote about Tennyson's shyness and interesting information about sculptors, such as J. H. Foley, Thomas Thornycroft, and Mary Thornycroft, and the physical appearance of public figures, such as Gladstone and T. H. Huxley. He also recorded his delight with Edinburgh.
After Jacqueline Banerjee pointed out in passing that the Internet Archive had portions of The Studio online, your webmaster drew upon it to add a series of materials to the site — "Sir George Frampton's house in St. John's Wood," a half a dozen drawings and a painting by Byam Shaw, and six paintings and two drawings by Solomon J. Solomon plus a fireplace by C. H. Townsend. The Internet Archive's digitized versions of the University of Toronto's copies of The Studio's provided the materials to create a Victorian Web translations of an essay on the Martin Brothers and Japanese pottery (with several dozen examples), Percy Bates's “The Late Frederick Sandys: A Retrospect”, and Baillie-Scott's essay “On the Characteristics of Mr. C. F. A. Voysey's Architecture” followed by the heavily illustrated “E. J. Horniman's ‘Garden Corner’ designed by C. F. A. Voysey;” These two articles plus materials from this periodical's illustrated review of the 1896 Arts and Crafts Exhibition, which included many illustrations of Voysey's textiles, wallpaper, carpets, and furniture, permitted the creation of a much-improved section about this major architect-designer.
Philip V. Allingham continued work on the illustrations of Dickens by Marcus Stone and Sol Eytinge, adding 50 new plates and thus far 10 sets of captions and commentaries for Stone's Our Mutual Friend.
Jacqueline Banerjee contributed essays (illustrated with more than 30 of her photographs) about Pugin's St Augustine's Abbey Church, Ramsgate and the Grange, his home adjacent to the church. To these she added St. Marie's Grange in Wiltshire illustratedby a contemporary engraving. Catriona Blaker of the Pugin Society very kindly read these new contributions and provided corrections and new information. She also created a new section on the Arts and rafts architect Charles Harrison Townsend, including his Whitechapel Art Gallery and The Horniman Museum. In addition, JB provided new versions of works containing links to electronic texts for Hannah More and George MacDonald.
Montserrat Martínez García sent in Spanish translations of twenty more essays from the religion section, completing all the material on alternate traditions from atheism and agnosticism to spiritualism, socinianism, and Swedenborg. Emma Haley's translations of a dozen essays on Marie Corelli also arrived and are now online.
Jacqueline Banerjee did a photo-essay on G. E. Street's American Cathedral in Paris and opened new sites for the sculptor George Wade and the architect Charles Harrison Townsend.
Jonathan Potter contributed “Constructing Social and Personal Identities in Dickens.’ David Copperfield.”
David Skilton, Research Professor in English at Cardiff University, who e-mailed the correct spelling of Miss Richmal Magnall's first name, also provided her dates: 1769-1820. Thanks!
November 2010
Your webmaster spent the first week of the month converting (for the French section of the site) dozens of Olivier Pinel's documents about the people and events of the French Revolution, which he has generously shared with readers of the Victorian Web; 100s more to go. He also added “Richard Jefferies, Mystical Agnostic and Skeptic” and “Richard Jefferies and the Industrial Sublime.” He also formatted the Spanish versions of more than 50 essays related to religion in Victorian England that Montserrat Martínez García translated, including those on the Church of England, dissenters and evangelical protestantism, the Tractarians, and other denominations. Lora Grigorova from Portugal sent in translations of the 3 documents in the Hall Caine section, Zaire Willems did the same for the biography of F. W. Farrar, and Esther Fernández translated the biography of R. D. Blackmore and a dozen related documents. Meanwhile, Asun López-Varela, who heads the Spanish-translation project, translated the sitemap for Decorative Arts and Design.
Philip V. Allingham transcribed and formatted William Winter's reminiscence of the illustrator, Sol Eytinge, Jr., his long essay on Dickens, Eytinge's drawing of Dickens, and Lock and Whitfield's photograph of Wilkie Collins.
Jacqueline Banerjee, who reviewed Victoria & Albert: Art & Love (published by the Royal Colections), created a series of photographs with accompanying commentary on material related to Victorian railways: a signal box on the Lewes and Uckfield Railway, Frederick Dale Banister's Eastbourne Station in Sussex, and an 1851 advertisement for railway insurance. In addition to her biography of Marochetti and photographs of his home on Onslow Square, she added images and text for his Richard I, Coeur de Lion outside the House of Lords, The Assumption of Mary Magdalene (the grand altarpiece at the Madeleine in Paris), his bust of Sir Anthony Panizzi at the British Library, and examples of his designs for furniture and ceramics.
Mike Pratt, Port Colborne, Ontario, Canada, requested and received permission to place on his site Philip V. Allingham's “Dickens's Impressions of the Mississippi valley at Cairo, Illinois, the original of ‘Eden’ in Martin Chuzzlewit.” Meanwhile, PVA continues writing commentaries on Eytinge's illustrations for Our Mutual Friend.
J. Michael Desmond, Professor in the School of Architecture at Louisiana State University, asked for and received permission to use the site's photograph of St. Paul's, Covent Garen, in his book on the architecture of his university. Paul Bukhovko writes from Belarus for permisisn to translate our article “Charles Lyell” [his Belorussian translation]. Ashley Muir Bruhn of Sterling Publishing in New York asked for and received permission to reprint portions of PVA's “Some Early Dramatic Solutions to Dickens's Unfinished Mystery” in an edited volume of John Forster’s The Life of Charles Dickens. Thalia Allington-Wood from the Tate requested and received GPL's photo of the bust of John Robert Cozens on the façade of Royal Institute of Painters in London. Alex, the webmaster of LivingBorough.co.uk, suggested an excange of links involving George Eliot's neighborhood.
The British Museum writes to invite our readers to a book-signing and Christmas shopping event on Thursday 2nd December in the British Museum Bookshop, from 6pm. On offer are complimentary seasonal refreshments, a discount on books on the decorative arts, a special selection of "authentic replica Victorian jewellery" and the chance to speak to the authors of a new book, Jewellery in the Age of Queen Victoria. The latter is evidently very wide-ranging, encompassing jewellery from Europe and America, and the roles of jewellery in fashion, literature and the culture generally. Sounds promising!
Danniel Dutton writes from the UK to let us know that the old off-site links to texts by George Eliot no longer work, Thanks! Mr. Dutton's e-mail prompted GPL to replace these links with ones to Project Gutenberg e-texts, after which he did the same for a dozen other authors. By the 29nd the site had 49,466 documents.
October 2010
The month, which marks the tenth anniversary of this quasi-blog within the Victorian Web, began with your webmaster in Bucharest, where he gave a talk on the American ceramicist-sculptor, Arnie Zimmerman at a conference on real and virtual cities at a Romanian center for semiotics. While in Bucharest he photographed an interesting nineteenth-century example of iron and glass architecture — the Macca-Vilacrosse Passage, whose name, date, and architect Prof. Mariana Net kindly provided. Just after mid-month more Spanish translations arrived, were formatted, and put online.
Philip V. Allingham scanned 17 illustrations for Sol Eytinge's for Dickens's Our Mutual Friend and provided htmls for the first 4.
Jacqueline Banerjee contributed a substantial essay about Pugin's stained glass in St Augustine's Church, Ramsgate accompanied by 16 photographs, after which she created a section on William Henry Playfair, the most famous Scottish architect working in the classical tradition; he designed both the Royal Scottish Academy and the National Gallery of Scotland. Next came her essay and photographs of George Audsley's New West End Synagogue
Andrzej Diniejko traveled from Poland to Sardinia to deliver a lecture on the Victorian Web at the Convegno Italiano at the University of Sassari. Upon his return home he sent along an essay on the life and works of Frances Trollope.
Rosemarie Morgan of St. Andrews writes to to provide advance notice of Hardy at Yale II: (9-12 June 2011).
Mark F. Bean writes to provide a possible explanation for the odd name Catnach.
Christ Keenan of the Edison Innovation Foundation invited us to add a link to the organization's blog, which I have done. Pauline Hernandez wrote to say that the Waterloo link to material about Sherlock Holmes no longer works and suggested another site. Oliver Penil writes to give notice of his French site that lists all those guillotined during the Terror. Paul Thompson writes, “your website won Shmoop's Best of the Web award for Bleak House.” Thanks!
As of the 18th, the site had 48,912 documents and images.
September 2010
As of the 27th, the site has 48,873 documents and images. Your now-seventy-year-old webmaster is writing from Singapore where he and Ruth have flown for the 10th-anniversary celebration of the honors program at the National University of which he was the founding dean. While recovering from jetlag, he has continued work on the French translation of the site, which now consists of 800 documents. Upon his return from Singapore on the 16th, he formatted and uploaded the sitemap for «El Catolicismo romano en la Gran Bretaña victoriana» and twenty odd essays on Victorian Roman Catholicism and anti-catholicism, which includes a chapter from Josef L. Altholz's book on the Liberal Catholic movement in England.
Philip Allingham scanned the images and wrote the text to accompany a series of 14 illustrations by Copping and the Taylors of Dickens' Dream Childrren, a volume written by the novelist's granddaughter; he also scanned the book's introductions.
Jacqueline Banerjee created a sitemap for the architect John Francis Bentley (1839-1902) and an essay about his Westminster Cathedral, London, accompanied by 14 of her photographs plus text and images for Cardinal Wiseman's tomb there. In addition she wrote the texts accompanying Ipshita Banerji's images of the Glass House in the Lal Bagh Gardens, Bangalore, India, and St. Philomena's Church, Mysore; she did the same for Ramnath Subbarabam's images of the Victorian Memorial Hall in Calcutta. She also granted permission to publishers Thames & Hudson and The History Press for use of her images of Susan Durant's sculpture and of Holly Village, Highgate, respectively, in their forthcoming books.
Michael Uphill requested and received permission to include JB's photograph of St Mary Abbotts in his Tales from the London County Crypt — “about bellringers in London.“ Winn W. Wasson, who teaches Political Science at Ashford University in Iowa, requested and received permission material transcribed by PVA.
Christophe Semois wrote suggesting a link to his site www.Napoleon-battles.com, which features the Battle of Waterloo, and I have added it to the suggested reading that follows the biography of Wellington. Ruairidh Anderson writes from the U. K. to announce his Victorian-related blog, Songs from the Howling Sea: every Friday he releases “a free song about a character or event from London's Old East End.” His titles include “Murder and the Medical Profession,” “Part Time Entertainers And Raw Sewage,” and “Sunshine from the East.” Hubert Groult writes from France to request a link to his Wilde site. Ed West wrote to ask for permission to use "pictures for my blog about buildings demolished in the 20th century." Christopher Rollason shared his translation of Tennyson's "Crossing the Bar" with us.
Rachel Preen, Advertising Manager, Schoolzone.co.uk Ltd, wrote while GPL was in Bucharest that the site had received a star rating from Schoolzone.
Jasmine Boni Ball of the International School of Florence writes, “I came across your site the victorian web and right now im writing a paper about 'what caused an increase in child labour during the victorian times/industrial revolution' was wondering if you could possibly give me some books or websites which would helped me with my historical investigation. I find the internet it quite limited and really need some strong primary sources." Here is GPL's response.
Anna-Maria Barz writes from Germany to let us know that a link in “Tennyson's Works” was broken: when a new version of Jim Kincaid's fine book was uploaded links to it weren't changed. Thanks, Anna-Maria!
August 2010
As the month ended, the site had 48,421 documents and images. Your webmaster continued work on the French version of the site, translating various documents in the Ruskin section, including his Oxford UP “Past Masters” Ruskin, John Ruskin et le conte de fées littéraire,” “John Ruskin sur fantasie dans l'art et la littérature,”, “Ruskin et Baudelaire sur l'art and l'artiste,” and “J. D. Harding et John Ruskin sur la variété infinie de la nature” — plus the usual documents conatining lists of links.
Jacqueline Banerjee contributed her essay on John Johnson's St Mary's, South Tidworth, which included thirteen photos including those of Farmer and Brindley's stone carving and stained glass windows by the firm of Clayton and Bell. These new contributions led GPL to add Farmer and Brindley attributions to various documents, including those in the sections for the Foreign Office and the London Natural History Museum. JB also contributed a heavily linked essay and photographs on Pugin's tabernacle now in Southwark Cathedral. Malta Geografika reprinted, with out permission, one of JB's essays on Malta.
Catherine J. Golden and Michael Marx provided another Victorian valentine for the section on Victorian letter writing.
Simon Cooke greatly expanded our section on Victorian book bindings with his essays, “Book Bindings of the 1860s: the Christmas Gift Book” and “Dante Gabriel Rossetti as a Designer of Book Bindings” plus more than a dozen beautful photographs of this aspect of the decoratibe arts.
John Sankey reviewed Paul Murphy's Nineteenth-Century Irish Sculpture: Native Genius Reaffirmed, and Steve Donoghue kindly shared with us his review of Robert Hewison's Ruskin on Venice, which first appeared in Open Letters Monthly: An Arts and Literature Review. Thanks to Nigel Banerjee for suggesting it and to Jacqueline Banerjee for gaining permission from Mr. Donoghue. Cynthia J. Gamble shared with us “Disproving Ruskin's Advice: ‘Don't Go to Exhibitions’ — A Review of Ruskin, Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites at the Tate Britain.”
Thanks to Constance Harsh, Professor of English, Colgate University, for providing the correct identity of the towers in the background of one of Phiz's plates for Martin Chuzzlewit. Thanks also to Merryn Somerset for explaining Hardy's reference to “Fosseway” in “A Trampwoman's Tragedy.”
July 2010
Your webmaster's Ruskinian pilgrimage ended on the 2nd, and for the next few weeks he continued to work on the hundreds of photographs of French gothic cathedrals and other buildings, the interior and exterior of Chartres being the last to see completion (and the stained class yet to come). In addition to continuing to format, proof, and link the lists of Ruskin's mentions of individual cities and structures scanned from the Library Edition, he continued what has probably been his single most difficult formatting and editing project on the Victorian Web — an annotated, heavily illustrated and cross-linked online edition of The Seven Lamps of Architecture. Unfortunately, Project Gutenberg has not yet added this work, and various online versions are often dreadful: the Hathi Trust's version, for example, spells Ruskin in various ways, including “Raskin” and “Iluskiu,” “St. Lô” appears as “st l6,” and “façade” as “fa9ade,” and it omits the crucial § in hundreds of cross-references, rendering them useless, since they appear to direct the reader to pages not sections in the text.
Taking a break from The Seven Lamps project, he created an online illustrated journal of the On the Old Road V trip, which pilgrimage James L. Spates, Professor and Class of 1964 Endowed Chair of Sociology and Chair, Urban Studies Program, at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, conceived and led. The illustrated journal awaits the contributions, comments, and photographs from other members of the group, who came from France, Switzerland, England, and the United States. Oh yes, by the 26st, the site had 47,355 documents and images.
On the 30th GPL uploaded the beginnings of French version of the Victorian Web, which thus far consists only of Susana Garcia Hiernaux's translations of materials on Bram Stoker, Swinburne, and Symons plus GPL's translations of various sitemaps and more than two hundred illustrated documents in the sections on architecture (the Houses of Parliament, Norman Shaw, and Waterhouse's Natural History Museum) and sculpture (e.g., the Albert Memorial and the works of Brock and Woolner). Translators — and corrections — most welcome!
Jacqueline Banerjee contributed her three-part essay, Letters in George Meredith’s The Ordeal of Richard Feverel — Part I: Arson and Amor, Part II: In the Toils of the "System", Part III: The "Real" Reader — plus a set of topics to be investigated and additions to the Meredith Gallery: an 1862 photograph of Meredith with his son Arthur and a late letter from the novelist. In addition she reviewed Kathryn Ferry's The Victorian Home, one of many useful very short, heavily illustrated books published by Shire. JB also provided photographs and text for the burial stone of Richard Anning Bell and the memorial one for F. W. Pomeroy, did the same for a particularly exciting building — the Shah Jahan Mosque (1867), Surrey, the first mosque in Northern Europe. Continung her work on nineteenth-century sculpture, JB added four new works to the John Gibson section.
Lord Norton used JB's photo of The Buxton memorial and credits her on the House of Lords Blog.
Philip V. Allingham scanned and edited Skinner Prout's 1849 Illustrated Londion News illustrated article, “Scenes on Board an Australian Emigrant Ship” including images of shipboard life and an image of the a settler's hut in Australia. Having provided the contemporary context, he wrote “Skinner Prout’s ‘Scenes on Board an Australian Emigrant Ship’ and David Copperfield,” all of which prompted GPL to create a new sitemap, “Emigration in Victorian Britain.” In addition, PVA scanned the images and accompanying text for ILN articles on four shipwrecks. He continued to mine Illustrated Londion News, producing “Old Style — The Mail Coach,” “New Style — The Mail Train,” and “Dickens's attitude towards the Age of Steam.”
Catherine J. Golden continues to add to her section about the Victorian revltion in letter writing with essays on condolence letters, “Prepaid Stationery and the Penny Black,” and “Valentine.’s Day: Love and Derision ‘By the Bushell.’” Having received permission from the Museum of London to reproduce in the Victorian Web George Elgar Hicks.’s The General Post Office, One Minute to Six she provided a substantial essay on the painting, and she also obtained permission to put online an image of one of the infamous Mulreadies, which GPL used to create details to illustrate her essay. Near the end of the month she sent in Michael Marx's photos of valentines and mourning stationery.
Graham Lupp is a successful Australian painter whose widely diverse artworks involve a great many interests and extensive travel overseas. Originally an architect, Graham also has a keen interest in Victorian Australian architecture, and has proposed sending along “Postcards from Oz” at irregular intervals, and he has already contributed enough material for GPL to create a section on Australian architecture (be sure to take a look at his painting of a window in the local Bishop's Victorian home.
Jeremy Gerrard contributed “The Morality of Sacrifice in Little Dorrit.”
Christian Myhre Nygaard of Jyskebank.tv, a Danish English-language online tv station, invited the Victorian Web to add a link to Gibraltar, an English territory with southern characteristics, which we have done in British Empire sitemap. Keither Duffy writes to let us know about the East Durham History Project to which we have added a link in the places section. Gary Crawford writes to let us know that the URL for Le Fanu Studies has changed. Thanks.
Dr Alexandrina Buchanan, Lecturer in Archive Studies at the University of Liverpool, writes in with information about the retsoration of St. Catherine's Chapel, Ely Cathedral.
Alberto Rinaldi e-mailed from Trossingen, Germany, “we have the pleasure to inform you that ‘The Victorian Webs’ has been selected as the Linksgiving.com Weekly Link Award winner for this week (July 11-17, 2010). Matthew Koyle pointed out a broken link in the index of authors, and Clare Imholtz wrote to correct an error in the introduction to the illustrator Gilbert. Thanks!
June 2010
In preparation for a voyage to France with fellow Ruskinians — the fifth version or stage of On the Old Road conceived and led by James L. Spates, Class of 1964 Endowed Chair of Professor of Sociology at Hobart and William Smith College — your webmaster scanned twelve plates from The Seven Lamps of Architecture, creating larger scanned images for individual parts of multi-section plates and adding the passages in which Ruskin discusses them. Whenever the Victorian Web had other relevant drawings and watercolors, GPL linked them to these plates as well. During the two-week Ruskin pilgrimage, he took more than a 1,000 photographs of buildings Ruskin described in Bayeux, Caen, Chartres, Coutance, Lisieux, Rouen, and St. Lô. Jim Spates, Cynthia Gamble, Pierre André Mentent, and Norma Wilson identified the architectural details Ruskin drew and about which he wrote. Standing before the buildings Ruskin escribed, Jim read from Ruskin's published writings, letters, and diaries, and Cynthia informed many of our excursions with cutting-edge scholarship by reading from her extensive transcriptions of unpublished manuscript materials. The site now contains photographs of the present condition of the detail at St. Lô to which Ruskin devoted Plate II as well as a better preserved analogue. Similarly, we now have an image of the original window tracery at Bayeux Cathedral that appears in Plate III and what he called the "foam bubbles" in the Plate VII.
The non-Ruskinian discoveries included buildings in Caen that resemble those Samuel Prout drew in Lisieux and a reconstruction (on the grounds of William the Conqueror's castle) of a medieval derrick used in stone quarries (for the technology section). This discovery prompted GPL to rewrite the discussion of ages of technology originally written in 1988, renaming it “Five Ages of Technology.”
The latest catalogue from London's Maas Gallery, whose contents they genrously shared with our readers, provided images and text for paintings and drawings by Jerry Barrett, Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale , Edward Burne-Jones, Herbert Dicksee, and William Etty. In addition, the catalogue contained two beautiful ink-and-watercolor drawings of pre-Victorian steam engines, one of which also contained a cut-away drawing of a paddle-wheel warship. These last two images prompted the creation of a section on steam power, just as the other Maas images led to creating sections for several artists new to the site and removing the list of individual artists from sitemap for Victorian painting and puttng it in a separate document.
Jacqueline Banerjee created a section on the Irish sculptor Albert Bruce-Joy, which includes a biography and status of Alexander Balfour and James Whiteside.
Catherine J. Golden, Professor of English at Skidmore College, who prompted GPL to create a new section, “The Victorian Revolution in Letter Writing, ” contributed her introduction to the subject and her essays — “Sir Rowland Hill,“ “The Portable Writing desk — the Victorian laptop,” and “Postal Products: Postage stamps, Stationery, Letter Racks, Paper Clips, Ink Wells, Desk Sets, Portable Writing Desks.” Thanks to Michael Marx for his excellent photographs accompanying the essays. JB has sent in additional photographs of Post Boxes, and GPL has continued to mine the Victorian Web for examples of ink wells, desks, and writing tables. JB reminded him that she had earlier sent in a photograph of the Perkins D cylinder Printing Press on which the first stamps were produced, and she also provided an image of Marcus Stone's illustration of Nora bent over her letter (from Trollope's He Knew He was Right), which, she pointed out, works well with Ellen Moody's 2007 essay, “Partly Told In Letters: Trollope's Story-telling Art.”
Carla Maria Gnappi, PhD, of Parma, Italy, contributed “Science and Technology in Victorian Utopias.”
Startpage.co.uk gave one of its awards to “David Ricardo's Contributions to Economics,” an essay that dates back to 1995.
Thanks to Alice Horne for correcting a misspelled name in the section on Great Expectations and to Marc B. Goldstein for correcting a real howler in “The Lady of Shalott.” Andy Wood, Hon. Secretary, Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours, corrected the birthdate of Alfred East, explaining “I am reliably informed that even during Sir Alfred's lifetime the date was often wrongly given.”
May 2010
Glorious May continues with site having grown to 46,355 documents. Drawing upon M'Clintock and Strong's nineteenth-century Evangelical Cyclopædia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature — the ten volumes of which David Cody, a researcher who worked on the original Intermedia project, gave him two decades ago — your webmaster added susbtantial materials to the religion section, including a ten-part essay on John Wesley, substantial discussions of George Whitefield, Socinus, and Socinianism, and three substantial essays on tracts and the tract movement. After Ohio University Press granted permission for the Victorian Web to translate into html its online PDFs of the introduction and first chapter of Megan A. Norcia's fascinating X Marks the Spot: Women Writers Map the Empire for British Children, 1790-1895 (2010) your webmaster spent several days scanning, modifying, and formatting the many, many endnotes for the VW version.
After Catherine J. Golden, author of Posting It: The Victorian Revolution in Letter Writing (2009), met with GPL to discuss ways of creating a section in the Victorian Web on the subject of her book, which will link to social history, gender matters, economics, technology, and politics, he retitled the section on printing as “Printing, publishing, letter writing, and the beginnings of telecommunications” and put up a new sitemap for Victorian letters as a social and tecnological practice to which Professor Golden contributed an introduction. GPL next devoted most of a week to formatting the materials, particularly the Victorian ones, in Eunice and Ron Shanahan's “Letters from the Past,” separating the letters and commentaries into sections containing for Victorian and earlier letters.
Jacqueline Banerjee added to our writers of children's and historical literature with “Notice of an essay on Emma Marshall ”, and sent in an illustrated essay on the Holborn Viaduct in London, one of the engineering feats of the age, which facilitated access from the West End of London to the East. She also added many new images of the work of the sculptor Henry de Triqueti, including the Triqueti Marbles in the Royal Albert Chapel, Windsor, and reviewed a new book on his work, with several additional images of his sculpture.
Andrzej Diniejko contributed “Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution and the Intellectual Ferment of the Mid- and Late Victorian Periods” and “Ambivalent Victorians in Modern and Postmodern Perceptions. A Review of The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror by Simon Joyce (2007).”
Adrian Lipscomb, who earlier provided our biography of the military painter, William Simpson, provided materials to open a new section on portrait miniatures and one of its practitioners, Maria Eliza [Burt] Simpson, which includes almost a dozen of her works, a biographical essay, and photographs of the artist.
Jeanette Edgar from Blackwell, The Arts & Crafts House in Bowness-on-Windermere, writes to announce William Morris: A Sense of Place, an exhibition that will run from 26 June to 17 October 2010. The Watts Gallery e-mailed a notice of its exhibition of “Photographs of Sir Hubert von Herkomer and his family from the Rob Dickins Collection.”
April 2010
As of 26 April, the site had 45, 928 documents and images. Your webmaster created a folder for Sarah Waters in the Neo-Victorian section of the site, to which Devon Anderson contributed “‘The flesh made word’: Fingersmith and the Textual Body, ” Amy Farley “Violating Female Function: The Rewriting of the Female Form in Fingersmith,” and Stefanie Sevcik “Writing, Reading, and Erasing Identities in Fingersmith.”
Jacqueline Banerjee added photos of Galizia's Maltese houses in the Moorish style and completed her section on Victorian Malta with the last of her three-part discussion, “Architecture and Civil and Military Engineering Projects,” the three parts of which include almost 3 dozen of her photographs. In addition , she also sent in photographs, texts, and fully fomatted html for St Michael and All Angels, Brighton, by G. F. Bodley and William Burges; and sitemaps for works by Sir Jeffry Wyattville and A. J. Humbert, two architects who worked on the royal estates at Windsor and Sandringham respectively.
Stuart Durant contributed “A Selection of Great Victorian Railway Stations.” Raymond E. O. Ella kindly provided a photograph of Thornycroft's bust of John Ella and information about the Victorian musician and composer. Teja Varma M.A., an M.Phil candidate at the University Of Delhi, contributed “No Escape to be Had, No Absolution to be Got”: Divorce in the Lives and Novels of Charles Dickens and Caroline Norton.
The section on Neo-Victorians grew as Stefanie Sevcik wrote “The Undelivered Message: French Theory and Biographical Research in A.S. Byatt’s Possession,” Amy Farey “The Public Eye & Narrative Ghosts: Textual Connectivity in A.S. Byatt’s Possession,” and Devon Anderson “‘For the sake of truth alone?’: Taking Possession of the Female Diary.”
Deborah McDonald, who some years back generously shared with readers of the Victorian Web some of her materials on women's work and Victorian feminism, sent along announcement of her new book entitled The Prince, His Tutor and the Ripper. After conferring with her pubisher, she shared her introduction and material upon homosexuality at Eton.
Rose Hepworth and Rachel Pearce, of the Arts Society, Newnham College, University of Cambridge, requested and received permission to use one of our scanned images.
Paul Thompson writes that th site has received best-of-the web awards from PC Magazine for the sections on Jane Eyre, An Ideal Husband, and Dracula.
Thanks to Miles Tittle who correctly identified the subject one of Morris's illuminated manuscripts and to Dan, who provided a corection to a broken link.
March 2010
Perhaps the most important news of the month was the request from the Library of Congress on 29 March to archive the Victorian Web for its historical importance. As of 29 March, the site had 45, 795 documents and images. Your webmaster redesigned and reformatted James Kincaid's Dickens and the Rhetoric of Laughter, and continuing work on the Spanish vesion of the site, formatted the materials on Emily Brontë, Catherine Hubback, and A. C. Benson. The first stages of the Great Expectations project saw completion: this experiment in collaborative scholarship and learning with web-based texts will link (1) the text of the novel, (2) previously published scholarly texts, encluding entire books, (3) dozens of illustrations, (4) contemporary reviews, and (5) student-created annotations that take various forms, including essays and reading and discussion questions. This web version of the novel derives from the Project Gutenberg EBook version that “An Anonymous Volunteer” and David Widger created. Thus far the text, several dozen illustrations, and a few dozen student commentaries are online.
Jacqueline Banerjee added to her work on Edinburgh architecture with a new section on William Hamilton Beattie (1842-1898) that includes his North British Hotel (now the Balmoral) and Jenners Department Store. Next came British Victorian architects in Malta: William Scamp, who designed St Paul's Anglican Pro-Cathedral in Valletta and The old naval bakery, now the Maritime Museum in Vittoriosa and E. M. Barry's (now-destroyed) Royal Opera House, Valletta, after which she wrote two illustrated essays on the Victorian British in Malta — the first on the historical background, the second on society and culture in Victorian Malta — with a third on architecture and civili engineering projects to come.
After completing the commentaries and scans for all 40 of the Phiz illustrations for David Copperfield, Philip V. Allingham sent in more than a dozen scanned images for several Hogarth series, including The Rogue's Progress, England and France, and Beer Street and Gin Lane, and the four-part Election series.
Andrzej Diniejko contributed two substantial essays: “Harriet Martineau: a Radical Liberal Social Commentator” and “Hannah More, Conservative Social Reformer,” introductions to the major works of both once enormously influential authors. (Diniejko's essay on More prompted GPL to look through bookshelves for his copy of S. C. Hall's A Book of Memories of Great Men and Women of the Age where he encountered an illustrated biography by the editor of the Art Journal, which he then scanned and translated into html.)
Sarah Zweifach contributed an interesting brief essay entitled “Saint or Sinner On the Scaffold? Public Shame in Great Expectations, Jane Eyre, and The Scarlet Letter ” that draws upon work in psychology and law. Kasper Nijsen from Amsterdam sent us Swinburne's Masterly Hand: Wagnerian Leitmotifs in "Tristram of Lyonesse". Stuart Durant, who wrote both “The Life and Work of Christopher Dresser, 1834-1904” and a chronology for the famous designer to the catalogue of the 1972 Fine Art Society exhibition, contributed “Christopher Dresser and Interior Design.” Ayla Lepine, Visiting Lecturer, Courtauld Institute of Art, wrote an extensive introduction to the life and works of the architect, George Frederick Bodley (1827-1907). Philip Ashby-Rudd and Emma Trehane contributed “Never-Land, Lulworth Cove and the intellectual circles of J. M. Barrie, Thomas Hardy, Alfred Fripp, Sir Frederick Treves and Gerald Du Maurier” with photographs by John Bickerton.
Lucia Hernandez writes from “Hampstead Theatre about Andersen's English (7 April-8 May 2010), a play that presents an important moment in Hans Christian Andersen’s relation with Charles Dickens. It is a haunting and wistfully funny new play about family secrets, loneliness and love.”
Don LePan, President of Broadview Press (which publishes out so many wonderfully annotated editions of Victorian works, wrote to say that the title of Robert Buchanan's “The Fleshly School of Poetry: Mr. D. G. Rossetti” had a typo — “Fleshy” instead of “Fleshly” One Tim [tradcliffe2@gmail.com] wrote to inform us that the link to "Maxwell on Molecules" from the chemistry page didn't work — thanks for that! — and that "the entire chemistry section is very limited. These issues, he advised, "should be immediately addressed as is your civic duty." It's always nice to hear from the young.
February 2010
By the twenty-second the site had 45, 403 documents and images. Continuing to work on the Spanish version of the site, your webmaster has thus far translated and uploaded 1,100 documents — a number really not all that impressive once one realizes that they all appear in sections on architecture, decorative arts, and illustration and thus contain comparatively little text! The long-planned recreation of The “In Memoriam” Project on the web has seen the first stage completed: all 133 sections of the poem have been formatted and linked to lists of almost every appearance of 20 images, symbols, and motifs, such as “ dream,” “hand,” “time” and “widow” (when words repeat within a lne or two, they are not linked). Recreating The “In Memoriam” Web, which Jon Lanestedt of the University of Oslo and GPL published in 1992 with Eastgate Systems, presents major problems on the WWW, since it lacks several key features of Eastgate's Storyspace, among them (1) the ability to create and overlay many small annotation windows, and (2) invisible links that readers can easily locate by pressing a key combination. Of course, using Java and other software, one could replicate some of these features, but the WWW's lack of standardization means that the resulting documents will not function in most web browsers. Stay tuned.
Philip V. Allingham has brought up to 37 the extensive commentaries for Phiz's illustrations of David Copperfield.
Jacqueline Banerjee contributed biographical material for the neo-classical sculptor John Gibson, and biographical material and an index for the engineer and architect Captain Francis Fowke; images of and commentaries on F. W. Williamson's Shrubsole Memorial in Kingston-upon-Thames, Surrey, Captain Fowke's Royal Scottish Museum in Edinburgh (to which Dave Henniker of Edinburgh Photography kindly contributed an interior view); and William Leiper's impressive Dowanhill Church in Glasgow. Also, an extended discussion of Gerald du Maurier's illustration for Chapter 18 of George Meredith's Adventures of Harry Richmond.
Andrzej Diniejko, our new contributing editor for Poland, wrote Shirley as a Condition-of-England Novel.
Drew Gibbons writes from snowy Virginia (!) that "the information under your 'how to cite' section is in need of updating. The MLA 7th ed., now in force, has made a number of changes, and the site is not reflecting them." As soon I can make it to the library, I shall up date the directions. Christopher Wieninger writes to let us know that Chris Redmon's Sherlockian site has moved to http://www.sherlockian.net/. Ashley McConnell writes to correct the assertion that Angela Georgina Burdett-Coutts "the first woman to be given a peerage," so I have added "Victorian" before "first woman."
Etienne Ma of Brown University pointed out two bad links in the sitemap entitled "The Social Contexts of Charles Dickens Writing," one it turns out created by reformatting E. D. H. Johnson's Charles Dickens: An Introduction to His Novels, the other by standardizing the names of sitemaps — once again, editing the site seems to involve two steps forward and one back. Thanks to all.
January 2010
Your webmaster continued working on the Spanish version, formatting the section on Max Beerbohm, George Eliot, Mrs. Henry Wood, and translating sections of the decorative arts, including its sitemap and those for ceramics, and galleries and sections on the Cult of Japan, the Martin Brothers, William de Morgan, and C.R. Ashbee and the Guild of Handicraft (jewelry, metalwork, and furniture).
Jacqueline Banerjee created new sections on the architect David Bryce and the sculptors Amelia Robertson Hill and Behnes including a biuograpjy, photographs and discussions of his Colonel Leake and Sir Robert Peel; she also provided images and discussions of Gibson's Venus Verticordia William Huskisson; plus an illustration by Walter Crane.
Philip V. Allingham has now completed his detailed commentaries on the first 29 illustrations of David Copperfield by Phiz.
Dr Andrzej Diniejko, Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Culture at Poland's Warsaw University, contributed Benjamin Disraeli and the Two Nation Divide," and following our invitation, he reviewed Indiana University Press' Burden or Benefit? Imperial Benevolence and Its Legacies. Derek B. Scott, Professor of Critical Musicology, University of Leeds, contributed to more of his BBc performances of Victorian music hall songs — "Pretty Polly Perkins of Paddington Green" and a Tyneside parody of it, "Cushie Butterfield."
Amy Brennan of the Scottish government's Culture, External Affairs and Tourism Directorate, wrote for and received permission to use one of Dr. Banerjee's photographs of a statue of Robert Burns. Dr. Andy Reid wrote for and also received permissin to use JB's photograph of the Viceroy's Lodge in Shimla, India, in a book on the "Tudoresque Diaspora."
V. Peidis kindly e-mailed to say that the one of our documents in the Feist collection of photographs had the wrong image and that the link in the gallery of statues of Queen Victoria did not work. Nathalie Chernoff of the University of Lancaster wrote let us know about a bad link. Kathy Webber wrote to correct a typo in Tennyson's "Crossing the Bar." Many thanks.
As of the 31st, the site had 44, 873 documents.
Last modified 5 January 2024