Literature

Finding a Refuge for the Victorian Illustrated Book in the COVE

Submitted by Catherine Golden on

Much of the joy of teaching a course I designed on “The Victorian Illustrated Book” comes from introducing students to the rare book room at Skidmore College.  Even senior English majors are often surprised to discover that Special Collections exists at a small liberal arts college.  In the rare book room, we study physical books, serials, and prints in the forms they appeared to the Victorians when they were first issued, though some have been rebound or put in archival boxes for safe handling.

The City of the Jugglers

Submitted by David Rettenmaier on
January, 2021

Set in the aftermath of Chartism, the European revolutions of 1848, and the bursting of the railway bubble, William North’s The City of the Jugglers; or, Free-Trade in Souls: A Romance of the “Golden” Age (H. J, Gibbs, 1850) is constructed around the rise and fall of an audacious commercial speculation in human souls, and, with it, England’s reactionary social order.  Punctuated by Carlylean statements of moral outrage, self-regarding authorial footnotes, diverting speculations on matters ranging from monetary policy to the state of modern cookery, repeated panegyrics on the versatile excellence of men-of-letters, and at least three doubled secondary plot lines, the book repeatedly transgresses and thereby calls attention to the formal conventions of the Victorian novel.  This edition of The City of the Jugglers seeks to make this deliberately problematic text both available and accessible to a twenty-first-century audience of students and scholars.  Freed from the market that it excoriates, hopefully North’s self-described “mythical history, magnetic revelation, dream of poetic vanity, incomprehensible cartoon, or whatever else it turn out to be in the eyes of men or angels” can speak to a new generation of “defenders of the people, which we, and we only, represent, in this age of transitions.”

Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories

Submitted by David Rettenmaier on

Oscar Wilde’s 1891 Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories assembles four short stories published separately in 1887. These amusing tales are semi-comic yet generically complex, and they exemplify elements of the aesthetic theory that Wilde collected in the volume published as Intentions in 1891. 

Tags: 

"The Phonograph’s Salutation"

Submitted by David Rettenmaier on

“The Phonograph’s Salutation” (1888, 1891), a poem written and recited onto record by Horatio Nelson Powers, was first “published” as an audio recording onto a wax cylinder in 1888, with the print text of the poem included on a pamphlet that was made to accompany the cylinder. The cylinder and accompanying print version were then sent across the Atlantic Ocean from Orange, New Jersey, where the recording was made, to London, England, where it was used to promote the capacities of Edison’s new perfected phonograph as a means of creating audible correspondence, or, phonograms. 

Pages

Subscribe to RSS - Literature