Ge Tang, University College Dublin Anthony Trollope. ca. 1859-1870. Courtesy of Carte de Visite Collection, Boston Public Library. Retrieved from the Digital Public Library of America, https://ark.digitalcommonwealth.org/ark:/50959/pk02cp74z.  In this photograph stands Anthony Trollope fully clad in black: a black vest buttoned-up, black trousers, black shoes, and a long frock coat. The colour and tight cut of his attire reflect the prevailing men’s fashion of his era which celebrated a sense of discipline, moral integrity, and professionalism. His penetrating gaze complements t ..read more

By Dr. Emma Ferry Barely suppressing squeaks of excitement in the hushed atmosphere of the Manuscripts Reading Room in the British Library, I squinted my way through Margaret Oliphant’s letters to and from her editors at Macmillan about her book on dress. This was my fifth foray into the Macmillan Letterbooks to investigate the ‘Art at Home Series’, but easily the most entertaining. The ‘Art at Home’ Series motif designed by Harry Soane c. 1876 Here, among these huge volumes of correspondence were the details of Oliphant’s initial commission; non-committal discussions about the book’s subject ..read more

by Sean Mier Photo of the manuscript of Gissing’s short story “The Firebrand,” cut into slips for typesetting, with compositors’ markings, showing Gissing’s microscopic hand. George Gissing, “The Firebrand,” Autograph MS, Undated but [June 1895], Box 1, Gissing Papers, 1863-1958, Lilly Library Archives, Indiana University Libraries, Bloomington, IN, 1 May 2017. Photograph by Zach Downey. Courtesy Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. Compared to the shapely legibility of George Gissing’s earlier writings, the drafts of New Grub Street (1891), notably, and all his manuscript ..read more

by Mary Gryctko “At Rest.” George Cattermole, illustration from The Old Curiosity Shop (1841). Dead children like Charles Dickens’s Little Nell (picture above on her deathbed) were a staple of sentimental Victorian fiction, to the point that even contemporaries apparently found it a tired enough trope to mock (see Oscar Wilde’s famous, if maybe apocryphal, quip that one “would have to have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing”). Many Victorians enjoyed these texts unironically, however, which is attested to by the eagerness of parents to apply sentimental scripts ..read more

by Olivia Abram Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Color lithograph by National Printing & Engraving Company, 188?. Courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. In my time as an English Language Arts teacher, one of my favourite texts to teach was Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde–for reasons beyond the fist bumps and high fives celebrating its manageable length. Strange Case is approachable, engaging, and was a perfect culminating book-length study in my unit on mood and tone. Eurowestern readers of Strange Case will almost certainly have at least an idea of the storyl ..read more

by Rebecca Sheppard Robert Sayer, “The Comforts of Matrimony: A Smoky House & Scolding Wife” (1790) What’s with blaming Helen for her husband Arthur’s increasingly bad behaviour? Going back to the first reviews of Anne Brontë’s Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) Helen has been chided for her “self-willed rashness” (“Tenant” [Sharpe’s] 182) and her bad decision “to link herself … [with] a sensual brute” (“Tenant” [Rambler] 65). More recently, literary critics condemn Helen’s “superior attitude” (Jackson 204), “incessant lecturing” (Langland 143), and “special arrogance” (McMaster 355). Was it ..read more

Submission date for Proposals : September 15,2023 The Mansion of Happiness (1842), A nineteenth-century board game. Image courtesy of wikipedia. Victorian Review invites submissions for a special issue devoted to the topic of “Videogames and Victorian Studies.” This issue will consider how game texts interact with Victorian genres, aesthetics, and literary themes by commenting on or critiquing their original contexts. Articles will examine how the embodied, user-driven mode of storytelling employed by videogames can offer new engagements with the era’s many lingering legacies in the present. T ..read more

by Sandy Burnley Burnley, Sandy M. “Looking Back: Posthumanism and Sympathy in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” Victorian Review, vol. 48 no. 1, 2022, p. 107-123. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/vcr.2022.0002. I first engaged with other-than-human animal representations as a master’s student who had just transitioned from veterinary medicine to literature. What these domestic companions had to teach me was not to be found in a clinic but in their sociohistorical imbrication—an entanglement that began to pique my interest when I was a young child reading Anna Sewell’s Black Beau ..read more

by Jill Galvan Gibbons mate for life. Matthias Kabel, “Pair of Lar Gibbons at Salzburg Zoo,” May 2006. Wikipedia Creative Commons License. When I first read George Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891), I was startled to find how much it focuses on a miserable marriage. I had heard about everything else this novel depicts: hack writers, the literary marketplace, the ravages of capitalism, a cruel post-Darwinian world. But Edwin and Amy Reardon were a shock. Gissing devotes so much time to their home life and to showing how the scarcity economy destroys their relationship. New Grub Street was the ve ..read more

by Eleanor Dumbill The name Trollope is familiar to most readers of Victorian literature. It is most readily associated with Anthony Trollope, though many Victorianists are also familiar with at least the headlines of his mother’s (Frances Milton Trollope) life. There were, in fact, seven published authors in the family over the course of the nineteenth century. We wanted to see how similar the writing styles of these authorial Trollopes were, especially after our identification of particular similarities between works by Thomas Adolphus Trollope and his mother. We suspected that this may, in ..read more