Queen Victoria’s "Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands": Illustrated Print Culture and the Politics of Representation

QueenVictoria published her first Highland memoir in 1867, a sentimental narrativeof royal life dedicated to Prince Albert entitled Leaves from the Journal ofOur Life in the Highlands.  Inresponse to the popularity of this edition, the publisher Smith, Elder and Co.released a lavishly illustrated edition in late 1868 to capitalize on theChristmas gift book market.  It featuredseventy-nine illustrations after works by various artists andphotographers.  When scholars have turnedtheir attention to the Queen’s journal, they have produced rich andsophisticated discussions of gender, monarchy, and celebrity, especially asthey relate to royal domesticity in the Scottish Highlands.  Yet these readings have rarely extended tothe illustrated version of the text. This article will consider the conjunctionof monarchy, the Scottish Highlands, and illustrated print culture in theillustrated Leaves through two different types of images:  steel plate engravings after watercolors bythe artist Carl Haag and wood engravings after watercolor sketches of Highlandgames by the Swedish artist Egron Lundgren. Each positions the male Highlander as a central figure in constructingthe dynamic of royal family life, sovereignty and empire.  Catherine Hall and Sonya Rose have recentlyexplored what it meant for the British to be “at home with the Empire,” asking“Was it possible to be ‘at home’ with an empire and with the effects ofimperial power or was there something dangerous and damaging about such anentanglement?” In the course of this article I will argue that theseillustrations constructed the male Highlander as a site of familiarity withinthe bounds of the nation, while simultaneously signaling his otherness andproximity to the more far-flung reaches of empire.   As a result, Leavesis as much about empire as it is aboutdomesticity, even as it eschews direct references to current events of theperiod that directly threatened both.   

Mrs. Rockefeller’s Exquisite Corpse

The “exquisite corpse” in this title refers to a gift book presented to Mrs. Abby Aldrich Rockefeller in December 1931, which contains signed notes from Rockefeller’s domestic employees, friends, ministers, art dealers, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) employees, and also a signed painting by Diego Rivera. The book’s construction highlights the intersecting social networks and associations among a variety of religious, artistic, philanthropic, and domestic organizations and individuals that are more typically investigated as distinct or non-connecting. As such, the book invites an alternate reading of influences shaping MoMA’s earliest years. This interpretation takes inspiration from the surrealist games and conceits of ethnographic and artistic surrealism—an approach that is generatively suggested by the Tribute Book’s construction. Read in this way, I take the gift book to open up a range of associations that make possible modes of interpretation through which to consider the secular and the modern religious. I use the book’s intertextual qualities as an entry point into a new consideration of the presence and effects of liberal-protestant spiritual aesthetics in MOMA’s earliest years. I argue that such spiritual aesthetics shaped the secular museum’s curation, display, and interpretation of political artists including Rivera and European surrealists.

Walter Scott, Five Short Stories: The Dundee Edition

Five Short Stories brings together a diverse selection of Walter Scott’s shorter fictions produced over a five-year span late in his long career. First published within the three-volume novel Redgauntlet (1824), “Wandering Willie’s Tale” remains a staple of Gothic anthologies. Two Scottish tales, “The Highland Widow” and “The Two Drovers”, come from Chronicles of the Canongate (1827), Scott’s only official short story collection. Two other works intended for a second series of Chronicles, “My Aunt Margaret’s Mirror” and “The Tapestried Chamber”, eventually appeared in a fashionable gift-book, The Keepsake for 1829. A grisly murder and a journey into a hellish underworld; a drug-induced desertion followed by a military execution; a simmering rivalry leading to a homicide; bigamy exposed by a magic lantern show; and an ornate room furnished with the ghost of an evil aristocrat: these short stories amply showcase Scott’s darker imagination.

Walter Scott's Late Gothic Stories

While ‘Wandering Willie's Tale’, above all of Walter Scott's shorter fictions, has often been included in Gothic anthologies and period surveys, the apparently disposable pieces that appeared in The Keepsake for 1829, renegades from the novelist's failed Chronicles of the Canongate series, have received far less attention. Read in the unlikely context of a plush Christmas gift book, ‘My Aunt Margaret's Mirror’ and ‘The Tapestried Chamber’ repay an audience familiar with the conventions of a supernatural short story. But to keep readers interested, The Author of Waverley, writing at the end of a long and celebrated career in fiction, would need to employ some new gimmicks. As we shall see, the late stories are not literary cast-offs but recastings finely attuned to a bespoke word-and-image forum.

Toward A Political Ecology in Lydia Maria Child’s “Chocorua’s Curse”

“Chocorua's Curse,” Lydia Maria Child's retelling of a White Mountain legend, found its way into middle class Boston homes through its publication in the 1830 gift book, The Token, accompanied by an engraving based on a Thomas Cole painting. Child's short sketch contrasts with typical iterations of the tale—and with the several paintings of the dramatic pyramidal peak by Cole—by its inclusion of homes spaces, a female figure, and a sense of the landscape as a watershed and not merely the iconic mountain peak. In addition, using ideas about household economy, educational transmission, and sympathy, Child prefigures ways of writing about the ecological flow of energy and materials through systems that include human and nonhuman entities. With this reading, the poison intended for a “troublesome” fox is an essential part of the subsequent chain of revenge killings and doubles with the final curse on the waters. Using the trope of sympathetic transmission, I argue that Child anticipates ecological thinking through a gendered lens. Material and emotional energy move through human and nonhuman entities, and mindful consideration can perhaps thwart the disaster caused by the men who, as critics have noted, seem disengaged from larger social systems.