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This article analyses John Henry Newman’s autobiography, Apologia pro Vita Sua, which is treated as a conversion narrative, alongside his dream vision, The Dream of Gerontius. On this basis, it examines the evolution of Newman’s religious creed in the context of 19th-century British systems of belief and ecclesiastical affiliation.
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This article examines Victorian anxieties about old age through discussion of Anthony Trollope's novel, The Fixed Period. On the basis of analysis of this satirical dystopian novel, the author concludes that the social problems of old age and how to treat elderly citizens were of crucial importance in late Victorian society.
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This article examines Polish and Irish political co-operation and agendas in 1830s London. It analyses the relationship between the democratic Polish political refugees of the Great Emigration, many of whom supported the Chartist movement, and the London Irish who joined Daniel O’Connell’s Precursor movement, considering the extent of cross-cultural misunderstanding.
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The author discusses late 19th-century invasion literature in the context of Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Ring of Thoth” and “Lot no. 249.” This enables the article to examine issues connected with British imperialism and reverse colonisation, since the plots of both texts can be presented as a version of imperial narratives, with ultimate victory over the invading force brought about by means of new, scientific methods.
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The author applies Manuel Aguirre’s theory of two zones in horror literature separated by thresholds – “the human world” and the “Otherworld” – to the haunted house in one of Elizabeth Gaskell’s rare excursions into the supernatural, “The Old Nurse’s Story.” There is analysis of the concern voiced about the fate of female victims of men and of the undermining of the idea of home as a safe place by its presentation as anti-home.
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This communiqué relates the history of the Queen Margaret College Settlement in Glasgow from the end of the Victorian period. It places this initiative undertaken by early women graduates within the wider university settlement movement, showing how women adapted to the social work involved in a project designed to encourage the moral and material betterment of slum dwellers.
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This article analyses the message of Irish 19th-century landscape painting, in an attempt to link physical space with national and cultural identity. It examines the artistic legacy of British-Irish relations, discussing metaphors found in selected works of art, while placing the landscape artists within the frame of reference of the colonial narrative of Ireland as the Other.
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Within the wide framework of Gothic fiction, this article offers an analysis of narrative strategies and spatial organisation in Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. It attempts to resolve the basic split personality mystery of whether Hyde was a Doppelganger or “the animal within me.”
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This article assesses and compares J. R. R. Tolkien’s Tree and Leaf with John Ruskin’s The Nature of Gothic, suggesting that the wide dissemination of Ruskin’s ideas had an impact on Tolkien. The author demonstrates the ways in which Tolkien employs these natural arboreal motifs to communicate reflections on various forms of creativity.
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The author presents a discussion of visual reimaginings in painting and illustrations, comic books, feature films, TV shows and video games, of Joseph Le Fanu’s novella Carmilla, concentrating on the 1971 film, Daughters of Darkness, in which the lead was played by Delphine Seyrig. This is accompanied by analysis of the novella’s ground-breaking female (lesbian) vampire and various motifs of the genre.
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This is an interpretation of a 2012 “autobiography” of a purported Jack the Ripper, James Carnac. The article discusses the intertexts and multi-layered paratextual elements of this piece of Ripperature – including the use made of literary works and visual material – that aim to authenticate the account by placing it in historical time.
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This analysis of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol uses psychological theory to address the question of what happened to effect a change in Scrooge’s behavioural patterns. It deals with the perception of time and balancing time perspectives, in the context of Philip Zimbardo’s Temporal Theory and Time Perspective Therapy.
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Within the framework of the theme of mid-19th century English anti-Catholicism, this article investigates the rise and fall of the bonfire night tradition of burning Guy Fawkes. It concentrates on analysis of Harrison Ainsworth’s popular 1841 historical novel Guy Fawkes and Selina Bunbury’s 1844 historical novel Coombe Abbey, both of which focus on the Gunpowder Plot.
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The use in this article of disability theory to analyse Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein raises questions connected with the social structuring of disability in general. It analyses the production of horror in the novel through exposing the contrast between the dis-abled monster and able-bodied characters.
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This article discusses and compares two novels with a mission or social purpose that concentrate on themes connected with, in the case of Charles Reade’s matter-of-fact romance Hard Cash (1863), the treatment of insanity, and in that of Wilkie Collins’s Heart and Science (1883), vivisection. The author concludes that in furthering a didactic purpose, neither novel departs far from the sensation framework.
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The relationship between late Victorian scientists and speculative writers is reviewed in this article in the context of British popular and fictional approaches to scientific research, including the use of scientific inventions in invasion narratives and war fiction. It shows interactions between novelists like H. G. Wells and the work of British particle physicists, a summary of whose achievements is provided.
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This article analyses the sources for 19th-century musical stage portrayals of the characters and behaviour of three 16th-century British Queens, Anne Boleyn, Mary Stuart and Elizabeth I. The author concentrates on Gaetano Donizetti’s operas, including detailed interrogation of the lyrics of Anna Bolena, Maria Stuarda and Roberto Devereux.
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The article deals with Augustan literature, discussing adaptations of Roman plots in John Dennis’s neo-classical tragedies. This phenomenon is placed within the framework of general interest in the political and cultural life of Ancient Rome that can be found in 18th-century English literature and criticism.
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This article seeks to examine Charles Dickens’s approach to the issues of race and colonialism in the context of the views current in Victorian England. It analyses the racialised body and racial hybridity in The Mystery of Edwin Drood, against a background of mid-century theories on racial hierarchies and natural inequalities.
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This article presents a detailed analysis of approaches to poverty in Scriblerian texts. It discusses their complex attitudes, including the debate on the appropriateness of laughing at the poor in comedy or satire, and traces to the industrial revolution the definitive social and literary locating of the sources of poverty in the ineptitude, laziness and moral turpitude of the poor themselves.
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