Middlemarch Interview

As our George Eliot month comes to a close, I thought I would post a link to an interview with Prof. Rohan Maitzen, in which she discusses Eliot’s Middlemarch. It is Eliot’s masterpiece (I don’t think that is up for debate, is it?), and Prof. Maitzen is full of wonderful insights about the novel.

Reflections on Adam Bede. Part II.

As English lecturers, we often have to remind our students to move from emotional to critical readings of texts. I once had a student who had trouble discussing Dickens’s Great Expectations in our tutorials because she hated Pip so much. Despite working to develop a critical voice over the years, I certainly have emotional reading experiences and am pleased that after reading countless Victorian novels, they still make me laugh out loud or cry. The moment in Adam Bede that I find most affective is when Dinah comes to see Hetty in her prison cell and Hetty, after showing no emotion or real awareness of her circumstances, breaks down and embraces Dinah:

The Rambling Birds of Raveloe

In Silas Marner Dolly Winthrop likens Eppie’s arrival to a little Christmas bird: “The door was open, and it walked in over the snow like a little starved robin” (179). Q. D. Leavis argues that Dolly’s robin analogy isn’t a heavy-handed allusion to a robin as a holiday emblem, and by extension, the arrival of a fatherless child as a Christmas miracle. Robins did indeed nest

Two Questions about Eliot Scholarship for the Internets

1) Why do we retain the pseudonym when discussing George Eliot/Mary Anne (etc.) Evans but not when referring to other Victorian writers like Currer Bell/Charlotte Brontë?

2) Why is Eliot’s (supposedly unattractive) appearance mentioned so frequently in Eliot criticism?

Silas Marner meets Melvyn Bragg

Just a quick note to mention that even Melvyn Bragg is joining in on George Eliot month! This coming Thursday, January 28, Melvyn will be discussing Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861) with Rosemary Ashton, Dinah Birch, and Valentine Cunningham on BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time. Be sure to listen in!

He “kissed each of the two large tears”: Affect and Desire in Eliot’s fiction

I have noticed an interesting affective moment that recurs again and again in George Eliot’s fiction. The typical scene involves the struggle of a man to resist his attraction to, and involvement with, a woman he knows he should keep his distance from. Then, despite his good intentions, he witnesses her tears and instantly loses his head in a passionate capitulation to his desire.

Spinal Curvature, Fascinating!

A few years ago, I had the opportunity to visit Dr. Williams’s library in London, where the Eliot-Lewes library is held. I was doing work on Philip Wakem’s hunch back and hoping to find some very exciting underlining in the books she read on the physiology of the spine. I’m not sure what I was imagining—maybe something like “spinal curvature!! fascinating.” Oh dear. Most likely I was looking for Eliot to guide me through the mass of medical literature I was quickly becoming mired in with no clear way of figuring out what was important. I was just too early on in my work to tell at that point.

Reflections on Adam Bede. Part I.

I am reading Eliot’s Adam Bede for the first time since I read it in graduate school, in a class that focused on Victorian representations of masculinity and the male body. And it certainly is a novel that seems to revel in describing the body of its hero, Adam. Eliot’s narrator begins the novel in the Bede brothers’ workplace, recording the sonorous voice of one of the workmen:

January is George Eliot month at the Floating Academy

George Eliot, 1877, Sketch by Princess Louise (Image from Ellen's Moody's website)

For the month of January, all of the posts here at the Floating Academy will be focused on George Eliot’s work, life, and critical afterlife. To get us started, here are a few links to comprehensive websites for all things Eliot related:

1) George Eliot @ the Orlando Project

The Orlando project (University of Cambridge) brings together a wealth of information on British woman writers. Their Eliot page provides a range of materials from her letters, journalism and fiction to biographical information about her education, career and family life. (Subscription required)

2) George Eliot @ the Victorian Web

The George Eliot page at the Victorian Web contains a range of articles on her life and work, including a basic bibliography of important works of Eliot criticism.

3) George Eliot in Warwickshire

The BBC’s Coventry division website has an interesting photographic tour of George Eliot’s life in Warwickshire. If you click on the “Images” link, you’ll find photographs of Eliot’s various homes and schools and a few portraits.

Victorian Freak Show Posters

"Krao" poster from the British Library's Online Gallery of Victorian Freak Show Posters

Kristan Tetens at The Victorian Peeper points us to an interesting online collection of Victorian Freak show posters at the British Library’s website. Noting the importance of “titillating publicity” to the success of these shows, the BL website emphasizes how the  invariably “exaggerated and stylised illustrations” of the posters graphically framed and pathologized the performers’ physical difference.

Bookbinding (the American Cousin Edition)

If you haven’t seen it yet, let me recommend the video that chronicles the production of John Carrera’s edition of the Merriam-Webster engravings. The Linotype was cast on a machine from the 1930s, but the binding process reminds me of so many images of Victorian binders seated as sewing frames.

Pictorial Webster’s: Inspiration to Completion from John Carrera on Vimeo.

Recommended Recent Books in Victorian Studies

The Floating Academy is jumping into the fray of year-end book recommendations. We’ve selected Victorian Studies books recently published (from 2006 onwards) that we find illuminating, intriguing, thoughtful and provocative. Please do add your own recommendations in the comments!

Dr Marigold and Mr Chops: Dickens Reprised

Two years before his death, in 1868, Charles Dickens famously toured the United States, giving public readings of his work. Mark Twain was in the audience in New York and admitted to being “a great deal disappointed” at Dickens’s performance. He records, “what a bright, intelligent audience he had! He ought to have made them laugh, or cry, or shout, at his own good will or pleasure — but he did not. They were very much tamer than they should have been.”

Lining the Nest: Art History and Victorian Studies

For years I’ve felt right at home in the nesting colony that is Victorian Studies. As Victorian Studies expanded in the last decade to include history along side literary criticism, I’ve snuggled in and lined my Victorian Studies nest with novels, popular science treatises, artificial limb catalogues, late-century films, and body building manuals. Although visual culture is central to Victorian Studies, it was only at the joint VSAWC and VISAWUS conference in October that I started to think about the art historians that might be nesting in the same Victorian Studies colonies.

This year’s joint Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada

Flights of Fancy

We’ve talked a lot on this blog about neo-Victorian fiction, but there are other arenas where the Victorians have gained a foothold in the popular imagination. Right now, there are a whole slew of intrepid knitters reinterpreting Victorian patterns with twenty-first century yarns, producing titles such as Victorian Lace Today.

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.