December 2013
Your webmaster has written “Beauties in Bell Jars: A Review of John Whitenight's Under Glass: A Victorian Obsession” and added more than 290 illustrations by Sidney Paget of the Sherlock Holmes stories, which provide useful documentation of railroad travel in the 1890s and what men wore, such as their hats, outerware, and trousers.
Landow's major project was a twenty-fifth-anniversary web-edition of the catalogue of Alice H. R. H. Victorian Bibliomania 1987 exhibition at the Museum of the Rhode Island School of Design. This catalogue's six dozen entries valuably complement Simon Cooke's section on book bindings and design with its authoritative discussions of Victorian book illumination, chromolithography, and relievo bindings, all related to both the Gothic Revival and the Arts and Crafts Movement. This important exhibition includes works by Owen Jones, Henry Noel Humphreys, William Morris, Augustus Pugin, John Ruskin, and many others. Fortunately, both the Museum and some of the major lenders to the exhibition, particularly Ellen K. Morris and Edward Levin, have enthusiastically supported creating a new, much-expanded e-version of the original catalogue, which replaced many of the black-and-white illustrations with color and also much more material.
Jacqueline Banerjee has contributed "Industry, Religion and Self-Help in Mrs. Henry Wood's Mrs Halliburton's Troubles," which includes a discussion of the glove-making trade in nineteenth-century Worcester, as well as an essay on humour in Mrs Wood's The Channings. Also, she added further comments on the webmaster's pictures of Vauxhall Bridge in London, with its eight unusually placed statues by F. W. Pomeroy and Alfred Drury, like Pomeroy's Pottery. Nearby was the Doulton Pottery in Lambeth, with interesting traces of it even in the one remaining building's interior.
Simon Cooke contributed ‘A Refined Division of Labour’: The Production of Cloth-Bound Books and has continued his work on Victorian book design, adding a dozen or so images of work by Aubrey Beardsley, Robert Dudley, Laurence Housman, and Albert Warren.
Mike Hickox, a frequent contributor, has written “A Sculptor's Workshop, Stratford-upon-Avon — 1617 by Henry Wallis”
John E. S. Pankhurst has contributed a catalogue of the stained glass and church decoration by the firm of Bell & Beckham.
Zsófia Marincsák of www.sherlockian-sherlock.com, a site based in Hungary, writes to exchange links. Rory Walsh. Discovering Britain Project Officer of the Royal Geographical Society, reqeusted and received permission to use one of our images.
Thanks to Rev. Dr. Ron Davies for correcting a caption for our photo of Budapest castle
On the thirtieth the site had 74,371 documents and images.
November 2013
Your webmaster added two works by Edith Downing illustrated in The Studio: Music and Mother and children. The Internet Archive online version of this periodical also provided images of paintings, including Albert Goodwin's The Delectable Mountains, and Sir Edward John Poynter's The Message, and sculpture including Sir Edgar Bertram Mackennal's Oceana. Robert Freidus and GPL teamed up once again, adding photographs of George Tinworth's Pilgrimage of Life Fountain in Kennington Park, London,
Philip V. Allingham will be heading to Lublin, Poland, next month to give a talk at Maria Curie-Sklodowska University for PASE (the Polish Association for the Study of English). His subject will be the changing reception of Great Expectations as reflected in its Victorian illustrations. Before heading across the Atlantic, Allingham wrote a dozen more essays on Harry Furniss's illustrations of Dickens's A Tale of Two Citiesich includes. Each essay contains an enlargeable image of the illustration, the passage it realizes, an interpretive essay, and comparisons with images of illustrations by other artists.
Jaqueline Banerjee created new sections for two important women novelists — Mary Augusta Ward and Mrs. Henry Wood. Ward's includes a biography, discussion of her career as writer, philanthropy, and later reputation, and Wood's biography, discussion of her career as writer, death and posthumous reputation, and her grave in Highgate Cemetery.
Andrzej Diniejko, our Contributing Editor for Poland, has created a substantial new section on Arthur Conan Doyle containing a biography, chronology, bibliography and discussions of both his writing career and interest in spiritualism. Prompted by the new material on Doyle, Banerejee wrote Dickens's Inspector Bucket Points the Way, and Landow added excerpts and essays on Doyle including “'Who will say what is possible in such a country?' South America as bridge to the unknown dreamland,” Racism and genocide in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, “We are the Mormons”: The Church of Latter Day Saints in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet, Sherlock Holmes's praise of state schools, Setting as characterization in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, “The notorious Professor Challenger” — “a stunted Hercules” and an “enormous bull-frog,” and “Sherlock Holmes's anti-romantic view of the country,” In addition, Landow added 140 of Sidney Paget's illustrations of Sherlock Holmes stories with the passages illustrated and then mined them for documents in the site's section on Victorian Men's Fashions, 1850-1900, including those on Outerwear, trousers, outerwear, and hats.
Diane Greco Josefowicz contributed Caroline Herschel (1750-1848), astronomer.
Simon Cooke, who reviewed Peter Levi's Edward Lear: A Life, created a new section on the artist and designer Robert Dudley, which includes essays on his illustrations, book cover designs, and chromolithographs. /p>
Nancy Glazener, Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, Department of English, University of Pittsburgh, asked for and received permission to reproduce Beerbohm's Robert Browning, Taking Tea with the Browning Society as an illustration for her Modern Language Quarterly essay on Browning in America.
Thanks once again to Robert Bowman for sharing images and information about sculpture in his gallery's collection: William Reid Dicks's Mask of Perseus, Francis Derwent Wood's The Bather, Richard Louis Garbe's The Song of the Siren, Frederick James Halnon's Peace, and Sir William Goscombe John's Boy at Play. Thanks also for AD Antiques for sharing images and information about several tiles by the Martin Brothers, including Flower-and-leaves and Rose. The Maas Gallery contributed an image of James Thomas Watts's A Welsh Wood in Winter.
Thanks to Anthony Pincott, Hon. Treasurer and Membership Secretary of The Bookplate Society, who writes from London to correct James Thomas Watts's year of birth: According to FreeBMD website, “ an index of births, marriages and deaths, transcribed from official registers,” he was born in March 1850. Thanks, also, to Deena Wang '14, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for pointing out broken links in the Music and Popular Entertainment section.
The site had 73,325 documents and images as of the thirteenth.
October 2013
Your webmaster delivered a keynote address at E-Learning2013 in Las Vegas entitled “Twenty-Five Years of Teaching with the Victorian Web: What Works and What Doesn't.” Continuing to work with Trollope's novels, Landow has written “Trollope's flawed protagonists — the example of Framley Parsonage,” “The path of a letter in Frampton Parsonage,” “Personal, local, and national politics in Frampton Parsonage and Trollope's use of the mock-heroic.”
Ah, the names of London pubs of which Robert Freidus sent in photographs that Landow formatted — Chelsea's The Adam and Eve, Black Lion Pub on High Kilburn Road (there are also Red and White Lion Pubs elsewhere), the Crown in Seven Dials and the Crown in Seven Dials and the Crown & Cushion on Westminster Bridge Road, the Falcon in Clapham south of the Thames and the Flask in Hampstead, way north of the Thames (saw one of the Rolling Stones there once). How about the Hung, Drawn & Quartered Pub at Byward Street and Great Tower Street. I especially like the name of the Shooting Star.
The Internet Archive provided seven drawings by Phil May, including a self portrait, plus a portrait of Charles Santley, the impressario and opera singer, by Thomas Cooper Gotch, who is generally known for his allegorical paintings of young girls and women.
Landow also formatted the photographs of medals by famous sculpturs provides by a collector who wishes to remain anonymous: Sir Joseph Edgar Boehm's Queen Victoria 1887 Golden Jubilee Medal, Frank Bowcher's William Shakspere (honouring William Spark Ogden), M.H. Spielmann, and 1897 Diamond Jubilee Medal for the Victorian Era Exhibition; Thomas Brock's maquette for the 1911 Royal Academy medal; Emil Fuchs's King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra Coronation Medal; William Goscombe John's Edward, Prince of Wales Investiture Medal and his George V Jubilee Medal; Alphonse Legros's John Stuart Mill; Frederick Lord Leighton's Queen Victoria 1887 Golden Jubilee Medal, and three by Sir Edgar Bertram Mackennal: Mercantile Marine WWI Medal, Royal Society of Arts Medal (George V) , and George V and Queen Mary Coronation medal.
Philip V. Allingham continued his major project on Harry Furniss's illustrations to Dickens's Christmas stories, each essay of which contains the scanned illustration, caption, text illustrated, commentary and comparison with other illustrators' approach to the same passage. He has written photo-essays for Polly, Barbox Brothers' Guest at Dinner, What Christmas is, as we Grow Older, and Nurse and Mother.
Jacqueline Banerjee has continued her work with the architect William Richard Lethaby, adding All Saints' Church, Brockhampton and Birmingham's Eagle Insurance Buildings, High Coxlease in Hampshire plus his drawing for an elaborate fireplace. She then sent in a photo essay on Claremont, the royal estate in Surrey where Queen Victoria spent her happiest days as a child. Next, she created a biography for another architect, George Halford Fellowes Prynne plus photo essays on the exterior and interior of his St Peter's Church, Staines, after which she wrote a biographical introduction to the works of Prynne's brother, the stained-glass designer Edward Arthur Fellowes Prynne plus a series of photo essays on his own work for his brother's church in Staines.
Derek B. Scott contributed his performance of Felix McGlennon's music hall song “Comrades.”
Simon Cooke contributed two essays on book and binding design: “Victorian book illustrators as book cloth designers, 1850–1870: Richard Doyle and Arthur Hughes” and “John Sliegh: illustrator and book cover designer.” He provided half a dozen illustrations for the first essay and is currently working on a set for the second. Thanks to Simon for procuring permission from Edmund M. B. King to include in the Victorian Web his “The Book Cover Designs of William Harry Rogers.” (which originally appeared in the British Library Journal). GPL scanned, formatted, and linked the text.
Gaby Lacayo has translated into Spanish three essays by Philip V. Allingham relating to Wilkie Collins life and relation to Dickens.
Thanks to Joseph Dimartino, who shared photographs of Thomas Brock's Hercules strangling Antaeus.
David McDonnell has written to thank us for providing information used in his book ClanMcDonnell Tales of Ireland.
The site had 73,026 documents on the twenty-eighth.
September 2013
The month began with your webmaster adding to the site several essays from Victorian periodicals, including one from the 1860 Cornhill Review on the adulteration of food and “Edward J. Poynter, R.A.” from the 1883 Magazine of Art, a periodical that contributed images and information about a range of paintings, such as Thomas Faed's From Dawn Till Sunset, Evangeline, His Only Pair, and Granny M'Laughan; Frank Holl's Self-portrait and portraits of John Everett Millais, Sir William Jenner, and John Bright; Albert Moore's MidsummerThe Lovers, Pale Margaret, The Quartet, White Hydrangeas, Rose Leaves, Reading Aloud, Autumn, and Yellow Marguerites; William Blake Richmond's Andrew Lang, Hermes, and A Maid of Athens; W. P. Frith, R.A. at the Age of Thirty, and Lauce and His Dog; John Collier's A Prietess of Bacchus, Arthur Hughes's Silver and Gold, Peter Macnab's The Lady of Shalott, and G.F. Watts's Sir Frederick Leighton. In addition to material about painting, the Magazine of Art provided reproductions of designs by G. F. Watts and W. E. Britten for Salviati mosaics in St. Paul's plus Britten's 12 illustrations of Swinburne poems and B. Jobling's drawings of Tyneside.
The Hathi Trust Digital Library's e-versions of The Art-Journal provided images and information for Augustus Leopold Egg's The Victim and Daniel Maclise's The Ballad Singer. Landow next created a section on Anthony Trollope's The Small House at Allington beginning with a “Crosbie was not altogether a villain” — Trollope and the psychology of betrayal, after which he added a dozen passages exemplifying the novel's characterization, setting, description, and political and social themes.
Philip V. Allingham continued his major project on Harry Furniss's illustrations to Dickens's Christmas stories, each essay of which contains the scanned illustration, caption, text illustrated, commentary and comparison with other illustrators' approach to the same passage. His essays include Arrivals at The Holly Tree, Servants at The Holly Tree, The Golden Lucy, Captain Jorgan, The Tinker's Philosophy and half a dozen others.
In addition to formatting and illustrating Linda Hall's “Garden Suburbs: Architecture, Landscape and Modernity 1880-1940,” Jacqueline Banerjee created a related project on Port Sunlight, including “Port Sunlight, Wirral, Cheshire: Introduction,” “Port Sunlight's Housing,” “Port Sunlight: Amenities,” as well as a new section for the architects William and Segar Owen and several of their buildings: Christ Church, The Lady Lever Art Gallery, and the Warrington Technical School.The next creates a biography and homepage for William Richard Lethaby as well as his Melsetter House, Chapel of St Colm and St Margaret,and All Saints' Brockhampton. Finally, she wrote “Mary Kingsley: Demystifying Africa.”
Andrzej Diniejko, our contributing editor from Poland, has written “The Fabian Society in Late Victorian Britain.”
Simon Cooke created a new section for the illustrator Ernest Griset, which includes an introduction and Griset's delightful Natural History, The Fox and the Grapes, and The Mountain in Labour. Thanks to Simon for procuring permission from Edmund M. B. King to include in the Victorian Web his “The Book Cover Designs of John Leighton, F.S.A.” (which originally appeared in the British Library Journal). GPL scanned, formatted, and linked the text, adding half a dozen images.
Hugh Small contributed “After Crimea: Florence Nightingale and Slum Clearance,” and Cyndy Manton shared a brief introduction to the designer Henry Wilson.
More Spanish translations: Esther Fernández Gutiérrez rendered into Spanish a dozen or so documents from the Blackmore section while Lourdes Ilian translated biography and Dick Sullivan's “Sadness and Salvation: Six Victorian Poems.”
Stephen Zelnick contributed “Conrad’s Bloody Imperialism: Achebe, Said, and what Conrad really wrote.” Charles de Paolo contributed “George Robert Waterhouse (1808-1888), Architect, Entomologist, Zoologist, Mineralogist, and Curator.” Amy Milne-Smith shared several extensive passages from her 2011 book, London Clubland: A Cultural History of Gender and Class in late-Victorian Britain, including “Understanding London Clubland: Exclusion in Action — Club Elections,” Gentleman behaving badly: Gambling in London Clubland,” and an extensive bibliography.
Thanks to a private collector who wishes to remain anonymous for sharing photographs of two paintings by Robert Brough — Sweetviolets and Breton Women.
Lindsey Moore, Deputy editor of Skipton's Craven Herald requested and received permission to use an image on the site.
Thanks to Donato Esposito for sending in new information about the year of J. H. Dearle's birth.
The site had with 72,708 documents on the thirtieth.
August 2013
Your webmaster reviewed Emerging from the Shadows, the catalogue for the fine exhibition of Holl's works at the Watts Gallery. Thanks also to Francesca Collin who obtained permission for us to put online photographs of painting and sculpture at Guildhall Art Gallery. These works include three by Sir George Frampton: Geoffrey Chaucer, Queen Mary, and King George V, Albert Bruce Joy's Lord Salisbury, William Merrett's Florence Nightingale, William Theed's General Gordon, John ing Herbert's Our Saviour Subject to His Parents at Nazareth, John Collier's Clytemnestra, and James Tissot's The Last Evening.
Drawing upon Project Gutenberg's online version of Anthony Trollope's Thackeray, GPL also added Thackeray's “The Willow” and his parody of this medieval-style balland. Thackeray also was the basis of the following documents: “Trollope on Thackeray's style,” “Thackeray becomes editor of the Cornhill Magazine,” “A Defense of Thackeray's characters in Vanity Fair,” “Henry Esmond the greatest of Thackeray's works,” “Trollope on the novel as teacher of morals,” and “Trollope on Dickens, Thackeray, and lectures and public readings,” The Hathi Trust Digital Library provided the text of its review of the Moxon Tennyson as well as engravings of the following paintings and sculptures: John Henry Foley's Innocence, Daniel Maclise's Undine, William Mulready's The Wolf and the Lamb David Roberts's Gate of the Metwaleys: Cairo, Clarkson Stanfield's The Battle of Trafalgar, Theeds's Sappho, William Wyon's The Rescue,
Jacqueline Banerjee began the month by reorganizing the material on Highgate Cemetery, including the monuments for George Eliot, Karl Marx, Herbert Spencer, and Frank Matcham. Turning to architecture in the Uk and Europe, she next contributed “Guildford Castle Grounds, Guildford, Surrey, by Henry Peak,” which includes a new a section for P. J. H. Cuypers, whose Rijksmuseum and Amsterdam Central Station both owed something to the amazingly widespread influence of Ruskin and the Arts and Crafts Movement — as indeed did Amsterdam's fabulous Shipping House, the first fully accomplished work of the Amsterdam School.
Then, coming back to her collaboration with photographer Robert Freidus, she wrote about John Johnson's Colquhoun Mortuary Chapel at Brookwood Cemetery, and the chapels and Egyptian Catacombs at Highgate Western Cemetery. She also put together with commentaries two galleries of views (Eastern and Western, and two of monuments with angels or similar figures (Eastern and Western), for each side of this famous cemetery. Monuments considered separately were Frank Holl's, Michael Faraday's and the architect Edward Blore's. But, thanks to our busy contributing photographer, there are many more famous people's graves and unusual monuments still to come. Special thanks to Dr Ian Dungavell for contributing his photos of the interior of the Colquhoun Mortuary Chapel at Brookwood.
Simon Cooke continued his essays on Victorian book illustrators with an introduction to the life and works of John William North and the following three essays on Arthur Boyd Houghton, the great illustrator: “Houghton as a stylist: from the Orient to images of the Victorian poor,” “Houghton and the representation of children,” and “Houghton, escapism, and contemporary life” plus a half dozen images.
Diane Greco Josefowicz contributed “Was Darwin Racist?: A Review of Charles De Paolo's The Ethnography of Charles Darwin: A Study of His Writings on Aboriginal Peoples ”
Jessica Porter and Albert Pionke contributed an HTML version of Thomas de Quincey's “Secret Societies.”
John Cooper, Webmaster of Oscar Wilde in America, shared with us “The Roots of Oscar Wilde’s Dress Philosophy.” Andrey Fomin has translated Diane Josefowicz's
“The Wave Theory of Light” into Czech. Thanks to Jeanette Edgar of Blackwell, the Arts and Crafts House in Bowness-on-Windermere for sharing a series of photographs of Baillie-Scott's furniture, and thanks to Liss Fine Art for sharing images of Frank Brangwyn's mural The Printed Word Makes the People of the World One and sketches for other murals, including studies for Man the Creator and Man the Master as well as Fyffe Christie's The Lady of Shalott .Thanks to Ellen McCormick for correcting a factual error.
On August 26th there were 72,190 documents and images on the site.
July 2013
Working through folders of photographs taken in London, your webmaster added London's Methodist Central Hall and the former St. Peter's Church (1866) — now St. Yeghiche's Armenian Church. Thanks to the Dean and Chapter of St. Paul's for permitting GPL to photograph and put online photos of the Victorian mosaics designed by Salviati and Richmond in the Cathedral.
GPL also formatted several of Robert Friedus's photograph series, including the tomb of Guilio Salviati, the Novello Theatre (originally the Waldorf), Shaftesbury Theatre. His new photographs of architectural sculpture include Paul Gasq's Simmer and Winter and works on the St. Thomas More Buildings in Chelsea, Balfour House on Great Titchfield Street, and buildings at 26 Westbourne Grove, Westminster Palace Gardens, 153 Fenchurch Street, and wrought iron gates and fencing at G. E. Street's Law Courts. Prompted by Philip Allingham's photo essay, “John Butler, Lieutenant-Colonel and leader of Butler's Rangers,” GPL began work on our new section on Victorian Canada.
Philip V. Allingham contributed 4 photographs by Alfred Ellis of characters in the play based on George Du Maurier's Trilby; each photograph is accompanied by Du Maurier's original illustration, the passage the photograph represents, and an essay explaining the relation ship between images and text. Her also contributed scans and commentaries the Tauchnitz plates of Dickens and the illustrations by Harry Furniss of Cricket on the Hearth, such as Caleb Plummer — The Toy Maker. Allingham began our new section on Victorian Canada with a photo-essay on John Butler, Lieutenant-Colonel and leader of Butler's Rangers.
Jacqueline Banerjee contributed “The Cremation Society and Woking Crematorium, Surrey, ” a “History of Brookwood cemetery,” and commentary to accompany Bob Freidus's photos on the Monastery of the St Edward the Martyr in Brookwood Cemetery. She also provided the text and bibliography for the history of Willesden United Synagogue Cemetery and for “Ritual buildings and views” as well as creating a new section for the architect Nathan Solomon Joseph, including a biography and preliminary list of works. Still in connection with cemeteries, she wrote about Sir William Drake, lawyer and art connoisseur, who has an elegant mausoleum at Brookwood, and rewrote an earlier piece on Highgate Cemetery to include seven of Robert Freidus's lovely pictures. She also added a new piece, with more of his pictures, on a remarkable late-19c.businesswoman, Marthe Josephine Besson, who is buried there. Finally, last month's visit to the recently restored Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam produced a biography of W. F. Dixon, and she followed this up in July with a series of five commentaries on his brilliant (in every sense) stained glass windows there.
Self-abuse, daughter abuse, manslaughter, homicide, scandal — Diane Greco Josefowicz, our Science & Technology Editor, discusses them all in her "Purity and Danger in Malvern: A Review of Pauline Conolly's The Water Doctor's Daughters."
Andrzej Diniejko contributed “A Short Bibliographical Survey of Thomas Hardy Studies.”
Want to see how Trollope (and his readers) mapped out his novels? Take a look at Ellen Moody's "Mapping Trollope; or Geographies of Power."
Ivo de Galan has shared another work with readers of the Victorian Web: Portrait of a young woman by Sir Samuel Luke Fildes, R. A.
A collector, who wishes to remain anonymous, shared with us photographs of the 16-inch version of Alfred the Great, L. Gwendolen Williams's A Primrose by the River Banks, Maggie Richardson's In Ha Signo Vinces, Mary Kynaston Watts-Jones's Mother and child, and her But things like this, you know, after a famous victory.
Alberto Landoni, a retired mathematician from a little town near Milan, Italy, requested and received permission to reproduce Jackie Banerjee's photograph of Cambridge's Church of the Holy Sepulchre in his planned book on Legnano.
Vassilaki Papanicolaou, who is finishing a doctorate in comparative literature at University Bordeaux III, France, kindly sent in corrections for some scanning and typographical errors on the site. Many thanks, and thanks to Brian J. Goggin of Stradbally North, Castleconnell, County Limerick, Ireland, for identifying the Louisa as a horse-drawn barge
As of July 29th the site had 71,729 documents and images.
June 2013
Continuing their collaboration, your webmaster and Robert Freidus created a partial list of the works that served as prizes in the annual Art Union lottery. He also put up “Communcations Networks: Postal Service, Telegraph, LAN, and Internet” — brief selection from Catherine Golden's work. On the 12th Landow left for Germany to begin a brief 1-month Fulbright (as a Senior Specialist in Information Technology) at the University of Bayreuth. Thanks to Tamsin Williams and the Watts Gallery for sharing more than a dozen images of paintings by Frank Holl, which has enabled GPL to create a new section on the artist and announce the Gallery's coming exhibition of his work.
Philip V. Allingham contributed essays on Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, "The Blackwood's Tale": An Enduring Legacy," and the Tauchnitz editions of Charles Dickens. He also continued his series of in-depth comparative studies of individual plates of illustrations of Dickens, The Ghostly Knocker, Marley's Ghost, Phantoms in the Street, and The First of the Three Spirits.
Jacqueline Banerjee contributed a five-part essay on Victorian orphanages that concentrates on Captain Coram and the Foundling Hospital in London but ranges widely as well. Much of the rest of the month was spent on completing her work on Lichfield Cathedral. This included the highly decorative monument to Bishop Selwyn, who was Bishop of New Zealand, and (exotic in another way) a monument to the controversial Major Hodson of Hodson's Horse, who died in the 1857 Mutiny. The interior of the Cathedral, with its splendid Scott-Skidmore screen and other fittings, came last, with a list of "Related Material" there serving as an index to the whole series. Other contributions included a short essay on E. M. Barry's Charing Cross Hotel (and some proof-reading, as usual! Please notify us of any mistakes you spot!).
Simon Cooke opened the month with essays on a series of new illustrators, including Ford Madox Brown, James Doyle, Charles Doyle, and Frederick Shields plus an essay on the illustrations of William Holman Hunt. He closed out July with an essay on John William North; the illustrations will come in August.
James Driscoll of Driscolls Antiques Ltd., of Clitheroe, Lancashire, kindly shared photographs of a dozen works of Victorian furniture, one of the most interesting being a burr walnut card table from the 1860s that opens in two different ways. Alison Davey of AD Antiques, of Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire, has generously shared photographs and information about two dozen ceramic objects, including chargers by William de Morgan, grotesque birds, vases, and a fish by the Martin Brothers, and a range of objects manufactured by Doulton — Lambeth jugs designed by Hanna Barlow, an Art Nouveau vase designed by Eliza Simmance, and Mark Marshall's The Waning of the Honeymoon.
Sharon Kim, Professor of English at Judson University, contributed four passages from her Literary Epiphany in the Novel, 1850-1950: Constellations of the Soul, which Palgrave Macmillan published in 2012: “Epiphany as experience and epiphany as a textual record of that experience,” “Epiphanies and spirituality,” “Epiphanies and Time,” and “Reverse Projection: Moral Epiphany in Middlemarch,”
As of June 24th, the site had 70, 820 documents and images.
May 2013
Lovely May began with your webmaster reviewing Leah Price's fascinating How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain and David J. Getsy's Body Doubles: Sculpture in Britain, 1877-1905. It ended with his joint review of two books about Victorian violence: Ingrid Hanson's William Morris and the Uses of Violence, 1856-1890 and Amy E. Martin's Alter-Nations: Nationalisms, Terror, and the State in Nineteenth-Century Britain and Ireland. In between he delved once again into the treasure house that is the Internet Archive, from which he created a new section on Frances Macdonald and added three objects to that for Alexander Fisher, 1 to that for Herbert MacNair, 11 photographs of interior architectural sculpture by W.R. Colton, two dozen examples of work in metal, glass, and textile design by Christopher Dresser, and more than a dozen objects by his favorite designer, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, a including a series on the Argyle Street tea rooms, several posters, and mural decorations. Later in the month issues of the Architecture Review furnished information and images that allowed adding more than a half a dozen names to our section on women sculptors plus new works by S. Nicholson Babb, Francis Derwent Wood, Sir William Reid Dick, George Frampton, Richard Garbe, Ernest Gillick, Andrea Carlo Lucchesi, Paul Raphael Montford, William Burnie Rhind, Ellen Mary Rope, and Albert Toft, Arthur George Walker. This same periodical also furnished material that permitted creating new sections in architecture for John Belcher and Mackay Hugh Baillie Scott and adding numerous examples of work by John Belcher, W.D. Caroe, Thomas E. Colcutt, Basil Champneys, Edward Buckton Lamb Sir Edwin Landseer Lutyens, Edward William Mountford, Ernest Newton, Charles Harrison Townsend, and Aston Webb.
Jacqueline Banerjee, who reviewed Mitchell and Benford's new Yale edition of George Meredith's Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside, with Poems and Ballads, created a photo-essay on T. R. Spence's St George's Church in Newcastle with the assistance of Bob Morgan, Dr Neil Moat, and the Newcastle City Library and the monument to Andrew Newton by Richard Westmacott, Senior, at Lichfield Cathedral. This was followed by stained glass at the cathedral by John Hardman, Charles Eamer Kempe and William Wailes, with short biographies of Kempe and Wailes. Other work this month includes a piece on F. W. Woodington's splendid Rugby Union Lion at Twickenham, and a longer life and illustrations for Kate Greenaway (for the illustrations, see the index there). Other contributions are about Ruskin's spring and pump at Fulking, Sussex, and Bird, a new illustration by Helen Allingham. She also reviewed Pamela Horn's concise but very useful Life in a Victorian Classroom.
Philip V. Allingham completed his extensive commentaries on Sol Eyting, Jr., illustrations to Dickens's Christmas book.
Simon Cooke has written the authoritative essay on William Holman Hunt as book illustrator. Continuing his series of essays on illustrated Victorian periodicals, Cooke also contributed an essay on The Quiver and four plates by Frederick Sandys.
Ed Green has shared with readers of the Victorian Web his “Music and the Victorian Mind: The Musical Aesthetics of the Rev. H. R. Haweis,” which first appeared in IRASM [International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music]. Thanks to the editors for their permission.
John Sankey's review of Nicola Capon's John Tweed: Sculpting the Empire came in at the end of last month. Many thanks!
Marja Berclouw contributed an illustrated essay, “A Prosaic but Useful Service: Bathhouses and Washhouses, an Idea Whose Time Had Come,” to the Public Health section. Michael and Sudan Padwee contributed new photographs and information about Victorian tiles that enabled GPL to create a homepage for them. Maroussia Oakley contributed introductions to two Victorian periodicals — Good Words for the Young and The Welcome Guest. Robert L. Patten has kindly permitted us to include his classic essay “ Pickwick Papers and the Development of Serial Fiction.”
Terence Trelawny-Gower writes inquiring about architectural sculpture in Clare College Cambridge designed by Sir Matthew Digby Wyatt and executed by Theodore Phyffers.
The SDBB (The Swiss Service Centre for Vocational Training, Study and Careers Counselling) is an Institution of the Swiss Conference of Cantonal Ministers of Education (EDK) requested and received permission to use an image of a student essay on Brontë.
Thanks to Richard Toporoski of Vancouver for pointing out a mistaken transcription of “GCB.” as “CCB.”
By May 27th, the site had 70, 313 documents and images.
April 2013
The month began with your webmaster back in London, expecting a balmy spring but encountering cold, strong breezes, and, yes, snow. Before leaving home, he put online 10 of William Nicholson's fine portraits of Queen Victoria and other notables, which Paul Liss of liss Fine Art shared with readers of the Victorian Web. Thanks, Paul! Thanks, too, to Chris Blanchett, a tile historian, who explained that tiles in G. E. Street's Roman church attributed to William Morris are actually by Frederick Garrard. He also contributed a glossary of ceramics terms, a biography of Garrard, discussion of his styles, list of works, and photographs of 46 other tiles by Garrard, which led to your webmaster's creating a homepage for tiles and for Gerrard. While out exploring the area north of Old Brompton Road, Landow came upon a William Butterfield gem — the Church of St. Augustine Queens Gate. See the new sections on the exterior, interior, tile paintings of Old and New Testament events, and the church's post-Victorian stained glass.
Thanks to Peyton Skipwith, past Master of the Art Workers Guild, and Ellspeth Dennison, current secretary, Landow was able to photograph the Guild's treasure trove of portraits for the site. The painted commemorative portraits of Masters of the Guild include Gilbert Bayes by G. N. Meredith Frampton, Robert Anning Bell's self-portrait, Sir George Frampton, R.A by William Strang, Graham Jackson by Solomon J. Solomon, F. W. Pomeroy by Robert Anning Bell. The sculpted ones (nine busts and one bas relief) include C. R. Ashbee by Allan G. Wyon, Walter Crane by George Blackall-Simonds, Selwyn Image by William Silver Frith, Thomas Stirling Lee (1898) by Arthur George Walker, W. R. Lethaby by Gilbert Bayes, William Morris by Conrad Dressler, William Strang George Frampton, Francis W. Troup by Gilbert Bayes, Heywood Sumner by Henry Alfred Pegram, Charles Harrison Townsend by Francis Derwent Wood. A visit to Parliament Square produced a new set of four photographs of Henry John Temple, Viscount Palmerston and a detail of the Disraeli. The rare appearance of the sun this trip also occasioned new photos, such as a brightly lit cow on the former Wrights Dairy on King's Road. Landow also reviewed Barbara Black's A Room of His Own: A Literary-Cultural Study of Victorian Clubland.
Rising very early one morning to avoid crowds in Parliament Square and take photographs there when the sun shines from just the right place in the sky, Landow made new images of Matthew Noble's statues of Robert Peel and Edward George Geoffrey Smith Stanley, Lord Derby as well as H. Young's Palmerston and Mario Raggi's Benjamin Disraeli. He then took a series of photographs of the medieval revival carvings on Middlesex Guildhall from which he created a gallery, linked to Jackie Banerjee's photo essay. Returning to a another place first photographed for the site a dozen years ago, he added many images to the section on Holy Trinity, Sloane Street — the Arts and Crafts Church. A walk around Chelsea produced photos of another interesting church — St Simon Zelotes, and thanks to Aïcha Mehrez and the Royal British Society of Sculptors for providing information and a photograph to accompany Landow's photographs of Dora House, the home of the Society. After Rupert Maas of the Maas Gallery gave the Victorian Web permission to use images from their current Pre-Raphaelitism show, Landow added to the site two works by the Pre-Raphaelite sculptor Alexander Munro plus paintings and drawings by William Bond, John Brett, Edward Burne-Jones, E. R. Frampton, Henry Holiday, A. W. Hunt, J. W. Inchbold, John Samuel Raven, D. G. Rossetti, Frederick Sandys, Robert Tonge, and William J. Webbe.
Philip V. Allingham spent April 11 through 13 at the University of Warminsko-Mazurski, in Poland, at a Dickens conference.
Early in the month, Jacqueline Banerjee completed a short series of essays on Basil Champneys' college buildings: Bedford College, London, Newnham College, Cambridge, and the Divinity School, Cambridge — also his Gothic memorial cross for All Saint's Church in Cambridge. These were followed by photo essays on the Victoria Law Courts, Birmingham, by Aston Webb & Ingress Bell, with memorable architectural sculpture by Harry Bates (Queen Victoria) and William Silver Frith (St George and the Dragon, and other figures), and the stylish Methodist Central Hall, Birmingham, the architectural sculpture for which was by the leading terracotta firm of Gibbs & and Canning. Then, as a result of a visit to South London, JB wrote about the William Booth Memorial Training College on Denmark Hill, and the statues there by George Wade: General William Booth himself and his wife Catherine, of the Salvation Army. She also reviewed the hefty new edition of J. Mordaunt Crook's splendid William Burges and the High Victorian Dream. At the end of the month, she opened a new section on the sculptor Mary Grant, which includes her statues at Lichfeild Cathedral, and her busts of Sir Francis Grant, Tennyson and Parnell. Adding some comments to Robert Freidus's picture, JB also discussed 49 Pall Mall, and started writing about Sir George Gilbert Scott's restoration of Lichfield Cathedral.
Derek B. Scott, our music editor, set in his performance of Longfellow's The Wreck of the Hesperus.
Simon Cooke contributed a dozen or so illustrations by Harrison Weir.
Maroussia Oakley, a new contribution, has written two essays on Victorian magazines: The Welcome Guest. A Magazine of Recreative Reading for All and Good Words for the Young.
Ruth M. Landow contributed five photographs of Tower Bridge.
Daniela Daniele, Assistant Professor of Anglo-American Literature, University of Udine, Italy, made an interesting contribution to the gender matters section: “Sandism in reverse: the strange, marmorean beauty of Julia Ward Howe’s The Hermaphrodite” Michael Padwee contributed 11 images of tiles by the International Tile Company. Mike Hickox contributed “The Political Background to The Death of Chatterton by Henry Wallis” Continuing the flood of new contributions, Martin C. Jenkins sent his his biography of the sculptor F. Lynn Jenkins.
Thanks to Mark Bernstein of Eastgate Systems for picking up a typo.
On the 29nd of April the site had 69,351 documents and images.
March 2013
This month your webmaster contributed a review of two works of Neo-Victorian fiction that provide continuations of novels by Dickens and Eliot: Charles Barry's Mr. Micawber Down Under (2011) and Imke Thormählen's The Laidislaw Case (2011). Then, working with photographs and research by Robert Freidus, and valuable assistance from Jacqueline Banerjee, he created sections containing hundreds of images for the following cemeteries and their monument and mausoleums: Abney Park, Beckenham, Hampstead, Hillingdon, Hither Green, Nunhead, and S. Ealing.
At the end of last month, Jacqueline Banerjee's contributions included an account of the Aston Webb buildings at the University of Birmingham, with external sculptural and decorative work by Henry Alfred Pegram and Robert Anning Bell, and T. R. Spence's magnificent window inside the Great Hall. So this month began with a new section on Spence, explaining his involvement with the Art Workers' Guild, together with a short biography of him kindly contributed by Dr Neil Moat, and one of his paintings, The Disciples of Sappho. A visit to Ealing then inspired another new section, this time on the London borough's best-remembered architect, Charles Jones, who was responsible for the former town hall, as well as the later town hall, and for important work on Sir John Soane's Pitzhanger Manor-House and its grounds, Walpole Park. In the park is Jones's memorial, by the medallist/sculptor Frank Bowcher. Jones's two town halls led to a new town halls index, bringing together various examples of this important class of Victorian architecture.
Philip V. Allingham continued his major illustration project, posting images and extensive commentary for the British Household Edition of The Unfortunate Traveller by E. G. Dalziel and the American version by C. S. Reinhart. He has also nearly completed the commentaries for Marcus Stone's eight Illustrated Library Edition illustrations for A Child's History of England, a series undoubtedly sanctioned by Dickens himself. In consequence, issues as various as Dickens's attitudes towards historical figures in English and French history such as Joan of Arc and Lady Jane Grey, as well as to "The Burgers of Calais," almshouses, Victorian theatres, ship-building, Mormon emigration, and mailboats have been connected with Dickens's non-fiction published in the 1850s and 1860s.
Diane Greco Josefowicz added an introduction and new material to her bibliography of primary sources on Victorian theories of biology and gender.
Simon Cooke, who continues to explain our already large section on illustration, contributed a biographical introductions for Thomas Morten and John Pettie plus examples of their work.
Elaine D. Trehub contributed "Archival resources relating to the higher education of women in England," a survey that covers thirteen institutions, including women's colleges at Cambridge, London, and Oxford.
Thanks to Liselot Quisquater from the University of Ghent for notifying us about a bad link, which turned out to be a document that had gone missing. Your webmaster located it and put it in its proper location. Thanks, too, to Katja Rachinsky, who wrote from Germany to correct a typo in the date of one of Alexander Bain's works, and to Thomas Sawyer from Irvine, California for proof-reading our essay on London Society and providing an important date.
As of the 25th, the site had 68,432 document and images.
February 2013
Your webmaster began the month editing and formatting the work of two new contributors on large projects. First, he worked with Michael Kersting's 40 photographs of Pugin's churches and chapels in County Wexford, Ireland. A much larger project involved creating with Clare Sargent a hypermedia assemblage comprising the history of St. Peter's College, Radley, its predecessor institution, St Columba’s College, Stackallan, Ireland, and the founders, patrons, staff, and a students of the English High Church boarding school — all of which provides the context for Ms. Sargent's edition (on this site) of Robert Singleton's diaries. Next, using volumes available online from the Internet Archive and his own library, GPL added steel engraved versions of works by J. D. Harding, Samuel Prout, and J. W. M. Turner from Jenning's 1833 Landscape Annual and the 1830 edition of Roger's Italy. The last half of the month was spent translating Elizabeth K. Helsinger's Ruskin and the Art of the Beholder into html and linking it to materials both within and without our Ruskin section.
Philip V. Allingham completed the commentaries on E. A. Abbey's American Household Edition illustrations for The Christmas Books and Christmas Stories, after which he began work on commentaries for Edward Dalziel's British Household Edition illustrations of The Uncommercial Traveller, complementing earlier commentaries on C. S. Reinhart's illustrations for a similar anthology in the Harper and Brothers' Household Edition. The acquisition of the full set of Furniss's 1915 edition of the works of Charles Dickens (courtesy of Professor Emeritus Jim Gellert of Lakehead University's English Department) prompted him to update the commentaries for a number of Furniss's illustrations for Great Expectations, including his complicated title-page vignette for that volume. All told, he's done about 30 essays during the last two months.
Jacqueline Banerjee created a section on the sculpture of Marshall Wood (1834-1882) and sent in new photographs of his statue of Queen Victoria in Kolkata, together with one of Richard Cobden in Manchester. Completing her work on St Chad's R. C. Cathedral, Birmingham, she wrote a piece on John Hardman & Co. and two of the Hardman stained glass windows there, the Flanagan window and the war memorial window. Very many thanks to Canon Gerry Breen of the cathedral for his kind help in "reading" the former. A prominent Kolkata architect followed, Walter Granville, whose General Post Office, High Court and elegant Indian Museum were all landmark buildings there — as was Charles Wyatt's grand Raj Bhavan or Government House. This led to an essay on the whole Wyatt dynasty of architects, and short separate biographies of Benjamin Dean Wyatt and Sir Matthew Digby Wyatt, as well as a couple of fine London buildings by two earlier Wyatts — Samuel Wyatt's Trinity House, and James Wyatt's "Gothick" former Royal Military Academy, Woolwich.
Andrzej Diniejko, our Contributing Editor from Poland, created a section on Caroline Norton, including a biography, chronology, and list of works in various genres.
This month, the Pugin Society asked if they could link to us, and the BBC history website requested our help on the topic of crime and crime fiction in the Victorian period. Peter Silk wrote to request permission to use one of Bob Freidus's photos for a Royal Mail commemorative sheet celebrating the life and work of the Australian sculptor Bertram Mackennal.
Alison Hemmings of the Caledonian Club's magazine asked for and received permission to use an image of St. Paul's.
Thanks to Matthew T. Howells for writing in with additional information about Church of St, James the Great on Cardiff.
Jane Freeman writes to point out a typo in Charlotte Brontë's penname. John Sankey, a regular contributor, corrects a few dates in the list of Athenæum members. Thanks!
As of the 25th, the site had 67,677 document and images.
January 2013
The year began with 66, 789 documents and images on the Victorian Web, 4,500 sites linked to us, and all of 101 people follow us on on the VW Facebook page.
Your webmaster continued expanding the section on Frank Brangwynn, adding thirty watercolors of bridges, medieval and modern, which led to creating a new home- or index page for Victorian railways in the visual arts. Next, he created a section on Liverpool before Victoria and another on Glasgow in the Visual Arts plus creating a chronology for the “Early History of the Steamship” and adding photographs and information about late-Victorian and Edwardian steam ships. Discovering that one of our images by Albrecht Dürer had gone missing, GPL scanned another and created a section on Dürer, which includes links to a few of the Victorian artists he influenced. Continuing to mine The Internet Archive, GPL added to our section on Victorian railways, beginning with late-nineteenth-century discussions of individual lines, such as The Great Western, the North-Eastern, and the London and South-Western Railways — more to come soon — and images and descriptions of characteristic locomotives.
Philip V. Allingham completed the last of his twenty-eight essays comparing individual illustrations by Edward A. Abbey to both the texts they realize and other artist's illustrations of the same passages.He has begun a similar series on the Dickens illustrations of Harry Furniss.
Jaqueline Banerjee began the month with a biography of the sculptor R. J. Wyatt and a photographs of his monument to the Smith Family in St Mary the Virgin Church, Merton Park, a church about which she contributed a photo-essay discussing both its origin form, Victorian additions, monuments, and stained glass window by Burne-Jones and Morris, including Moses and Abraham, Isaiah and David, St Mary and St John, and . Other materials associated with this church include Nathaniel Hitch and Henry Philip Burke Downing's war monument in the churchyard. She also added a photo-essay on Silvester Charles Capes's commercial building at 14-16 Cowcross Street in Islington. (The Financial Times requested and received permission to quote from one of her contributions.)
Upon her return from India, she contributed some beautiful photographs of Frampton's statue of Sir Andrew Henderson Leith Fraser that stands before the Victoria Memorial in Calcutta. Turning to things back in England, she sent in a substantial photo-essay of Pugin's Cathedral Church of St Chad, Birmingham, followed by others on the interior of St Chad's, and on Pugin's stained glass there. Thanks to the Dean & Chapter of the cathedral for allowing us to illustrate these. Somers Clarke's essay on stained glass provided some interesting comments on the subject too. Finally, these researches also turned up some more information about a later stained glass artist, A. K. Nicholson.
Some extra pictures of Chantrey's Bishop Heber in St Paul's Cathedral in Kolkata took us back to India again, and prompted John Sankey to send in a new contribution about Thomas Brock's young Queen Victoria in the Victoria Memorial Hall there. Many thanks!!
Simon Cooke continued his series of articles on Victorian periodicals with an introduction to the Methodist reformer Thomas Bywater Smithies's Band of Hope Review and its illustrations, including John Gilbert's Curious Jane with the Gypsies. He accompanyied this contribution with essays on Smithies's British Workman and its illustrations by Gilbert and Robert Barnes. He also added examples of work by German illustrators, such as Alfred Rethel's Death on the Barricades and Siegfried and the Rhine Maidens. Cooke also wrote essays on The Churchman’s Family Magazine and London Society — An Illustrated Magazine of Light and Amusing Literature for the Hours of Relaxation. The month ended with an essay with examples of the illustrations of Richard Dadd.
Asun López-Varela vetted and then sent along Yuliya Yuliyanova Pavlova's translations into Spanish of the materials on the children's author, Julia Horatia Ewing.
Philip Cohen contributed photographs of the Glasgow Royal Asylum, Gartnavel, where the poet John Barlas ended his days.
The De Morgan Centre, which has sent along a notice of their forthcoming exhibition, The Lost Paintings of Evelyn De Morgan (1 February to 20 April), has also kindly shared several images of the artist's work, including St. Christina Giving her Father’s Jewels to the Poor.
Dennis McCue, Senior Information Officer, Glasgow City Council, kindly sent along a photograph of George Frampton's monument for Queen Victoria as exhibited at the 1901 International Exhibition in Glasgow, which now accompanies photographs of the statue in Calcutta by Ramnath Subbaraman, Robert Freidus, and Simon Stock.
Michael Curl writes to inform us that the old link to Trollope's Apollo: A Guide to Classics in the Barsetshire Novels of Anthony Trollope no longer works and to one that does. Thanks! Thanks and apologies are due to Denise Betteridge whose e-mail from last July pointing out the disappearance of an image just surfaced in GPL's in-box.
As of the 28th the site had 67,194 documents and images.
Last modified 5 January 2024