The Time Machine and the Importance of Being Ernest In the Time Machine by H. G. Wells, we meet The Time Traveler whom travels to a faraway future. He finds himself surrounded by the Eloi and Morlocks, two very different types of beings that habited the lands. The Eloi were considered the masters, their […]
Taking place in 1895, the trials of Oscar Wilde certainly lived up to the hype of being the trial(s) of the century. Moises Kaufman’s Gross Indecency makes the three trials into a play as six or seven narrators analyze archived documents and bring the trials to life. Accused of “posing somdomite” by the Marquess of […]
Did Oscar Wilde use his writing as a way to talk about his own life without directly acknowledging it? A common theme is his writing focused on men who struggled with questions of morality and double lives. We specifically see this theme in his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and in his play The […]
Public and private selves Often what we project in public is an edited version of our private selves or at least our private opinions. In Oscar Wilde’s play The Importance of being Earnest and Moises Kaufman’s Gross indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde think are two very good examples of what the representation of […]
Deception is never a good thing and most times it doesn’t end well. Deception was used to manipulate family members and get out of family affairs. It also has been used as a cover up for an alternative lifestyle. Deception has been used mainly to separate the private self to the public self. Two pieces […]
Oscar Wilde possessed a very individualized view of the world and did not shy away from his convictions whether in the public or private eye. While in public this devotion to staying true to his personal ideologies Wilde openly supported the aesthetic movement even when it was not especially popular. In private Wilde pursued homosexual […]
A name – to most – is just that: a somewhat arbitrary social convention with the simple, practical purpose of easily distinguishing person A from person B. At what point, though, does a name transcend its practicality and hold more value? This interesting philosophical question is something that is explored both by Oscar Wilde and […]
The late 1800’s were a busy time for Oscar Wilde. Wilde had written a novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray and he had two successful plays being performed in London’s West End. However, Wilde’s success would shortly be coming to an end. Deception was a major theme in Wilde’s play, The Importance of Being Earnest. […]
Did Oscar Wilde value the art of deception? In his play, The Importance of Being Earnest, the two prominent male characters lead double-lives, and in the process, deceive many of their loved ones and friends. In Moisés Kaufman’s play, Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, the trials of Wilde are dramatized, and yet […]
What happens when your private life becomes public? For Oscar Wilde it meant being arrested and going to prison. Gross Indecency by Moises Kaufman is a play that centers itself on the trials of Oscar Wilde’s personal life going public. The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde is a play that centers itself on […]
Like so many women of the Victorian Era, Bertha Mason of Jane Eyre does not get a voice. Bertha Mason’s character is physically in the pages of Jane Eyre and in fact, one of the biggest characters of the novel. The only vocalization of Bertha Mason that readers get is an eerie and bone chilling […]
The Old Bailey Archive focuses on the various crimes and trials throughout the Victorian Era in England. The site is maintained by Open University, University of Hertfordshire and University of Sheffield, and was last updated in April of 2013. The Old Bailey, as the site itself notes, was active from 1674 until 1913. Throughout its […]
The Old Bailey Online was compiled by the Universities of Sheffield, Hertfordshire, and Open that archives court cases in England during 1674-1913. The Old Bailey Online is free for the public to use. The Old Bailey was created in 2000 and the last update was in April of 2013. What makes the Old Bailey so […]
There are many websites that help us learn from the past. One of the great archival sites is the NINES website. This cite allows the user to go into different archives. One of them that a person can go into from the NINES website is The Old Bailey site. When you first go to the […]
Throughout Victorian literature, there are many reoccurring themes that seem to be significant to the era and genera. One that seems to be most prevalent is that of the poor woman trying to improve her circumstances, as well as that of the fallen woman. These two themes can be seen quite clearly in Thomas Hardy’s […]
There are many overarching themes that can be found throughout Victorian era texts, especially regarding gender oppositions among societal norms. This theme can be compared between the two literary texts Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbott (1884) and Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy (1891). These “romance” stories are very similar in the […]
Destructive Decisions: Tess D’Urbervilles and the Picture of Dorian Gray In these two novels we meet our heroes, Dorian and Tess, who throughout their tales make decisions that impacted their lives and endings. In both novels, our characters decisions were influenced by other’s points of views and personal agendas. Throughout the novels, Tess and Dorian […]
Both Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray were originally published as serials. Wilde was published in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine and Hardy’s was published in three different publications aimed at different demographics. The Graphic newspaper published a modified and more “family” version of Tess while the Fortnighty […]
Biological determinism, the idea that the genes and biology of a person dictate their behavior, is an idea found repeatedly in Flatland and The Picture of Dorian Gray. A. Square and Dorian Gray are molded figuratively and literally in the novel and they come into conflicts as a part of their biology. The books are […]
In Victorian literature male characters and female characters are by default different in where they work how they dress, act and the expectations of them. One of the themes that I picked up on was the sexualization of men and women as depicted in novels. It is for this reason that I chose Thomas Hardy’s […]
In Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, there are several scenes in which characters consume alcohol and this is certainly prevalent enough to be considered a motif on Hardy’s part. I won’t mention every instance in which an alcoholic beverage is consumed, but I will concentrate on those of the most importance as Hardy seems […]
Religion and Social Division in the Victorian Era The Victorian Era was a period in which there was a clearly established and stratified social hierarchy. There existed a strict adherence to the social conventions of the time, and one’s social standing was primarily based on inheritance: ancestral lineage took precedence over virtually everything else. Similarly, […]
During the Victorian Era, social status meant everything. Being at the top meant those people had a world of opportunities. However, it also came with a long list of unwritten rules to abide by. Going against these social etiquettes was taboo. As for the lower class, it was very unlikely for them to become a […]
Innocent might not be the first word that comes to mind when we think of Tess Durbeyfield from Tess of the D’Urbervilles or Dorian Gray from The Picture of Dorian Gray. Wickedness might be a term we think of when reading about both of these characters. Both characters come from very different backgrounds and they […]
Movement upward along the social hierarchy is the American dream; it is what has attracted people to the United States from its very inception. The belief that all men are created equal has influenced this adoption of unfathomable opportunity for all men. In America as well as England though men are held apart from women. […]
In Victorian England, which was worse: a ruined reputation or death? While death may seem the obvious answer, two novels from that time period seem to imply otherwise. Thomas Hardy’s novel, Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Oscar Wilde’s novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, showcase the ways in which social reputations mattered in Victorian society. Furthermore, […]
Old Bailey Online is a free, searchable site that allows viewers to take a look back in history and read the surviving proceedings that took place from 1673 to 1913. Old Bailey gives the reader biographical detail of the types and categories of about 197,000 indictable offences. During this period of proceedings about 2,500 men and […]
With reading the novels Tess of the D’Urbervilles, by Thomas Hardy, and The Picture of Dorian Grey, by Oscar Wilde, I have come to the conclusion that Tess and Sibyl are equals. Both of these women can be persuaded to do anything. They also are weak characters in both novels, even though one of the […]
NINES Tutorial: The Yellow Nineties Online The Yellow Nineties Online is an online database which is “focused on The Yellow Book and other avant-garde aesthetic periodicals” and can be found at www.1890s.ca. The site, which is edited by Dennis Denisoff and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, is host to completed editions of 13 volumes of The Yellow […]
“It was a poisonous book” (92). Anyone who has read Oscar Wilde’s novel, The Pictures of Dorian Gray, may wonder what was so threatening about the “yellowbook” that occupied the fascination of Dorian Gray. Although it’s not named in Wilde’s text, the yellowbook is supposedly based on the French novel, À Rebours, by Joris-Karl Huysmans. […]
The Yellow Nineties archive site is an open access, peer reviewed electronic resource for The Yellow Book and other avant-garde aesthetic periodicals that flourished in Great Britain in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. It is edited by Dennis Denisoff and Lorraine Janzen Kooistra from Ryerson University. It contains facsimile editions that are available […]
The Rossetti Archive is a digital archive that “facilitates the scholarly study of Dante Gabriel Rossetti.” Rossetti is most known through his life’s work. He spent most of his life as a writer, designer, painter, and translator. Due to his wide ranging abilities, Rossetti has been called “the most important and original artistic force in […]
I did research on The Yellow Nineties archive, which is an online collection consisting of thirteen volumes of The Yellow Book, along with one volume of The Pagan Review , one volume of The Life of Sir Thomas Bodley, and four volumes of The Evergreen. The Yellow Book was the leading journal of the 1890’s, […]
Rossetti Archive: The fourth projected installments of the Rossetti Archive. The first installment which was debuted in the Spring of 2000. This section was centered in the 1870’s volume of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s poems and pictures that were associated with that book. The second installment was released in the summer of 2002. This section […]
The Rossetti Archive The Rossetti Archive “facilitates the scholarly study of Dante Gabriel Rossetti,” a painter, designer, writer, and translator of the second half of the nineteenth century, by providing a digital collection of his complete writings and pictures. It aims “to include high-quality digital images of every surviving documentary state of DGR’s works: all […]
NINES Tutorial: Rossetti Archives The NINES “is a scholarly organization devoted to forging links between the material archive of the nineteenth century and the digital research environment of the twenty-first” (nines.org). They are a digital archive, which by definition “is a repository that stores one or more collections of digital information objects with the intention […]
The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg is, what I believe, a disturbing look into the world of mental illness. Hogg uses religion as a basis for this tale of a mentally ill young man. Robert Wringhim Colwan is an outcast within his own family. He is neither a son […]
Jane Eyre is based on the life story of a woman who seems relatively independent, despite her poor social status. Throughout the novel, she seems to be brave enough to leave any situation she doesn’t like. This is seemingly interesting because she has no money or family to support her. This is similar to the […]
My thoughts on Jane Eyre: SPOILER ALERT!! The ending of Jane Eyre was very unsatisfying for me because I think that Jane is on a power trip at the end when she come to take care of Rochester. I say this because from the moment she started living with Mr. Rochester he has been the […]
In this blog post I will discuss the differences and similarities between Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands. Bronte’s Jane Eyre is a novel but was once thought to be a biography written by a man; later we realize that it in fact was written by a […]
The depiction of Creole women in Victorian era literature is vastly different when comparing works by Mary Seacole and Charlotte Bronte. Although the works in question – Jane Eyre and Adventures of Mrs. Seacole – are different genres, the commonality of features they share is far more than one would expect between a fiction and […]
Jane Eyre in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Mary Seacole in her own telling of Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole In Many Lands, couldn’t be more different physically and more similar emotionally. White Jane is white and Mary is Creole, Jane is innocent, Mary is a widow involved in a rumored illicit relationship, Jane is […]
While we did not read all of Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands, we did read enough to be able to compare the historical person Mrs. Seacole to that of the fictional character Jane Eyre. Jane Eyre and Mrs. Seacole are quite similar in a few ways. One can see early on in […]
By far one of the roundest characters to come out of nineteenth century literature, Jane Eyre, the protagonist from Charlotte Bronte’s famous novel, is truly remarkable, consistently showcasing an incomparable depth regarding her struggles, her desires, and her ability to balance them all. What makes her character most impressive, though, is the fact that she […]
In comparing Mary Seacole to Jane Eyre there are more similarities than I originally perceived. Admittedly, I couldn’t picture a Jamaican nurse having much in common with an English school girl/teacher/governess. Aside from the obvious—gender, class, etc—Mary Seacole and Jane Eyre have much more important and interesting characteristics in common including their desires and occupations. […]
Silent, submissive and starving: in order to survive at Lowood Institution during the reign of Mr. Brocklehurst, a girl was required to surrender her voice, independence and health. In Charlotte Brontë’s novel, Jane Eyre, a disturbing depiction of female education in Victorian England is portrayed as both oppressive and neglectful. The school for “charity-children” demonstrates […]
Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present is a digital archive of British women writers’ biographies, works, and contexts. It is published by Cambridge University Press, edited by the Canadian scholars Susan Brown, Patricia Clements, Isobel Grundy (2006), and hosted by NINES. Its title refers to the heroine of […]
Prior to reading this tale, I rarely had a full grasp of what the setting looked like in texts read for class. Most was left to imagination and I had minimal knowledge on how to gain a better understanding. I did little research on where novels actually took place or how the original work actually […]
The String of Pearls: and its monsters The reason I chose to identify the monsters of The String of Pearls is because the concept of the main characters Sweeney Todd and Mistress Lovette being the monsters of the story really fascinates me. And although it is quite obvious that their actions are monstrous that is […]
My group’s Lo-Fi mapping assignment was focused on the London map of 1775, a map which actually predates the publication of the story by several decades. Our focus was set on the areas immediately surrounding Fleet Street and The Temple gardens. Interestingly enough, though, the area that I found most peculiar was a dense cluster […]
When reading a book it is not too often I take the accuracy of the setting into account. The setting is what sets the mood and helps the reader gain knowledge of the surroundings in a story therefore, I trust the writer to tell what is important. It is the freedom the author has to […]
When you read do you research everything that you do not understand or do you look up the places and the people that you do mot know? Well if you are like me and are taking five English classes, you may not have the time to research every little detail that that you come across. […]
The String of Pearls: London Atlas The story consists of how Sweeny Todd, a barber, kills his customers and sends their “meat” to Mrs. Lovett, his accomplice; she uses the meat for her famous meat pies and sells them in her shop. Her customers would come every day at midday to buy her meat pies […]
Reading The String of Pearls offers an experience upon the reader that is unique when compared to that of other Victorian literature. The String of Pearls has distinctive characteristics such as its laborious realism as well as contemporary Victorian characteristics relayed throughout the story. With its conscientious devotion to remaining true to the reality it […]
In creating a visual representation, the physical spaces of London leap of the pages into reality and a much clearer picture can be made of how the spaces relate to each other. Readers know much of the characteristics and culture of Fleet Street as we are told it surrounded by the Inns of Court that […]
The String of Pearls: or, The Sailor’s Gift is but one of many versions of the Sweeney Todd tale that was first published in serial form in The Peoples Periodical. It was later called Sweeney Todd, The Demon of Fleet Street and The String of Pearls, or The Barber of Fleet Street, A Domestic Romance. […]
Many Victorian texts are online these days, but getting them there can be difficult to do. It is a long process if it is to be done with the most effectiveness for the reader. Putting a text online is actually a very interesting process. It is time consuming, but very rewarding at the same time. […]
When reading a text, how often do you think about whether or not the author has stayed true to the physical representation of his or her choice in setting? In all honesty, it’s one of the last things I consider when sitting down to indulge in a story. When I first read The String of […]
Before entering this class, the Victorian Era was one that seemed pretty two-dimensional and straightforward to me. My idea of the time was a bit off—as I discovered soon after visiting the Neville Museum exhibit. Rather than puffy dresses and embellishments, I found the era to be much more practical and humble that I first […]
Before entering this class, the Victorian Era was one that seemed pretty two-dimensional and straightforward to me. My idea of the time was a bit off—as I discovered soon after visiting the Neville Museum exhibit. Rather than puffy dresses and embellishments, I found the era to be much more practical and humble that I first […]
The commemorative saucers and the painting of Queen Victoria’s coronation were the two artifacts of the “Images of Victoria” exhibit at the Neville Museum that caught my attention most. In the commemorative saucers, Queen Victoria looks young, but is married to Prince Albert so she is at least 21 and not a child. Her key […]
Before going to the Neville’s “Images of Victoria” and “Victorian Americans” exhibits, my idea of the Victorian Era included big dresses, wigs, and castles (maybe I was going a little medieval on myself?). Being surrounded by a bunch of Victorian artifacts definitely set me straight, and even surprised me as to how much more advanced […]
The Victorian Era had a lot of status symbols in it and people in lower classes were always trying to look higher class. One part of the museum that shows this well was the part that talked about silver-plating and mass produced pieces of porcelain artwork. The image that I thought was mysterious was a […]
What was Interesting and what was Mysterious I’m usually not one for visiting museums, it happens more times than not I get bored. I’m always craving just a little bit more from the exhibits or my expectations of the content. So upon my visit to the Neville museum I was pleasantly surprised to see that […]
Throughout the Victorian period, Queen Victoria was seen as a beacon of hope and change. This is reflected in many aspect of Victorian living, including home-wear and the poetry that surrounded the time. This was clearly portrayed in the Victorian exhibit at the Neville Public Museum. All aspects of life seemed to try to incorporate […]
Going through the “Images of Victoria” exhibition was like going back in time and seeing a piece of our history. The beautiful cabinet included stanzas from the poems “Crowned and Wedded” by Elizabeth Browning, a brief history of Victoria and even an original painting from Victoria’s coronation. Overall, we are shown history seen through the […]
Victorian Imagery: Actual vs Idealized Victorian Era arts, both literary and traditional, developed a very interesting divergence from the established norms of the time through the use of realism. Realism as a literary technique allowed writers to convey rhetoric in new ways and we see the advent of […]
How did Queen Victoria see herself: monarch, wife or both? As a young woman and fresh ruler, there were many expectations of her to be great, but what expectations did she have for herself? Are there any clues as to how she prioritized her roles? While we may never have concrete answers to these questions, […]
In the “Images of Victoria” exhibit at the Neville Public Museum I was particularly struck by one engraving of a painting, titled “The Coronation of Queen Victoria”, by Thomas Parris. There are many connections that one could infer from this picture, for instance, I found myself comparing it to other works regarding Queen Victoria that […]
In examining the successful reign and life of Queen Victoria, we are immediately wrought with images of the era she herself so greatly influenced; that is to say that the classic “Dickensian” London is never a scene which is far from our thoughts in bringing to light the Queen’s influence on literature. To be sure, […]
The Victorian time period in Great Britain and in The America’s is surprisingly similar concerning the ideas of city structure. During this time period England and Scotland were going through the post-enlightenment and an urbanization phases in their history. There were also many medical advances that happened during this period. Gone were the crowded streets […]
The Neville Museum’s Victorian artifacts reveal an outstandingly positive perspective of Queen Victoria that had apparently been prevalent in England during her reign. There were different artifacts including portraits, a book and a pair of plates bearing a depiction of the queen. One artifact in particular that had captured my attention was a ceramic figurine […]