December
he month began with Philip V. Allingham taking his patented approach to the complete illustrations of a single novel, and again moving beyond Dickens, he has scanned George Cruikshank’s illustrations for Harrison Ainsworth’s
Jack Shepppard and is locating the text realized and creating commentaries for each one.
Many thanks to Neil Holland, curator at the University of Aberystwyth's School of Art, for giving us permission, at the end of last month, to use an image of their portrait of architect and designer John Pollard Seddon for a new section on him, starting with his very special Byzantine-Revival church, St Catherine's Hoarwithy. Simon Cooke and John Salmon both helped by contributing photographs of this.
This month, Jacqueline Banerjee contributed entries on the City Churches in Dundee, especially St Mary's, the Parish Church, which has some lovely Burne-Jones windows, including the great east window. Another window here, depicting the Resurrection, led her to open a new section on the important Scottish stained glass designer Daniel Cottier. Still in Dundee, she wrote short pieces on the Howff Cemetery, the former General Post Office, the Clydesdale Bank, and the Mercantile bar in Commercial Road. Later she looked at a shop nearer home, which still has its original Victorian Doulton tiling. Later in the month, she opened another new section, this time on the ornithologist, naturalist and anti-Darwinist Francis Orpen Morris, with material about his life, and excerpts from some of his writings, most importantly (and entertainingly) his attack on the theory of evolution.
This month also included a private view of Leighton House Museum's latest exhibition, "Flaming June: The Making of an Icon," which continues until 2 April 2017. Highly recommended for those in need of some sunshine! Their installation shots brought us some valuable new material on Flaming June itself, and Leighton's other paintings of 1895: Lachrymae, The Maid with Golden Hair, Twixt Hope and Fear, and Candida.
Andzej Diniejko created a section Isaac D’Israeli, father of the Prime Minister and novelist, contributing a biographical introduction, chronology of his works, and discussion of his religion. Your webmaster chimed in and drawing upon Project Gutenberg added the complete texts of his essays on religion, including “The Talmud” and “The Jews of York,” and on book collectors (“Bibliomania”) and paratextual matters — “Prefaces,” “Dedications,” and “Titles of Books.”
Ray Dyer contributed a long, detailed bacteriology timeline and he and your webmaster have thus far created twenty-two brief biographies of the pioneering scientists, such as Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg, mentioned in the chronology. Ray has also begun a section on major diseases, thus far contributing ones for anthrax and typhus.
Stephen Foster created our new section on Erasmus Darwin, beginning with a biography, introduction to his poetry, ideas of evolution, and his radical politics, after which he added a series of characteristic excerpts from the scientific poems and Darwin's extensive explanatory notes on such topics as the adaptations of plants and their insect polinators, the sensitivity of plants, and their medical uses. Other excerpts concern Darwin’s use of classical mythology in his scientific poems and the discovery of the electrical Nature of lightning.
On the twenty-sixth the site had 91,854 documents and images.
November 2016
s the month begins, your webmaster has recreated most of the old diamond-shaped for the home screen and for many authors before formatting and linking Lionel Gossmann’s latest project, an essay on a famous Scottish photographer Thomas Annan: “Clyde-built: Thomas Annan’s The Old Closes and Streets of Glasgow”.
After the generous collector who has shared many photographs of sculptural works and information about them provided another batch of images, Landow added to the site works by Gilbert Bayes (Sea Nymphs Riding Stallions] and Head of a Warrior (or Athena)), Frank Bowcher’s Edward VII-Worcester County medal, Sir Thomas Brock’s Bust of a man (possibly Sir Henry Harben), Benjamin Creswick’s Female Nude and Crawford Biscuit Box, three works by Aimé-Jules Dalou (Journée remplie, Femme cousant , and Édouard Lindeneher), Richard Garbe’s Alfreda, Tilting Knights, Knight and Lady, and Classical Woman, Sir Alfred Gilbert’s Victory, Ernest George Gillick’s Inner Temple World War I medal, Edouard Lanteri’s Sir Squire Bancroft, Ruby Levick’s Bust of a Man, Thomas Macleans’s Ione, Phoebe Gertrude Stabler’s three works (Picardy Peasant, Picardy Peasant Woman, and Baby on a Cushion), and Albert Toft’s Hagar.
The same generous collector also provided images and information about sculpture-related metalwork, such as Bertha Lillian Goff’s silver and leather book cover, Katie Harris’s Silver box decorated with a bas relief and a silver prayer book cover, and Florence Harriet Steele’s Silver Tazza.
Philip B. Allingham created a section for William Sharp's illustrations for The Moonstone, which consists of 51 images and detailed discussions!. Continuing these large projects, he next added George Cruikshank’s eleven illustrations of William Harrison Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard. A Romance. At present he is revising the 74 documents containing William Jewett’s illustrations of The Moonstone in Harper’s Magazine/
The summer holidays seem far away now, but Jacqueline Banerjee finally found time to write about the McManus, Dundee, with its fabulous Albert Hall and Victoria Gallery, which she so much enjoyed visiting. This George Gilbert Scott building has stained glass by Clayton and Bell, Burne-Jones, and William Aikman, all celebrating Scottish history (Aikman's window tells the story of the extraordinary Scottish missionary, Mary Slessor) and has paintings by Rossetti, Landseer, Sir Frank Brangwyn, Sir John Lavery and others. A special favourite was William McTaggart, on whom she opened a new section, with several paintings, including his lyrically impressionist And All the Choral Waters Sang. Many thanks to the McManus for their permission to use photographs, also to the librarian of the Royal College of Physicians Edinburgh, and photographer Andrew Lee, for supplementing them.
Lionel Gossman kindly sent in some more photographs of Karl Friedrich Schinkel's work in Berlin and Potsdam, showing more about his career and his links with English architects. Thanks also to Joe Pilling, for a review of David Cesarani's new book, Disraeli: The Novel Politician, and to John Salmon for another series of splendid church photographs, this time of George Gilbert Scott's St Matthias, Richmond, both its exterior and its interior, and its many fine stained glass windows by major Victorian firms, including William Wailes's beautiful west wheel window. Sir Arthur Blomfield's chancel screen here led JB to look at this architect's work at Eton College, which in turn caused her to write an introduction to the architect Henry Woodyer, an Old Etonian whose "burning bush" lamp standard there is a well-known landmark.
Andrzej Diniejko, our Contributing Editor for Poland, has written “Benjamin Disraeli’s Silver Fork Novels. A Brief Introduction.”
Simon Cooke, continuing his work on Victorian book design, sent in examples by Albert Henry Warren, John Sliegh, and Robert Dudley.
Ray Dyer contributed “The Higher Critics: An Annotated Chronology, 1710-1917,” and regular contributor Tony Schwab reviewed Emma Griffin’s Liberty’s Dawn: A People’s History of the Industrial Revolution.
Thanks to the Bedford Fine Art Gallery for sharing several paintings with us: Christiana Patterson Ross’s The Pedlars on the Road to Edinburgh, James Lobley’s Remember the Poor, and William Sidney Cooper’s Sheep. Thanks, too, for Stephen Basedo for sharing “Medievalism in Victorian Fiction — A Brief Bibliography” with our readers.
Jordan Silaen has translated Diane Greco Josefowicz’s “The Wave Theory of Light” into Indonesian.
Verity Burke from the University of Reading, who is Associate Editor of the Wilkie Collins Journal, kindly shared a description of this new online journal.
Thanks to Bob McEachern for pointing out a bad link in the homepage of Phiz’s illustrations to David Copperfield and to Geneviève Lipietz for correcting a spelling error in the caption for Drury’s statue of Reynolds.
On the twenty-eighth the site had 91,658 documents and images.
October 2016
he leaves began to turn as the nights became much colder, and your webmaster changed the visually boring list version of homepage (or sitemap) for the site to a better, text-based version of the old diamond shapes one. Mark Bernstein tells us that eventually we'll be able to have both the more interesting one intended for those reading on large tablets and computers and the list needed for reading on smart phones. Thus far only the homepages for John Ruskin and George W. M. Reynolds have the diamond-shaped design. More will come as time permits.
Landow has created a new section in “authors” for Reynolds, adding thirty excerpts from and brief essays about his The Mysteries of London — an extraordinarily long novel by the man who was almost certainly the most widely read Victorian novelist. (He and Dickens despised each other.) Reynolds, a radical through and through, attacked capital punishment, imprisonment for debt, government spying on private letters, child labor in Lancashire coal mines, prostituting twelve-year old girls, adulteration and contamination of food, and the three "Laws" by which he argued the rich kept down the poor — the Game, Corn, and Poor Laws. He makes Queen Victoria a character in the novel, and he also explains the fine points of bodysnatching. Landow also added more than 70 illustrations of the novel by the unfortunately named Stiff.
After Jackie Banerjee introduced him to a special issue of The Studio devoted to bookplates, GPL created a folder for them in the decorative arts and design section of the site and added more than seventy-five examples.
Early in the month, Jacqueline Banerjee opened two new sections, one on the artist H. H. Lathangue, which includes his controversial Leaving Home, and the other on the stained glass designer E. J. Prest, whose windows can be seen in St Augustine of Canterbury Church, Highgate — John Salmon sent in many splendid photographs of this church, which also has a fine window by Nathaniel Westlake, amongst others. She added a distinctive sequence of windows by Rossetti and Morris, The Sermon on the Mount as well, this time sent in by Colin Price. Colin Price also sent in a beautiful war memorial window in St John's, Cardiff. Other additions included a notice of three useful reprints by Cambridge University Press, of contemporary works on the Great Exhibition, more information about the reliefs on the façade of the Oxford and Cambridge Club in Pall Mall, some commentary on Alfred Conquest's Surrey Landscape, and (with photographs from Tim Willasey-Wilsey) an account of the former Army and Navy Stores in Mumbai.
Later in the month, John Salmon sent in three more batches of wonderful photographs of the (former) Ark of the Covenant, in Upper Clapton, London; St Andrew's Church, Stockwell Green, London, now sadly under threat; and the particularly lovely chapel of the Hospital of St John and St Elizabeth, in St John's Wood, London. In connection with the first of these (the Ark of the Covenant) JB wrote an introduction to the unusual and notorious Agapemonite sect, and added some work on the brilliant windows there, by Walter Crane. She also opened a new section on the stained glass makers, Shrigley & Hunt, and (on quite a different topic) wrote about the connection of the major Prussian architect, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, with England.
We now have well over 3000 followers on Twitter, many of whom interact with us and make us feel a useful part of the academic community!
Simon Cooke contributed material on book illustration, cover design, and photography, one Glaswegian working in all these areas — William Ralston for whom Simon wrote introductions for his work as a photographer, illustrator, and book cover designer. In addition, he added “Owen Jones as a book cover designer” with examples of his work.
Tim Willasey-Wilsey contributed ““The loss of the steamship Cleopatra with Indian convicts bound for Singapore” and “Mumbai’s Neoclassical Town Hall and the Bombay Engineers who designed and built it.”
Ray Dyer contributed detailed chronologies for Lewis Carroll and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Tony Schwab sent in “How to be smart: Reflections on Thomas Carlyle.”
Thanks to Ann Kennedy Smith for correcting a date in the Amy Levy chronology.
On the last day of the month the site had 90,910 documents and images.
September 2016
s August ended and September began, your webmaster arrived in London, met with Jackie Banerjee, and set off on a cruise around the coast of England with detours to Dublin and the Isle of Man. In London he discovered
Thomas Telford’s St. Katherine Dock project, and added photographs of his lock connecting the Thames with Philip Hardwick’s Warehouse. Stopping in Salisbury, he photographed some of the cathedral’s medieval and Victorian sculpture, which included eight thirteenth-century bas reliefs in the Chapter House (which houses a contemporary copy of the Magna Carta) plus R. C. Lucas’s Sir. R. Colt Hoare and Margaret Thomas’s Memorial to Richard Jefferies. In Wales Landow photographed St. David’s Cathedral and its ceilings restored by Sir George Gilbert Scott and encaustic tiles and their medieval sources.
St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, Ireland, brought photographs of war memorials related to materials in our section the British Empire — those for members of the 18th Royal Irish Regiment lost in the Burma War, 1852-53, the King’s Royal Irish Hussars, the First Royal Irish Regimen (China War, 1840-42) plus the regimental flags of British army units hanging in the choir and John Henry Foley’s statue of Sir Benjamin Lee Guinness outside the cathedral.
Landing on the Isle of Man, which some say is Thomas-the-tank-engine’s Isle of Sodor, produced photographs of the island’s locomotives and rolling stock and of the station at Port Erin. Belfast, the next stop on your webmaster’s travels, produced additional photographs of Thomas Brock’s Queen Victoria and Titanic Memorial and four bronze allegorical figures on Sydney March’s Boer War Memorial.
Arriving on the Scottish mainland allowed your webmaster to return to old haunts and obtain photographs of some new buildings and sculpture and additional views of ones already on the site. Glasgow, for example, featured a lovely department store interior in a Grade A British Listed Building and the Argyll Arcade to go with all out London arcades. Glasgow Cathedral contained a memorial to the men of the Seventh Highland Light Infantry lost in a battle on the North-west frontier of India — a battle that, as Tim Willasey-Wilsey helpfully pointed out, had been discussed in one of his recent essays. Edinburgh, where the trip ended, produced additional images, including a detail of the Scott Monument and a new pictures of the Wellington equestrian monument on Princes Street.
Apart from an important meeting at the beginning of the month (with your webmaster!) Jackie Banerjee enjoyed spending a week looking at a single Arts and Crafts church, St Martin's, Low Marple, working with over fifty photographs kindly sent in by Michael Critchlow. This lovely church has work by Henry Wilson and Christopher Whall as well as Sedding, and stained glass by William Morris, Christopher Whall, Herbert Bryans and others, all linked from the the bottom of the three main webpages about it. This project involved saying more about Sedding himself, and opening new sections on Whall and the stained glass designer, Herbert Bryans. She also illustrated and formatted a contemporary account of George Meredith, and a new review kindly shared by the journal Cercles, of Annie Ramel's The Madder Stain: A Psychoanalytic Reading of Thomas Hardy, by Stéphanie Bernard. In between, she added recent pictures of Oscar Wilde's childhood home in Dublin as well, and two famous old shops on Jermyn Street: Harvie & Hudson's because of its Pugin tiling, and Floris because of its connection with Florence Nightingale.
Towards the end of the month, JB added reviews of Linda Stratmann's The Secret Poisoner: A Century of Murder, and the exhibition, Victorians Decoded: Art and Telegraphy, at the Guildhall Art Gallery, along with several illustrations for each, including John Brett's lovely Echoes of a Far-Off Storm and James Clarke Hook's dramatic, in-your-face Deep Sea Fishing. Another addition was Michael Faraday's home at Hampton Court.
Tim Willasey-Wilsey contributed ““A Scrimmage in a Border Station” — The death of William Cameron in the Sudan.”
Colin Price joins the team as one of our wonderful Contributing Photographers.
Ray Dyer contributed four essays on Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno. After Landow added 15 of Frank Furniss’s illustrations, Dyer sent in commentaries for them.
On the twenty-sixth, the site had 90,130 documents and images.
August 2016
ugust has seen your webmaster occupied with two large projects, the first involving the redesign of the site so it can be read pleasurably on both smart phones and devices with larger screens, such as computers and larger tablets. Mark Bernstein, Assistant Editor for Web technology and Design, is president and chief scientist at Eastgate Systems, which created (and sells) Storyspace (the software on which the pre-WWW version of the Victorian Web resided) and Tinderbox, software widely used by journalists and writers of nonfiction. Mark, who previously made our basic essay stylesheet work on smartphones, wrote a program to find any html errors that might prevent new stylesheets from functioning properly, and he e-mailed the program’s output, which came to a 46-page single-spaced list. Fortunately, about a third of these reported problems turned out to involve intentionally unformatted offline materials or groups of documents easily fixed with global find-and-replace. Still, many hours have been spent looking for that missing >, ", or backslash!
The other major project involved creating a web version of Lionel Gossman’s monograph, Unwilling Moderns: The Nazarene Painters of the Nineteenth Century and its 100 illustrations. Julie Codell, Professor of Art at Arizona State University, contributed previously published several essays, for the first of which, “Photographic Interventions and Identities: Colonising and Decolonising the Royal Body,” Landow created a web version.
Phillip V. Allingham has reformatted two-dozen of Fred Barnard’s illustrations of Martin Chuzzlewit and then moved on to those for David Copperfield, after which he created a new section for Alfred S. Pearse whose illustrations for Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone he added along with detailed commentaries of each image. Continuing with illustrations for Collins’s famous novel, Allingham next added illustrations and extensive commentaries for work by F. A. Fraser and John French Sloan.
Jackie Banerjee started the month by working with Colin Price's new photographs of the lovely Rossetti triptych at Llandaff Cathedral. Then she completed a long overdue piece about London's Tube, before turning to sculpture, with an account of Sir John Steell's statue of Robert Burns in Dundee, and several new sculptures and drawings by Henri de Triqueti, such as his splendid statue of Pierre Lescot on the Louvre, his finely detailed drawing of an angel at a church in Padua, and his preparatory study for the Marmor Homericum at University College London. JB also added a piece from the Internet Archive on Queen Victoria's funeral. Many thanks to Cercles for sharing with us Marianne Drugeon's review of Emily Eells's recent edition of Wilde in Earnest, which is now illustrated with some photographs of the 1895 production of the play. Cercles also sent us Helena Ifill's thoughtful review of Kirby-Jane Hallum's Aestheticism and the Marriage Market in Victorian Popular Fiction: The Art of Female Beauty. At the end of the month, JB added an introduction to the distinguished Scottish portrait-painter Sir Francis Grant, and some beautiful photographs of stained glass in Winchester Cathedral sent in by Colin Price, including the Jane Austen memorial window there and the windows by Edward Burne-Jones and John Dearle in the Epiphany Chapel, starting with Burne-Jones's Annunciation window. These last were formatted with the new style sheet, on which so much work is currently being done!
Simon Cooke formatted “‘Handsomely bound in cloth’: UK Book Cover Designs 1840-1880,” which Edmund M. B. King contributed.
Tim Willasey-Wilsey contributed ““‘One of the basest, foulest murders that ever stained the page of history’? The brutal death of Sir William Macnaghten.”
Ray Dyer of the Royal Institute of Chemistry contributed Chemistry Time-Line, 1755-1901: Victorian Chemistry in Context “Mesmerism. Ancient and Modern,” “Glossary of Terms Used for Mental Illness, with Chronological Synopsis,” “Theories of mental illness in the nineteenth-century ‘Bedlam’ Asylum Era, 1815-1898.,” “The ‘Lingua franca’ of Nineteenth-century Medical Psychology,” and “Child Study in the Nineteenth Century.” Tony Schwab reviewed Stephanie Barczewski’s Heroic Failure and the British.
Adrian S. Wisnicki of Department of English and Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln writes to announce that Livingstone Online has now been published. “Livingstone Online is a digital museum and library that enables users to encounter the written and visual legacy of famous Victorian explorer David Livingstone (1813-1873). The site challenges reigning iconic representations of Livingstone by restoring one of the British Empire's most important figures to the many global contexts in which he worked, traveled, and is remembered.”
Thanks to Alexandra Whittaker and Fellows, the Birmingham and London auction house, for sharing a lovely Arts and Crafts brooch attributed to Arthur and Georgie Gaskin.
On the twenty-second the site had 89,554 documents and images.
July 2016
ormatting Lionel Gossman’s monograph on the history of the Victorian stained glass revival with special reference to the Glaswegian Stephen Adam led your webmaster through several byways to the beautiful Bible in Pictures by the wonderfully named Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld. Thus far we have 125 of his illustrations, many of which have commentaries and are interlinked. Landow also added “William Holman Hunt's Egyptian-style furniture.” In working with issues available online The Reader, an interesting, unfortunately short-lived intellectual magazine of the 1860s, GPL encountered and transcribed a range of interesting material on literature, philosophy, religion, and the visual arts, including reviews of works by M. E. Braddon, Frances Power Cobbe, Mrs. Henry Wood, George MacDonald, John Everett Millais, Coventry Patmore plus essays on the political implications of the sensation novel, periodicals in British India, spiritualism and on John Stuart Mill as the leading philosopher of the age.
Before going off on holiday, Jackie Banerjee continued working with Ramachandran Venkatesh on Mumbai's great heritage of "Bombay Gothic" buildings, with F. W. Stevens's poignant Mulji Jetha Fountain, and the (Former) Churchgate Terminus. Special thanks to Venkatesh for his piece on Stevens's Standard Chartered Bank, including information about banking history in Mumbai, and sculpture here by Roscoe Mullins. Thanks also to Martin Cook, for sending in some useful information about the cost of E. S. Prior's Voewood House. JB also opened two new sections. one for the architect John Gibson, with a look at the lovely St Margaret's ("The Marble Church") in Bodelwyddan, Clwydd; the other for the stained glass firm, Burlison & Grylls, followed by ten examples of work attributed to the firm at Rochester Cathedral. Thanks to Colin Price for all these pictures! On returning home, JB started adding various new items from her travels, such as a "Liverpool Special" postbox, the recently restored and magnificent Liverpool Lime Street Station, and Peter Ellis's extraordinarily advanced Oriel Chambers, also in Liverpool.
Tim Willasey-Wilsey contributed photographs of Thomas Brock’s monument to Queen Victoria in Belfast, Sir Francis Chantrey’s Monument to Sir John Phelips, plus photographs an an essay on a Memorial Column to Admiral Hood in Somerset.
Rendering our site in Spanish continues at universities in Madrid. Professor Asun Lopez-Varela edited Evelina Šaponjić-Jovanović’s translation of the second chapter of Marjorie Stone’s book on Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Ana González-Rivas Fernández edited Ana Abril Hernández’s translation of Andrzej Diniejko’s “Walter Besant: Un Sketch biográfico” and his introduction to late-nineteenth-century Slum Fiction — “Ficción de barrio: Introducción” plus Delfina Kashki’s translation of Jackie Banerjee's photo-essay on J. M. Barrie, George Du Maurier, and Thomas Hardy in Lulworth Cove, Dorset. María Álvarez translated half a dozen documents on EBB, which were edited by Belén Piqueras, and Helena Sánchez revised and edited Luisa Antón Pacheco’s “Samuel Smiles.”
Diane Greco Josefowicz contributed “A Real Doll,” a review of Joanna Ebenstein's The Anatomical Venus: Wax, God, Death and the Ecstatic, and Susan Guralnik reviewed Malcolm Shifrin’s Victorian Turkish Baths.
Thanks to Jim Spates for sharing “Ruskin’s moss & the beauty of the earth” from his blog, Why Ruskin? Thanks, too, to Cordula Grewe for permitting us to include excerpts from Painting the Sacred in the Age of Romanticism, her study of the German Nazarene painters, on the site: “The Nazarenes as Art Revolutionaries,” “The Religions of the Nazarenes and the Conflict of Faiths,” “Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld’s Bible in Pictures,” and “Nineteenth-century European Anti-Semitism.” A third thanks goes to Tony Harker of Oxford for sharing with us a fascinating letter concerning freed slaves written by a minor Jamaican official to his brother, an antislavery Methodist minister back in England. A fourth thanks to Gail Frampton, who kindly sent us photographs of her great-great grandfather, whose Crimean War letter she found on our site. It's wonderful to receive material from readers!
Thanks also to Antoine Capet of Cercles for letting us reproduce on our website Ginger Frost's searching review of Thomas R. C. Gibson-Brydon's The Moral Mapping of Victorian and Edwardian London: Charles Booth, Christian Charity, and the Poor-but-Respectable.
Many thanks to D. C. Rose for letting us know that some of the Wilde websites he recommended some years back have blinked out of existence. Thanks, too, to Diane L. Ritter for pointing out some embarassing typos and fixing a link and to Mark Graham for pointing out the Greek letters on a Pugin tile.
On the twenty-fifth the site had 89,312 documents and images.
June 2016
une began with your webmaster creating a section for one of his favorite painters, John Singer Sargent. Thanks to the riches and generosity of major museums that permit Creative Commons use of images of works in their collections, particularly the Metropolitan Museum in New York, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, London’s National Portrait Gallery, and Tate Britain, we have the beginnings of an adequate coverage of this great painter.
Much of the month have been occupied by creating a web version of A Stained Glass Masterpiece in Victorian Glasgow: Stephen Adam’s Celebration of Industrial Labor by Lionel Gossman, M. Taylor Pyne Professor Emeritus of Romance Languages, Princeton University. In addition to providing important material about Scotland, an important part of the UK for which the Victorian Web dosn't have nearly enough material, the book’s early chapters serve as introductions to our section on stained glass.
Phillip V. Allingham continues his vast Little Dorrit illustration project by adding more than a dozen of James Mahoney's visual interpretations of Dickens — and then comparing his to those of other illustrators.
At the end of last month, Ramachandran Venkatesh had sent in photographs and a helpful commentary on Elphinstone College in Mumbai, and Jackie Banerjee added commentaries to several other photographs of his, for example of statues by Matthew Noble (including one of Mountstuart Elphinstone himself) and Thomas Woolner (a characterful one of David Sassoon), in the same city. She also added a notice of the new exhibition at the Courtauld of Georgiana Houghton's "Spirit paintings," along with several of the paintings on show there. Other additions were three buildings (the former Cambridge Medical School, Voewood House and The Barn, Exmouth) for our new section on architect E. S. Prior. Special thanks to Antoine Capet of Cercles for letting her reproduce on our website her new review of Malcolm Shifrin's splendid Victorian Turkish Baths.
Thank you also to Cynthia Gamble for sending in an interesting note about her book on Wenlock Abbey; to Rosalind White, for her useful essay on that popular (sad) topic, "fallen women" (on such figures in George Eliot, Wilkie Collins and Elizabeth Gaskell); and to Antoine Capet of Cercles for sharing another review, this time by Allanah Tomkins, on Elizabeth Hurren's Protesting about Pauperism: Poverty, Politics and Poor Relief in Late-Victorian England, 1870-1900. Particularly welcome was a batch of photographs from Ramachandran Venkatesh, with commentary, for a new entry on one of the greatest buildings of the Gothic Revival, the Victoria (now Chhatrapti Shivaji) Terminus in Mumbai. JB added a life of the architect, F. W. Stevens and two of his other works, the Royal Alfred Sailors' Home and the much-praised Municipal Buildings, as well (several more to follow). She also added an introduction to the artist, Richard Redgrave.
Tim Willasey-Wilsey contributed photographs of John Flaxman’s Tomb of Harriet Susan née Dashwood, Viscountess Fitzharris (1783-1815) and Henry Weekes’ Shelley Memorial.
Thanks to Marie and Ray Ella for sharing photographs of their Lincolnshire home, part of which was formerly a Victorian Primitive Methodist chapel.
Thanks to Tony Schwab, who most recently contributed his essay on the sublime, for sending in corrections about materials found throughout the site; thanks to Natalina Aloisi who writes from Italy to helpfully point out a missing letter that broke a link; and thanks to Dr. Cammy Thomas who notified us about an obsolete document.
On the twenty-seventh the site had 88,861 documents and images.
May 2016
fter your webmaster returned from London, he continued work on editorial and other cartoons from Fun and added dozens of cartoons to the categories first created — arts, cabs and omnibuses, children, poverty and starvation, religion, servants, and workers plus parodies of word and image. New topics included what people wore, railways, theatre and popular entertainment, Valentine’s Day, Christmas, environment and public health and Queen Victoria and the royal family. One result of working with humorous and editorial cartoons has been to create sections for book illustrators new to the site, including Henry Stephen “Hal” Ludlow, James Frank Sullivan, and John Gordon Thomson.
Landow also reviewed Devon Cox’s The Street of Wonderful Possibilities: Whistler, Wilde, and Sargent in Tite Street and created a section on Anna Lea Merrit, the American artist living in London who painted Love Locked Out, which is discussed in the book.
One of the largest recent projects on the site involved reducing rather than adding to it, as we removed syllabi of courses that formerly used the Victorian Web at universities in the United States, Canada, and Singapore and student contributions not particularly relevant to the site, such as those on twentieth-century American non-fiction and modern fantasy.
The site added an obituary for Linda H. Peterson, who contributed her pioneering book on Victorian autobiography and other materials some years ago. We hope to add more of her books and articles.
Philip V. Allingham continues his work on book illustration, turning his attention to the way Phiz, Mahoney, Furniss, and others illustrated Dickens’s Little Dorrit.
Jacqueline Banerjee got a warm welcome at the Ragged School Museum on its open weekend this month, afterwards adding a long overdue introduction to Dr Barnardo. Working with more pictures from Ramachandran Venkatesh, she continued filling out our Mumbai section with its well-known Flora Fountain, co-designed by Richard Norman Shaw. She added commentaries to Julia Cameron's May Day and a Fun cartoon which also plays on Tennyson's "May Queen" for a royal betrothal. Much time was spent revising and updating a number of earlier pieces by various people, such as Paul Mersh's account of General Gordon's charitable works, first added in 2007. Looking for relocated illustrations, and incorporating links to new material, for example in the biography of Brunel, also took time. Later in the month, JB added about a dozen of Susan Durant's medallions of the royal family, and updated the sections on both Durant and Henri de Triqueti, especially on the Triqueti Marbles at St George's Chapel, Windsor, while preparing for her talk at the PMSA (Public Monuments and Sculpture Association) conference. She also images and commentaries for his cenotaph for Prince Albert and the Yates Memorial. At the end of the month she reviewed the Tate's new "Painting with Light" exhibition.
Thank you to Rosie White, who shared two new items from her "Cabinet of Curiosity" with us: "Alice through the Magnifying Glass, Visual and Verbal Interplay in Wonderland," and "Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies and the Origins Debate." Thank you too to Antoine Capet of Cercles for sharing with us Mark Klobas's review of Nancy Ellenberger's Balfour's World: Aristocracy and Political Culture at the Fin de Siècle.
Simon Cooke created a section on the late-nineteenth-century illustrator Christiana Mary Demain ‘Chris’ Hammond (1860–1900), which includes eight of her works and a critical biography. Cooke also contributed several book designs by Alex Turbayne, including ones for Kingsley’s Westward Ho!, Maria Edgeworth’s Maria, and Sir Walter Scott’s The Lady of the Lake. At month’s end Cooke created a new section for a Paul Woddroffe, which thus far includes a dozen illustrations and an introduction to his life and work entitled, “Paul Woodroffe: Illustrator of the Nineties.”
Susan Walker writes to us about a crowdsourcing effort to fund Casa Tolomei, the Italian summer home of the Brownings in 1853 and 1857.
Thanks to Nina Taylor for catching several documents dated 2018 — would that we could read the future! And thanks to Diane L. Ritter for catching scanning errors in the biography of G. P. R. James and Simon Collcutt for catching multiple mispellings of T. E. Collcutt's last name!
On the ninth the site had 88,597 documents and images, on the 30th after we removed more than 600 documents from the former section on course material associated with the site and added other documents, it had 88,266.
April 2016
pril began with your webmaster in London, where he attended a number of exhibitions and their press views. First, he headed straightaway to the Victoria & Albert Museum to see their installation of the Botticelli show he had reviewed after seeing it in Berlin. The joint review, which compares the very different approaches of the two museums, is now online. He next wrote “Bejewelled Treasures — a review of another exhibition drawn from the Al Thani Collection,” and Tate Britain’s “review of Conceptual Art in Britain, 1964-1979.” Next up Undressed: A Brief History of Underwear at the Victoria & Albert, and Pre-Raphaelites on Paper at the Leighton House Museum. A return visit to the Blackfriars Pub produced some improved photographs of the Arts and Crafts decorations and sculpture.
While in London, Landow met with the private collector who has shared photographs of his large collection of sculpture, painting, and decorative arts. Thus far the new materials of which images have appeared online include Robert Anning Bell’s Sir Galahad, Conrad Dressler’s Benjamin Disraeli, Francis Derwent Wood’s Bust of a Laughing Women, Kathleen Bruce Scott’s Peter as a Baby, Stephen Wiens’s Girl with a Lizard, Edouard Lanteri’s Duet, and his French Hospital Dispensary medal, Sydney March’s General Wolfe, Sir Edgar Bertram Mackennal’s pair of Coalport Cornucopias Ellen Mary Rope’s Unto Babes and Visit of the Magi and Onslow Whiting’s Boer War Commemorative plaque.
Landow opened a section for another Trollope novel, The Three Clerks, beginning a homepage and two documents — “Trollope and contemporary fraud, embezzlement, and stock swindles” and “Who has given so great a blow to political honesty as Sir Robert Peel?.”
The same collector generously shared photographs about medals and plaques by George Gammon Adams (Sir George Gilbert Scott ), Emil Fuchs (Boer War Royal Tour/Visit to the Colonies medal), the painter and Royal Academician Edward J. Poynter (Clio (ΚΛΕΙΩ)), Francis John Williamson’s Queen Victoria Diamond Jubilee plaque, and members of the Wyons family that dominated Victorian medallist work: Joseph Shepherd Wyon’s John Bacon and Samuel Johnson and Leonard Charles Wyon's Thomas Banks. Decorative arts contributions include Katie Harris’s silver christening cup and match box.
At the end of last month, Jacqueline Banerjee added the picturesque Barmouth Bridge, the longest in Wales, thanks to pictures contributed by Colin Price. Thanks again too to Roger Beale of oldprints.com for kindly letting us use a picture from the Illustrated London News to illustrate a new commentary on the handsome Royal Courts of Justice clock. Then it was on to the writer, illustrator and cartoonist, Wallis Mackay, for whom she created a new section with his life, and a dozen or so of his illustrations and cartoons.
Many thanks for two new book reviews: one by William Whyte via Cercles, on Martin Geoffrey Cook's Edward Prior: Arts and Crafts Architect, and the other by Ellen Moody on Martha Stoddart Holmes's Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture. The former prompted JB to write an introduction to a new section on Prior. Similarly, R. Venkatesh's photograph of a chattri in Mumbai's former Victoria Park prompted her to make a new section for its architect Sir Samuel Swinton Jacob, and to update an older account of Coronation Park in New Delhi, still slowly evolving into a heritage site. Then she wrote a piece about the Savile Club in Mayfair. Finally, returning to Colin Price's photographs, she added new information and pictures to Brunel's Chepstow railway bridge, and the Forth Rail Bridge, and also put online with commentaries the Avon Aqueduct in Linlithgow and the unique Warrington Transporter Bridge. At the end of the month she received Rosalind White's interesting piece on "Mesmerism, Madness and Witchcraft in Charlotte Bronté's Jane Eyre."
All this left a little time for some enjoyable meetings with our webmaster and his wife during their three-week stay in London; for updating and correcting a number of old documents, such as that on Tower Bridge and Its Art; and for her usual freelance writing. She published a couple of new reviews for the TLS this month, and a piece on the fascinating topic of the London Underground for Aquila. She also visited Windsor to see the Triqueti Marbles at first hand, since she is working on a paper on this sculptor for next month's PMSA Emigré Sculptors conference in London.
Derek B. Scott contributed another performance of a Victorian ballad — George Root’s The Hazel Dell.
Simon Cooke created a section for an illustrator new to the site — Richard Heighway, providing an introduction and 5 plates.
Thanks to a new contributor, Robert Hill, architect and collector of architectural drawings, who shared Isaiah Robert Edmondson Birkett’s drawing of a Birmingham office block.
Robert Freidus contributed photographs of funerary and memorial sculpture from St. Giles Cathedral, Edinburgh: Sir George Frampton’s General Sir William Stephen Alexander Lockhart, three works by James Pittendrigh MacGillivray (Robert Fergusson, John Knox, and Margaret Oliphant), and John and William Birnie Rhind’s James Graham, 1st Marquis of Montrose.
As of the twenty-fifth the site had 88,236 documents and images.
March 2016
arch began with your webmaster continuing to work with cartoons and articles from Fun, the Victorian would-be rival to Punch that for an important part of its existence was owned by the Dalziels, the artists and engravers involved with so much book and periodical illustration. It turns out that whereas the Internet Archive and Hathi Digital Library Trust each have around half a dozen of the magazine’s volumes, each of which contains six months’s issues, the Suzy Covey Comic Book Collection in the George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida, offers a full run of the magazines. Unfortunately, unlike the Hathi online versions, the Florida ones have only page images but no usable text, which has meant spending many hours making transcriptions. Some of the sections begun in February that began with only a few examples, such as those on Disraeli, Gladstone, and railways, which only had a few examples, now have many more — there are, for example, now 28 cartoons for railways — and we now have many more topics, some grim (poverty and starvation in Victorian Britain), some serious (the Risorgimento), and others with comedy, including those on the arts, cabs and omnibuses, children, servants, workers, and religion. Among the most interesting are those cartoons and verse that either simply allude to Victorian painting and sculpture as a means of creating political satire or those that parody these works.
Philip V. Allingham has transcribed and written introductions for three sections of an 1838 adaptation of Dickens’s Oliver Twist, possibly by George Almar.
A trip to Venice this month gave Jacqueline Banerjee material for a piece on Salviati in Venice and Britain: An Introduction, and she would like to thank Rita Kovach for permission to use a portrait of Antonio Salviati. But much of her time was spent in working with a new contributor, Colin Price, on some very famous bridges: George Gilbert Scott's Clifton Hampden Bridge; Isambard Kingdom Brunel's Saltash Bridge, Wharncliffe Viaduct, and Maidenhead Railway Bridge; William Tierney Clark's Marlow Bridge; and the Blackfriars road and railway bridges in London. Thank you to Colin for sending in a huge number of photographs, including sets documenting all the cathedrals of Britain, in all their aspects (especially stained glass). Towards the end of the month (still in the bridges section), she added archival excerpts about the Tay Bridge Disaster, and commented on Colin's pictures of the new Tay Bridge.
JB also added three new reviews, shared with us by Professor Antoine Capet, reviews editor of the online journal Cercles: Janet Gezari's review of Wuthering Heights on Film and Television: A Journey across Time and Cultures by Valérie V. Hazette; William Whyte's review of Gavin Stamp's Gothic for the Steam Age: An Illustrated Biography of Sir George Gilbert Scott (our second review of this important book); Laurent Bury's review of Lindsay Smith's Lewis Carroll: Photography on the Move. Thanks to Professor Capet and the authors involved for giving us permission to include these.
Simon Cooke, our editor for illustration and book design, has just published George Du Maurier: Illustrator, Author, Critic, which he co-edited with Paul Goldman, contributing a chapter and introduction.
Tim Willasey-Wilsey contributed “An indelible stigma of disgrace”: The Guns of Kabul,” which prompted the creation of a homepage for Afghanistan.
Thanks to Sarah Colegrave Fine Art for sharing with our readers half a dozen late-Victorian watercolors of Pakistan by Edward Clifford, paintings and drawings by Walter Greaves, and a delightful watercolor by Violet Brunton.
Thanks to James Spates, Professor of Sociology Emeritus Hobart and William Smith Colleges, for “How I Found Ruskin,” originally a 50-page essay most of which is devoted to Ruskin's political importance.
Thanks to Albert Hickson for correcting a typo on the index for Liverpool. Many thanks also to Rita Kovach for correcting a date in the new Salviati piece, and sending in some more information about the firm's showrooms in London.
On March fourteenth the site had 87,730 documents and images.
February 2016
ebruary already? The time flew by especially quickly for your webmaster, who found himself immersed in two large projects dependent upon the wonderful resources of the Hathi Digital Library Trust, from which he obtained maps, illustrations, and Punch cartoons, and long articles from The Illustrated London News, Fraser’s Magazine, the Westminster Review, and Fun, which linked together created a characteristic Victorian Web projects — namely, a series of interlinked primarily documents with commentaries plus some brief essays on a major issue, in this case the brief if deadly uprising after emancipation in Jamaica followed by the excessive and illegal reprisals by Governor Eyre and his underlings, some of whom were ultimately indicted for murder. Our interwoven materials on the Morant uprising and the subsequent Governor Eyre affair work well with our materials on the West Indies and public commentary on all sides of the affair has much to tell us about many subjects, including Carlyle's reputation, the context of the 1867 Reform Bill, and the British government’s rare willingness to seek and carry out justice in the face of jingoism, racism, and imperialism.
After examining articles in newspapers and journals, Landow decided to see how Punch and similar magazines treated the issue, an investigation that led to the discovery of the Hathi Trust’s issues of Fun, an obvious rival to Punch and imitator of it. This far we've put online with occasional commentary cartoons about Disraeli and the second reform bill, arts and literature, railways (and swindlers), and royal weddings, and the usual Punch-like cartoons on the war-between-the sexes with more than a dozen editorial cartoons on Gladstone and the failed battle for Irish Home Rule in the 1890s.
Philip V. Allingham in a burst of creativity has completed his one of his illustration projects, providing the plates, passages, commentary, and up to half a dozen comparison images by other artists for Harry Furniss’s illustrations of Charles Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit. Like Trollope, who notes that as soon as he completed one novel, he reached for a sheet of paper and began a new major project, PVA next began and completeda similar series of Henry Matthew Brock’s book jacket and beautiful color illustrations of Dickens’s The Holly Tree Inn.
The highlight of this month for Jacqueline Banerjee was the "Artist and Empire" exhibition at the Tate, which she reviewed along with its accompanying book. Many thanks to Leeds Art Gallery and Robert Crouch Rare Books, as well as the Tate, for helping her illustrate the review. Writing separately about Edward Armitage's dramatic allegorical painting Retribution at Leeds, she also provided an introduction to his work. Another pleasure was coming across Walter Crane's old house in Kensington, and learning about his bohemian lifestyle there!
Later in the month, she added accounts of The Prospect of Whitby pub in Wapping, and the Wapping Hydraulic Pumping Station opposite it. Finally, she opened a new section on John Wilson Croker, to include an essay by David Morphet on Croker's Image of France, reprinted here by kind permission of the Eblj (Electronic British Library Journal). For the periodicals section, she also formatted and illustrated Morphet's new and longer piece, "The Political Mission of the Quarterly Review, 1809-1859." Many thanks also to Antoine Capet and Deborah Mutch, for allowing us to reprint from Cercles Mutch's informative book review of Haewon Hwang's London's Underground Spaces: Representing the Victorian City, 1840-1915.
Andrzej Diniejko continues his essays on the novels of Disraeli with Benjamin Disraeli’s The Young Duke as a Silver Fork-Novel With Social Commentary.
Simon Cooke contributed “Aubrey Beardsley as a Book Cover Designer.”
Tim Willasey-Wilsey contributed “The Victims of Fugitives’ Drift,” a photo essay about a British invading force that was annihilated at the hands of the Zulus with nearly 1800 killed and only 55 surviving. This new material on southern Africa encouraged your webmaster to create a section on Rhodesia, the modern Zimbabwe.
Thanks to John Sankey, our long-time contributor on matters relating to Thomas Brock, for sending in three new works by the sculptor — Richard Baxter, his very first public monument, and equestrian statues of Edward VII in Sydney, Australia, and Toronto, Canada.
Thanks to our following readers: (1) to Rebecca Brittenham, Associate Professor of English, Indiana University, South Bend, for notifying us about a dead link to an external website listed in a bibliography (2) Michael Thomas for pointing put an incorrect date and to Bill Burns for correcting the incorrect date given in reference works for the illustrator Robert Dudley’s death; (3) Bryn Roberts of the British Museum for pointing us to the availability online of a fifteenth-century illuminated Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.
On the twenty-ninth — that extra leap-year day — the site had 87,390 documents and images.
January 2016
As the new year begins, your webmaster continued to mine The Illustrated London News, adapting both individual documents, such a biography with portrait of Darwin and an obituary and portrait of the sculptor, Alexander Munro, and also sets of interlinked essays and images, such as those on the 1887 British occupation of Burma, men's and women's turn-of-the-century clothing, and new galleries of advertising. Thus far we have small collections of those for patent medicines, soap and skin care, and jewelry. In addition, the ILN proved a source for a wide variety of new materials — or comments added to materials already on the site — on individual painters and sculptors as well as on India.
Jacqueline Banerjee started the month by formatting and illustrating two new reviews, the first by Bénédicte Coste, of Muriel Pécastaing-Boissière et Marie Terrier's Annie Besant (1847-1933): La lutte et la quête [The Struggle and the Quest], and the second, by Deborah Mutch of John Callow's new edition of Keir Hardie's From Serfdom to Socialism. Many thanks to Antoine Capet and the authors of these reviews for permitting them to be reprinted here. JB then extended an earlier account of Richard Jefferies and other "Country Writers," turning it into a photo-essay, and opened a new section on H. G. Wells, with a biography focused on the Victorian years when he wrote some of his ground-breaking "scientific romances" as well as the first of his more traditional novels. This section includes discussions of The Wheels of Chance and The War of the Worlds, and also considers his reputation. With the help of more photographs from Michael Critchlow, she then added The Four Kings Altar Frontal by Thomas Wardle and the Leek Embroidery Society to the new embroidery section, and several more after that, including the beautiful Hierarchy of Angels panel. This was only part of a whole set of pictures from the same contributor, documenting G. E. Street's work on St Edmund the Confessor, Leek, with its lovely windows by G. F. Bodley (who designed the two rose windows, one shown here), John Henry Dearle and others.
By the end of January, just over six months after first joining Twitter, we have over 1,240 followers, some of whom have sent in very useful queries and comments, as well as contributions. Michael Critchlow is one of these. Another is Jamal Jafri, who spotted a discrepancy in the source material about the Asiatic Society of Bengal in Calcutta. Special thanks to Mimi Matthews, who also got in touch, and contributed a lively piece on "Penny dreadfuls, juvenile crime, and late-Victorian moral panic," which your webmaster formatted. Many Twitter replies have contained encouraging remarks about the website!
Simon Cooke contributes the essay and plates for “Fawkes to Marcus Stone: Trollope and his ‘Other’ Illustrators During his Lifetime.”
Derek Scott sent in performances of two more Victorian parlor songs — A life on the ocean wave and A bandit’s life is the life for me.
Tim Willasey-Wilsey’s latest addition to his section on the British West Indies is “Georgian Jamaica and its public buildings.”
Naomi Lightman contributed “‘No man could owe more’ — John Ruskin’s debt to Anna Barbauld’s books for children.” We are grateful to David Morphet, another new contributor, for his interesting piece on Louis Jennings, a forgotten Victorian journalist, who became editor of the New York Times.
As of the twenty-fifth the site has 86,606 documents and images.
Last modified 5 January 2024