Alice in Wonderland

I’ve just seen the new Alice in Wonderland (And got caught in a thunderstorm on the way home.  I feel like the dormouse in the teapot! Or something like that.)  The new movie is sort of an Alice-meets-The Wizard of Oz action-fantasy, with the Red Queen pitted against the White Queen and Alice as Jabberwock-slayer.  [...]

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The Relevance of Edison’s Ear?

Readers, you may be interested in a new website that features Canadian documentary films, many of which were screened at one time or another at the wonderful Hotdocs Documentary film festival that takes place annually in Toronto. There are a few films that may be particularly relevant to scholars of the nineteenth century including Seeking [...]

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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’ [...]

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Animals in the City: Wilkie Collins’s Heart and Science

I have just finished reading Wilkie Collins’s novel Heart and Science (1883). One of the things I was most struck by was the presence of animals in the world of the novel. In its exploration – and dichotomizing – of “heart and science,” the novel focuses on the issue of vivisection so animals obviously play [...]

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