The ‘despised trade’ in textiles: H. G. Wells, William Paine, Charles Cavers and the male draper’s life, 1870–1914

Gold open access article available at http://www.maneyonline.com/doi/10.1179/0040496915Z.00000000059This essay examines the situation of the male draper in terms of his relationships to textiles and female customers between the 1870s and the outbreak of the First World War. Drawing on accounts of shop work produced by men employed as drapers and drapers’ assistants, the essay highlights the ridicule levelled against men who sold textiles, their work with fabrics and clothing, as well as the service they provided for an almost exclusively female clientele, being widely derided as unsuitable labour for a man. One draper recorded that his was ‘a despised trade’. Through an analysis of three first-hand accounts of the draper’s lot the essay raises questions about social constructions of masculinity in relation to representations of shop work and the handling of fabrics. The essay focuses on H. G. Wells’s descriptions of his teenage years as a draper’s apprentice recorded in his Experiment in Autobiography (1934); William Paine’s political treatise, Shop Slavery and Emancipation (1912), based on the injustices he experienced as a draper’s assistant; and the diary of a Bond Street draper, Charles Cavers, posthumously published as Hades! The Ladies! Being Extracts from the Diary of a Draper (1933).AHRC AH/K00803X/

Charlotte Brontë's Gothic Fragment: 'The Story of Willie Ellin'

'This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Edinburgh University Press in Victoriographies. The Version of Record is available online at: https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/vic.2021.0407Charlotte Brontë’s eighteen-page fragment, ‘The Story of Willie Ellin’, written shortly after the publication of Villette in 1853, combines the gothic and realism and uses multiple narrators to tell a disturbing story of cruelty towards a child. The generic instability and disordered temporal framework of this fragment make it unlike anything Brontë had previously written, yet it has attracted the attention of few scholars. Those who have discussed it have condemned it as a failure; the later fragment ‘Emma’, also left incomplete by the author’s premature death, has been seen as the more likely beginning of a successor to Villette. ‘The Story of Willie Ellin’ reveals Brontë at her most experimental as she explores the use of different narrative voices, including that of an unnamed genderless ‘ghost’, to tell a story from different perspectives. It also shows Brontë representing a child’s experience of extreme physical abuse which goes far beyond the depictions of chastisement in Jane Eyre (1847). This essay argues that ‘The Story of Willie Ellin’ affords rich insights into Brontë’s ideas and working practices in her final years, suggesting that it should be more widely acknowledged as a unique aspect of Brontë’s oeuvre, revealing the new directions she may have taken had she lived to complete another novel

Review of Women and Personal Property in the Victorian Novel

Dorothea Brooke was reluctant to accept the bequest of her mother\u27s jewellery, but was George Eliot equally resistant to the allure of pretty things? Deborah Wynne thinks not. Wynne cites a letter from Eliot to her friend Elma Stuart in which the energizing pleasure of \u27little joys\u27 is a cause for celebration: it is cheering to think that there are blue clocks as well as troubles in the world. There is another spiritual daughter of mine whom I should gladly see eager about some small delight - a china monster or a silver clasp - instead of telling me that nothing delights her. One can never see the condition of the world truly when one is dead to little joys. (p. 89) The strategic significance of such small delights is Deborah Wynne\u27s topic in this book. Wynne is not the first to cast an eye on women\u27s relationship with property in this period. Tim Dolin\u27s Mistress of the House: Women of Property in the Victorian Novel (1997), for example, examines the representation of independently propertied women in Victorian fiction. Wynne\u27s focus, however, is not on the property that women owned but on the property that - before the Married Women\u27s Property Acts in the late nineteenth century - they were not legally entitled to possess: when Millicent Garrett Fawcett\u27s purse was stolen by a pickpocket, the thief was charged with stealing the property of her husband. Wynne emphasizes that when we consider the treatment in Victorian fiction of women\u27s things - linen, china, jewellery, pieces of furniture and items of dress - we need to bear in mind the restrictions upon women\u27s ownership of those things. She wants to draw our attention away from commodity culture and display towards less substantial, everyday objects, such as teacups, handkerchiefs, pincushions, and dolls, and by pursuing the ways in which such things circulate, or cease to circulate, in fictional texts, to demonstrate some of the means by which women evaded or challenged the constraints of property law

Miss Havisham’s dress: Materialising Dickens in film adaptations of Great Expectations

This article was published in Neo-Victorian Studies© 2012.This essay focuses on the neo-Victorian materialisation of Dickens’s vision through the costuming of the Miss Havisham figure in three film adaptations of Great Expectations: David Lean’s Great Expectations (1946), Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), and Alfonso Cuarón’s Great Expectations (1998), a modern updating. The distinct film language which emerges from the costume designs in each of these films enables cinema audiences to re-read and re-imagine the novel’s portrayal of perverse and uncanny femininity. As a result, the disturbing and enduring ambiguity of Havisham’s clothing establishes her as a figure of resistance to modernity, and as an embodiment of decline, signalling youth and age by means of a robe which is at once wedding gown, unfashionable garment and shroud

Charlotte Brontë and the Politics of Cloth: The ‘vile rumbling mills’ of Yorkshire

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Brontë Studies on 18/12/17, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14748932.2018.1389154This essay examines Charlotte Brontë’s engagement with the textile industry from her earliest writings to her 1849 Condition of England novel Shirley in order to emphasise the role that Yorkshire and its staple industry played in her writing. Critics have discussed Brontë’s interest in textile production largely in relation to Shirley. However, her fascination with cloth manufacturing is evident in many of her Angrian tales and some of her unfinished novels. This essay argues that through her early representations of mills and mill owners Brontë formulated an understanding of political conflict and masculine power which helped to shape her mature writing. This culminates in Shirley with her critique of the taboo against educated women entering careers in trade and manufacturing

Reading Victorian rags: Recycling, redemption, and Dickens's ragged children

This is an Version of Record of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Journal of Victorian Culture on 24 December 2014, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/13555502.2014.991747 This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/ which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.In Victorian Britain rags were not only associated with the inadequate clothing of the poor, they were also viewed as a valuable commodity, widely collected for recycling into paper. This essay examines rags as simultaneously despised and precious objects, tracing the connections between Victorian accounts of poverty, the industrial recycling of rags into paper, and the redemption narratives created by Charles Dickens about rescued children. A supporter of Ragged Schools and champion of rags recycling, Dickens drew on the idea of the transformation of dirty rags into clean paper in his representations of ragged children. To him, the recycling of rags indicated the civilizing forces of modernity, and reading Dickens's representations of ragged children in this context reveals how cloth recycling became a paradigm for society's duties towards destitute children. This essay explains Dickens's juxtaposition of ragged children with references to rag-dealing in his novels; by this means he suggested that street children, like their ragged clothing, were capable of being purified and transformed into social usefulness.AHRC AH/K00803X/

Textile Recycling in Victorian Literature: An Interview with Deborah Wynne

An interview: Helene B. Ducros interviews Deborah Wynne about her research on Victorian textile recycling and its representation in the work of Charles Dickens.This interview refers to Wynne's research into Victorian textile recycling and how it was represented in Victorian literature and culture, particularly the work of Charles Dickens

How often do GPs use rapid computer access to laboratory results? A description of 18 months’ use by 72 practices in Tayside

This paper describes the uptake and usage by a group of general medical practices in Tayside, Scotland of a novel system designed to give rapid access to laboratory results in primary care. The speed of access to laboratory results from primary care is one factor that determines how laboratory results are both requested and used. Without easy and timely access to laboratory results, general practitioners (GPs) are not able to make the most efficient use of laboratory tests, and this therefore impinges on whether those tests are requested. Fountain was designed to provide a front end for GPs to gain rapid and easy access to laboratory results in a manner familiar to them. It was initially made available in primary care in the region to 72 practices, with 272 GP desktops having immediate access to results when they are ready. The pattern of use and uptake was monitored remotely after the system was introduced, and the first 18 months of use are described here. Initial use varied widely between practices with rates of access varying from 160 hits per 1000 population to none at all.However, the access rate gradually conformed to a more standard rate of around 20 hits per 1000 population per month, regardless of the initial rate of use. This pattern conforms to that describing the introduction of new technologies in other settings. Continued use in practice and the concordance of usage between practices confirms that rapid and reliable access to laboratory reports from primary care is both useful and used

Risk Stratification in Women Enrolled in the Acute Decompensated Heart Failure National Registry Emergency Module (ADHERE-EM)

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/75587/1/j.1553-2712.2008.00030.x.pd