Brace yourself. Try to imagine a world in which the violin has become “nearly obsolete.” I know, right?! You’ve nearly fallen to your knees, begging for mercy, asking yourself why. Why, great creator, did humanity ever get to this point? I am a big fan of the violin. I am learning to play it at almost 40 […]
An affluent womanizer, Tony Bream. The nicest, sweetest girl, Jean Martle. A desperate lover abroad too long in China, Dennis Vidal. The odd Rose Arminger. They all seem like characters from the famed game Clue. Who was the murderer of the little girl Effie Bream; who held this child’s delicate body under the water until […]
The motif of arctic exploration is not unique during the Romantic period in which many authors, such as Mary Shelley and Coleridge, utilize the setting of a sub-zero climate and its dangers to highlight the macabre and mysterious nature of their plots and characters. In Wilkie Collins’s short story “The Devil’s Spectacles” the artic setting […]
Victorians were skeptical, to say the least, of forgiveness. The process seemed destabilizing at best, insincere at its worst. Forgiveness never really leaves the map of the Victorian literary landscape and yet authors attempt to push it to the margin. Dismissing forgiveness as impossible or undesirable appears to be an unrealistic a goal in many of […]
Freud’s claim that excrement is ailment makes a tidy frame for the familiar portrait of Victorian London, or what Dickens in Bleak House calls a “filthy wilderness.” Excrement, defined in the OED as “that which remains after a process of sifting or refining,” emerges from a laborious and sometimes painful process of internalization and elimination […]
When I was an undergraduate with an interest in studying Victorian literature, a professor once asked me how much Trollope I had read. I scratched my head: Trollope? Never heard of him. The professor explained that Anthony Trollope used to be the backbone of nineteenth-century literature courses, so I, of course, made Trollope the focus […]
That I have named this very blog after Marie Corelli — and her “electric creed” in the novel A Romance of Two Worlds — speaks to a fact that I don’t really need to reveal: I am in love with Marie Corelli. The pleasure that reading her books brings me is one that can only […]
A couple days ago I took some students in my class to see the latest cinematic attempt to bring Charlotte Bronte’s classic novel Jane Eyre to the public. At the opening scene of Cary Fukunaga’s film my heart sank down into my heels and then, from there, I only stomped the ground with a red […]
Victorians wrote love stories about work. Labor was the answer to almost every question. Carlyle’s hero in Sartor Resartus cries, “Produce! Produce! […] Work while it is called To-day; for the Night cometh, wherein no man can work.” For Victorian authors and artists, work is either placed on a pedestal as an emblem of progress, […]
William Hazlitt is notorious for writing criticism that doesn’t hold back. A kind of rogue who received a large number of threats for his blatant opinions concerning authorship and culture, Hazlitt ruminated about the darker aspects of human experience. In his best-known work, The Spirit of the Age (British, 1825), he appears more tame than in […]
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