Snow and Dickens: The Victorian ‘Inconvenient Truth’

Scientists’ investigations into environmental issues often fail to promote political change unless those investigations are popularised in the public consciousness. We will illustrate this thesis through the work of Dickens and the pioneering physician, Dr John Snow. In Victorian London, Snow challenged the deeply held theory that miasmas caused diseases such as cholera. However, his investigations, now considered the foundation of modern epidemiology, were dismissed by the medical establishment. By 1884, his work had been verified. Contemporaneously, Dickens worked with early advocates of public health, Edwin Chadwick and his brother-in-law, Henry Austin, to promote and then defend the landmark 1848 Public Health Act. By 1850, however, the Public Health Act was being eviscerated, and Dickens attacked the vested interests he saw as opposed to public health. Fast forward to the present, and we see this history repeating itself in the issue of global warming. The science of global warming has been developing since the 1820s and is now well accepted, but serious political debates continue in North America over scientific uncertainty and the economic costs of tackling the problem

Dickens in the New Millennium

This special issue of the Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens initially published in 2012 means to celebrate Charles Dickens’s bicentenary of his birthday and offers a selection of articles derived from the yearly conference of the Dickens Society which took place in Aix-en-Provence. The aim of this volume is to consider how Dickens’s fiction is understood, interpreted and taught nowadays, and whether it answers twenty-first-century concerns. The essays collected here also examine how today’s public views the mid-Victorian period through Dickens’s writing. The editors would like to thank all the authors for their contributions to the present volume as well as the research centres which made this publication possible : the LERMA (Laboratoire d’Études et de Recherche sur le Monde Anglophone – Université d’Aix-Marseille 1), EMMA (Études Montpelliéraines du Monde Anglophone – Université de Montpellier 3), CECILLE (Centre d’Études en Civilisations, Langues et Littératures Étrangères – Université Charles de Gaulle Lille 3), the PULM (Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée), the Dickens Society and the Dickens Museum for their kind permission to use Robert William Buss’s ‘Dickens’s Dream’. The volume consists of six sections. ‘Making a Start on Dickens’ contains three essays focusing on teaching Dickens or stressing the relevance of Dickens’s work in the information age. ‘Iconic and Cinematic Dickens’ is about the visual potentialities of Dickens’s work in book illustrations or cinematic adaptations. ‘Reading Dickens’ reviews the value of reading itself in the Victorian author’s fiction as well as his recourse to sentimentality or to a double narrating stance. The articles in ‘Scientific Dickens’ show the contribution that science and the history of science still bring to the interpretation of his work today. ‘Hypo/Hyper Dickens’ explores another contribution to his legacy in the form of Dickensian doubles, either in his own fiction or as post-Dickens neo-Victorian rewritings. Finally ‘Metafictional, Prototypical and Archetypal Dickens’ studies a selection of metanarratives (mythological, apocalyptic, geological), which Dickens used to decipher the signs of his times. Ce numéro hors série des Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens entend célébrer le bicentenaire de la naissance de Charles Dickens (1812-1870). Il réunit une sélection d’articles dérivés du Congrès de la Dickens Society qui s’est tenu à Aix-en-Provence en 2012. Le but de cette publication est d’évaluer la façon dont la fiction de Dickens est comprise, interprétée et enseignée aujourd’hui, et de voir si cette fiction répond aux préoccupations du XXIe siècle. Les articles regroupés ici examinent également la manière dont le public d’aujourd’hui considère la période victorienne à travers les écrits de Charles Dickens. Les rédacteurs en chef remercient les auteurs des contributions de ce volume ainsi que les centres de recherche qui en ont permis la publication : le LERMA (Laboratoire d’Études et de Recherche sur le Monde Anglophone – Université d’Aix-Marseille 1), EMMA (Études Montpelliéraines du Monde Anglophone – Université de Montpellier 3), CECILLE (Centre d’Études en Civilisations, Langues et Littératures Étrangères – Université Charles de Gaulle Lille 3), les PULM (Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée), la Dickens Society et le Dickens Museum pour leur autorisation de faire usage du tableau de Robert William Buss, ‘Dickens’s Dream’, comme couverture. Le volume se compose de six sections. ‘Making a Start on Dickens’ regroupe trois articles qui se concentrent sur l’enseignement des oeuvres de Dickens dans un contexte secondaire ou universitaire ou sur leur pertinence dans le monde numérique et connecté d’aujourd’hui. ‘Iconic and Cinematic Dickens’ se concentre sur les potentialités visuelles de ses œuvres par le biais des illustrations publiées dans des éditions posthumes ou des adaptations cinématographiques. ‘Reading Dickens’ considère la valeur qu’attribuait l’auteur victorien à la lecture au travers de ses fictions, son recours au sentimentalisme ou à une double instance narrative. Les articles de la section intitulée ‘Scientific Dickens’ montre la contribution que la science et l’histoire de la science continuent d’apporter à l’interprétation de ses oeuvres aujourdhui. ‘Hypo/Hyper Dickens’ explore une autre contribution à son patrimoine sous la forme des doubles dickensiens, soit au sein de ses œuvres, soit dans le domaine des réécritures néo-victoriennes. Enfin, ‘Metafictional, Prototypical and Archetypal Dickens’ aborde un ensemble de méta-récits (mythologique, apocalyptique, géologique), auxquels Dickens a eu recours pour déchiffrer les signes de son temps

Design and phenotyping procedures for recording wool, skin, parasite resistance, growth, carcass yield and quality traits of the SheepGENOMICS mapping flock

A major aim of the research program known as SheepGENOMICS was to deliver DNA markers for commercial breeding programs. To that end, a resource flock was established, comprehensively phenotyped and genotyped with DNA markers. The flock of nearly 5000 sheep, born over two consecutive years, was extensively phenotyped, with more than 100 recorded observations being made on most of the animals. This generated more than 460 000 records over 17 months of gathering information on each animal. Here, we describe the experimental design and sample-collection procedures, and provide a summary of the basic measurements taken. Data from this project are being used to identify collections of genome markers for estimating genomic breeding values for new sheep industry traits.Jason D. White... Philip Hynd... et al