This page is updated regularly. Please refresh the screen to see the latest news.
January 2025
Season's Greetings and best wishes from us all for a very happy and fulfilling New Year! As our Managing Editor, Diane Josefowicz, sends 2024 down into the archives, let's hope 2025 will enrich our website and make it even more diverse and rewarding. On a personal note, entering her fifth year as Editor-in-Chief, JB would like to express her gratitude to all who have continued to contribute, or started to contribute, during that time, as well as to the other members of the Foundation and Editorial Boards for their support. Following George Landow's highly knowledgeable and energetic leadership has been a challenge as well as a privilege, and the fact that the site is still growing and thriving is largely down to his inspiration. Thank you, George, as ever.
This may be the place to mention one of George's initiatives, which we plan to develop. He had started making some tours of different areas of the website, such as this one, of London buildings. Do try it! More will follow. And, as usual, please remember to check out the latest calls for papers. The topic of the 57th Annual VSAO (Victorian Studies Association of Ontario) Conference is particularly timely: "Victorian Conviviality and Entertainments" (and note that the deadline for submissions is 24 January).
Despite the distractions of the holiday period, several projects have continued or even come to fruition. Thanks to the good folk at St Augustine's of Hippo, Edgbaston, JB was able to add their splendid church to the new section on J. A. Chatwin, and Emeritus Churchwarden Stephen Hartland kindly sent in a highly entertaining newspaper clipping, in which a visitor extols both the area and the church, while slyly poking fun at local pretentions. This church's fine musical tradition reminded her of Henry Woodyer's St Martin's Church in Dorking, which has a memorial to Ralph Vaughan Williams, so that came in for some new attention (thanks to David Dixon for his photographs of the interior).
Another very rewarding project was completed soon afterwards: Philip Jackson sent in a series of five articles from the Lady's Pictorial profiling its women contributors, thus putting names (and sometimes faces) to them, and giving details about their careers. These could be incorporated into JB's new alphabetically arranged index to editors and journalists, making them easier to find. This is a brilliant new addition to the study of both the periodicals themselves, and women's huge contribution to this field. JB also added a review of Brigid Allen's joint biography of Emily Eden and her brother Lord Auckland. Emily accompanied her brother to India where he served as Governor-General, and was implicated in the disastrous aftermath of the First Afghan War. But, as her writings suggest, Emily was a fascinating character in her own right, and both siblings deserve re-assessment now.
Next, the Pre-Raphaelite Society allowed our Senior Editor, Simon Cooke (who established our link with it), to select and format for our website two of the essays from the latest issue of their journal. One is Cecilia Rose's intriguing and prize-winning essay. "A Secret Preoccupation: John William Waterhouse and the Occult." Thanks to Simon, we can now see how women's demonstrations of their esoteric powers went beyond séances and table-rapping, and inspired some of Waterhouse's most admired paintings. The other article that Simon selected, intriguingly entitled "An Elephant, a Rhino, and a Mickey Finn," is Kirsty Stonell Walker's examination of the effects of chloral on Dante Gabriel Rossetti's life and relationship with his model, Fanny Cornforth. Complex relationships come under scrutiny again, this time in literature, in Simon's own review of Katie R. Peel's recently published Readers and Mistresses: Kept Women in Victorian Literature.
In true Victorian spirit, Philip Allingham has been fully immersed in his local pantomime season, but has sneaked a little time to improve on some of the twenty-year-old scans in the Dickens gallery. One that shows Dickens standing nonchalantly in his porch at Gadshill is especially evocative. Other improvements were to his material on the Household Edition: the cover and frontispiece of the final volume are particularly handsome, but many more of the illustrations have now been rescanned and more fully considered .
Most exciting of all is the whole extended section on the artist William Dyce, with more than 20 paintings comprehensively discussed by Dennis Lanigan, all carefully proofread by Scott Thomas Buckle. This is a major contribution, because Dyce was influenced by or directly involved in so many of the important strands of nineteenth-century culture, from the German Nazarenes and the Pre-Raphaelites in art, to High Church Tractarianism, to scientific studies in astronomy and geology, and to photography. But paintings like Pegwell Bay and Christabel also stand alone as some of the most memorable masterpieces of the age.
Another holiday treat was to hear from our French translator, Sabrina Laurent, who added James Tissot's poignant depiction of the ailing Mrs. Newton asleep in a Conservatory Chair [Mrs. Newton endormie sur une chaise dans la véranda] to our French section.
More recently (mid-month) Laurent Bury has reviewed a new book in the promising new field of reception studies: Medievalism and Reception, edited by Ellie Crookes and Ika Willis. Several chapters discuss the way the Victorians responded to the Middle Ages, offering new approaches to the literature (including some works by women historians and novelists) and wider culture of the period.
With the end of the month already approaching, DJ has brought in an exciting new piece on Victorians and the Discovery of X-Rays by Nicole Lobdell, which is knowledgable, thought-provoking and enjoyable to read — exactly the qualities we seek to present. There's more than meets the eye here, indeed: had you ever thought, for instance, how this new discovery tied in with the Victorians' deep fascination with the unseen?
Correspondence: we were very sad to learn that Rita Wood, whom Simon introduced to us in 2019, and who built up our section on York architects, passed away at the end of last year. She had been unwell for a long time, but continued to contribute until very near the end, and we shall miss her greatly. Just to give you an idea of her work, here is her piece on the beautiful Chapter House at York Minster (as is apparent here, Rita loved and was especially knowledgable about church tiles).
Last modified 11 January 2025