scholarly journals MR AND MRS PUNCH IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND

2006 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 1055-1082 ◽  
Author(s):  
ROSALIND CRONE
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Victorian England ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Masculinity And Femininity ◽  
Puppet Show ◽  
Violent Relationship ◽  
Central Characters ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Attitudes Towards Marriage

This article examines the changes and continuities in the depiction of the violent relationship between the popular glove-puppets, Punch and Judy, over the course of the nineteenth century. While the puppet show emerged as a low-brow street entertainment during the first decades of the nineteenth century, by 1850 it had been hijacked by the middle and upper classes, and began to appear with increasing frequency in fashionable drawing rooms. At the same time, the relationship between the two central characters, Punch and Judy, was substantially modified. On the streets, during the first half of the century, the Punches’ marriage had both reflected the continuing popularity of the early modern theme of the ‘struggle for the breeches’ and encapsulated familial tensions that resulted from the pressures of industrialization and urbanization. However, from 1850 the middle classes attempted to reshape the relationship into a moral tale in order to teach their children valuable lessons about marital behaviour. Yet, at the same time, the maintenance of violence in the portrayal of the Punches’ conjugal life exposed crucial patterns of continuity in attitudes towards marriage, masculinity, and femininity in Victorian England.

“Fraud, Fun, and Feeling”: Slavery, Industrialism, and the Mother-Machine in Frances Trollope's Fiction

2020 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 519-550
Author(s):  
Lucy Sheehan
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Victorian England ◽  
Emotional Life ◽  
Maternal Body ◽  
Experience Of Care ◽  
Frances Trollope ◽  
Violent Relationship ◽  
Industrial Novels

For Frances Trollope, the nineteenth century was defined by what she perceives to be a pervasive mechanization of emotional life, a phenomenon similar to what Tamara Ketabgian has recently described as the “industrialization of affect” in this period. At the center of this phenomenon, for Trollope, is the disquieting specter of the mother-machine, a figure in whom the processes of mechanical production and maternal reproduction collide. The figure originates, in Trollope's fiction, in the character Juno, an enslaved woman whose alienation from her children under slavery serves as a major plot point in her groundbreaking 1836 antislavery novel The Life and Adventures of Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw; or Scenes on the Mississippi. That figure is then reworked in the violent relationship between children and machines Trollope would go on to depict in her 1839–40 novel, The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy, one of the first industrial novels published in Victorian England. In these early fictions, Trollope documents what she perceives to be the mechanization of the maternal body under, alternately, slavery and industrialism, and its consequences for both the work and experience of care under nineteenth-century capitalism in its varied forms.

“THE MOST BEAUTIFUL MURDER”: THE TRANSGRESSIVE AESTHETICS OF MURDER IN VICTORIAN STREET BALLADS

2000 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-37
Author(s):  
Ellen L. O’Brien
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Popular Press ◽  
Victorian England ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Collective Resistance ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
Cultural Texts ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Popular Texts

To say that this common [criminal] fate was described in the popular press and commented on simply as a piece of police news is, indeed, to fall short of the facts. To say that it was sung and balladed would be more correct; it was expressed in a form quite other than that of the modern press, in a language which one could certainly describe as that of fiction rather than reality, once we have discovered that there is such a thing as a reality of fiction.—Louis Chevalier, Laboring Classes and Dangerous ClassesSPEAKING OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE, Louis Chevalier traces the bourgeoisie’s elision of the working classes with the criminal classes, in which crime becomes either the representation of working class “failure” or “revenge” (396). Chevalier argues that working- class texts “recorded” their acquiescence to and acceptance of “a genuine fraternity of [criminal] fate” when they “described and celebrated [it] in verse” (397). Though a community of fate might inspire collective resistance, popular poetry and ballads, he confirms, reproduced metonymic connections between criminal and worker when “their pity went out to embrace dangerous classes and laboring classes alike. . . . One might almost say [they proclaimed these characteristics] in an identical poetic strain, so strongly was this community of feeling brought out in the relationship between the favorite subjects of working-class songs and the criminal themes of the street ballads, in almost the same words, meters, and tunes” (396) Acquiescence to or reiteration of worker/criminal equations established itself in workers’ views of themselves as “a different, alien and hostile society” (398) in literature that served as an “involuntary and ‘passive’ recording and communication of them” (395). Though I am investigating Victorian England, not nineteenth-century France, and though I regard the street ballads as popular texts which record resistance, not acquiescence, Chevalier’s work usefully articulates the predicament of class-based ideologies about worker and criminal which functioned similarly in Victorian England. More importantly, Chevalier acknowledges the complexity of street ballads as cultural texts..

Wild Actors and Wrathful Deities

2014 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-32
Author(s):  
Kevin Bond
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Theatrical Culture

This paper examines the relationship between the celebrated kabuki guild of Ichikawa Danjūrō actors and the popular Narita Fudō deity cult in the capital of Edo in early modern (seventeenth to nineteenth century) Japan. While the actors’ worship of the cult and their personifications of the deity on-stage have been well documented by scholarship, less known is how this patronage resulted in the transformation of the deity’s character and worship among commoner audiences. By tracing the Danjūrō–Narita Fudō connection among popular media of the day, this paper argues that the guild’s artistic incorporation of the deity did not merely represent a religio-commercial collaboration, but the creation of a uniquely contemporary deity specific to Edo’s theatrical culture.

The Painting (Composition)

2021 ◽  
pp. 149-170
Author(s):  
Martin Eisner
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Tristram Shandy ◽  
Word And Image ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
De Vulgari Eloquentia

This chapter scrutinizes the challenges editors confronted in their typographical composition of Dante’s poem with two beginnings. Should the first beginning be followed by the rest of the poem and then the second beginning or both beginnings and then remaining verses? The various solutions proposed in the early printed editions, nineteenth-century translations, and early modern manuscripts, show the complexity of Dante’s own poetic strategy in this poem on the anniversary of Beatrice’s death, which aims to defeat time and overcome Beatrice’s death by adding more time. Exploring the persistence of this issue in the most recent editions, the chapter considers the poem in light of Dante’s decision to represent himself in the prose as painting an angel. Connecting this remark to Dante’s reflections on angels and representation in the De vulgari eloquentia and the Commedia, this chapter examines Dante’s thinking about the materiality of texts and the relationship between word and image in the context of a larger tradition that stretches from Augustine and Petrarch to Sterne’s Tristram Shandy.

scholarly journals The Pig or the Stye: Drink and Poverty in Late Victorian England

1973 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 380-395 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. B. Brown
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Victorian England ◽  
Social Controversy ◽  
Clear Sign ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
Political Alignment ◽  
The Relationship

In the last third of the nineteenth century, the relationship of poverty and drunkenness became a topic of bitter social controversy. The debate often had hopelessly polarized positions, being reduced in crudest form to a disagreement over whether poverty caused intemperance or the reverse. The very emotionalism and repetition of the argument, while disappointing to the logician, was a clear sign of the deep passions that the question invoked. While contributors to this debate stretched across the spectrum of religious and political alignment, the controversy was essentially the creature of the left. As will be argued, the question of self-inflicted poverty through drunkenness excited the Liberal and emergent socialist-labour parties far more than it did the Conservative-Unionist sector.

scholarly journals Ruthenian Protestants of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and their relationship with Orthodoxy, 1569–1767

2007 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-62
Author(s):  
Andrej Kotljarchuk
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Ethnic Identity ◽  
Cultural Identity ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Eastern Europe ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
Grand Duchy Of Lithuania ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Grand Duchy

In the nineteenth century when the process of the formation of modern ethnic identity in Eastern Europe started, Belarus lost its educated strata, the Ruthenian elite, the potential leadership of this movement. That happened for a number of reasons. Among them, there was the success of the Counter-Reformation over Protestantism and Orthodoxy in Belarus and Lithuania. After 1667 Catholicism became the sign of political loyalty to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. As a result, step by step the Ruthenian nobility and the upper class of townspeople of Orthodox and Protestant faiths adopted Polish religious and cultural identity under the formula ‘gente ruthenus, natione polonus.’ Very little has been written about the ethnic Ruthenian nobility of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, especially its Protestant group. The aim of this article is to present an overview of the relationship between the early modern Protestant and Orthodox parts of the Ruthenian elite and their correlated identity.

Pocket borough to county borough: power relations, elites and politics in nineteenth-century Grimsby

Urban History ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 481-503 ◽  
Author(s):  
P.J. SHINNER
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
Early Stage ◽  
Urban Context ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Leading Role ◽  
The Relationship

ABSTRACTThis article considers the relationship between landed culture and the emergent middle classes in a rapidly expanding urban context substantially removed from the more familiar examples. The port of Grimsby expanded rapidly in the second half of the nineteenth century, displaying many facets in common with other industrial centres and boasting a substantial middle-class presence from a relatively early stage. At the same time the extent to which Grimsby's middle classes assumed a leading role in the town's development is questionable and subject to qualification.

Imagining the Ancient Britons: Victorian Adventures in Wye-Land

2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-43
Author(s):  
Rebecca Welshman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Human Activity ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Natural Phenomena ◽  
Periodical Press ◽  
Victorian England ◽  
British Identity ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Relationship

Depicted in the mid to late nineteenth-century periodical press as wild, remote, and ‘intensely national’, Wales was perceived as a place of quiet mystery, geographically and socially distinct from the industrialisation of Victorian England. The borderland territory of the Wye Valley – what the Victorian journalist and historian, Barbara Hutton, called ‘Wye-Land’ – has been inhabited for over 12,000 years and preserves an ancient British identity in its rich archaeological landscapes. Developments in mid Victorian archaeology and anthropology precipitated a rise in the number of prehistoric excavations, which popularised knowledge of how ancient Britons lived and died. Drawing from articles in the late Victorian periodical press, and the activities of the Cardiff Naturalist's Society in the 1870s, which included the study of geology, botany and archaeology, this paper suggests that the observation of natural phenomena in the late nineteenth century was closely associated with the study of past human societies. I identify the changing interpretations of prehistoric sites – from early Victorian notions of barbarous druids, to more informed and sensitive appreciations of ancient British societies, whose sympathetic relation to the landscape fostered imaginative connections between late Victorians and their ancestors. This transition away from perceptions of being wholly distinct from prehistoric activity, shaped late Victorian pastoral journalism and encouraged a more integrated vision of the relationship between past and present human activity in the region.

Disease and Civilization: A Scottish Atlantic Network of Physicians in the Enlightenment

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-216
Author(s):  
Sarah Irving-Stonebraker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Historical Progress ◽  
Practice Of Medicine ◽  
Benjamin Rush ◽  
American Physician ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
A Current

Through an examination of the extensive papers, manuscripts and correspondence of American physician Benjamin Rush and his friends, this article argues that it is possible to map a network of Scottish-trained physicians in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Atlantic world. These physicians, whose members included Benjamin Rush, John Redman, John Morgan, Adam Kuhn, and others, not only brought the Edinburgh model for medical pedagogy across the Atlantic, but also disseminated Scottish stadial theories of development, which they applied to their study of the natural history and medical practices of Native Americans and slaves. In doing so, these physicians developed theories about the relationship between civilization, historical progress and the practice of medicine. Exploring this network deepens our understanding of the transnational intellectual geography of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century British World. This article develops, in relation to Scotland, a current strand of scholarship that maps the colonial and global contexts of Enlightenment thought.

The Romantics in Alternate History from Hawthorne to Clarke: Generic Edges and the Counterfactual Turn

Romanticism ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-215
Author(s):  
Alex Broadhead
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Alternate History ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Critical Interest

In 2009, Damian Walford Davies called for a counterfactual turn in Romantic studies, a move reflective of a wider growth of critical interest in the relationship between Romanticism and counterfactual historiography. In contrast to these more recent developments, the lives of the Romantics have provided a consistent source of speculation for authors of popular alternate history since the nineteenth century. Yet the aims of alternate history as a genre differ markedly from those of its more scholarly cousin, counterfactual historiography. How, then, might such works fit in to the proposed counterfactual turn? This article makes a case for the critical as well as the creative value of alternate histories featuring the Romantics. By exploring how these narratives differ from works of counterfactual historiography, it seeks to explain why the Romantics continue to inspire authors of alternate history and to illuminate the forking paths that Davies's counterfactual turn might take.

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