Writing the Disaster: Babbage and the Black Box

I’m teaching a course in Victorian culture this summer, and planning to open the class with a chapter from Charles Babbage’s Ninth Bridgewater Treatise (on “Natural Theology”). His mathematical speculations in this text seem to me perfectly representative of the anxious and industrious Victorian desire to apprehend every incident and accident of the physical world. [...]

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Modern Times, Nervous Men

I’m testing out some ideas about neurasthenia, my favourite nineteenth-century nervous complaint. Mark Micale and Elaine Showalter have argued quite convincingly that neurasthenia was polite metonym for male hysteria. I, however, am interested in the ways that it differs from hysteria – the particulars that made it non-feminizing. The following are some of my musings [...]

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Green Thinking circa 1888?

I came across an interesting article in a volume of All the Year Round from 1888 that got me thinking about Victorian fascinations with the future. One particular passage about energy technologies in the year 1988 struck me as curious, especially considering our own green movement,  so I thought I would post it here for [...]

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I Dream of Luggage

Since the end of April, I’ve been houseless and thus not as productive as I was hoping I would be this summer. I won’t bore you with all of the details or complaints, but suffice it to say that my seemingly perpetual state of transition over the last few months (which has now come to [...]

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On Railways and the Aesthetics of Floating

I was very pleased when we first decided to call this blog “The Floating Academy” because I’ve been interested in the metaphorics of floating for a few years now. The Victorians were fascinated, as well as irritated, by floating things.

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