Muffin, anyone?

A Guest Post by Emily Simmons

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.

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Serialized Reading, in Two Parts. Part II.

A Guest Post by Emily Simmons

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. 

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Sublime Penmanship

A guest post by Emily Simmons

This week my research has taken me on a brief foray into the cultural history of handwriting. I’d like to think about the forms and functions of handwriting in a print culture.  How, for example, might penmanship education and practice have changed in an age where print was prevalent, but hand-written letters were still the main form of daily correspondence? Or, how might would-be authors have viewed handwriting (or been judged by it) as they composed with an eye to ‘getting into print’?

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Serialized Reading, in Two Parts. Part I.

A guest post from Emily Simmons

Currently I am both reading and not-reading Wilkie Collins’s The Law and the Lady.  Our Nineteenth-century reading group has undertaken an approximation of the serialized reading experience this summer with a sensation novel. The novel was originally serialized in weekly installments in The Graphic between September 1874 and March 1875. 

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