Exhibit:

Material Culture and the Victorian Novel: Objects, Places, and Historical Events

Preview of images

An ornate French chatelaine engraved with flowers A mother walks in the park with her children clipped to her chatelaine. A wife comforts her husband, who has just received notice of a death. David Copperfield and Dora Copperfield host a disastrous dinner party Mr. Pegotty returns from Australia to visit the happy couple--- David and Agnes Copperfield
Left: Charles M. Relyea, Mary Barton Frontispiece, 1907, The Victorian Web. Right: Chris Hammond, 'You won't even say you'll try and like me; will you, Mary?,' 1899, Cranford and Mary Barton. Unknown, Valentine, 1850s, The Victorian Web. William Lovett, The People's Charter, 1838, The British Library. The Illustrated London News, The Cotton Famine - Group of Mill Operatives at Manchester, 1862, The British Library. Jonathan King, Valentine, 1860-1880, Museum of London Collection. Edouard Rischgitz, Divorce Court, 1870, Hulton Archive. Ivor Symes, "'O Jem! Take me home.,'" 1905, Mary Barton.
Catherine Golden, "A Lady's and a Gentleman's lapdesk,“ from The Portable Writing Desk — Victorian Laptop, 2010, Victorian Web. David Harris, "A writing desk and dressing case combined, advertised in a Parkins & Gotto catalogue of the 1850s," in his Portable Writing Desks, 2008. William Makepeace Thackeray, "Miss Sharp in Her School-Room," in his Vanity Fair, 1848, 1861 woodcut scanned by Gerald Ajam, Victorian Web. Rawdon Opens Becky's Desk, Vanity Fair (2004), Starring Reese Witherspoon and James Purefoy
Frederick Sandys, "Margaret Oliphant," sketch, 1881, National Portrait Gallery
Hugh Thomson's "She is Tolerable" illustration from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice Hablot Knight Browne, Phiz's "I Make the Acquaintance of Miss Mowcher" illustration from Charles Dickens' David Copperfield S. G. Hulme Beaman's "The Features Seemed to Melt and Alter" illustration from Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
The Drunkard's Son on a convict ship en route to Australia. A convict is flogged on a triangle flogging structure David Copperfield is pictures aboard a docked ship bound for Australia, saying his goodbyes to the Peggottys and the Micawbers. Aboriginals using fire to hunt kangaroos

  

 

 Henry Treffey Dunn, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his Friend Theodore Watts-Dunton at Rossetti's home in Cheyne Walk, 1882, National Portrait Gallery .

 Material objects and historical events and places incorporated into the nineteenth-century British novel position the genre in a cultural moment. Our gallery includes objects, events, or places of importance to novels by William Thackeray, Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy. Victorian material objects--such as those on display in Rossetti's Cheyne Walk home in Chelsea in this 1882 painting by Henry Treffey Dunn--as well as historical events and places fill our virtual “cases” and root the nineteenth-century British novel in the material culture and history of the period.  

 

Images in this Exhibit

The Key to Being the Angel in the House: Victorian Womanhood in Dickens's "David Copperfield"
An ornate French chatelaine engraved with flowers A mother walks in the park with her children clipped to her chatelaine. A wife comforts her husband, who has just received notice of a death. David Copperfield and Dora Copperfield host a disastrous dinner party Mr. Pegotty returns from Australia to visit the happy couple--- David and Agnes Copperfield

The Victorian ideal of the "Angel in the House" comes from Coventry Patmore's popular poem by the same name (1854-62). A dedication to his wife, the poem praises a woman who is charming, graceful, sympathetic, self-sacrificing, and capable. Patmore fixes the idealized theme of Victorian womanhood, presenting these virtues as the feminine mission. But a woman's work is not solely to please her husband--- she does all of this because she wants to. She embraces the Victorian ideal and finds fulfillment through it. The chatelaine is the ultimate tool of the Victorian Angel, and Charles Dickens...
The Traveling, Malleable Valentine in Mary Barton: The Force of Love
Left: Charles M. Relyea, Mary Barton Frontispiece, 1907, The Victorian Web. Right: Chris Hammond, 'You won't even say you'll try and like me; will you, Mary?,' 1899, Cranford and Mary Barton. Unknown, Valentine, 1850s, The Victorian Web. William Lovett, The People's Charter, 1838, The British Library. The Illustrated London News, The Cotton Famine - Group of Mill Operatives at Manchester, 1862, The British Library. Jonathan King, Valentine, 1860-1880, Museum of London Collection. Edouard Rischgitz, Divorce Court, 1870, Hulton Archive. Ivor Symes, "'O Jem! Take me home.,'" 1905, Mary Barton.

The popularity of the Victorian valentine arose in the 1840s, following the reform of the Penny Post. James Beaton wrote a poem predicting the rise of posted valentines: “The letters in St. Valentine so vastly will amount, / Postmen may judge them by the lot, they won’t have time to count; / They must bring round spades and measures, to poor love-sick souls / Deliver them by bushels, the same as they do coals.” Victorian valentines were often handcrafted by men and women. There were different types of valentines, such as the flaming valentines which were strong declarations of love,...
Books within Books: Gendered Literary Allusions in The Mill on the Floss

 The Victorian era was host to an array of cultural shifts in literacy and publishing. As printing presses were standardized, books became cheaper and easier to create and distribute to the masses. Mandatory schooling rose as Victorian society began to value education more highly. George Eliot’s wrote her 1860 novel The Mill on the Floss at the peak of these developments, and protagonist Maggie Tulliver interacts with literature and longs for an education. Eliot represents Maggie’s passion for literature as incongruent with Victorian gender roles— she is constantly dissuaded from...
Gendered Objects in the Victorian Era and Vanity Fair: The Portable Writing Desk
Catherine Golden, "A Lady's and a Gentleman's lapdesk,“ from The Portable Writing Desk — Victorian Laptop, 2010, Victorian Web. David Harris, "A writing desk and dressing case combined, advertised in a Parkins & Gotto catalogue of the 1850s," in his Portable Writing Desks, 2008. William Makepeace Thackeray, "Miss Sharp in Her School-Room," in his Vanity Fair, 1848, 1861 woodcut scanned by Gerald Ajam, Victorian Web. Rawdon Opens Becky's Desk, Vanity Fair (2004), Starring Reese Witherspoon and James Purefoy

 At the turn of the Victorian era, manufacturing would experience a boom like none before. A well-running economy and huge technological advantages combined to create a culture that not only produced an unprecedented amount of goods but also had the excess fund to spend on things that weren't a necessity to live. The Victorian obsession with objects combined with other notions of proper culture, such as sex and gender, to create notable differences in the creation and usage of items, dividing them along gendered lines, perhaps none so much as the portable writing desk. Used by Victorian's...
Memory, Trauma, and Poverty: Child Labor in Charles Dickens's David Copperfield

The child laborer was often referred to as the slave of industrialized England. With hardly any agency or wisdom of their own, impoverished children were stripped from their childhoods and forced to work long hours in unsanitary conditions for low wages. Children could be found across the country working in mills, factories, and coal mines—transforming Europe into the continent we know today. Through language and imagery, Victorian authors across time and space allude to the poverty and poor living conditions that often pushed children into laboring positions to help families to...
The Railway in the Fiction of Elizabeth Gaskell, Margaret Oliphant, and Kate Chopin
Frederick Sandys, "Margaret Oliphant," sketch, 1881, National Portrait Gallery

"Since the invention of printing, no discovery has been made that has exercised so great a change and produced such remarkable and beneficial results to the whole human race as has the introduction of railways and that of steam carriages. By steam-locomotive power distance has been comparatively annihilated, and in conjunction with steam navigation, it has practically reduced the dimensions of the earth." --The Illustrated London News, October 1864. 

The railway boom of the 1840s had a major impact on Victorian life and fiction. The above article in The...
The Inevitability of Physical Impairment in the Nineteenth-Century Novel: The Evolution of Stigma in the Long Nineteenth Century
Hugh Thomson's "She is Tolerable" illustration from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice Hablot Knight Browne, Phiz's "I Make the Acquaintance of Miss Mowcher" illustration from Charles Dickens' David Copperfield S. G. Hulme Beaman's "The Features Seemed to Melt and Alter" illustration from Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Stigma, according to Heather Love, in her essay of the same name, is that “disapproval and disadvantage that attach[es] to people who are seen as different” (173). It metastasizes perceptions of impairment, transforming it (i.e. “body-mind” limitations) into disability (i.e. what elsewhere I have called society’s “myriad barriers to inclusivity”). Love details how “[o]nce a person is stigmatized, other qualities tend to be interpreted through the lens of this trait” (Clare xvi; “Towards A More Social Social Model”; 175). In this exhibit, I am interested in what I have termed “externalizing...
Fading from Collective Memory: The Battle of Waterloo and Its Historical Significance in Vanity Fair

The Battle of Waterloo was a major historical event that took place on June 18, 1815 in Waterloo, Belgium. Fought between Napoleon Bonaparte’s French army and a coalition led in joint efforts by the Duke of Wellington and Prussian Field Marshal Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher, the bloody battle was the culminating conflict of the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815), which saw millions of casualties among both soldiers and civilians. The death count was staggering, but today’s society has reduced the sheer impact of the battle to numbers and song lyrics; a once never-forgotten battle has faded from...
Dickens's Australia: Place of Exile and Emigration
The Drunkard's Son on a convict ship en route to Australia. A convict is flogged on a triangle flogging structure David Copperfield is pictures aboard a docked ship bound for Australia, saying his goodbyes to the Peggottys and the Micawbers. Aboriginals using fire to hunt kangaroos

Since ancient European times, the term "terra australis incognita” (the unknown southern land) held in it the prospect of adventure, wealth, and glory. Theorized to be a large mass of land in the southern hemisphere to balance out the land in the north, Australia was idealized for the promise of gold and commercial riches. In 1768, after centuries of unsuccessful voyages, Captain James Cook landed on the eastern coast of Australia, claiming the continent for Britain. In a period of increasing criminal activity and quickly depleting prison system resources back home, Britain was forced to...
Jos Sedley the Nabob: Colonization of India within Thackeray's Vanity Fair

Description: From the early 15th century to the late 19th century, the East India Trading Company played a large role in Britain’s economy and society. Many people were able to become wealthy by going to India, attaining wealth by trading and amassing goods that could be purchased inexpensively and sold at a high price back in Britain. There were so many men going to India to seek their fortune that they soon made up a large portion of British society , emphasizing the importance of consumer culture during this time. Jos Sedley in William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair works as a...
Stonehenge, British Heritage, and Tess of the D'Urbervilles

Stonehenge is a Megalithic structure and English Heritage site constructed between 3000 and 2000 BC by the Neolithic inhabitants of Southwest England. The exact purpose of these stones has remained unknown in the millennia since its construction, and it has occupied the imagination of the English for just as long. The stone structure appears in Arthurian legend as a memorial to the fallen soldiers of King Ambrosias. According to Geoffrey of Monmouth's history of England, Merlin constructed the monument for those slaughtered in Salisbury Plain by the Saxons. This was considered fact through...