'I Have Every Reason to Love England': Black (neo)Victorianism and Transatlantic Fluidity in Neo-Victorian Fiction

Within neo-Victorianism, or contemporary fiction which rewrites the Victorian age, Marie-Lousie Kohlhe has pointed out a critical “reluctance to engage head-on in cross-cultural comparisons, which seem essential in order to get fully to grips with exactly how cultural memory of the nineteenth century is mediated and shaped by a genre that is hardly exclusively ‘British’ in any self-contained sense” (Kohlke 2009, 255). Setting off from that premise, I tackle the neo-Victorian genre in its global dimension by focusing on the transoceanic links between Antebellum America and Victorian Britain as it is exhibited in two postcolonial neo-Victorian novels, namely Belinda Starling's The Journal of Dora Damage (2007) and Nora Hague's Letters from an Age of Reason (2001), both of them dealing with African Americans crossing the Atlantic ocean towards Victorian Britain. These texts provide a remediation on significant loopholes in Victorian literature, namely the absence of race as an explicit subject in general and the under-representation of interracial love affairs in particular. Similarly, these neo-Victorian texts provide imaginative acts of fictional recovery coalescing with historical reconstructions on the growing presence of African Americans in Victorian Britain which, according to Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, feature as a gap in the historiography of Black British history (Holbrook Gerzina 2003, 5). The transatlantic interplay between African Americans and nineteenth-century Britain, or “Black America’s romance with Victorian Britain” (Dickerson 2008, 4) was not free from contradictions, though, given that African Americans were then appealing to a country which at the time was setting the foundations for late-Victorian scientific racism, a project which secured the British Empire’s subjugation of non-white races and provided the basis for modern-day racism (Brantlinger 2011, 6-7). The transatlantic fluidity between Black America and Victorian Britain reveals a double drive, a conduit for mutual influence which finds resonance in the recovery of the Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy’s term for the hybrid, fractal and transcultural circulation of subjects and ideas across the Atlantic ocean as a result of the slave trade which unearths black subjects as historical agents with an intellectual history (Gilroy 1993, 4-6). In the novels under analysis, the Atlantic ocean comes to stand for a liquid conduit facilitating both the reconstruction of broken transatlantic family ties and the appropriation of European radical discourses in order to support African-American abolitionism. Ultimately, I contend that for the African-American characters in the texts under scrutiny, Victorianism represents a model of respectability, democracy and modernity, the very values of citizenship that black slaves were denied by the American slave system. The inherent contradictions of associating the Victorian age, the epitome of imperialism and colonial domination, with the liberation of African-American slaves only reveals the complexities of the term ‘Victorianism’ and what it has meant to past and present generations.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

'Not worse than other girls': the convent-based rehabilitation of fallen women in Victorian Britain

Focuses on the convent-based rehabilitation of fallen women in Victorian Britain. Penitentiaries for sexually and morally outcast females; Cultural issues; Description of penitentiary work; Sexually transgressive penitents; Cases; Category of fallen women; Typical life of a fallen servant

Cultural Haunting and the Trace of the Colonial Other in Arthur Conan Doyle's Short Fiction

In Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain (2002), Susheila Nasta argues that “the arrival in Britain of several generations of black and Asian 'immigrants' in the period following decolonization and Independence was not simply the residue of the end of Empire, it was the culmination of a long but hidden relationship, a relationship that has persistently been written out of the nation's political, cultural and literary histories” (Nasta 3). In light of this statement, this paper aims at tracing the presence of the Colonial Other in late-Victorian culture via a reading of Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Black Doctor” (1898) and “The Brown Hand” (1899). These under-read tales provide a constructive counterpoint to widespread and far more popular late-Victorian narrations of reverse colonization such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) or Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897), which exemplify the “brutally abjected, demonized or stereotyped” treatment of race in nineteenth-century English literature (Daileader 75). This paper is informed by literary-historical excavations into black British history such as Antoinette Burton's At the Heart of Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter (1998), Rozina Visram's Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History (2002) and Peter Fryer's Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (1984). Additionally, I draw upon Kathleen Brogan's concept of 'cultural haunting', in which “the individual's or family's haunting clearly reflects the crisis of a larger social group”, to delve into issues of ethnicity, race and exoticism out of “a poorly documented, partially erased cultural history” (Brogan 2). Ultimately, I argue that, although the tales under analysis must necessarily be framed within Western representation of the Colonial Other and they evince traces of Edward Said’s model of Orientalism, they conversely provide a more benign portrayal of the presence of diasporic collectives on Victorian Britain, more aimed at representing issues of integration, transculturation and diaspora rather than contamination and invasion. Key words: cultural haunting, colonial Other, Conan Doyle References: Burton, Antoinette. At the Heart of Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter. Berkeley and London: U of California P, 1998. Brogan, Kathleen. Cultural Haunting. Ghosts and Ethnicity in Recent American Literature. Charlottesville and London: U of Virginia P, 1998. Conan Doyle, Arthur. “The Black Doctor.” 1898. Tales of Terror and Mystery. By Conan Doyle. Ohio: Summit Classic P, 2012. ---. “The Brown Hand.” 1899. The Great Keinplatz Experiment and Other Tales of Twilight and the Unseen. By Conan Doyle. Ohio: Summit Classic P, 2012. Daileader, Celia R. Racism, Misogyny and the Othello Myth: Inter-Racial Couples from Shakespeare to Spike Lee. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. Fryer, Peter. Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain. London: Pluto P, 1984. Nasta, Susheila. Home Truths: Fictions of the South Asian Diaspora in Britain. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002. Visram, Rozina. Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History. London: Pluto P, 2002.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

That's Where the Money Was: Foreign Bias and English Investment Abroad, 1866-1907

Why did Victorian Britain invest so much capital abroad? We collect over 500,000 monthly returns of British and foreign securities trading in London and the United States between 1866 and 1907. These heretofore-unknown data allow us to better quantify the historical benefits of international diversification and revisit the question of whether British Victorian investor bias starved new domestic industries of capital. We find no evidence of bias. A British investor who increased his investment in new British industry at the expense of foreign diversification would have been worse off. The addition of foreign assets significantly expanded the mean-variance frontier and resulted in utility gains equivalent to a meaningful increase in lifetime consumption.Capital markets, Home bias, History, Victorian overseas investment

"Plays thus at being Prosper" : Caliban and the colonised savage in mid-nineteenth-century Britain : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Philosophy in English at Massey University

Representations of Caliban in Victorian Britain took the form of plays, performances, reviews, poems, paintings, cartoons, sketches, and commentaries. These representations predominantly involved an ambivalence between portrayals of Caliban as human, and as non-human. A similar ambivalence is apparent in Victorian representations of the savage. Taking Robert Browning's "Caliban upon Setebos" as an initial example, this thesis applies Homi Bhabha's model of colonial mimicry to these representations of Caliban in order to show that the ambivalence in them is continuous with the ambivalent aim of the colonial mission, which is both to suppress and to enlighten. This ambivalent colonial mission leads Caliban to be constructed within Victorian colonial discourse in an ambivalent fashion, and he is hence both contained within and subversive against that discourse. Caliban acts as a conceptual site at which colonial ideology can be both defended, by those interpretations of Caliban which are continuous with stereotypical Victorian representations of the savage, and challenged, by those representations which are subversive to the colonial ideology which is the basis of this stereotype. The challenges to colonial ideology come from interpretations of Caliban as an evolutionary figure and as a satirical figure. It is in the process of defending the colonial interpretation that the ambivalence inherent in the colonial model is made clear. Thus Caliban can be seen to be, in these interpretations, a representation of this stereotype of the colonial savage, functioning to justify the ambivalent colonial mission

Gold and Greater Britain: Jevons, Trollope, and Settler Colonialism

The Australian gold rushes of the 1850s provide an exemplary test case for exploring the impact of Greater Britain—the settler colonial empire—on the Victorian novel and political economy. British gold diggers’ nomadism operated in seeming antithesis to the colonies’ explosive growth, which posed a conceptual challenge both to political economy’s stadial model of societal development and to liberal narratives of labor and land—narratives that underpinned concepts of individual character and civil society. Informed by colonial writing and the experience of gold fields, W. S. Jevons’s Theory of Political Economy (1871) and Anthony Trollope’s John Caldigate (1879) reimagine metropolitan space and subjectivity in settler-colonial terms, helping lay the ground for a deterritorialized, global British identity

The role of visual appearance in Punch’s early-Victorian satires on religion

Satires on various aspects of contemporary religion can frequently be found in the early Victorian editions of Punch. The more strident forms of Protestant evangelicalism, in the earlier 1840s, and Roman Catholic revivalism, around 1850, came in for particular attack. This pattern was partly the result of a drift in the editorial policy of the publication towards a less radical social and political position. However, Catholicism, in both its Roman and Anglican varieties, was particularly vulnerable to the combination of visual and verbal parody employed by Punch because of that denomination’s stress on visual aspects of worship. Evangelicals, by contrast, employed modes of dress and architecture that were similar to those of the secular world of their time and were, thereby, harder to depict as strange and peculiar. The pages of Punch can, therefore, tell us not only about how various Christian groups were viewed in early Victorian England but also about the ways in which they attempted, with varying success, to parry and pre-empt critique in the print media

A Decade of Urban History: The Historical Urban Studies Series

The first half of the 1990s was a pivotal period in the development and growth of urban history in Europe. In Britain the Urban History Group began to convene again after a decade in abeyance, work commenced on the three-volume Cambridge Urban History of Britain, the Urban History Yearbook became Urban History whilst the European Association of Urban Historians organized their first conference. It was in this climate that Ashgate Publishing commissioned a new monograph series, Historical Urban Studies, under the editorship of Richard Rodger, editor of Urban History, and Jean-Luc Pinol, the leading French urban historian and a key figure in the European Association of Urban Historians (EAUH). The aim of the series was and is to be comparative over both time and space, drawing on multiple locations to explore what is common and what distinctive about the urban experience of diverse towns and nations. The broad agenda for the series was shaped by an overarching concern with the administration and governance of the city which underpinned attempts to manage the social, economic and political challenges wrought by 300 years of urban change. In particular, the editors stress the importance of the comparative element which should allow historians to distinguish ‘which were systematic factors and which were of a purely local nature’. The editors set themselves an ambitious agenda and this essay aims to explore how the series has developed over the ten or so years since it commenced publication; the degree to which it has provided a platform for advancing the sub-discipline of urban history; and to consider some future directions which urban history might take

Introduction : screen Londons

Our aim, in editing the ‘London Issue’ of this journal, is to contribute to a conversation between scholars of British cinema and television, London historians and scholars of the cinematic city. In 2007, introducing the themed issue on ‘Space and Place in British Cinema and Television’, Steve Chibnall and Julian Petley observed that it would have been possible to fill the whole journal with essays about the representation of London. This issue does just that, responding to the increased interest in cinematic and, to a lesser extent, televisual, Londons, while also demonstrating the continuing fertility of the paradigms of ‘space and place’ for scholars of the moving image1. It includes a wide range of approaches to the topic of London on screen, with varying attention to British institutions of the moving image – such as Channel Four or the British Board of Film Classification – as well as to concepts such as genre, narration and memory. As a whole, the issue, through its juxtapositions of method and approach, shows something of the complexity of encounters between the terms ‘London’, ‘cinema’ and ‘television’ within British film and television studies