Bernard Lightman and Bennet Zon (eds.), Victorian Culture and the Origin of Disciplines New York: Routledge, 2020. Pp. 336. ISBN 978-0-3672-2842-2. £120.00 (hardback).

A young, inexperienced governess is charged with the care of Miles and Flora, two small children abandoned by their uncle at his grand country house. She sees the figure of an unknown man on the tower and his face at the window. It is Peter Quint, the master's dissolute valet, and he has come for little Miles. But Peter Quint is dead. Like the other tales collected here – ‘Sir Edmund Orme’, ‘Owen Wingrave’, and ‘The Friends of the Friends’ – ‘The Turn of the Screw’ is to all immediate appearances a ghost story. But are the appearances what they seem? Is what appears to the governess a ghost or a hallucination? Who else sees what she sees? The reader may wonder whether the children are victims of corruption from beyond the grave, or victims of the governess's ‘infernal imagination’, which torments but also entrals her? ‘The Turn of the Screw’ is probably the most famous, certainly the most eerily equivocal, of all ghostly tales. Is it a subtle, self-conscious exploration of the haunted house of Victorian culture, filled with echoes of sexual and social unease? Or is it simply, ‘the most hopelessly evil story that we have ever read’? The texts are those of the New York Edition, with a new Introduction and Notes.

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Beth Palmer. Women’s Authorship and Editorship in Victorian Culture: Sensational Strategies. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. ISBN: 978-0-19-959911-0. Price: US$110.00/£60.00

Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net ◽

10.7202/1026019ar ◽

2012 ◽

Author(s):

Tabitha Sparks

Keyword(s):

New York ◽

Victorian Culture ◽

Oxford University ◽

Oxford University Press

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Blue Jeans Stage and Screen

Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film ◽

10.1177/1748372718791055 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 46 (1) ◽

pp. 59-72

Author(s):

David Mayer ◽

Helen Day-Mayer

Keyword(s):

New York ◽

Visual Culture ◽

Silent Film ◽

Film Adaptation ◽

Victorian Culture ◽

Distinctive Features ◽

Attempted Murder ◽

Modern Media ◽

Blue Jeans

Scholars of Victorian and Edwardian theatre necessarily piece together their accounts of ephemeral performance through manuscripts, reviews, and other responses preserved in print and visual culture. However, films made between 1895 and 1935 offer frequent, unexpected, and sometimes curiously skewed glimpses of the Victorian and Edwardian stage. This essay focuses on John H. Collins’s 1917 silent film adaptation of Blue Jeans, Joseph Arthur’s melodrama, popular from its New York debut in 1890. The melodrama is perhaps most famous for ‘the great sawmill scene’. This iconic scene, an early example of an episode in which a helpless victim is tied to a board approaching a huge buzz saw, turns a mundane setting into a terrifying site for suspense, violence, and attempted murder. Whilst the film made alterations and abridgements, the overall effect was to preserve the play’s distinctive features. Our essay shows how the stage version is preserved within Collins’s film adaptation so that the cinematic artefact gives unique access to the Victorian theatrical work. Films not only preserve Victorian forms in modern media and extend the reach of Victorian culture, but also open a new resource and methodology for understanding Victorian and Edwardian theatre.

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