VICTORIAN STUDIES最新文献

{"title":"Weird Fiction and Science at the Fin de Siècle by Emily Alder (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.2979/vic.2023.a911130","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/vic.2023.a911130","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Weird Fiction and Science at the Fin de Siècle by Emily Alder L. A. Delgado (bio) Weird Fiction and Science at the Fin de Siècle, by Emily Alder; pp. ix + 249. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, $99.99, $79.99 ebook. In Weird Fiction and Science at the Fin de Siècle, Emily Alder offers a clear and exceptionally compelling examination of the evolution of pre-Lovecraftian weird horror, a genre that simultaneously appropriates as it repudiates the positivist tendencies of Victorian science in its generation of monsters. In her examination of the genre, Alder illustrates the ways in which fin-de-siècle weird fiction is distinct from the Gothic, a mode which has, for better or worse, dominated scholarly discourse on horror fiction. While \"the early roots of the weird tale are entangled with those of the gothic and science fiction\" (2), Alder notes that the horrors that emerge from weird fiction are characterized by haunting abnormality, or what China Miéville describes as the \"abcanny\" or \"teratological expressions of that unrepresentable and unknowable, the evasive of meaning\" (Miéville qtd. in Alder 11). The book examines the ways in which late Victorian scientific discourses helped shape weird horror. Tales of this type, she argues, were invested in exploring and testing the borderlands of science and material reality. The weird, at least as it emerged in the work of writers such as William Hope Hodgson, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, Robert Louis Stevenson, H. G. Wells, and Edith Nesbit, challenged positivist assumptions about objective reality by introducing distortions, mutations, and absences along with [End Page 346] its inscrutable weird monsters. Alder argues that weird fiction also imagines other ways of knowing as well as other, possibly monstrous, types of knowledge that challenge the epistemological mastery that scientific positivism promised. The weird tale constructs \"enweirded epistemological terrains that validate abcanny realities\" (27). Alder also traces the cultural impact of heterodox movements and practices such as Spiritualism, Theosophy, and occultism, as well as psychical research, on the development of the genre. Such movements, like the fiction these movements inspired, challenged the claims of nineteenth-century science while simultaneously relying upon the cultural validation that science granted. While the first chapter defines the weird and establishes the parameters of her investigation, Alder's second chapter applies the claims of the first by exploring how science serves as a gateway to the weird in Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) and Machen's The Great God Pan (1894). In both stories, access to the weird is achieved through scientific experimentation. But the monsters this science produces, science which is itself adulterated and made weird by metaphysics, are ones that are nearly impossible to pin down for study. Mr. Hyde and Helen Vaughan, Stevenson's and M","PeriodicalId":45845,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN STUDIES","volume":"103 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135448359","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Material Inspirations: The Interests of the Art Object in the Nineteenth Century and After by Jonah Siegel (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.2979/vic.2023.a911122","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/vic.2023.a911122","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Material Inspirations: The Interests of the Art Object in the Nineteenth Century and After by Jonah Siegel Stefano Evangelista (bio) Material Inspirations: The Interests of the Art Object in the Nineteenth Century and After, by Jonah Siegel; pp. xxviii + 373. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2020, $66.00, £49.99. As art reached ever larger audiences over the course of the nineteenth century, there was a corresponding growth in debates about its public value. Practical and theoretical concerns were raised about where and how art works ought to be displayed. Writers, no less than experts and critics, engaged with the challenges of grasping art objects in their material existence—a challenge that generated complex emotions as it tended to make viewers conscious of their own bodies as organs of perception and desire. Starting from these premises, Jonah Siegel's fascinating new book explores how materiality affected both the lived experience of and critical discussions about art, focusing primarily on the second half of the century but frequently also stretching back to Romantic literature and right up to the present day. Material Inspirations: The Interests of the Art Object in the Nineteenth Century and After charts a vast territory. Readers, however, are helpfully given some guiding threads: the reception of classical antiquity; responses to Raphael; the influence of artistic reproduction and display on categories of perception and art writing. At the heart of the book is a sustained analysis of the mediating role played by institutions, notably libraries and museums. These, Siegel explains, \"came into their own in the nineteenth century as foils to the onslaught of change that characterized the period,\" becoming \"ideal locations for reflection on the power of material things, especially when those things stand at an angle to the amnesiac drives of modern culture\" (52, 53). Siegel is an expert on museum culture. Here, he writes compellingly about how the museum became an increasingly unsatisfactory, puzzling space, which struggled to accommodate the new ways of coming close to art that were facilitated by travel and transport technologies. For a middle-class public that had experienced seeing classical sculpture in sun-flooded archaeological sites and contemplating religious paintings in incense-suffused churches, encountering such objects in museums came across as an act of cultural deracination. Examples from George Eliot and Vernon Lee show how writers were sensitive [End Page 329] to this shift whereby the museum becomes a place not only to know the object but to problematize systems of values and forms of knowledge. The library, as the symbolic space of print culture, complicated responses in a similar fashion. Siegel pays particular attention to how engravings and illustrations mediated the circulation of classical objects, affecting the construction of their cultural value in determining ways. In this process, popul","PeriodicalId":45845,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN STUDIES","volume":"32 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135448345","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Reviewers","authors":"","doi":"10.2979/vic.2023.a911141","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/vic.2023.a911141","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45845,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN STUDIES","volume":"31 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135448351","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Advocates of Freedom: African American Transatlantic Abolitionism in the British Isles by Hannah-Rose Murray, and: The Ties That Bind: Transatlantic Abolitionism in the Age of Reform, c. 1820–1865 by J. R. Oldfield (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.2979/vic.2023.a911113","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/vic.2023.a911113","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Advocates of Freedom: African American Transatlantic Abolitionism in the British Isles by Hannah-Rose Murray, and: The Ties That Bind: Transatlantic Abolitionism in the Age of Reform, c. 1820–1865 by J. R. Oldfield Padraic X. Scanlan (bio) Advocates of Freedom: African American Transatlantic Abolitionism in the British Isles, by Hannah-Rose Murray; pp. xvi + 372. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020, £47.99, $61.99. The Ties That Bind: Transatlantic Abolitionism in the Age of Reform, c. 1820–1865, by J. R. Oldfield; pp. xiii + 210. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020, £24.99, $54.99. \"I am hardly black enough,\" Frederick Douglass wrote to a friend in 1846, during a speaking tour of the United Kingdom, \"for British taste\" (qtd. in Murray 140). Douglass, famously the most photographed person in the nineteenth century, understood that he needed to curate his image carefully for overwhelmingly white British audiences. Many Britons were patriotic abolitionists, finding in the end of the British slave trade in 1807 and of colonial slavery in most of the British empire in 1834 incontrovertible evidence of British moral superiority and imperial virtue. At the same time, Victorian ideas of \"civilization\" and of Britain's obligation to spread it throughout the colonized world placed white Britons at the pinnacle of an imagined racial and cultural hierarchy. Two new books on abolitionism, Advocates of Freedom: African American Transatlantic Abolitionism in the British Isles by Hannah-Rose Murray and The Ties That Bind: Transatlantic Abolitionism in the Age of Reform, c. 1820–1865 by J. R. Oldfield, use the transatlantic culture of antislavery that Black American lecturers in Britain exemplified to explore the relationship between Britain after the end of slavery in the Caribbean and the United States before the Civil War. Murray's work attends carefully and thoughtfully to the forms of self-presentation and rhetorical strategies that Black orators on tour adopted to reach their audiences. Oldfield's book offers new insights into the internal organization and material culture of mid-nineteenth-century Anglo-American abolitionism. However, where Murray shows how and why Black Americans flattered British audiences to make their arguments, Oldfield is content—much like British audiences in the 1840s and 1850s—to take that flattery at face value. Advocates of Freedom is rooted in archives assembled as part of an impressive effort, led by Murray, to collect, catalogue, and map itineraries followed by Black American activists and lecturers in Britain from the mid-1830s to the turn of the twentieth century. Building [End Page 309] support among the British public for American abolition required, Murray argues, a careful rhetorical strategy of \"adaptive resistance\" (7). Black activists who visited Britain turned to their advantage the wearying experience of being unable to avoid seeing representations of themselves in a culture grounded i","PeriodicalId":45845,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN STUDIES","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135448362","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Continental Tourism, Travel Writing, and the Consumption of Culture, 1814–1900 ed. by Benjamin Colbert and Lucy Morrison (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.2979/vic.2023.a911116","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/vic.2023.a911116","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Continental Tourism, Travel Writing, and the Consumption of Culture, 1814–1900 ed. by Benjamin Colbert and Lucy Morrison Christopher M. Keirstead (bio) Continental Tourism, Travel Writing, and the Consumption of Culture, 1814–1900, edited by Benjamin Colbert and Lucy Morrison; pp. xiv + 343. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, $54.99, $54.99 paper, $39.99 ebook. Continental Tourism, Travel Writing, and the Consumption of Culture, 1814–1900 opens with an epigraph from the famous blind traveler James Holman's A Voyage Round the World (1835), where he reflects on the fading ritual of the Grand Tour, once \"a matter of serious importance,\" which the increasing ease and ubiquity of travel had rendered \"somewhat ludicrous\" (Holman qtd. in Colbert and Morrison 1). Like many travel writers traversing this familiar ground, Holman felt compelled to reinvent his subject, something for which his lack of sight may have proved an advantage: \"undistracted by recollections of visual objects,\" he wrote, he could draw more abundantly on his other senses (Holman qtd. in Colbert and Morrison 2). Much like Holman did for his contemporaries, Benjamin Colbert and Lucy Morrison's present edited volume reimagines the Victorian encounter with Europe. The collection brings new critical and investigative tools to bear on a familiar subject, including increased focus on the body and its senses, beyond sight, in shaping travel experience. Chloe Chard, for instance, examines the popularity of picnicking near the ancient ruins of Pompeii, where consuming simple fare amidst its uncannily preserved domestic spaces offered an especially resonant \"way of shifting historical time into the ambit of personal time\" (78). Other chapters reflect new attention in travel studies to the multilayered nature of travel writing authorship and the complex editorial interventions that often preceded publication. In terms of scope, the book widens our understanding of the Victorian map of Europe to the north and the east, while also taking up some understudied destinations and subgenres of travel writing along the more beaten path of Western Europe. Continental Tourism is bookended by two chapters examining the means and pace of modern travel and its impact on the body. Morrison's chapter on the brief but notable craze for roller coaster travel in, of all places, post-Napoleonic Paris, serves as a reminder to Victorianists that well before the arrival of the railroad, efforts were already underway to craft a new kind of \"consumerist experience of travel-as-motion and travel-as-feeling\" (17). As its name indicates, the Montagnes Russes was itself a cultural import from Russia (exchanging sleds and ice for carts and rails) and would become a major international attraction, featured, for instance, in Thomas Moore's The Fudge Family in Paris (1818). (Moore's text, along with other examples of early century travel satire, is the focus of a separate chapter by Colbert.) Hitting the ","PeriodicalId":45845,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN STUDIES","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135448346","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Serving a Wired World: London's Telecommunications Workers and the Making of an Information Capital by Katie Hindmarch-Watson, and: Racing the Street: Race, Rhetoric, and Technology in Metropolitan London, 1840–1900 by Robert J. Topinka (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.2979/vic.2023.a911112","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/vic.2023.a911112","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Serving a Wired World: London's Telecommunications Workers and the Making of an Information Capital by Katie Hindmarch-Watson, and: Racing the Street: Race, Rhetoric, and Technology in Metropolitan London, 1840–1900 by Robert J. Topinka Mark W. Turner (bio) Serving a Wired World: London's Telecommunications Workers and the Making of an Information Capital, by Katie Hindmarch-Watson; pp. xi + 270. Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2020, $29.95, $29.95 ebook, £25.00, £25.00 ebook. Racing the Street: Race, Rhetoric, and Technology in Metropolitan London, 1840–1900, by Robert J. Topinka; pp. xii + 182. Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2020, $85.00, $34.95 paper, $34.95 ebook, £71.00, £30.00 paper, £30.00 ebook. It probably comes as no surprise to anyone to learn that race, gender, and class were deeply imbricated in the forms and technologies of communication in the nineteenth century. More surprising, I think, is how little extended work there has been that teases out in granular ways the implications of that imbrication, considering the significance and impacts of a range of rapidly developing communication technologies across the century. Both Katie Hindmarch-Watson's Serving a Wired World: London's Telecommunications Workers and the Making of an Information Capital and Robert J. Topinka's Racing the Street: Race, Rhetoric, and Technology in Metropolitan London, 1840–1900 offer important new insights into the topic and deepen our understanding of a technologized society. Their focus is not the histories of specific technologies (though there is some of that in both books), but the social implications of a society quickly adapting to those technologies. As a historian, Hindmarch-Watson provides a deeply researched, archive-driven account of the labor forces behind the telegraph and the telephone in particular; hers is a labor history of one branch of the nineteenth-century service economy. As a media studies scholar, Topinka brings together a media archaeology approach and actor-network theory to argue that race was a key technology in mediating the proliferation of material things in the urban world. While they explore the concept of technology in distinct and even divergent ways, both studies lead to a consideration of biopolitics in the center of the globalizing, imperial, and highly networked world: London. Hindmarch-Watson's study focuses on the \"information conduits\" who acted as mediators in the electronic communication systems that came to define the modern, [End Page 306] urban world, from roughly the 1870s to the beginning of World War I (1). As the infrastructure of new communications systems were rolled out—telegraph lines and stations in the city and telegraph poles alongside railways, for example—new occupations emerged, such as telegraphists, telegraph messengers (the infamous \"telegraph boys\"), and telephone operators (12). The quickly growing workforce became central to the expans","PeriodicalId":45845,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN STUDIES","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135448327","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Marriage and Late-Victorian Dramatists by Mary Christian (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.2979/vic.2023.a911132","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/vic.2023.a911132","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Marriage and Late-Victorian Dramatists by Mary Christian Eglantina Remport (bio) Marriage and Late-Victorian Dramatists, by Mary Christian; pp. xii + 203. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, $99.99, $99.00 paper, $74.99 ebook. Mary Christian opens Marriage and Late-Victorian Dramatists with a re-examination of the widely held view that, when Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House was first performed at the Novelty Theatre in London in June 1889, it presented Victorian audiences with a marriage plotline that was markedly different from those to which they had been accustomed. She argues that, by offering an ending in which the wife leaves her husband, the play challenged the traditional marriage plotline of British comedies and melodramas, and \"the rising and falling action of the well-made play\" that was popular at the time (3). She further remarks that, due to its thematic novelty, the play challenged contemporary British playwrights to engage newly with the traditional marriage plotline, by responding to changing social realities at the turn of the century. Christian focuses on five dramatists from the period: Oscar Wilde, Arthur Wing Pinero, Henry Arthur Jones, George Bernard Shaw, and Elizabeth Robins. The first strand of the argument is concerned with the ways in which these dramatists engaged with Ibsen's A Doll's House (Et dukkehjem), first performed at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen, Denmark in December 1879. Christian's analysis offers a new way of regarding marriage itself as theatrical, a play in which husband and wife each fulfill their socially constructed gender roles. Christian considers the tarantella episode in A Doll's House as the starting point of these [End Page 350] investigations, emphasizing the significance of its meta-theatricality. This argument is intriguing and is well-elaborated in the second chapter, though perhaps there could have been a more sustained engagement with this idea throughout the book as a whole, an approach that would have strengthened Christian's case for Ibsen's influence on British dramatists of the 1890s and 1900s. As it stands, the representation of marriage in the plays of the New Drama movement of the 1890s is often conflated with other issues more generally related to marriage during the period. These include Christian's discussion of a range of issues in the book: marriage legislation in Britain; contemporary divorce cases; the married lives of dramatists; actors playing marital roles; interaction between the actors playing in marriage plots and their audiences (both on-stage and off-stage); critical commentary in newspapers on the marriage plot of a given play; and the rewriting of certain marriage-themed plays as parodies. Each chapter of the book deals with a number of these issues, offering intriguing analyses of the plays of Wilde, Shaw, Pinero, Jones, and Robins. The result is a remarkably informative book on marriage and theater during the late Victorian period, but one i","PeriodicalId":45845,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN STUDIES","volume":"2016 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135448340","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Comments & Queries","authors":"","doi":"10.2979/vic.2023.a911140","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/vic.2023.a911140","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45845,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN STUDIES","volume":"149 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135448342","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Sculptural Body in Victorian Literature: Encrypted Sexualities by Patricia Pulham (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.2979/vic.2023.a911124","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/vic.2023.a911124","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: The Sculptural Body in Victorian Literature: Encrypted Sexualities by Patricia Pulham Laura Eastlake (bio) The Sculptural Body in Victorian Literature: Encrypted Sexualities, by Patricia Pulham; pp. x + 226. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020, $110.00, £75.00. \"Please do not touch.\" From ubiquitous signage to spiky plants intended to deter visitors from sitting on historic furniture, the modern museumgoer understands that touching artworks is a forbidden desire in and of itself. Patricia Pulham's latest book, The Sculptural Body in Victorian Literature: Encrypted Sexualities, takes us back to the period when the museum was first becoming an \"eyes only space\" and explores the cultural associations between statues and sexuality (24). Pulham focuses on transgressive desires, defined broadly as those that would have been \"impossible to acknowledge in the moral climate of the nineteenth century … whether these be homosexuality, Pygmalionism, necrophilia or paedophilia\" (1–2). Pulham argues convincingly across each of the five chapters that literature functions as an extension of the museum space. The sculptural body in literature is a site where forbidden touch becomes imaginatively possible. Desire is \"encrypted\" into the language of sculpture both in the sense of its being hidden or buried, but also its being secretly encoded and available for viewing only by those \"in the know\" (2). We proceed through \"a literary gallery of sculptures\" beginning with two full chapters on the most famous instance of statue love: the myth of Pygmalion and the perfect woman he sculpts from marble (25). Pulham reminds us that Ovid's account of the Pygmalion myth is just one of a constellation of variant versions from antiquity and that nineteenth-century writers and artists tended to shy away from Ovid's more explicitly eroticized version. Instead, Victorian receptions used the myth of Pygmalion to navigate ideas of pure and impure heterosexual desire, and parallel tensions between the real and the ideal in art. The story of Pygmalion became a touchstone for late Victorian aestheticism and the Parnassian ideal. With the craft of art often expressed by Théophile Gautier and others through the language of hard substances like marble and gems, the desire to touch statues—whether literally as sculptor or figuratively as poet—can be read as part of a larger Parnassian desire to sculpt thoughts in marble. Pygmalion's desire to sculpt the perfect woman becomes a quest for artistic perfection. Pulham offers the works of Arthur O'Shaughnessy and Thomas Hardy's The Well-Beloved (1897) as examples of a \"reverse Pygmalionism which rejects flesh in favour of 'pure' art\" but that often renders the living woman a spectral or corpse-like object of artistic desire (74). The remaining chapters look beyond Pygmalion to examine an expanded range of contexts and desires. Chapter 3 explores sculpture and sexuality in the context of Italian collections and the increasin","PeriodicalId":45845,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN STUDIES","volume":"39 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135448348","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Combating London's Criminal Class: A State Divided, 1869–95 by Matthew Bach (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.2979/vic.2023.a911111","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/vic.2023.a911111","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Combating London's Criminal Class: A State Divided, 1869–95 by Matthew Bach Rosalind Crone (bio) Combating London's Criminal Class: A State Divided, 1869–95, by Matthew Bach; pp. x + 191. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020, $112.50, $35.95 paper, $28.76 ebook, £28.99 paper, £26.09 ebook. Over the course of 100 years, approximately between 1770 and 1870, imprisonment—one of several options for the punishment of petty offenders and occasionally felons during the early modern period—became the most common sanction for all types of crime. Imprisonment replaced a range of bodily punishments, from branding and whipping to hanging and transportation. The decline of transportation was particularly protracted. It began with the loss of the American colonies in the mid-1770s, followed by legislation and institutions (including Millbank Penitentiary in London) that enabled judges to sentence some felons, who would otherwise have been transported, to periods of imprisonment instead. The establishment of new penal colonies in Australia from 1788 gave transportation a new lease of life—more than 162,000 convict men and women were shipped to Australia between 1787 and 1868. It was the closure of New South Wales to convicts in the 1840s followed by Van Diemen's Land in 1853 that dramatically reduced the numbers being transported and finally forced the British government to construct a system of land-based prisons to accommodate serious offenders serving long sentences of imprisonment (then called penal servitude). The release of convicts back into British society after serving a term of imprisonment in domestic prisons was not new. However, the official end of transportation captured the public imagination and helped to stoke fears about the existence of a so-called criminal class, the members of which, contemporaries argued, were uncivilized and undisciplined habitual offenders who rejected honest labor and made their living entirely from crime. The need to do something about this criminal class was given a sense of urgency by the garroting panics—two waves of violent street crime supposedly committed by convicted felons released from prison with tickets of leave (on probation) in 1856 and 1862. The legislation that followed, crafted specifically to bring the criminal class under control, is the subject of Matthew Bach's book Combating London's Criminal Class: A State Divided, 1869–95. As Bach rightly points out, the 1869 Habitual Criminals Act was some years in the making. It built upon earlier legislation on penal servitude passed in 1853, 1857, and 1864, which introduced tickets of leave, conditions for license holders, and tougher sanctions for repeat offenders. As the Acts of 1857 and 1864 were passed in the wake of [End Page 304] the garroting panics, some historians have argued that they were knee-jerk reactions to address public alarm. The 1869 Habitual Criminals Act followed the cessation of transportation to the last remaining penal colony","PeriodicalId":45845,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN STUDIES","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135448352","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}