STARVATION IN VICTORIAN CHRISTMAS FICTION

It may seem that Christmas literature, with its glorified descriptions of overflowing tables and conviviality, has no place in a discussion of that other extreme, starvation. However, much of the nineteenth-century literature containing narratives of Christmas speaks directly to national fears of famine. Starvation entered the print matter of Christmas first as part of a social argument and later as a concern for the abiding national identity that had become intertwined with Christmas itself and, more symbolically, Christmas fare. Writers including Charles Dickens, Benjamin Farjeon, Augustus and Henry Mayhew, the creators of Punch, and Mary Elizabeth Braddon authored Christmas pieces that showcase literary reactions to the developing issues of hunger throughout their century. This essay offers an overview of the treatment of starvation in the Christmas literature of the nineteenth century.

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Shiny Black and Layers of White: Japanned Papier Mâché, Race and the British Empire

Journal of Design History ◽

10.1093/jdh/epaa042 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Gavi Levy Haskell

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

National Identity ◽

British Empire ◽

East Asian ◽

Nineteenth Century Literature ◽

British Industry ◽

Black Surface ◽

Century Literature ◽

Great Exhibition

Abstract Race, class and empire in nineteenth-century England inflected understandings of japanned papier mâché, influencing both its brief popularity and its abrupt demise in the 1860s. Although the material was rarely used as an explicit signifier in nineteenth-century literature or theory, or indeed mentioned at all, its inclusion in the Great Exhibition suggests its cultural and industrial centrality. This article proposes that this disparity results not from an absence of meaning, but from too great a complexity and too clear a set of implications. As an imitation of an East Asian form, japanned papier mâché represented an Orientalizing fantasy; as a shiny black surface, japanned papier mâché tapped into both desires and anxieties surrounding racial Blackness; as a backdrop for depictions of recognizably British landscapes and architecture; and as a distinctively British industry, japanned papier mâché offered a kind of national identity-fashioning. Tying a ubiquitous but understudied material of the English mid-nineteenth century to broader histories of the British empire, this article demonstrates the tidy encapsulation of the fraught and complex 1850s and 1860s into the materiality, forms and failure of japanned papier mâché.

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The Victorian Baby in Print

10.1093/oso/9780198858010.001.0001 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Tamara S. Wagner

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Charles Dickens ◽

Wilkie Collins ◽

Infant Care ◽

Mary Elizabeth Braddon ◽

Nineteenth Century Literature ◽

Victorian Britain ◽

Close Analysis ◽

Changing Roles ◽

Charlotte Yonge

The Victorian Baby in Print: Infancy, Infant Care, and Nineteenth-Century Popular Culture explores the representation of babyhood in Victorian Britain. The first study to focus exclusively on the baby in nineteenth-century literature and culture, this critical analysis discusses the changing roles of an iconic figure. A close look at the wide-ranging portrayal of infants and infant care not only reveals how divergent and often contradictory Victorian attitudes to infancy really were, but also prompts us to revise persistent clichés surrounding the literary baby that emerged or were consolidated at the time, and which are largely still with us. Drawing on a variety of texts, including novels by Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Mrs Henry Wood, and Charlotte Yonge, as well as parenting magazines of the time, childrearing manuals, and advertisements, this study analyses how their representations of infancy and infant care utilised and shaped an iconography that has become definitional of the Victorian age itself. The familiar clichés surrounding the Victorian baby have had a lasting impact on the way we see both the Victorians and babies, and a close analysis might also prompt a self-critical reconsideration of the still burgeoning market for infant care advice today.

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