I think Undisciplining Victorian Studies is an important but difficult task. The push to decolonize Academia has been ongoing for much longer than this year’s BLM movement. My experience in Ryerson English has been tinged by an attempt at decolonization. Many of my profs have made a strong effort to incorporate postcolonial, Indigenous, and subaltern writers and artists into their syllabi. I have read much less of the American and British classics than I’m sure I would have read at UofT. But there is always more work to be done.

The sexual dynamics of Salome and its accompanying illustration was a main theme across all our discussions this week. More specifically, female sexuality as dominating was discussed in a few of the presentations. Visually, we see this dynamic in Beardsley’s illustration through the Salome being positioned higher than male characters in the same illustration. This was something I noticed as I was analyzing “The Eyes of Herod” for my Research Question assignment, but it was fascinating to notice that this is a common motif throughout the illustrations.

I found the process of curation an interesting exercise because it challenged us to look at texts in the context of their production rather than their textual content. This is, for the most part, the opposite of what we have been trained to do as English students. It was nonetheless interesting to analyze a text in the context of its production: its history, its publishers, its editors, etc.

A point of interest for me this week was learning more about the historical context Dickens was writing in. Learning more about the material conditions of the Victorian working poor during the 1840s added a new layer of appreciation for the text. References to the “Poor Law” and the “Treadmill” in the first stave completely went over my head in my initial reading. It is clear to me now that Dickens was thinking about the conditions of working class people as he was writing A Christmas Carol, but also had a keen sense of his middle class audience.

What has intrigued and surprised me most about this course so far is the existence of an online database like COVE itself. It seems brilliant to me that that the minds behind the body scholarship on a pre-digital era have fully embraced the digital in this way. To me, COVE demonstrates not only the importance of digital archives for the way it makes the obscure accessible (albeit for a small fee), but also for the way it harnesses the tools of the internet to enhance the scholarship being done.