December 2019
ecember began with Landow still paging through the typed pages of notes stored in five-by-eight inch binders compiled in the 1970s. Among the riches hidden there appeared references to “Mr. Swinburne’s Debt to the Bible” and “Scottish Art and Artists,” two excellent, very detailed essays in the Scottish Review and another to Coventry Patmore’s “Mrs. Cameron’s Photographs” in Macmillan’s magazine. The 1896 Quarterly Review’s “Robert Browning as the Inspiration for Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites” exemplifies another such critical gem. Thanks again to the Hathi Trust, whose accurate OCR makes transcribing and formatting such valuable Victorian work so much easier that it would otherwise have been. On the eighth Landow put online ““Scorn for the humanitarian spirit’ — a Review of Christopher Herbert’s Evangelical Gothic: The English Novel and the War on Virtue from Wesley to Dracula” and “Christopher Herbert on Bram Stoker’s Dracula as ‘Evangelical Gothic’”
Jackie Banerjee completed a project she started last month, on Regent's Park. This involved some additions to our sections on John Nash, including some elegant terraces in the Outer Circle of the park. She also added his little summerhouse in, and design-work for, St James's Square. For Decimus Burton, who collaborated with Nash on the Regent's Park scheme, she added a villa in the park, The Holme, and the now long-gone Colosseum close by. In doing all this she came across her old account of Marble Arch, from 2006, and spruced it up. We try to keep improving! Other additions included a fine old locomotive which was on display at Cork's Kent Station. This came from revisiting material on Ireland to add text to Robert Freidus's wonderful extra pictures of St Fin Barre's Cathedral. So there is now a bit more about William Burges's quirky gargoyles and grotesques. A bigger task was to incorporate several more very welcome pictures into a much enlarged account of the cathedral's interior. Later she added a contemporary account and some extra photographs to George Gilbert Scott's Vaughan Library at Harrow and a mosaic of Pharmacy symbols to our public health sector. Her last piece this month was a review of the exhibition, "Forgotten Masters: Painting for the East India Company," at the Wallace Collection.
Philip Allingham has created a series of illustrated documents about Dickens’s Pickwick Papers that compare the work of multiple illustrators. One particularly interesting set examines the way various artists depicted Sam Weller’s father, the amiable and portly Tony, over a period of 80 years. Do enjoy those by Phiz in 1837 and in 1874, Sol Eytinge, Harold Copping, Felix O. C. Darley, Harry Furniss, and J. Clayton Clarke ("Kyd"), this last an artist whose images of Dickens’s characters on cards that came with packs of cigarettes made them very popular.
Andrzej Diniejko, our Assistant Editor for Poland, has written The Critique of Rabbinic Authority in Isaac D’Israeli’s The Genius of Judaism. Landow then added a response to D’Israeli.
Many thanks to Amitav Banerjee for his detailed review of William Dalrymple's The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company, a disturbing exposé which serves as a warning for the modern world as well.
Lionel Gossman, M. Taylor Pyne Professor Emeritus of Romance Languages at Princeton University, contributed a transcription of Grace Aguilar’s “History of the Jews in England” (1847) and a brief introduction to this author.
Thanks to Dr Kay J. Walter, Professor of English, University of Arkansas at Monticello, for sharing her “How I came to Ruskin” and for Kristin Mahoney for sharing the announcement of “Fin du Globe: Decadence, Catastrophe, Late Style — a Conference at Cornell University, 10-13 September 2020.” Thanks also to Maynard Brandt for sending information to correct a broken link.
Graham Robertson, a retired English Rolls-Royce enthusiast living in Brazil, came upon information about early life of Sir Henry Royce (1863-1933) and discovered some interesting information about a pub originally called the Rising Sun, and requests anyone with additional information to contact the webmaster.
November 2019
t's time for a tribute to George Monteiro, a wonderful scholar who died this month. George, Professor of English and Portuguese Studies at Brown University, shared his brilliant essays on Robert Browning with readers of the Victorian Web many years ago. Although first known as an expert and editor of Henry James, W. D. Howells, and John Hay (America's first modern Secretary of State and an author fine short stories), this Americanist drew upon his Portuguese heritage after a Fulbright to Brazil. A founder of Brown's Department of Portuguese Studies, he translated many books as well as wrote critical works on major poets like Pessoa. More striking than his extraordinarily wide range and continuing productivity in old age was his unflagging ability to notice apparently minor details in a text that provide a way into their techniques and meaning. In other words, he combined the best of the new criticism (or explication du texte) with reader response theory and textual editing. In his “The Apostasy and Death of St. Praxed's Bishop” George pointed out what should have been obvious to a century of Browning’s readers — that all the materials that the speaker of this deathbed monologue mentions refer to biblical symbols of heaven. Reading George's essay, one realized that the kind of details we readers usually pass by actually form a complex semiotic structure that makes the poem much richer, understandable, and important. And he did this all without jargon. I mention this essay because it proved important to my own examinations of biblical symbolism, but I have to acknowledge yet another debt to him: George was also responsible for the textual editing I and my students have done, and that in turn — it's another story — led eventually to my books on hypermedia, critical theory, and, of course, the Victorian Web. George’s witty, often acerbic lunchtime conversations at Brown’s then-pretty dreadful cafeteria — the often saw through the Emperor's new clothes of the university’s administration and departments that had spun off from English — proved a crash course in how to do scholarly criticism.
November began with your webmaster creating a section for Heywood Sumner in stained glass and transcribing his illustrated “Sgraffito as a Method of Wall Decoration” from the 1902 Art Journal. He also created a section on the illustrations of Althea Gyles, which included Willam Butler Yeats's essay about her in The Dome. Paging through Herbert Spencer’s writings on education and society, Landow found several worthy of adding to the site and then seeking to find places to which they should connect, one example being ““Parents are not good enough”: Children, Human Nature, and the Relation of Education to a Flawed Humanity and Its Flawed Society.” Others include “The Tyranny of Petty Social Restraints, “The Necessary Obnoxiousness of Reform and Reformers” “The Folly of Victorian Formal Dinners,” and “All Institutions Eventually Become Oppressive.”
Going through notebooks and folders assembled three decades ago, Landow found images and information added to our section on painting, including Richard Ansdell’s Taking a Rest, another half dozen by John Brett, Charles West Cope’s Shylock and Jessica, ten book illustrations by Arthur Hughes, and four works by Solomon J. Solomon. These notebooks also prompted the creation of a homepage for the many British paintings of contemplative women in their various forms — daydreaming, reading, and falling into reveries. Scanning in Art-Journal reviews of Frith’s Derby Day and The Railway Station from the old notebooks, he added them to our presentations of those paintings. Mining these notebooks led in turn to Landow’s transcribing W. P. Frith’s essay settling old scores as the painter fought a battle four decades old — “Crazes in Art: ‘Pre-Raphaelitism’ and ‘Impressionism.’”
At the beginning of the month, Jackie Banerjee completed a review of the National Portrait Gallery's exhibition, "Pre-Raphaelite Sisters." In the process, she opened new sections on Joanna Boyce Wells and Marie Spartali Stillman, with (so far) just a few examples of their work, such as Wells's sensitive portrait of Jamaican-born Fanny Eaton. She also added other works from the show, including two lovely medallions by Maria Zambaco (one is of Stillman), and an embroidered evening bag by Jane Morris. Other paintings added include Millais's Effie with Foxgloves in Her hair. It was truly an inspiring show. Continuing to work with Colin Price as well, JB put online the magnificent Hardman east window at Motherwell Cathedral, N. Lanarkshire, with a brief piece about the Cathedral itself. After this came a new section on the artist, copyist and co-founder of the Art Fund, Christiana Herringham, with a biographical introduction, and an account of how she copied the Ajanta Cave frescoes in India.
Many thanks to Jill R. Armitage for her discussion of one of Edward Armitage's major (but controversial) untraced paintings, Hymn of the Last Supper and Lucy Paquette, for her account of the Artists Rifles, which so many painters, sculptors, illustrators, photographers and designers joined, and which sustained many tragic losses in the twentieth century. Nick von Behr also sent in an excerpt from his new book, Building Passions: Brunel, Barry and "Modern" Victorian Architecture. Later, Gary Britland sent in a photograph of the beautiful chancel of St James' Church, Hyndburn, Lancs.. Colin Price's latest have been the Loughborough Carillon Tower, and another unusual war memorial by William Goscombe John in Hereford Cathedral.
Philip V. Allingham continues his work on Dickens, Phiz, Thomas Nast, and illustration.
Robert Freidus, one of our regular contributing photographers who sent in a series of images of the stained glass of Harry Clarke, also contributed many others of gargoyles and grotesques on St. Fin Barre’s Cathedral in Cork, Ireland, sculpture on the west front of the cathedral as well as its stained glass (for which Jackie Banerjee wrote a fine essay), floor mosaics, and paintings of the Stations of the Cross. Freidus also contributed photographs of the Cork’s Butter 1845 Exchange and its Shannon Theatre.
Thanks to David O’Shaughnessy from Trinity College Dublin, who sent in an announcement of a useful website, The Censorship of British Theatre, 1737-1843. And thanks to Anne Willis BSc MA, Independent Research Historian, for contributing a bibliography of materials about the Victorian High Church. Thanks also to Brian K. Schønberg, Pastor of the Ledøje-Smørum Church in Copenhagen, who sent along a photograph of the English-style Catholic Apostolic Church [Katolsk Apostolisk Kirke].
Landow color-corrected and formatted photographs of the following works contributed by a collector who wishes to remain anonymous: Gilbert Bayes’s The Scales of Time, the bronze, reduced0size version of Sir Thomas Brock’s Eve, William Goscombe John’s untitled brass bas relief of a crouching nude, and two terracotta works by George Tinworth: Peter Paying the Tribute Money, and And the Lord Looked upon Peter. The same collector also sent photographs of a silver table clock designed by Katie Harris and the following works by medallists: Frank Bowcher’s Edward Prince of Wale Home Coming medal and Queen Victoria Diamond Commerce medal , Sydney William Carline’s George Reginald Carline 1911, Alfred Drury’s William Shakespeare, Emile Fuchs’s Field Marshal Sir George Stuart White, Robert James Richardson’s Five medals on wooden frame (1907), Albert Toft’s M.S.M.E. Exhibition medal 1924 .
Thanks to Jim Spates for pointing out an error in one of our Victorian texts, and thanks too for the fine detective work of Lenna Winther-Saxe, retired part-time faculty member in the Photography Department of Fresno City College, California, who identified Ludgate House (later known as The Cooks Tours Building) in our architectural sculpture section.
October 2019
ctober began with Ruth Richardson, author of important books on Dickens, the history of science, and Victorian poverty, sharing an interesting brief essay about the Authorship Gray’s Anatomy. Your webmaster then wrote “Three Works of Unorthodox Scholarship,” which examines self-published books created outside the academy on Edward Bulwer-Lytton, William Hogarth, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writings about vampires. Just before heading to Budapest and points east, Landow added “Mr. Punch on the polluted Victorian environment” and several Punch cartoons about Victorian railways, including ones about their dangers, rapid expansion, and enforcing class structure and class separation.
During Landow’s two weeks travelling down the Danube from Budapest to Bucharest via Belgrade, he took many photographs of Eastern European architecture, leading to entirely new material, such as the Budapest’s Dohány Synagogue, its Central Market, and the Name of Mary Church in Novi Sad, Serbia, as well as additions to documents created more than a decade ago; these include Budapest’s Parliament House and St. Matthias Church (which was under reconstruction during his earlier visit). Another result of voyaging eastward on the Danube was “Romanesque Revival Elements in Eastern European Architecture.”
During your webmaster's absence, Philip V. Allingham wrote a long review of Catherine Golden's Serials to Graphic Novels: The Evolution of the Victorian Illustrated Book, covering some different ground from Simon Cooke in his earlier review of the same book. Allingham also updated and extended our bibliography of commentaries on the Victorian illustrated book, and sent in an interesting piece of contemporary journalism about one of the young Dickens's haunts, the Red Lion pub in Westminster.
This month Jackie Banerjee has continued working with Colin Price's excellent photographs, including Stephen Adam's west window at St Luke's Greek Orthodox Cathedral (on which she found some contemporary material), and the ceramic version of Burne-Jones's The Days of Creation. She then extended the discussion of the original painted version. Thanks to information from Jill R. Armitage, a relative of the artist Edward Armitage, RA, she also corrected and made some changes to our section on Armitage, and to a discussion of Marylebone Church, for which Armitage had produced a series of murals. Naturally, she then went on to review Jill Armitage's very helpful book on her relative. That was followed by another review, this time of Roger Bowdler's latest book, in the British Heritage series: War Memorials. Among other additions here and there, she added Millais's striking Esther and (again with a photograph sent in by Colin Price) the Indian Mutiny Memorial Window in Newcastle's Cathedral Church of St Nicholas.
Deborah Hickey contributed “Millais’s Vale of Rest and the Victorian Crisis of Faith,” and B. N. Barr sent in the first of a scheduled series of essays on the late-Victorian artist, Maude Goodman. Several of Béatrice Laurent’s students at the Université Bordeaux-Montaigne have contributed essays: Juliette Pochelu sent in “Lilith, from Talmudic Demoness to Victorian Dissident” and Jeanne Barangé, Sarah Baudouin, Pauline Montigné teamed up to write “Gloves and the Victorians: They Go Hand in Hand.” Pochelu’s essay led to the creation of a new section for the symbolist artist Althea Gyles and the transcription from The Dome of an article about her by William Butler Yeats.
September 2019
eptember began with Stephen Basdeo sharing “King Coal — Industrial and Domestic Air Pollution and the Reaction against it” from his blog and Philip V. Allingham continuing his comparative essays on Anglo-American illustration of Dickens and other Victorian authors. He has now completed the first ten essays on Thomas Nast’s illustrations of Dickens Pickwick Papers and a dozen of Phiz’s illustrations for Charles Lever’s Davenport Dunn. Allingham first wrote on Lever nineteen years ago when he contributed a discussion of the novelist’s Barrington. He has now added brief essays on swindlers and the new divorce law in Davenport Dunn.
Responding to a reader's inquiry, and working with Jackie Banerjee during your webmaster's absence, Philip Allingham also added a very welcome new section on Charles Dickens's family, discussing the lives of his wife, Catherine, and their ten children. Allingham has also placed online images and accompanying commentaries for more than 100 Dickens illustrations by Thomas Nast.
Near the end of the month your webmaster crossed the Atlantic, catching the Victoria and Albert show on food and food waste before heading to a conference in Marlborough, Wiltshire, where he delivered the closing keynote on the double vision of Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites and took some photographs of this secondary school and its chapel designed by Thomas Garner & George Frederick Bodley from which five of the current seven Anglican bishops have graduated.
This month, still looking back to her visit to Wales, Jackie Banerjee opened a new section on the work of the painter Sir George Clausen, with his In the Fields in June which she saw in the National Museum of Wales, Cardiff — though her favourite so far is The Gleaners Returning. Thank you to Sarah Bilston for her input in one of these, via Twitter. Our other editors came back from trips with photographs too. Working with some taken by Simon Cooke, she introduced and wrote about the work of busy Carlisle architect C. J. Ferguson — just two churches so far: the railway church at Tebay and another Cumbrian church, St Bridget at Bridekirk. Colin Price's photographic souvenir was a set of great pictures of Glasgow's Victorian bridges, in a fine mix of styles, from the Albert Bridge (yet another tribute to the Prince Consort) to the City Union Railway Bridge, with several wonders in between.
Later on, JB added a commentary to Sir Richard Westmacott's The Progress of Civilisation pedimental sculpture over the British Museum, and, with some extra photographs kindly contributed by Philip Pankhurst, extended the entry on J. P. Seddon's lovely St Catherine's Church, Hoarwithy. She also opened a section on Robert J. Newbery, a prolific stained glass craftsman working mainly in Wales, hoping to have more photographs to put in it soon (only one so far!).
This month, too, Simon Cooke sent along more photographs of Ruskin's home in the Lake District, Brantwood, including one of his study there, as it is today. In addition he created a section on the illustrator and book designer Fred Mason.
At Simon’s invitation, Nancy Henry, Nancy Moore Goslee Professor of English, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, send in “How I came to George Eliot”
Many thanks to Amitav Banerjee for his review of Stuart Flinders's Cult of a Dark Hero: Nicholson of Delhi.
Janelle Pötzsch, of the Institute of Human Sciences at Paderborn University in Germany created material for a new section on Harriet Taylor Mill, including a discussion of her relationship with John Stuart Mill, Taylor Mill’s “The Enfranchisement of Women,” her views of Gender Equality and Social Progress, and “Domestic Violence and British Law.”
Laurence Roussillon-Constanty, Professeur des Universités HDR, University of Pau et de Pays L’ardour, France, contributed her “How I came to Ruskin,” as did Béatrice Laurent, Lecturer at the University of Bordeaux.
August 2019
ugust began with your webmaster continuing work with Simon Cooke on a new section on advertisements and book design, after which the added material on Jeremy Bentham.
Thanks to photographs contributed by Laurence Cooke, and information from Simon Cooke, Jackie Banerjee started the month by writing about London Road Cemetery, Coventry, laid out by Joseph Paxton. She made a new index for Paxton in the architecture section, and added photographs of various monuments, including an elaborate one for Paxton himself, and a simpler but touching headstone for the metalworker Francis Skidmore. She then greatly enjoyed reviewing the new Alfred Russel Wallace Companion, edited by Charles H. Smith, James T. Costa and David Collard. She also added a local church, St Mary Magdalene, Littleton, Surrey, mainly because she noticed that some of its windows (e.g. a two-light one of the Nativity and Mary Magdalene, were designed by a "Mrs Theodore Bouwens." She has found out a little about her, and hopes to find out more. Even closer to home, and with the help of contributing photographer John Salmon, she improved on an earlier account of St George's, Esher, with its associations with the young Princess Victoria.
Later on, she reviewed the latest brilliant single-artist exhibition at the Compton Gallery in Surrey, "John Frederick Lewis: Facing Fame," adding several new pictures to our section on Lewis, and (back to Wales!) considerably extended our account of W. D. Caroe's main building of Cardiff University, adding a number of other Cardiff buildings and artworks, such as Sir Thomas Brock's William Menelaus (Menelaus was both Managing Partner of the Dowlais Steelworks, and an art collector). Perhaps her favourite addition so far from the National Museum and Art Gallery in Cardiff has been Edward Lear's Mount Kanchenjunga from Darjeeling.
Many thanks also to Professor Richard Scully of the University of New England, in New South Wales, for allowing us to include several excerpts of his article, "A Comic Empire: The Global Expansion of Punch as a Model Publication, 1841-1936."
Thanks to Andrew Hill, Associate Editor of The Financial Times for contributing his “How I came to Ruskin.” Remembering that George Eliot, like John Ruskin, has a bicentenary in 2019, Simon therefore suggested that we invite readers to tell their stories of “How I came to George Eliot” to match the 40 Ruskinian encounters that have arrived thus far. In addition to Simon’s, we have ones by Rosemary Ashton, Emeritus Quain Professor of English Language and Literature and Honorary Fellow of UCL, University College, London, and Linda Mayne, Chairman of the George Eliot 2019 Bicentenary Committee, The George Eliot Fellowship.
Thanks to Thomas Prasch, Professor and Chairman, Department of History, Washburn University, for sharing with readers of the Victorian Web his “Alfred Russel Wallace on the Evolutionary Origins of Morality.”
July 2019
imon Cooke and your webmaster created a new section on Victorian paratextuality that examines ways in which parts of printed books not considered part of the main text, such as their covers, frontispieces, title-pages, bookplates, book-prize plates, and illustrations, affect that text’s meanings. This new work provides an interesting way into work that Philip Allingham has done over the past nineteen years and Simon has done since became editor for book illustration and design.
Landow also added selections from Suzanne K. Langer’s Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art (1941), including “The Origins of Philosophy,” “Symbol and Signs,” and “Physics, Sense Perception and ‘the Real World.’” In addition he added “Utilitarianism’s Fundamental Problems” and “Aristotle on Character and Characterization in Drama.”He also reviewed York Art Gallery’s Ruskin, Turner & the Storm Cloud.
Philip V. Allingham continues his detailed illustration projects with Arthur Burdett Frost’s 40 illustrations of American Notes and Sketches by Boz. His new project involves writing an introduction and critic essays about Charles Lever’s Davenport Dunn: A Man of Our Day and Phiz’s illustrations for it.
Early in the month, Jackie Banerjee finished writing about Mortimer Menpes's record of his visit to Japan, categorising his hundred paintings there (for example, those of children, workers, sunsets, etc.), and picking out topics that were relevant to British art and design, especially craftsmanship and the aesthetic movement. In formatting Lucy Paquette's welcome essay, "On Holiday with James Tissot and Kathleen Newton," she added a dozen new paintings and drawings to the section on Tissot, including Room Overlooking the Harbour and his fine etching, The Trafalgar Tavern, Greenwich.
On returning from Wales, where she gave a talk on Sir Matthew Digby Wyatt in Monmouthshire in aid of a restoration fund, she added some new material on the Wyatts, for example, about Cefn Tilla (the venue for the talk), and Usk's beautifully restored Session House. More to follow! But most of the last week was spent on the photographer Oscar Rejlander, who now has a new section with about a dozen examples of his work, including her favourite, Happy Days.
Thanks, as so often, to Professor Antoine Capet, reviews editor of the online journal Cercles, and to Professor Yann Theloniat, for sharing with us the latter's review of Anna Barton's Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Liberal Thought: Forms of Freedom. The review is in French, but JB added a headnote in English, as well as the usual illustrations, captions and links (thanks to Professor Capet for helping with the captions!). The same procedure was followed, with the same kind of help, with Professor Capet's detailed review of the Rejlander exhibition catalogue. Thanks also to Paul Goldman, for his equally thorough and authoritative review of Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Lisa Surridge's recent study, The Plot Thickens – Illustrated Victorian Serial Fiction from Dickens to Du Maurier. Finally, thanks to Colin Price for contributing some extra and very useful photographs to an entry on Hadrian's Wall. He too made a useful correction to a caption.
Diane Josefowicz wrote an in-depth review of Michael Tondre’s The Physics of Possibility: Victorian Fiction, Science, and Gender.
Pascal Debout, Faculté de Droit, Université de Strasbourg, added his “How I came to Ruskin,” as did Arjun Jain, Proprietor of the John Ruskin Manufactory, New Delhi, India. Alan Cole contributed “How Ruskin came to Me.” Selby Whittingham, who recurited Cole, sent his Ruskininan encounter plus a long, detailed review of the York Art Gallery’s recent Ruskin, Turner and the Storm Cloud. Zachary Bullock contributed “From Labor to Value: Marx, Ruskin, and the Critique of Capitalism.”
Michael Williams contributed “The Rouncewell Brothers in Bleak House: Dickens on Men of the Old Social Order and the New.” Rebecca Nevset contributed images and commentaries for Phiz’s illustrations for James Malcolm Rymer’s A Mystery in Scarlet. Monika Mazurek, Associate Professor, Pedagogical University of Cracow, contributed “Anglican Baptism, Christening, and Churching.”
June 2019
une began with your webmaster working on new photographs of sculpture in private collections on both sides of the Atlantic, including Gilbert Bayes’s The Derelict and Baby with fish, our sixth version of Aimé-Jules Dalou’s The Truth Revealed and his Peasant Sharpening a Scythe, Alfred Drury’s terra cotta head of a girl, Sir George Frampton’s pair of maquettes for Queen Mary’s dollhouse, L. Goyeau’s Piping Hot, Christine Gregory’s The Spirit of Mischief, Charles Hartwell’s A Flower Seller, A. Joliveaux’s The Angler, Andrea Luccesi’s The Seasons Greetings, Mary Morton’s Baby Holding A Fish, A. Bertram Pegram’s Untitled [Young Girl with Scarf], Emile Louis Picault’s Work and Post Pugnam (After the Fight) Christine Stockdale’s untitled nude that was an Art Union prize in 1912, Albert Toft’s Spring, and L. Gwendolen Williams’s Sitting Child and works by Victorian mededallists, including C. F. Carter’s Inigo Jones, A. Halliday’s George V Coronation and Queen Mary Coronation medal, Thomas Stirling Lee’s untitled portrait of a woman, Lilian Hamilton’s Lord Gort, three by Alphonse Legros (Don Juan Heredia, Pierre Gregoire, and Orlando Martorelli), and A. B. Wyon’s C. R. Leslie.
One of Landow’s continuing projects has been the creation of revolving or rotatable image of sculpture that permit our readers to see all sides of each work. Using newly purchased BoxshotVR along wiht GIMP and Mac Photos, he has created a half dozen of such images for major works, perhaps his two favorites being Alfred Drury’s Elsie Doncaster and Frederick James Halnon’s Peace. Turning to work in a more static vein, he added F. W. W. Topham’s The Story of Ruth and Boaz, which depicts a father reading the biblical tale to his son as they sit together in a hayfield at harvest time. In addition, he added a brief illustrated Illustrated London News review of the theatrical adaptation of A Christmas Carol and Fun’s parody of stays at picturesque old inns plus a dozen or so editorial cartoons about Gladstone and Disraeli from Victorian periodicals, such as Fun and Punch (We now have more than 60 Disraeli cartoons from Fun alone.) He also added material on John Stuart Mill, including his attack on “Social Rights” (or what today is termed “Micro-Aggression”), the conservatives as the “stupid party,” and the political dangers of intuitionism and a priori justifications.
The beginning of the month saw Jackie Banerjee completing two current projects. One was with Liz Hallett, on the stained glass at Romsey Abbey. This included ten windows by James Powell & Sons, one of which has a surprising detail — knitting needles in a ball of wool! The glass at the Abbey by Alexander Gibbs inspired a new section on him, and Colin Price kindly sent in some additions for it, notably the magnificent West Window at All Saints' Margaret Street. The other project she completed was in the new philanthropy section: a piece on Philanthropy and the Workhouse, extended from a short article published earlier in the Dickens Magazine. Later in month she reviewed the very informative exhibition, "Young Wellington in India" at Apsley House, completely rewriting her brief earlier account of Apsley House itself, and discussing Antonio Canova's colossal statue of Napolean there. Many thanks to English Heritage for sending so many great photographs for these items. Still only halfway through at the end of the month was a new project, looking at Sir Mortimer Menpes' many watercolours of Japan, the result of his visit there in 1888. He was bowled over by the Japanese aesthetic sensibility and his paintings reflect and help to explain the "Cult of Japan" in late Victorian Britain.
Continuing his series of essays on the subject, Simon Cooke has written his twenty-fifth essay — “Selwyn Image as a Book Cover Designer.”
Paul Sawyer, Professor of English & Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow, Cornell University, shared his “How I came to Ruskin” with readers of the Victorian Web, as did James S. Dearden, Founder of the Ruskin Association, Former Master of the Guild of St. George, and Former Keeper of the Ruskin Galleries at the Bembridge School, Ann Gagné, Lecturer at the University of Toronto Scarborough, and William McKeown, Associate Professor of Art History, University of Memphis.
Thanks to Bob Freidus, one of our contributing photographers, for sending along photos of old London pubs, including Old Blue Last, The Rising Sun, Dog & Duck, and Masons Arms. Thanks also to Maynard Brandt for corrected an error of dating.
Thanks to Catherine Golden for contributing “The Caricature Tradition and Victorian Illustration, 1830-1900,” which prompted the creation of a new section about caricature, and to Jackie Banerjee for sending along am excerpt from Grant Wright’s 1904 book on the subject.
Thanks to Catherine Layton, who sent in material on Ouida, the Victorian sensation novelist, from which Landow created an introduction, biography, and a bibliography of secondary sources and to which he added portraits and other images from a biography and from the National Portrait Gallery and images some title-pages of her novels from the Hathi Digital Trust. He also added a link to Ernest Gillick’s memorial to the novelist.
Many thanks also to Antoine Capet, reviews editor of the online journal Cercles, and to reviewer Pat Thane, for sharing a review of a new book from Bloomsbury: Sarah Roddy, Julie-Marie Strange and Bertrand Taithe's The Charity Market and Humanitarianism in Britain, 1870-1912.
As of the twenty-fourth the site had 104,845 documents and images.
May 2019
ay began with Alfred Alan Taylor writing in to identify his uncle Robert James Bird as the model for Sir Thomas Brock’s figure of Progress on the Victoria Memorial before Buckingham Palace.
Your webmaster’s invitations to readers of Ruskin to share their stories of how they encountered the Victorian sage have now produced twenty-three brief autobiographical essays with almost that many promised. In May atories of encountering Ruskin arrived from Alan Davis, who edited the Ruskin Review and Bulletin for a decade, from Ray Haslam, artist and Ruskin scholar, Tim Holton, picture framer, and from Julian Spalding, former Master of the Guild of St George and former Director of Sheffield, Manchester, and Glasgow Museums, and Sharon Aronofsky Weltman, William E. “Bud” Davis Alumni Professorship, Louisiana State University. An old friend and particularly distinguished Ruskin scholar, Elizabeth K. Helsinger, the John Matthews Manly Distinguished Service Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago, next sent in hers. Thanks as ever to James Spates, who seems to know everyone who ever read Ruskin, for sending along names and e-mails. As part of the Ruskin 200 activities, Landow enlarged the section containing reviews of Ruskin scholarship, adding half a dozen, some written decades ago.
Landow created a section and homepage for transatlantic relations, after which, using the Project Gutenberg online copy of the 1852 edition of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, he organized our material on the great philosopher and economist, adding a sitemap (or homepage), “A Short Account of the Life and Writings of Dr. Adam Smith,” and Smith’s definition of value and his discussions of productivity and the division of labor, the crucial importance of roads and canals, the need to educate the working classes, and the evil done by the East India Company and other monopolies, and his one use of the term the “invisible hand.” Trawling through his collection of screenshots of the Illustrated London News, prompted the creation of a new section on the paintings of John Philip after he came upon a biography of the artist, and the same periodical produced C. Calhtrop’s Job Praying for His Friends and Sir Richard Westmacott’s sculptures on the pediment of the Royal Exchange, a biography and portrait of Sir Alfred David Sassoon, C.S.I., and Lord John Russell’s translation of Dante’s lines on Paolo and Francesca. Meanwhile The Magazine of Art provided an engraving of Edward Onslow Ford’s Henry Irving as Hamlet, Rosenthal’s Elaine, T. Jackson’s The New Front of Brasenose College to High Street, and Marion H. Speilman’s essay “The National Statue to General Gordon.” Fun contributed cartoons on a wide range of subjects — from sermons and the difficulties of clergymen to the effects of telegrams on daily life, poverty, and comments on Disraeli and Lord Derby
Philip Allingham has completed another major project, which involved making new, higher quality scans of Phiz’s 41 illustrations for Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit plus providing extensive commentaries on the plates as well as providing comparisons with the work of later illustrators.
Early in the month, Jackie Banerjee completed the section on Trivandrum (Thiruvananthapuram) in Kerala, where public buildings like the Secretariat, University College and the State Library played a central role in creating the modern state, and where religious diversity was expressed in a variety of houses of worship, like the The Masjid-i Jahān-Numā (the "World-reflecting Mosque") and the Syrian Christians' St George's Cathedral. Never has it been clearer that architecture tells the story of its times. Returning to more familiar territory, JB updated a 2006 webpage about Adrian Jones's massive sculpture of The Angel of Peace Descending on the Chariot of War, on the top of the Wellington Arch, and added a telling cartoon by Gerald du Maurier on the American Exhibition of 1887. At the end of the month she opened a new section on philanthropy, to bring together some of the names that we already have, and to include the important philanthropist, George Peabody, who did so much for housing the "respectable poor." She also added a number of new types of Victorian postboxes (including a very early one, and one with a suffragette connection — and an Edwardian one! She is currently working with parish historian Liz Hallett, who has contributed photographs and information about the beautiful stained glass windows of Romsey Abbey: her favourite so far has been Henry Holiday's The Pool at Bethesda."
Derek B. Scott, Professor of Critical Musicology at Leeds and our editor for music and popular entertainment, contributed his audio file of My Sweetheart When a Boy (1870) — his forty-fifth performance of Victorian popular music on the site!
Many thanks to Antoine Capet for sharing his review of the Thomas Annan exhibition at the Getty Museum in 2017, and its catalogue — an opportunity to explore further the contrasts in Annan's work, and consider whether there was anything at all optimistic about his photographs of Glasgow's slums. The review is in French, but has an English abstract, and the illustrations need no translation! Thanks to Professor Capet too for allowing us to reprint an illustrated version of Jackie Banerjee's review of Lee Jackson's Palaces of Pleasure: From Music Hall to the Seaside to Football, How the Victorians Invented Mass Entertainmentreview, originally written for Cercles
Simon Cooke's new review, of Hallie Rubenhold’s The Five: The Untold Stories of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper, ends on an indignant note, as he asks whether the Ripper would have escaped detection had his victims been higher up the social scale.
Thanks to Louise Hope for correcting some spelling errors.
On the twenty-seventh the site had 104,077 documents and images.
April 2019
our webmaster added “Caricature and Theatricality in Early Victorian Book Illustration,” an excerpt from Catherine Golden’s Serials to Graphic Novels, and “To what degree did Hardy stack the deck against Jude??” Walking through Chelsea and Kensington, he took photos that he added to our galleries of late-Victorian chimneys and pinnacles. A trip to York on a bright sunny Spring day produced photographs of George Walker Milburn’s statue of William Etty, a York native, before the York Gallery of Art, York Minster, the ruins of St Mary's Abbey, the Guildhall and the River Ouse, and flowers and blossoming trees on a April Day. Coming up: photographs from the National Railway Museum and a review of Ruskin, Turner, and the Storm Cloud.
Philip Allingham contributed “Dickens and the Parish Beadle” and in a continuing effort to improve the images in our section on book illustration, some of which are now twenty years old, Simon Cooke has been making scans from better original copies and Allingham has been adjusting the htmls. Together they have begun to improved George Cruikshank’s illustrations of Oliver Twist and Martin Chuzzlewit.
Another visit to the Picture Gallery at Royal Holloway, University of London, prompted Jackie Banerjee to update our descriptions of the sculptures in its two quadrangles by Count Gleichen, especially that of Thomas and Jane Holloway, which has been splendidly restored. She then added a few more paintings by Arthur Hughes: Springtime (Cornwall), The Heavenly Stair, Home from Work, and The Woodman's Child. Afterwards she opened a new section on ornithology in the science section, with works by the ornithologist John Gould, who became especially famous for his work on hummingbirds.
Not having visited India this spring, JB went there just in spirit, and opened a new section on Robert Fellowes Chisholm, another of those architects who changed the skyline of Indian cities (in this case Madras, or Chennai as it is called now) but are almost unrecognised here. Chisholm's Senate House there is a magnificent building. She also added the Victoria Jubilee Town Hall, Trivandrum. There are more from S. India to come. Nearer home she added to the story of the Red Lion pub in Parliament Street, which has an interesting connection with Dickens!
Many thanks to Professor Antoine Capet, review editor of the online journal Cercles, for sharing with us Professor Laurent Bury's review of Sarah Bilson's The Promise of the Suburbs: A Victorian
Andrzej Diniejko, our Contributing Editor from Poland, contributed “The Genesis, Early Publication History, and Reception of Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure.”
Simon Cooke created a six-part essay entitled “Social Commentary and Victorian Illustration: The Representation of Working Class Life, 1837–1880.” On a jaunt to Wales, he took photographs of the North Wales landscape, Dinorwic Quarry, The Victoria Dock in Caernarfon, and Dolbadarn and Beaumaris Castles. After formatting Simon’s photos, Landow recalled he had some from a visit to South Wales and added 4 photos of Fishguard.
Robert Brownell contributed his Ruskin encounter as did Stuart Eagles.
Professor Charles DePaolo, a frequent contributor sent in “Darwin's Demiurge: Natural Selection & Rhetorical Paradox.”
Françoise Baillet, Professor of British History and Culture, Université Caen Normandie, sent in an announcement of a one-day conference on the subject of Lines of Labour: Representing the Labouring body in Victorian graphic art. Bethan Carney similarly posted a call for papers on Victoria for “Dickens and Bodies” — a One-Day Conference (Saturday 19 October 2019) at the Senate House, University of London. Stuart Eagles contributed additional photographs to a pub with Dickens connections. On the twenty-ninth the site had 103,794 documents and images.
Philip Allingham continues his large project of improving the image scans and commentaries he created for Phiz’s illustrations for Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit. He also created an essay on Mark Tapley for the Dicken’s section on that novel.
As Colin Price, one of our Contributing Photographers, continues to send in superb images of stained-glass windows, whose beauty is so difficult to capture, Dr. Banerjee sizes and formats them. A fine example of this work would be the Faith, Hope, and Charity windows by William Wailes for Lichfield Cathedral. She also greatly expanded our materials on the painter William Gale, adding James Dafforne’s biography and several paintings, including
Sick, and in Prison,
Blind Bartimeus, and
The Confidante. In addition, she enjoyed revisiting Royal Holloway's Picture Gallery with its fabulous collection of well-known Victorian paintings. This led her to update her 2006 account of Royal Holloway's Founder's Building (where the gallery is housed) and to bring in many of the paintings there, including Millais's The Princes in the Tower, Edwin Long's The Babylonian Marriage Market, John Brett's Carthillon Cliffs and Briton Riviere's An Anxious Moment. Thanks to Dr Helen Wilson, who sent in some great photos of it, she could also write a short piece about E. S. Prior's Holy Trinity (New) Church, Bothenhampton, a church that Pevsner himself thought should be more widely known.
Towards the end of the month, she opened new sections on the Scottish artist Peter Graham and the painter/illustrator Frederick Richard Pickersgill with introductions and several of their paintings, and added to the section on Abraham Solomon with a biography written in the nineteenth century, and paintings including his fine Departure of the Diligence at Biarritz.
Andrzej Diniejko contributed “The Genesis, Early Publication History, and Reception of Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure,’
James A. W. Heffernan, Professor of English Emeritus, Dartmouth College, both reported on his first encounter with Ruskin and shared with our readers his essay on Peter Milton’s Tsunami and its representations of Ruskin, Turner, and Constable. Pritika Pradhan, who is a PhD candidate at Rutgers shared first encounter with Ruskin as did Mark Frost, Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Portsmouth, and Sara Atwood, PhD, North American Development Director, Guild of St George, and Simon Cooke, our Assistant Editor for Book Illustration and Design, Tom Rawson, and Michael Wheeler, founding Director of the Ruskin Centre and Ruskin Collection Project at Lancaster University.
Mike Williams, a frequent contributor, sent in “Kingsley’s ‘True’ Fairy Tale<,” a study of that author’s anti-fairytale, Madam How and Lady Why, that builds upon Siobahm Lam’s 2007 essays. D. E. Latané contributed “Edward Bulwer Lytton’s committal of his wife Rosina to a private mental asylum in 1858”
On the eighteenth the site had 103,505 documents and images.
To occupy some of the hours on the trains and planes, Landow began to experiment more with linking complete texts of English authors in both English and French, something made possible by Project Gutenberg. He’s put up more than 50 of Oscar Wilde’s poems in French translation and will begin to interlink them with their English originals as time permits. Drawing upon the riches of Project Gutenberg, Landow formatted
18 of Wilde’s essays in the original English and four in French, perhaps the most interesting of which is Wilde’s long essay on the greatness of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, which also contains a history of English women poets. This being the year of Ruskin and his bi-centenary, your webmaster has been adding to the Ruskin section and improving the linking of its documents within the section itself and adding materials. Since Unto This Last remains one of his most important works, Landow has created a web version of it based on the University of Lancaster’s wonderful online edition of the Cook and Wedderburn Library Edition text. (Back in 1994, he was British Academy Visiting Professor at Bowland College, University of Lancaster, where he spent six weeks creating a proof-of-concept hypertext version of part of Modern Painters.) As one of the first projects, Lancaster’s Ruskin Library created an online translation of the entire Library Edition — an essential resource — but since they quite properly tried to reproduce the original pages, we still need a hypertext version that both makes many of the cross references far easier to use and also adds additional material. The first draft of the hypertext Unto This Last is now online, but we expect it will continue to grow and change. We now also have a homepage (or sitemap) for Unto This Last that contains links to topics, authors mentioned, and biblical quotations in it as well as discussions of it by
twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholars.
The Internet Archive online version of the Illustrated London News provided a portrait of the artist William Edward Frost, a picture of John Gibson’s Theseus Killing the Robber, an image and description of Alexander Munro’s Gillie and Hound, and a drawing of artists waiting to see if their work had been accepted for the annual Royal Academy exhibition. The Library of Congress (via the Internet Archive) provided 28 drawings, etchings, and collotypes of Edinburgh by Hanslip Fletcher, which will be interlinked with our materials on that city.
Philip Allingham contributed Honoré Daumier’s The Sickroom Nurse (La Garde-Malade), Henry Walker’s portrait of Samuel Palmer. and “Samuel Palmer and Dickens's Pictures from Italy.”
This month found Jackie Banerjee back in Gibraltar (at least, in spirit), writing about this Overseas Territory's Anglican Cathedral, Trinity Lighthouse at Europa Point, Garrison Library, Trafalgar Cemetery, and so on, and adding Thackeray's account of it after his visit there. She hopes that others will contribute to this new section on the Rock. Her next port of call was Two Temple Place, to review its exhibition, another celebration of Ruskin's Bicentenary: "John Ruskin: The Power of Seeing." This prompted her to put a number of new paintings online, including Ruskin's own Kapellbrücke, Lucerne, John Brett's Mount Etna from Taormina, William Parrott's J.M.W. Turner on Varnishing Day and one of Edward Lear's brilliant bird-studies, of a macaw. It was interesting to see another version of Benjamin Creswick's Blacksmith's Forge, this time in terracotta. By the end of the month, JB had also reviewed Adrian Barlow's two recent books on the stained glass studio of Charles Eamer Kempe, and in the process added a number of new windows to the section on Kempe, from Lichfield and Southwark cathedrals. Only a few of the photographs used were her own: most came, with permission, from contributing photographer Colin Price's wonderful compendium of cathedral stained glass. Outstanding examples are the Tree of the Church window at Lichfield, and the ChaucerMarch 2019
arch began with plenty of snow on the ground here in Providence, Rhode Island, at the same time that Jackie Banerjee complains of heat in London. Having completed a hypertextual version of Ruskin’s Unto This Last, Landow worked two weeks creating one for the companion work, Munera Pulveris. He also created a homepage for Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. During a visit to New York, he visited the Future of Storytelling (FOST) installation, the highlight of which was a virtual reality adaptation of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, which he reviewed for the Victorian Web.
February 2019
s the month began, your webmaster found himself shuttling back and forth between London and southern France. After delivering lectures on Ruskin and Tennyson to the English faculty at the Université de Bordeaux-Montaigne and another talk on biblical imagery to a graduate student seminar, headed north first to Paris and then to London to see the magnificent Burne-Jones exhibition at the Tate and a beautifully designed (if far less interesting) Dior show at the V&A. Landow then headed back down south to the Université de Pau et des Pays de l’Ardour where he gave the keynote at the French Victorian Society (or SFEVE) and a talk and a workshop on digital humanities to postgraduate students who hope to create a project that will appear on this site.
Simon Cooke's well-informed and informative review of Catherine Golden's Serials to Graphic Novels: The Evolution of the Victorian Illustrated Book is the first contribution to a new section of reviews about studies of illustration. Thanks also to Colin Price, for sending in a series of new and improved images of the majestic Burne-Jones windows at Birmingham Cathedral, and to Lucy Paquette for adding some interesting new research findings to her chronology of James Tissot.
We now have over 8000 followers on Twitter. They come from all over the world, some helpfully translating our tweets into their own languages for others to follow. "Academic twitter," as one follower termed it, is a very useful source of information about what's happening in Victorian studies. For instance, earlier this month we stay-at-homes could see tweets about our webmaster's presentations on Ruskin in France. You can see them too, by clicking on the twitter logo on the homepage, but you need to scroll down a bit now!
Andrzej Diniejko contributed a series of essays and a chronology for Mona Caird, one of the New Woman novelists and campaigners against vivisection.
James L. Spates, Professor of Sociology Emeritus, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, has contributed an important monograph in time for the celebration of the Ruskin bi-centenary: Ruskin’s Sexuality: Correcting Decades of Misperceptipn and Mislabeling.
Dr. Cynthia Gamble, Honorary Research Fellow, University of Exeter, contributed “How I came to Ruskin” to our collection of narratives of first encounters with Ruskin’s works, and the writer and broadcaster Rob Cowan sent in “How I first encountered Ruskin.”
Thanks to Joachim Dagg, who contributed “The need to distinguish between the two Patrick Matthews,” which differentiates the arborist who coined a phrase close to Darwin’s “natural selection” and his namesake, a physician in the service of the East India Company. Thanks also to Dr Stephen Basdeo of the American International University in Leeds for sharing information about the cost of attending the great Public Schools, Eton and Harrow and Nigel Ogilvie for correcting two typos, one a particularly egregious blunder.
On the twenty-fifth the site had 103,278 documents and images.
January 2019
ontinuing to work on a series of networked documents and images about British India, chiefly before the traumatic 18567 Mutiny, your webmaster created a new section for Sir Henry Montgomery Lawrence, which includes his justification of British Rule in South Asia, despite his abhorrence of the East India Company's piratical conquests, and his argument that “No place or office should be absolutely barred to the native soldier.”
After Christmas, Jackie Banerjee finished some new work on Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale, especially enjoying Youth and the Lady, and Walter Shaw Sparrow's contemporary discussion of some of her watercolours. She then reviewed two recent books on dress reform: one by Don Chapman (Wearing the Trousers) and one by Kat Jungnickel (Bikes and Bloomers), and (another swift change of subject!) opened a new section on Gibraltar. She started with its history, and a lively account of Victorian Gibraltar by an American visitor, but then broke off to visit the Watts Gallery in Compton, Surrey, and review its most enjoyable and illuminating exhibition about Christina Rossetti.
Thanks to Alec Hamilton for writing in about Heywood Sumner's contribution to St Mary the Virgin, Great Warley, and his subsequent correspondence about the website and its pros and cons (for those unfamiliar with its navigation tools).
We're grateful again to the online journal Cercles and to Professor Laurent Bury for sharing his review of the book accompanying the current Burne-Jones exhibition at the Tate, Christina Rossetti: Poetry in Art.
Many thanks to a new contributor, Rita Wood, for her knowledgeable and well-illustrated 4-part essay in the architecture section on Victorian Architects and the Romanesque, and to Simon Cooke who strayed out of book design and illustration to review Michael Palin's Erebus: The Story of a Ship, about one of the ships at long last discovered on the seabed, after the lost Franklin Expedition of 1845.
We are very sad to report that one of our contributors, the artist and writer Michael Blaker, who wrote (for example) about "The Revival of the Artist-Etcher in the Victorian Period," passed away at the end of last November. We send our deepest condolences to his widow Catriona and all those who are having to come to terms with his loss.
Beverley Park Rilett, Research Assistant Professor and Lecturer in English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, contributed two essays related to the author of Middlemarch: “Victorian Sexual Politics and the Unsettling Case of George Eliot’s Response to Walt Whitman” and “George Henry Lewes, the Real Man of Science: Behind George Eliot’s Fictional Pedants.”
Thanks to Matthew Poland, Assistant Editor, Modern Language Quarterly, for pointing out a nonfunctioning link to a non-existent document, which lead to creating the missing bibliography. Thanks also to Calvin McCarter for reporting a broken link and to Louise Hope for suggesting corrections for two formatting errors!
Thanks to the Fine Art Society, London, which reports that it is leaving New Bond Street after 142 years, for sharing images from what may be its final catalogue: Gilbert Bayes’ The Challenger, Richard Garbe’s The Red Shawl, and Francis Derwent Wood’s Nude Torso plus a Pugin settle and a “Sunray” Fireplace Fender by Thomas Jekyll and Frank Brangwyn’s A Mediterranean Port.
As the twenty-eighth the site had 102,926 documents and images.
Last modified 5 January 2024