Traditions and Transformations

Modernist, feminist, experimental: the terms we now most associate with Virginia Woolf all presuppose a break with conventions and a rejection of the status quo in art and power relations. Yet all her life, Virginia Woolf kept returning in memory to her childhood home, to the crowded Victorian family in which she was raised, where boys went to the best schools that Sir Leslie Stephen could afford, and girls, however clever or gifted, were shaped for charitable work, for motherhood, for marriage to prominent men. This obsessive turning back is a kind of pained nostalgia: a lament, a grievance, a comfort—and the engine of even her most avant-garde work. This chapter explores the traditions and assumptions of that potent childhood world, in part through the prism of three conservative female role models her mother, Julia Stephen, chose for her daughters: Mrs. Humphry Ward, Octavia Hill, and Florence Nightingale.

Octavia Hill y sus aportes en el origen de Trabajo Social en la Inglaterra del siglo xix

En este artículo se hace un análisis del origen del Trabajo Social desde la perspectiva de género, haciendo énfasis en los aportes de Octavia Hill como pionera del Trabajo Social, a partir de su intervención social ante la pobreza y la carencia de vivienda y espacios dignos para las personas más vulnerables de Londres a mediados del siglo xix. Además, se destacan sus concepciones teóricas y las principales corrientes epistemológicas, tradicionales y emergentes que guiaron su quehacer profesional y al Trabajo Social, en general.

Paperwork and Philanthropy: Dickens’s Involvement in Metropolitan Improvement

This chapter analyses Dickensian afterlives in nineteenth-century philanthropic works alongside an investigation of Dickens’s personal involvement in a scheme to improve London’s provision of housing stock for the East End poor. Dickens collaborated with a number of his social network on this project, including Angela Burdett Coutts and Dr Thomas Southwood Smith. His chief contributions were bureaucratic, and, contemporaneously with this work, he explored tensions between the effectiveness and ineffectiveness of paperwork in Bleak House. Thus, this chapter suggests that Dickens’s practical and administrative involvement in charity work informed his imaginative representation of the utility and futility of paperwork, and how he conceptualised the effectiveness of different forms of writing. Dickens famously contended for pet causes in his fiction, but the various ways in which Dickens’s works were appropriated by other people, and recontextualised to promote or to criticise philanthropic projects, reveal that his writing was not always useful in the sense that he imagined. Indeed, the instrumentality of Dickens’s fiction to effect charitable projects was often indirect. For example, philanthropists, including Mary Carpenter and Octavia Hill, curated literary afterlives to enhance the effectiveness of their arguments in published treatises, even though the novels are not always relevant to their causes.