Curating feeling

This introduction discusses the process of ‘curating feeling’ in response to the ‘Fallen Woman’ exhibition curated by Lynda Nead at the Foundling Museum in 2015. It uses this idea to reflect on both the historical specificity of Victorian emotion and the ways in which emotive objects have the potential to collapse time, nurturing a transhistorical sense of emotional community. The introduction presents the articles in this issue of 19, which read the relationship between nineteenth-century arts and feeling across a range of cultural objects including painting, sculpture, music, literature, and architectur

Fighting the Good Fight: Transforming Expectations of Women in Front of and Behind the Camera

The film industry is a male dominated field. This is not new information. Directing, cinematography, and musical composition are the most heavily male governed above-the line crew positions, with women only making up 12% of directors as of 2018 (Quick, “The data…”). There is an unfortunate hesitation in support for female filmmakers from the part of studios. Melissa Silverstein of “Women and Hollywood” writes that there are quite specific visual expectations of a director to be a “white male with greying hair,” as this is what people are used to (Smith, “Female trouble…”). To go along with this, only 35% of speaking roles in film are given to women, and that decreases further to 24% in terms of actual leading protagonist roles (Quick, “The data…”). One of the larger contributions to this is the disparity of language between men and women, and how such differences can affect perceptions of strength. Women are more likely to use apologetic language, or tones of hesitancy (Zhukovsky, “Speaking Up…”). While one’s use of language does not negate the credibility of their ideas, an apologetic approach is not normally associated with expectations of a strong director. Women in filmmaking ventures can use language to their advantage, but those with a tendency to sound apologetic are usually less likely to be taken seriously as an authoritative figure. While it differs from its original intention, the short film “Come Up for Air” displays weakness in both males and females, as it follows a young female protagonist that does little to change her situation outside of lashing out in bouts of selfishness. When faced with the same unapologetic selfishness from her father, however, she finds the strength to forgo her pride and go to her sister as a form of her own apology. In this way, the protagonist recognizes her own flaws through seeing the same flaw in someone else, yet she chooses to overcome it, showing growth and strength

Charles Kingsley's 'Hypatia', visual culture and Late-Victorian gender politics

Charles Kingsley’s Hypatia or New Foes with an Old Face was first published in Fraser’s Magazine in 1852, but was reissued in numerous book editions in the late-nineteenth century. Though often viewed as a novel depicting the religious controversies of the 1850s, Kingsley’s depiction of the life and brutal death of a strong female figure from late antiquity also sheds light on the way in which the Victorians remodeled ancient histories to explore shifting gender roles at the fin de siècle. As the book gained in popularity towards the end of the century, it was reimagined in many different cultural forms. This article demonstrates how Kingsley’s Hypatia became a global, multi-media fiction of antiquity, how it was revisioned and consumed in different written, visual and material forms (book illustrations, a play, painting and sculpture) and how this reimagining functioned within the gender politics of the 1880s and 90s. Kingsley’s novel retained a strong hold on the late-Victorian imagination, I argue, because the perpetual restaging of Hypatia’s story through different media facilitated the circulation of pressing fin-de-siècle debates about women’s education, women’s rights, and female consumerism

Victorian fiction and the material imagination

How should we deal with the ‘stuff' in books? This is the question addressed in the lead articles of the Spring 2008 issue of 19, all of which focus on some aspect of the material in relation to Victorian fiction. Gas, rocks, jewellery, automata and the entire contents of houses are examined in essays that explore the material imagination of Dickens, Hardy, George Eliot and Thackeray, among others. Moving forward from the previous edition, which different types of collected object, here contributors examine how the material is brought into collision with literature. The phrase 'material imagination' can be traced to the work of Gaston Bachelard who identifies two types of imagination, the formal and the material. Whereas the former focuses on surfaces and the visual perception of images, the latter consists of '…this amazing need for penetration which, going beyond the attractions of the imagination of forms, thinks matter, dreams in it, lives in it, or, in other words, materializes the imaginary'. As Bachelard suggests, the material imagination involves more than just a focus on the representation of objects and the contributions to this edition explore such wide ranging subjects as the gender politics of ownership, dispossession, the body as object, the politics of collecting and display and the dichotomy between the material and immaterial. In addition, this edition features a forum on digitisation and materiality. We are particularly pleased to be able to make use of 19's digital publishing format to further debates about digital media. In the forum, five contributors respond to a series of questions about the nature of the virtual object. All five have worked or are working on nineteenth-century digitisation projects so they are uniquely placed to consider issues surrounding representation and the nature of digital space

The museum as 'Dream Space': Psychology and aesthetic response in George Eliot’s Middlemarch

This essay explores the relationship between aesthetics and psychology through the idea of the museum as a ‘dream space’ in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. It begins with a discussion of Charles Dickens’s Amy Dorrit and Hilda in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun, two women who, like Dorothea Brooke, dream their way around Italian museums and the fragment-rich spaces of Rome. Pregnant moments of female subjectivity take place in museum spaces characterised by their oneiric qualities. Such fictional depictions extend Sheldon Annis’s notion of the museum as ‘dream space’, taking account of a variety of sleep states associated with the museum that include mesmeric trance and double consciousness. Middlemarch, in particular, draws on contemporary psychological accounts of such phenomena developed by John Addington Symonds, Enaeas Sweetland Dallas and Frances Power Cobbe. Eliot’s depiction of Dorothea’s responses to the museum of Rome engages with theories of consciousness and debates about the nature of spontaneous, individual will. In Middlemarch the creative potential of the unconscious mind is explored through the idea of the museum as a dream space

The album as museum? A response to Patrizia di Bello on an interdisciplinary approach to Mrs Birkbeck's Album

This review develops Patrizia di Bello's model of the album as female collection outlined in her article ‘Mrs Birkbeck's Album: The hand-written and the Printed in Early Nineteenth-Century Feminine Culture'. The review explores the practice of Victorian women's album-making in the context of ideas about collecting and the nineteenth-century museum. It argues that such albums both appropriate and subvert aspects of museum practice. Mrs Birkbeck's album challenges the idea of a traditional, chronological display but it utilises the juxtapositional elements inherent in museum exhibition to great interpretive effect

An investigation into the role of pregnancy in the development of stress incontinence of urine

Methods: For the prospective observational study, 250 women were recruited from the antenatal clinics of University College London Hospital and The Whittington Hospital at their booking appointment. All women were less than 20 weeks pregnant at booking. The patients were interviewed with a standard questionnaire at booking, 28 weeks, 34 - 36 weeks of pregnancy and at 6 and 12 weeks postpartum. At the first interview patients were asked about incontinence prior to the pregnancy. The patients then completed a frequency volume voiding chart for each visit except the first. They were asked to attend the clinic with a full bladder and performed a standing stress test at the 28 and 34 - 36 week visit. The delivery details were collected at the first postpartum interview. For the retrospective study 300 primiparous patients who had delivered at The Whittington hospital were sent a questionnaire three months after delivery. Results: 181 women completed the prospective study. The reported frequency of micturition increased during pregnancy and declined after delivery. The frequency of micturition recorded on the charts showed a similar pattern. The total volume voided per day increased during pregnancy and declined after delivery whereas the mean volume voided at each micturition decreased in pregnancy compared to postpartum. There was no difference in the mean volume voided in the women who reported incontinence compared to those women who were dry. The numbers of women reporting incontinence increased in pregnancy to 44.8% at 28 weeks and then declined after delivery to 12.2% at 12 weeks postpartum. 58.1% of the retrospective questionnaires were returned. 32.9% had some form of incontinence at the time of completing the questionnaire whereas 31.8% had incontinence in pregnancy

Zinc hyperaccumulation in Thlaspi caerulescens

The total land available to farm globally is only one quarter of the land available. With the current world population currently rising, standing at over 6.6 billion people in August 2008, a need to produce larger food quantities is an ever increasing pressure to scientists and farmers. The options available to support demands are to produce crops that have higher yields grown on land we currently have available, crops with increased tolerance to abiotic stresses, such as saline toxicity and crops to reclaim land that has been damaged by human use such as heavy metal contaminated land. There are currently over 400 plant species belonging to 45 different families that can tolerate and accumulate excessive amounts of heavy metals, such as nickel, cadmium and zinc. Thlaspi caerulescens a member of the family Brassicaceae (which is therefore closely related to Arabidopsis thaliana), is a well studied model for studying heavy metal accumulation as it accumulates zinc, nickel and sometimes cadmium to high levels without showing signs of toxicity. The primary aim of this research was to identify and confirm potential genes responsible for the hyperaccumulation of zinc, using microarray and qPCR technologies. The second aim was to functionally test any highlighted, potential candidate genes through transgenics, therefore this project aimed to develop a transformation protocol to study potential candidate genes in planta. The microarray successfully identified genes that were differentially expressed in the hyperaccumulator T. caerulescens compared to T. avense, several were confirmed by qPCR. A good candidate gene from this and other studies on Thlaspi caerulescens and Arabidopsis haleri was HMA4 which is a member of the P1B-ATPase family. An RNAi construct was successfully made of the HMA4 gene in an attempt to silence the gene in planta. Attempts were made to transform Thlaspi caerulescens through tissue culture and floral dip methods; however these were unsuccessful due difficulties of T. caerulescens cultivation and transformation. Future strategies would include rapid cycling of plants and heterologous expression of native T. caerulescens genes in Arabidopsis thaliana

An assessment of student satisfaction with peer teaching of clinical communication skills

Background: Peer teaching is now used in medical education with its value increasingly being recognised. It is not yet established whether students differ in their satisfaction with teaching by peer-teachers compared to those taught by academic or clinical staff. This study aimed to establish satisfaction with communication skills teaching between these three teaching groups. Methods: Students participated in a role-play practical facilitated either by clinicians, peer-teachers or non-clinical staff. A questionnaire was administered to first-year medical students after participating in a communication skills role-play session asking students to evaluate their satisfaction with the session. Data were analysed in SPSS 20. Results: One hundred and ninety eight students out of 239 (83%) responded. Students were highly satisfied with the teaching session with no difference in satisfaction scores found between those sessions taught by peers, clinical and non-clinical staff members. 158 (80%) considered the session useful and 139 (69%) strongly agreed tutors facilitated their development. There was no significant difference in satisfaction scores based on tutor background. Conclusions: Satisfaction is as high when tutored by peer-teachers compared to clinicians or non-clinical staff. Constructive feedback is welcomed from a range of personnel. Final-year students could play an increasing role in the teaching of pre-clinical medical students

Zinc hyperaccumulation in Thlaspi caerulescens

The total land available to farm globally is only one quarter of the land available. With the current world population currently rising, standing at over 6.6 billion people in August 2008, a need to produce larger food quantities is an ever increasing pressure to scientists and farmers. The options available to support demands are to produce crops that have higher yields grown on land we currently have available, crops with increased tolerance to abiotic stresses, such as saline toxicity and crops to reclaim land that has been damaged by human use such as heavy metal contaminated land. There are currently over 400 plant species belonging to 45 different families that can tolerate and accumulate excessive amounts of heavy metals, such as nickel, cadmium and zinc. Thlaspi caerulescens a member of the family Brassicaceae (which is therefore closely related to Arabidopsis thaliana), is a well studied model for studying heavy metal accumulation as it accumulates zinc, nickel and sometimes cadmium to high levels without showing signs of toxicity. The primary aim of this research was to identify and confirm potential genes responsible for the hyperaccumulation of zinc, using microarray and qPCR technologies. The second aim was to functionally test any highlighted, potential candidate genes through transgenics, therefore this project aimed to develop a transformation protocol to study potential candidate genes in planta. The microarray successfully identified genes that were differentially expressed in the hyperaccumulator T. caerulescens compared to T. avense, several were confirmed by qPCR. A good candidate gene from this and other studies on Thlaspi caerulescens and Arabidopsis haleri was HMA4 which is a member of the P1B-ATPase family. An RNAi construct was successfully made of the HMA4 gene in an attempt to silence the gene in planta. Attempts were made to transform Thlaspi caerulescens through tissue culture and floral dip methods; however these were unsuccessful due difficulties of T. caerulescens cultivation and transformation. Future strategies would include rapid cycling of plants and heterologous expression of native T. caerulescens genes in Arabidopsis thaliana