Introduction

When W. T. Stead died on the Titanic he was the most famous Englishman on board. A mass of contradictions and a crucial figure in the history of the British press, Stead was a towering presence in the cultural life of late-Victorian and Edwardian society. In this introduction, we consider Stead as a ‘mass of contradictions’ and offer a few ways in which his prodigious output and activity might be understood.\u

Symons and Print Culture: Journalist, Critic, Book Maker

My intent here is to explore the range and ingenuity of Arthur Symons’s participation in print culture, and to probe how he managed his bread and butter work as a journalist, critic, and book maker. My focus is his article ‘The Painting of the Nineteenth Century’, in its differing functions and forms over a four-year period (1903-1906), as a periodical book review and a chapter on painting that appeared in Studies in Seven Arts, a book comprised of articles from the press. What initially drew me to this article was its evidence of Symons’s sustained support for Simeon Solomon, a queer British artist from a London-based family of Jewish painters, in the decade that followed the Wilde trials, and among the inhibitions they fostered. Nearly a generation younger than Solomon, Symons (1865-1945) was born just as Solomon (1840-1905) began his career. Solomon appears in both the 1903 and 1906 versions of Symons’s review, and in between a newspaper review of an exhibition of Solomon’s work in 1905/1906. Symons enters late into Solomon’s story in these pieces, towards the end of the artist’s life

Print in transition: studies in media and book history

Book synopsis: This book examines the outbreak of print in late Victorian Britain. It joins categories that are normally separated: literature/popular culture, books/magazines, publishers/newsagents, and media studies/media history. The approach is through material culture, archival material that is theorised and gendered. Chapters focus on authorship, production, and gender in relation to Dickens, Pater, Ruskin, Eliot, Symons, and James, and serials such as Master Humphrey's Clock, the Westminster Review, Artist and Journal of Home Culture, Publishers' Circular, Yellow Book and Savoy

In our time: adult education and Birkbeck: Extra-Mural — an experiment 1988–2009

In this article I suggest that three strands of adult education in the nineteenth century contributed to the experiment of the affiliation of Extra-Mural Studies and Birkbeck between 1988 and 2009: those of the mechanics’ institutions, the University of London, and Extra-Mural (‘Extension’). Although these strands had distinct origins, they were all respondents to the popular demand of the day for access to education by adults excluded from further and higher education in Oxbridge, which was full-time, residential, expensive, and confined to Anglicans and young men. The alternatives that adult education offered were secular and non-residential. They included part-time, evening teaching of subjects that reflected student demand. Adult education from the 1820s provided classes in practical science, mathematics, modern languages, English literature, and vocational training in mechanics, and in London University, medicine and law. In their parallel development, during which they all changed radically, these types of adult education were unmistakably hybrid, imitating each other in course selection and delivery, and sometimes competing for students. Extra-Mural joined the university in 1904 as its External Department, while Birkbeck joined the University of London in 1924 as a separate college, giving up, however, its daytime teaching, its intake of students of all ages, and the teaching of economics, to fit into the university without friction. The second part of the article explores one example of a productive partnership in the college between Extra-Mural and a Birkbeck department: English in Extra-Mural and the Department of English over the two decades that Extra-Mural was part of Birkbeck. Lastly, the article considers how the college privileged the other strands of adult education and shed Extra-Mural by integrating its full-time staff and on-site courses, and silently obliterating its vast provision of classes across the capital. A colour-coded Timeline follows this article to help trace the development of adult education that impacted on Birkbeck, and its lurches and adjustments to survive, from 1823 onwards

In our time: a timeline of adult education, from the Mechanics’ Movement to Birkbeck

This document has been compiled to clarify the historical origins of three strands of adult education in the nineteenth century that contributed to the experiment of their conflation at Birkbeck in two decades of the twentieth century, from 1988 when the University of London’s Department of Extra-Mural Studies joined the college, through to its finale in 2009, when Extra-Mural was integrated into the college, and its extensive outreach programme across London abandoned

The Nightingale and the Rose: Chamber Opera in Two Acts

Thesis advisor: Chen YiVitaThesis (M.M.)--Conservatory of Music and Dance. University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2018I chose Oscar Wilde’s short story, The Nightingale and the Rose (about a nightingale who sacrifices her life to create a red rose for love), for my opera for its fantasy, wit, and expectation-defying tropes. This one-hour chamber opera for piano, chorus, two actors (Aubrey; bicyclist), dancers, and six vocalists (Gayle: soprano; Scarlet, Nita: mezzo sopranos; Alex, Elon: tenors; Oakley: baritone) is a reduction of the projected complete orchestration. Act One includes scenes 1-3 and dance interludes 1-2, and Act Two comprises scenes 1-2 with one dance interlude. In historical artistic works nightingales represent creativity and their songs, laments. I advanced these concepts as author of the libretto, and the symbols fed the musical materials and development. Regarding pitch choices: each interval represents a feeling, realm, or ideology, which build leitmotivs for characters and moods. P1/P8 represent optimism (in leitmotifs: Gayle, yellow, hope, love). M2/m7 and m2/M7 represent the natural world (red rose, Gayle, hope, Oakley, love, sorrow, death). M3/m6 and m3/M6 represent feelings of the heart, intuition, or right brain activity (Scarlet, Gayle, hope, love, sorrow, colors). P4 represents logic and left brain thinking (Alex, philosophy, hope, Gayle). The tritone represents heartbreak and disillusionment (Oakley, Gayle, sorrow, death). P5 represents dull hollowness (Aubrey, sorrow). Regarding other musical elements: Gayle and Nita sing varied, improvisatory-like repetitions, with colorful techniques such as glissandos, trills, and brief drastic descending lines to show the emotive power of laments. I demonstrate Gayle’s care for all by having her sing duets with every character she encounters. The chorus sets the scene as garden night creatures. They support Gayle’s wordless leitmotifs: Gayle, love, sorrow, and death to an intense climax. Repetition, expanding ranges, accelerating accompaniment, and cluster chords build tension. Complete silence after the climax adds to its impact, and the a cappella chorus sings the lament-like death motive in unison, highlighting the poignance of this moment in the drama. Gayle represents creativity, and death is her creative act. To create, creativity must die. However, after the destruction/creation of an idea, there is always another, so I added a wordless musical epilogue to the original story.Abstract -- Synopsis -- Libretto -- Composer notes -- Instrumentation -- Music score -- Vit

Late style and speaking out: J A Symonds's In the Key of Blue

This article examines In the Key of Blue (1893)—an essay collection by John Addington Symonds—as a case study in queer public utterance during the early 1890s. Viewed through the critical lens of late style, as theorised by Edward Said, the evolution of this project, from compilation through to reader reception, reveals Symonds's determination to “speak out” on the subject of homosexuality. Paradoxically, In the Key of Blue was thus a timely and untimely work: it belonged to a brief period of increased visibility and expressiveness when dealing with male same-sex desire, spearheaded by a younger generation of Decadent writers, but it also cut against the grain of nineteenth-century social taboo and legal repression. Symonds's essay collection brought together new and previously unpublished work with examples of his writing for the periodical press. These new combinations, appearing together for the first time, served to facilitate new readings and new inferences, bringing homosexual themes to the fore. This article traces the dialogic structure of In the Key of Blue , its strategies for articulating homosexual desire, and examines the response of reviewers, from the hostile to celebratory

Peter Blake, George Augustus Sala and the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press. The Personal Style of a Public Writer

Previous scholarly work on Sala has been sporadic and sparse: a full biography by Ralph Straus in 1942, P. D. Edwards’s treatment (1997) of the careers of Sala and Edmund Yates as ‘Dickens’s young men’, and Cathy Waters’s examination of his writing as part of a larger study of Household Words in 2008. So it is good to have Peter Blake’s new book on G. A. Sala (1828-95), a prodigal journalist, a pioneer of ‘new journalism’ and a renowned ‘special correspondent’ as we know, but also a robust Bo..