Project MUSE®: Journal of Victorian Culture - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/332
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Journal of Victorian Culture.daily12026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 11 (2006) through Vol. 13 (2008)Latest Articles: Journal of Victorian CultureTWOProject MUSE®Journal of Victorian Culture1750-01331355-5502Latest articles in Journal of Victorian Culture. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions, and: Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain, and: Interiors of Empire: Objects, Space and Identity within the Indian Subcontinent, c.1800–1947 (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/251371
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When we think about the Victorian home, it often conjures up a vision of rooms overcrowded with a variety of objects. Two of the books under review here explore the role of objects in people’s lives both in Britain and in the empire, seeking to uncover what those items implied about the people who decorated with them. Neither book is a conventional history of interior design, but each seeks to lay out the underlying reasons for the decorative choices individuals made. Both books cover long periods in order to provide an idea of how material culture evolved. While Deborah Cohen’s Household Gods exposes the processes reshaping the domestic interior between 1830 and 1930 in Britain itself, Robin D. Jones’
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/332/image/coversmallHousehold Gods: The British and Their Possessions, and: Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain, and: Interiors of Empire: Objects, Space and Identity within the Indian Subcontinent, c.1800–1947 (review)2008-10-08text/htmlen-USHousehold Gods: The British and Their Possessions, and: Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain, and: Interiors of Empire: Objects, Space and Identity within the Indian Subcontinent, c.1800–1947 (review)2008-10-082008TWOProject MUSE®166622026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-10-08Socialism, Sex, and the Culture of Aestheticism in Britain, 1880–1914 (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/251372
<p></p>
Debates on the place of art in society, which rumbled through the nineteenth century, became louder during the period between 1880 and 1914 as the British socialist movement grew. What constituted art, who produced and consumed it, and the political relevance of the definition of art, were questions raised as part of the attempt to separate the classes and masses at a time of rising working-class political power; these questions were also active in the development of British socialist thought. Ruth Livesey’s Socialism, Sex, and the Culture of Aestheticism in Britain, 1880–1914 sets William Morris’s expanded socialist aestheticism within the aesthetic tradition of the period and juxtaposes the individualism
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/332/image/coversmallSocialism, Sex, and the Culture of Aestheticism in Britain, 1880–1914 (review)2008-10-08text/htmlen-USSocialism, Sex, and the Culture of Aestheticism in Britain, 1880–1914 (review)2008-10-082008TWOProject MUSE®137012026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-10-08Notes on Contributors
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/251373
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Sharon Aronofsky Weltman is Professor of English at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. Among her most recent books and articles on Victorian literature is Performing the Victorian: John Ruskin and Identity in Theater, Science, and Education (2007). She is currently working on a book project about Broadway musicals adapted from Victorian materials.
Anna Barton is a lecturer at Keele University. Her forthcoming monograph, Tennyson’s Name: Identity and Responsibility in the Poetry of Alfred Lord Tennyson will be published by Ashgate in November of this year.
Kelly Boyd is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London. She is author of Manliness and the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/332/image/coversmallNotes on Contributors2008-10-08text/htmlen-USNotes on Contributors2008-10-082008TWOProject MUSE®95402026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-10-08Harriet Martineau and the Concept of Community: Deerbrook and Ambleside
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/251374
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Faced with the fiction of Harriet Martineau, scholars have rarely concealed an unease bordering on distaste. In her early popular tales Illustrations of Political Economy (1832–4), Martineau attempted to employ the resources of fiction to stimulate a reader’s emotional engagement with what she saw as universal truths on production, distribution, exchange and consumption; Orazem duly complains of simplistic cause-and-effect preaching, a reductive view of human nature and a moralistic tone.1 David is no more enthusiastic. She sees the tales as ‘very heavy going. Characters speak like the embodiment of stiff Principles that they are, the creation of settings is toilsomely mechanical . . . ’ Indeed, they are
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/332/image/coversmallHarriet Martineau and the Concept of Community: Deerbrook and Ambleside2008-10-08text/htmlen-USHarriet Martineau and the Concept of Community: Deerbrook and Ambleside2008-10-082008TWOProject MUSE®1057372026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-10-08A Victorian Woman’s Place: Public Culture in the Nineteenth Century (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/251375
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Simon Morgan’s diverse and wide-ranging study is a useful contribution to the current scholarship which aims to re-evaluate the public life of Victorian middle-class women. His research has moved the debate forward on several fronts. Firstly, Morgan provides a more nuanced understanding of the ‘separate spheres’ discourse by accentuating the blurred boundaries between public and private domains. Secondly, he adopts broader definitions of politics and political culture in this period. These definitions soften the distinctions between formal and informal methods of political participation and in so-doing allow for a change of focus which enables female contributions to be assessed rather than marginalised.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/332/image/coversmallA Victorian Woman’s Place: Public Culture in the Nineteenth Century (review)2008-10-08text/htmlen-USA Victorian Woman’s Place: Public Culture in the Nineteenth Century (review)2008-10-082008TWOProject MUSE®123462026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-10-08‘The Mightiest Instrument of the Physical Discoverer’: The Visual ‘Imagination’ and the Victorian Observer
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/251376
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In 1870, John Tyndall gave an address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science entitled ‘Discourse on the Scientific use of the Imagination’. In it, he declared that, when
Bounded and conditioned by cooperant Reason, imagination becomes the mightiest instrument of the physical discoverer. Newton’s passage from a falling apple to a falling moon was, at the outset, a leap of the prepared imagination . . . . In fact, without this power, our knowledge of nature would be a mere tabulation of coexistences and sequences.1
Tyndall’s qualified but exuberant defense of the ‘imagination’ has often been viewed – by his contemporaries and by recent scholars – as a limit case, an
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/332/image/coversmall‘The Mightiest Instrument of the Physical Discoverer’: The Visual ‘Imagination’ and the Victorian Observer2008-10-08text/htmlen-US‘The Mightiest Instrument of the Physical Discoverer’: The Visual ‘Imagination’ and the Victorian Observer2008-10-082008TWOProject MUSE®1390622026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-10-08Tennyson’s Rapture: Transformations in the Dramatic Monologue (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/251377
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I went to 80 countries, you know [. . . ] I gave contemporaneous accounts, I wrote about a lot of this in my book. You know, I think that, a minor blip, you know, if I said something that, you know, I say a lot of things —millions of words a day — so if I misspoke, that was just a misstatement. (Hillary Clinton, quoted in the Philadelphia Daily News, March 24th 2008)
Hillary Clinton’s claim that she ‘misspoke’ when she said that she landed in Bosnia under sniper fire in 1996 was greeted with a good deal of scepticism, both from supporters of her rival in the fight for the Democratic nomination and from the press and public at large. Clinton’s statement confirms that, as a politician, words are her
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/332/image/coversmallTennyson’s Rapture: Transformations in the Dramatic Monologue (review)2008-10-08text/htmlen-USTennyson’s Rapture: Transformations in the Dramatic Monologue (review)2008-10-082008TWOProject MUSE®118262026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-10-08Victorian Women Writers and the Classics: The Feminine of Homer, and: George Eliot and the Discourses of Medievalism (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/251378
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What are the distinctive means by which women writers and readers have encountered and appropriated ancient texts, themes and forms? The two studies reviewed here thoughtfully address this important question: Isobel Hurst’s Victorian Women Writers and the Classics, and Judith Johnston’s George Eliot and the Discourses of Medievalism. Both Hurst and Johnston offer well-informed and subtle commentaries on the unique and sometimes irreverent ways in which nineteenth-century English women writers received and re-authored tradition. Since the gendering of reception is a topic of debate in many fields, both of their books will make important contributions to scholarship beyond the discipline of Victorian literary
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/332/image/coversmallVictorian Women Writers and the Classics: The Feminine of Homer, and: George Eliot and the Discourses of Medievalism (review)2008-10-08text/htmlen-USVictorian Women Writers and the Classics: The Feminine of Homer, and: George Eliot and the Discourses of Medievalism (review)2008-10-082008TWOProject MUSE®172002026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-10-08Robert Louis Stevenson, Science, and the Fin de Siècle, and: The Transforming Draught: Jekyll and Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson and the Victorian Alcohol Debate (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/251379
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A pair of books with markedly different approaches, Julia Reid’s Robert Louis Stevenson, Science, and the Fin de Siècle and Thomas L. Reed’s The Transforming Draught nevertheless both recoup a form of criticism and an author that have suffered relative neglect. Each of these literary studies demonstrates how the single-author study can perform a fruitful cultural analysis. In doing so, each also makes a good case for the importance of Stevenson.
Reid’s study of Stevenson and science provides a coherent understanding of Stevenson’s entire oeuvre of published and unpublished writings, omitting only his poetry. It ‘explores Stevenson’s interest in evolutionist thought, arguing that an interest in the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/332/image/coversmallRobert Louis Stevenson, Science, and the Fin de Siècle, and: The Transforming Draught: Jekyll and Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson and the Victorian Alcohol Debate (review)2008-10-08text/htmlen-USRobert Louis Stevenson, Science, and the Fin de Siècle, and: The Transforming Draught: Jekyll and Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson and the Victorian Alcohol Debate (review)2008-10-082008TWOProject MUSE®178502026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-10-08The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror, and: Victoriana: Histories, Fiction, Criticism (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/251380
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Freud famously said that those who do not understand the past are condemned to repeat it. How well, then, do we understand our fascination with the Victorians? That is the subject of Simon Joyce’s The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror and Cora Kaplan’s Victoriana.
Joyce argues that, despite what we have learnt about the period from Queen Victoria’s ascension in 1837 to her death in 1901, our conception of ‘the Victorian’ has essentially stayed the same: imperialism; the industrial revolution; the separation of public and private spheres, a hypocritical attitude to sex and ‘an ascendant hegemony of bourgeois values’ (5). We may excavate those who have been excluded from the historical record, and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/332/image/coversmallThe Victorians in the Rearview Mirror, and: Victoriana: Histories, Fiction, Criticism (review)2008-10-08text/htmlen-USThe Victorians in the Rearview Mirror, and: Victoriana: Histories, Fiction, Criticism (review)2008-10-082008TWOProject MUSE®153212026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-10-08‘We Other Victorians’: Literary Victorian Afterlives
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/251381
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There is a narrative that constructs the demise of the Victorians through Bloomsbury’s Oedipal murder. Lytton Strachey lambasted Victorian biography as ‘[t]hose fat two volumes [. . . ] with their ill-digested masses of material, their slipshod style, their tone of tedious panegyric, their lamentable lack of selection’.1 Somerset Maugham breathed some life back into the corpse, though, in Cakes and Ale (1930), a fictional and critical engagement with biography that critiques the Moderns’ construction of the Victorians, restricted as they are by the demands of their own contemporaneity. The ‘last’ of the great Victorians (who is and is not Thomas Hardy in the novel) is anatomised between one mode of memoir
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/332/image/coversmall‘We Other Victorians’: Literary Victorian Afterlives2008-10-08text/htmlen-US‘We Other Victorians’: Literary Victorian Afterlives2008-10-082008TWOProject MUSE®402422026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-10-08Putting Matter in its Right Place: Dirt, Time and Regeneration in Mid-Victorian Britain
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/251382
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In 1966, Mary Douglas published Purity and Danger, her classic study of rituals of pollution and cleanliness. The study, which spanned both primitive and modern societies, was underpinned by what she termed an ‘older definition’ of dirt as ‘matter out of place’.1 The universal application of this definition was thus linked to its implication of cultural relativity: namely, that dirt is whatever, within a given society, eludes or threatens order and system. Such an insight has informed a great deal of historical scholarship on the subject of dirt, including Victorian dirt. Dirt in fact is now a well-established part of Victorian historiography and has elicited an impressive body of interdisciplinary
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/332/image/coversmallPutting Matter in its Right Place: Dirt, Time and Regeneration in Mid-Victorian Britain2008-10-08text/htmlen-USPutting Matter in its Right Place: Dirt, Time and Regeneration in Mid-Victorian Britain2008-10-082008TWOProject MUSE®989622026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-10-08From Redress to Farce: Breach of Promise Theatre in Cultural Context, 1830–1920
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/251383
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On 27 April 1883, the Times reported that Georgina Weldon (1837–1914) had recently been seen riding through central London
on a tricycle, on which was painted in large letters ‘Mrs. Weldon’s Crystal Tricycle’. It appears that on the conclusion of her business at the Courts Mrs. Weldon was on her way to a rehearsal at Sanger’s amphitheatre, where she is to appear on Thursday next as Serjeant Buzfuz in the sketch of ‘Bardell v. Pickwick’.1
It is certainly no surprise that Weldon found an effective way to transform what might have been an unremarkable trip into a publicity stunt: an inveterate, indefatigable, and extremely efficient self-promoter, Weldon had first achieved notoriety in the late 1870s
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/332/image/coversmallFrom Redress to Farce: Breach of Promise Theatre in Cultural Context, 1830–19202008-10-08text/htmlen-USFrom Redress to Farce: Breach of Promise Theatre in Cultural Context, 1830–19202008-10-082008TWOProject MUSE®1435352026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-10-08Announcement
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/251384
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The Journal of Victorian Culture successfully inaugurated an essay prize competition in 2007, and published the first winner (by Louise Lee) in 13.1 (2008). We are pleased to announce the next competition. The aim of the JVC Essay Prize is to promote scholarship among postgraduate research students working on the Victorian period in any discipline in the UK and abroad. The essay, which must be no longer than 7000 words in length (including notes), may be on any aspect of Victorian culture appropriate for the scope of the journal (this embraces literature and history, including cultural, intellectual, social, political, economic and religious history; the history of music, science, technology, medicine
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/332/image/coversmallAnnouncement2008-10-08text/htmlen-USAnnouncement2008-10-082008TWOProject MUSE®45562026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-10-08Art for Art’s Sake: Aestheticism in Victorian Painting (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/251385
<p></p>
Although the discussion of ‘art for art’s sake’ is as old as the term itself, the discussion of it as a philosophical and interdisciplinary problem is rare. Over-familiarity consigns its meaning all too often to the realms of common assumption, where it may become a relic of glitzy high-Aestheticism. Elizabeth Prettejohn’s Art for Art’s Sake offers a fresh enquiry into its controversial rise to prominence.
To some extent, this is familiar ground for Prettejohn. Her last major project, After the Pre-Raphaelites: Art and Aestheticism in Victorian England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999) was peopled by many of the same protagonists. Indeed, several passages – such as the explanation of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/332/image/coversmallArt for Art’s Sake: Aestheticism in Victorian Painting (review)2008-10-08text/htmlen-USArt for Art’s Sake: Aestheticism in Victorian Painting (review)2008-10-082008TWOProject MUSE®150232026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-10-08Fanny Kemble: A Performed Life (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/251386
<p></p>
Deirdre David’s book is the fifteenth biographical study of the great nineteenth-century actress Fanny Kemble. It comes hard on the heels of Rebecca Jenkins’ critically acclaimed Fanny Kemble: The Reluctant Celebrity (2005). So the first question to ask is ‘do we need another biography of Fanny Kemble so soon?’, to which the answer must be a resounding ‘yes’. For one thing, where Jenkins ended her book with the break-up of Fanny’s marriage in the 1840s, David takes the story through to her death in 1893. For another thing – and more importantly – David advances and defends a fascinating interpretation of her subject, flagged up in her subtitle ‘a performed life’. She interprets the life both on and off the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/332/image/coversmallFanny Kemble: A Performed Life (review)2008-10-08text/htmlen-USFanny Kemble: A Performed Life (review)2008-10-082008TWOProject MUSE®129292026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-10-08Victorians on the Contemporary Stage
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/251387
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The Victorians are a fixture of contemporary theatre. I don’t mean their own drama, although of course Oscar Wilde is performed continually from London’s West End to high school productions in Cedar City, Utah. Even Dion Boucicault – a name better known to theatre historians than to theatre buffs – regularly finds an audience. In the last few years, New York alone has seen Boucicault’s The London Assurance at the Roundabout Theatre (1997), both The Streets of New York (2001) and The Colleen Bawn (2003) at The Irish Rep, and The Shaughraun at the Storm Theatre (2008). Yet, while regular productions of Victorian plays clearly constitute an important part of Victorian afterlife, in this roundtable article I
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/332/image/coversmallVictorians on the Contemporary Stage2008-10-08text/htmlen-USVictorians on the Contemporary Stage2008-10-082008TWOProject MUSE®292082026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-10-08Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/251388
<p></p>
Sharon Marcus’s Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England extensively revises critical interpretations of female relationships during the Victorian era. Scholars in the fields of queer studies and feminist theory will quickly recognise the title’s nod to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985), a landmark study that inaugurated the field of queer theory. Indeed, Marcus acknowledges her allusion to Sedgwick’s title and notes her employment of ‘Sedgwick’s wise insight that homo- and hetero- are inherently interrelated’ (10). Marcus defines her audience broadly, stating her argument’s applicability will extend to scholars of queer
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/332/image/coversmallBetween Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (review)2008-10-08text/htmlen-USBetween Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (review)2008-10-082008TWOProject MUSE®155292026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-10-08The Victorian University and Our Own
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/251389
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The Victorian period, in both England and America, saw the establishment of many new colleges and universities. In 1836, the King ended the monopoly that Cambridge and Oxford had over the awarding of university degrees by granting a royal charter to the University of London, which had begun offering university-level instruction in 1826. Owens College, Manchester (later to become the centre of the federal Victoria University in combination with university colleges in Liverpool, Leeds, and Sheffield), admitted its first class in 1851; in 1851, John Henry Newman went to Ireland to establish a Roman Catholic university in Dublin. The University of Bristol opened in 1876; Mason College of Science, which became
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/332/image/coversmallThe Victorian University and Our Own2008-10-08text/htmlen-USThe Victorian University and Our Own2008-10-082008TWOProject MUSE®268932026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-10-08Old Phrases and Great Obscenities: The Strange Afterlife of Two Victorian Anxieties
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/251390
<p></p>
[Criticism] obeys an instinct prompting it to try to know the best that is known and thought in the world, irrespectively of practice, politics, and everything of the kind; and to value knowledge and thought as they approach this best, without the intrusion of any other considerations whatever.1
I think the test of obscenity is this, whether the tendency of the matter charged as obscenity is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall.2
The repercussions of these two pronouncements, which redefined the relationship between the Victorian state and the field of culture, reverberated well into the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/332/image/coversmallOld Phrases and Great Obscenities: The Strange Afterlife of Two Victorian Anxieties2008-10-08text/htmlen-USOld Phrases and Great Obscenities: The Strange Afterlife of Two Victorian Anxieties2008-10-082008TWOProject MUSE®348652026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-10-08The Citizen’s Body: Desire, Health, and the Social in Victorian England (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/251391
<p></p>
The architect Robert Kerr, better known as the author of The Gentleman’s House (1864), appears briefly in Gilbert’s book as an unlikely defender of working-class desire. Against the middle-class housing reform creed that workers should be taught to wish for three rooms in their tenements rather than being allowed to prefer to ‘pig together’ in one, Kerr suggested, in an address to the Royal Institute of British Architects, that perhaps one room might better meet the simpler needs, habits and resources of those working poor who could not afford to heat, light, and decorate multiple rooms. Kerr’s audacious suggestion was rejected, and the three-room dogma went on to stir cravings for parlours and pianos – the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/332/image/coversmallThe Citizen’s Body: Desire, Health, and the Social in Victorian England (review)2008-10-08text/htmlen-USThe Citizen’s Body: Desire, Health, and the Social in Victorian England (review)2008-10-082008TWOProject MUSE®169512026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-10-08Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/251392
<p></p>
As we rush toward 2009 and the bi-centennial of Darwin’s birth, February 12, 1809, with the Darwin industry going full blast and producing a bibliography positively Shakespearean in dimensions, we might wonder what else there is to left to say. Addressed from the perspective of biology, sociobiology and evolutionary psychology, philosophy, history, anthropology, and cultural studies, Darwin – a man who did not much like writing and who was noted for even excessive modesty – has become one of the most talked about figures in the cultural history of the West. The very blandness of his private life after his voyage on the Beagle has turned out to be of consuming interest. A man who kept all his notes and all
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/332/image/coversmallDarwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability (review)2008-10-08text/htmlen-USDarwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability (review)2008-10-082008TWOProject MUSE®235662026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-10-08Introduction
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/251393
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Do the Victorians continue to live? Kathryn Hughes subtitled her persuasive 1998 biography of George Eliot, The Last Victorian. But is there such a thing? Postmodern notions of the instability of interpretations have been a powerful factor in driving critics recently to consider the so-called ‘afterlives’ of cultures. A more acute sense of the changing nature of historical knowledge, the apparent fragility of claims about master narratives of the past, has helped too. So has the greater perceived sense of the cultural critic’s own historical location and its effect on his or her judgment. The Victorian period has been no exception to these reconsiderations. Cora Kaplan’s Victoriana (2006) and Simon Joyce’s
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-15T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/332/image/coversmallIntroduction2008-10-08text/htmlen-USIntroduction2008-10-082008TWOProject MUSE®45512026-05-15T00:00:00-05:002008-10-08