Grace and the “Material Media” of Hardy’s Desperate Remedies

Thomas Hardy likes graceful women, but none are as deliberately graceful as Cytherea Graye in his first published novel, Desperate Remedies (1871). In a scene rife with small-town prying eyes and the unconscious self-caricaturizing of town locals displaying their cultivation through the organization of a Shakespeare reading, the beautiful Cytherea enters a room – her appearance forming “an interesting subject of study for several neighbouring eyes.” Hardy highlights the “gracefulness of her movement, which was fascinating and delightful to an extreme degree,” before further describing the faultlessness of her figure in the following terms:

What’s the time, Mister Wolf?

As part of my dissertation research on representations of automata in Victorian literature, I’ve been reading a bit about the figurative history of clocks. I’ve been particularly fascinated by the changing fortunes of the clock in metaphors relating to the nature and construction of knowledge. As Otto Mayr details in Authority, Liberty & Automatic Machinery in Early Modern Europe, the clock was an extremely flexible concept that was conscripted for symbolic use in many different epistemological projects.

What (and how) does “Victorian” mean?

I have been thinking about what the term “Victorian” means and how our notion of our field differs from how scholars in other fields of English literature conceive of their area of specialization. I recently presented a paper at a Modernist Studies conference. My research is primarily Victorian-focused but the work I have been doing lately on the relationship between Victorian sound technology, disability and cultural ideologies of language has bled past the century-boundary into the modern period. Leaving aside the issue of the arbitrariness of periodization for the time being, (though it is certainly a discussion we can have in the comments), I wanted to post about an interesting distinction I noticed between Victorian Studies and Modernist Studies.

Gather ‘Round: T. H. Huxley’s Fairy Tale

John Dickson Batten's illustration of Jack and the Giant. English Fairy Tales (1890)

At Oxford in 1893 Thomas Henry Huxley opened the Romanes lecture with a fairy tale: “Here is a delightful child’s story, known by the title of “Jack and the Bean-stalk,” with which my contemporaries who are present will be familiar. But so many of our grave and reverend Juniors have been brought up on severer intellectual diet, and, perhaps, have become acquainted with fairyland only through primers of comparative mythology, that it may be needful to give an outline of the tale” (47).

Tangled Up in Blue

Illustration from the 1875 Chatto & Windus Piccadilly Ed. of Poor Miss Finch

A striking coincidence: while writing a funding proposal for a project on epilepsy in the Victorian imagination, this interview popped up on The Huffington Post. It’s a segment from The Today Show with Paul Karason, the “blue man” who’s been treating a skin condition with colloidal silver for over a decade. (The show seems to have a penchant for curious bodies—just yesterday they featured an young girl who’s been sneezing ten times a minute for the past two weeks.)

Anyway, I was particularly struck by Karason’s story because I’ve reading Wilkie Collins’ Poor Miss Finch, a highly original meditation on the intersections of disability and visibility. 

An Embarrassment of Riches…

I’m putting together a syllabus for a general course on the Victorian novel, and am finding it difficult to decide what 5 or 6 novels to include. This syllabus is for a job application, so it is a course that I’d like to teach someday, rather than one that I will actually be teaching soon. I need to keep it general, but have decided to include a broad focus on representations of the family, especially alternative families (surrogate parents, siblings living with in-laws, adults living with parents, etc).

Muffin, anyone?

At the recent VSAWC/VISAWUS conference I heard a fascinating paper on the cultural signification of the muffin in Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby. The presenter, Susan Cook, offered a nuanced account of the muffin’s origins, its ingredients (I had no idea they were made using potatoes), and, of course, the dubious connotations of the muffin man’s residence on Drury Lane (very much an area of mixed social repute in the 1830s).  In Nicholas Nickleby the muffin is on an upward social trajectory, yet it still speaks to an economic disconnect between the muffin sellers and their own product, which they cannot afford.  After the paper I began thinking about another Victorian novel that is a favourite of mine for its food –  Cranford.

Horses, Trains, and Francis Blake

Shutter test (Agnes Blake), ca.1888. Image property of the Massachusetts Historical Society

My recent research on the history of the telephone has led me to learn more about Francis Blake (1850-1913), an American scientist who experimented with early sound technology and worked with Alexander Graham Bell.  Blake, who was also interested in photographic technology, made significant shutter-speed advances to improve high-speed photography. Like Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey, Blake used high speed-photography to capture a moment within a movement and to trace stasis amidst speed. The Massachusetts Historical Society’s website has a wonderful exhibition of Blake’s photography including the requisite high-speed photographs of horses and trains. Their publication also contains an article by Keith F. Davis on “The High Speed Photographs of Francis Blake” that is illustrated by an array of Blake’s photographs.

Has Steampunk finally arrived?

This is just a short note to a link for the current Steampunk exhibition at the Museum of the History of Science at Oxford. I’ve never really been sure what to make of Steampunk fiction, illustrations, and culture — the genre has always seemed marginal and lacking in scholarly rigor. Yet, I’m fascinated by Steampunk creations because they forge a link between the Victorian era and the present. Does the Steampunk exhibition at Oxford mark the genre’s triumphant arrival or its inevitable fad-like decline? Perhaps both at the same time, if we think in Hegelian terms? I’m really not sure. Thoughts?

http://www.mhs.ox.ac.uk/steampunk/

Lost in Google Books

I haven’t posted in a while because I’ve been lost in Google Books. Okay, not literally. We don’t have the technology yet to physically enter into a virtual geography of Google Books, but I can say that I’ve been overwhelmed lately by the sheer volume of materials available to my eyes and fingers.

Victorian Bodies Exposed: Visiting the Wellcome Collection

I recently moved to London, England. For a Victorian scholar, living in England’s capital certainly has its perks, including the fact that I get to visit wonderful exhibitions, like the Wellcome Collection’s “Exquisite Bodies.” The Wellcome collection brings together the artefacts of entrepreneur and traveller Henry Wellcome, showcasing his interests in medicine, health, and sexuality.

Knitting Victorian Studies

The winter I settled in to write my dissertation a couple of years ago was also the winter I took up knitting in a big way. Maybe it was the Ithaca winter, maybe knitting was an outlet for dissertation stress, or maybe it was just the pleasure of doing something tactile and tangible after sitting at a computer all day. At any rate, I kept chugging away at both the writing and my first sweater all winter long. By the time spring came, I had a scarlet sweater with a few holes in it and one arm longer than the other, and a couple of dissertation chapters that I hope cohered a little better.

The Work of Handwriting in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

While doing research at the British Library last fall, I came across a thoroughly fascinating pamphlet advertising Edison’s Electric Pen, known more properly as “The Edison Electric Pen and Duplicating Press, for the Rapid, Accurate, and Economical Production of all kinds of Writings, Drawings &c.”

The Child is the Father of the Man

Merciful heavens- I haven’t posted in ages. Like Bob Cratchit, “I am behind my time,” like Ebenezer Scrooge, I’ve reformed and promise to be as good a friend as this good old blog has ever known.

Of late I’ve been thinking about how to treat willful lies in an autobiography. As the Toronto contingent of the Floating Academy has likely heard far too often, I’m working with the promotional materials of Eugen Sandow, the Prussian body builder.

Gothic Optics

"Mr. Mansfield." Double-exposure photograph of stage actor Richard Mansfield as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

A couple of weeks ago, I returned from Lancaster, where the International Gothic Association held its Ninth Biannual Conference: Monstrous Media / Spectral Subjects. I couldn’t have found a major conference so perfectly attuned to my interests, and the papers did not disappoint. The shortest route to explaining to friends just what “Gothic Media” might be tends to cut through the flesh-eating-television and killer-cellphone movies we’ve been bombarded with over the past few years, but nineteenth-century technologies were well represented at the conference as well.

self-indulgence

So far, I’ve tried to make all my posts have a point, even if it’s only (and it usually is) an itty-bitty one.  But, I’ve been thinking with all of our posts on the nature of technology, isn’t part of the point of blogging that it doesn’t have to have a point?  So here goes a very un-Victorian, completely self-indulgent post…

On my recent trip to the UK for BAVS-NAVSA, I dragged friends and family into one of my favourite self-indulgent activities:  looking at Victorian things.

The Technological Tools of our Trade

Many of us at the Floating Academy have focused our initial posts on what it means to blog about academic research interests: about a blog’s potential strengths and weaknesses, its unique form and scope of content, its establishment of new communities and feedback loops.

Serialized Reading, in Two Parts. Part II.

One of the fun things about posting with a title like this one is that I knew I was coming back to it sooner or later.  Well, The Law and the Lady is finished, and we’ve had another meeting to discuss its attractions (many) and repulsions (some, yes).  Of the serialized reading experience I have little else to say. At the end of my forced hiatus I finished the novel in one gulp; it certainly wasn’t lacking in page-turning sensation. 

Drawing Serially

In her last post, Jennifer raised a number of possible connections between contemporary blogging and nineteenth-century serial writing. After reading a recent article by Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Lisa Surridge in Victorian Studies, “The Plot Thickens: Toward a Narratological Analysis of Illustrated Serial Fiction in the 1860s,” I think one of the ways that Victorian serial fiction may differ from contemporary blogging is in the complex and reciprocal relationship between serial writing and illustration.

Writing Serially

In the first chapter of his book Charles Dickens and His Performing Selves, Malcolm Andrews attends to the particular relationship that Charles Dickens had with his readers – both in his imagination and in theirs. Andrews discusses the influence of serialization on the relationship between writer and reader, drawing heavily on Hughes and Lund’s The Victorian Serial, to argue that “Dickens could use serialization as a means of intervening regularly in the lives of his readers, thereby creating in them a degree of reliance on himself…that matched his reliance on their affection and attention” (16). For Andrews, this particular and intimate reader-writer relationship set the stage for the remarkable popularity of Dickens’s public readings.