The Nineteenth Century: Victorian Period

The New Man was a crucial topic of discussion and a continual preoccupation in late-Victorian feminist writing, precisely because he was more often a wished-for presence than an actual one. Nevertheless, creators of neo-Victorian fiction and film repeatedly project him backwards onto the screen of literary history, representing him as having in fact existed in the Victorian age as a complement to the New Woman. What is at stake in retrospectively situating the New Man – or, as I will call him, the ‘Neo-Man’ – in the nineteenth century, through historical fiction? If one impulse behind fictional returns to the Victorian period is nostalgia, then what explains this nostalgia for The Man Who Never Was? This essay will suggest that neo-Victorian works have a didactic interest in transforming present-day readers, especially men, through depictions of the Neo-Man, which broaden the audience's feminist sympathies, queer its notions of gender relations, and alter its definition of masculinity.

Download Full-text

Introduction

10.1093/oso/9780198724247.003.0001 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Rowan Strong

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Historical Context ◽

Victorian Period ◽

British Colonies ◽

Christian Society

The Introduction looks at the historical context of British and Irish Christianity in the 1840s when the Anglican emigrant chaplaincy began. It also looks at conclusions of historians examining British and Irish emigration in the nineteenth century. Scholars have known for many years that the Victorian period in Britain was one of massive religiosity. Yet, when historians describe emigrants from this highly Christian society arriving in British colonies, the settlers are often described as generally religiously indifferent, unchurched, and even hostile to religion. On this basis it becomes difficult to understand how so many churches were built by British colonists in Australia and other settler colonies; how colonial denominations became established so quickly and effectively; and how sectarianism began, let alone flourished. Finally, this Introduction provides a discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of the groups of sources that have been used in this study.

Download Full-text

Insomnia and the late nineteenth-century insomniac: the case of Albert Kimball

Interface Focus ◽

10.1098/rsfs.2019.0074 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 10 (3) ◽

pp. 20190074 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Matthew Beaumont

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Sleep Problems ◽

Urban Society ◽

Late Nineteenth Century ◽

The Enlightenment ◽

Victorian Period ◽

The Usa ◽

History Of ◽

Late Nineteenth ◽

The Individual

This article explores the emergence, in late nineteenth-century Britain and the USA, of the ‘insomniac’ as a distinct pathological and social archetype. Sleeplessness has of course been a human problem for millennia, but only since the late-Victorian period has there been a specific diagnostic name for the individual who suffers chronically from insufficient sleep. The introductory section of the article, which notes the current panic about sleep problems, offers a brief sketch of the history of sleeplessness, acknowledging the transhistorical nature of this condition but also pointing to the appearance, during the period of the Enlightenment, of the term ‘insomnia’ itself. The second section makes more specific historical claims about the rise of insomnia in the accelerating conditions of everyday life in urban society at the end of the nineteenth century. It traces the rise of the insomniac as such, especially in the context of medical debates about ‘neurasthenia’, as someone whose identity is constitutively defined by their inability to sleep. The third section, tightening the focus of the article, goes on to reconstruct the biography of one exemplary late nineteenth-century insomniac, the American dentist Albert Kimball, in order to illustrate the claim that insomnia was one of the pre-eminent symptoms of a certain crisis in industrial and metropolitan modernity as this social condition was lived by individuals at the fin de siècle .

Download Full-text

The Changing Faces of the Byronic Hero in Middlemarch and North and South

Romanticism ◽

10.3366/e1354991x0800007x ◽

2008 ◽

Vol 14 (1) ◽

pp. 25-35 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

SARAH WOOTTON

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Women Writers ◽

Cultural Phenomenon ◽

Victorian Period ◽

Byronic Hero ◽

Nineteenth Century Novels ◽

North And South

Almost two hundred years after the publication of the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, the Byronic hero remains, as Andrew Elfenbein argues, an ‘unprecedented cultural phenomenon’.1 This essay is not concerned with the more direct descendants of the Byronic hero (Rochester and Heathcliff, for example); rather, I shall be focusing on the less immediately obvious, and in some respects more complex, reincarnations of the Byronic hero in two nineteenth-century novels, George Eliot's Middlemarch and Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South. Establishing previously neglected connections between these authors and the figure of the Byronic hero not only opens new avenues of debate in relation to these novels, but also permits a reassessment of the extent and significance of Byron's influence in the Victorian period. The following questions will be addressed: first, why does a Byronic presence feature so prominently in the work of nineteenth-century women writers; second, what is distinctive about Eliot and Gaskell's respective treatments of this figure; and, third, how is the Byronic hero subsequently reinvented, and to what effect, in modern screen adaptations of their work?

Download Full-text

State Intervention in Mid-Nineteenth Century Britain: Fact or Fiction?

Journal of British Studies ◽

10.1086/385811 ◽

1983 ◽

Vol 23 (1) ◽

pp. 63-83 ◽

Cited By ~ 12

Author(s):

P.W.J. Bartrip

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Public Opinion ◽

State Intervention ◽

State Regulation ◽

Individual Freedom ◽

The Third ◽

The People ◽

Victorian Period ◽

Government Interference ◽

Laissez Faire

The question of the degree of state intervention in nineteenth-century Britain has interested generations of scholars since the beginning of the present century. Did mid-nineteenth century England constitute an “age of laissez-faire” which gave way to an “age of collectivism,” or did an “age of mercantalism” merge into one of state regulation during which process, even in the early and mid-Victorian period, the state exercised considerable control over the day-to-day lives of its citizens? These are two of the questions over which there has been extended debate.The term laissez-faire has been employed in a variety of ways by different writers, by no means all of whom have troubled to define their understanding of the expression. Recently Professor Perkin has argued that during the nineteenth century two distinct meanings were attributed to it (and seven to the related, though antithetical, concept, collectivism!). For the purposes of this paper the term is taken to mean the philosophy, policy and, above all, the practice of minimal government interference in the economy.The most influential case for an “age of laissez-faire” was presented by Dicey in Law and Public Opinion. In this Dicey identified three overlapping legislative phases: Quiescence (1800-1830), Individualism (1825-1870), and Collectivism (1865-1900). The first consisted of an absence of legislation, the second of “constant” parliamentary activity to abolish restraints on individual freedom and the third of state intervention “for the purpose of conferring benefit upon the mass of the people” at the expense of some loss of individual freedom.

Download Full-text

The Courtown Land Agents and Transnational Estate Management, 1850–1900

The Land Agent ◽

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474438865.003.0006 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 93-108

Author(s):

Rachel Murphy

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Financial Situation ◽

Management Structure ◽

Victorian Period ◽

Estate Management

The nature of estate agencies across the four nations during the nineteenth century varied depending on the size and location of the estate, and the financial situation of the landlord. In short, just as estates were not homogenous, neither were the agencies that managed them. This chapter considers the management structure of a transnational estate during the second half of the nineteenth century, using the Courtown estate as a case study. It examines the roles of the agents, sub-agents and bailiffs employed on the estate during this period. It is hoped that the study will enable comparison with other estates within the four nations, leading to a deeper understanding of the role of the land agent during the Victorian period.

Download Full-text