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Scandal

Wendy Parkins

in Jane Morris: The Burden of History

This chapter scrutinises the persistent association between Jane Morris and sexual scandal in biographies and scholarship associated with the Pre-Raphaelites. Her two known affairs, with Rossetti and ... More

This chapter scrutinises the persistent association between Jane Morris and sexual scandal in biographies and scholarship associated with the Pre-Raphaelites. Her two known affairs, with Rossetti and with Blunt, are re-examined through diverse contemporaries sources. Close attention is paid to correspondence concerning Rossetti’s psychological breakdown among his inner circle of friends in 1871 as a key resource in the perpetuation of a negative view of Jane Morris while the account of her affair with Blunt is examined through Blunt’s Secret Memoirs, a multi-volume journal describing his extra-marital dalliances and obsessions. Against the prevailing depiction of Jane Morris as a femme fatale, this chapter argues that a closer examination of her letters not only reveals a high degree of self-knowledge concerning her status as an object of exchange between well-known men but also attests to a sense of emotional agency despite the constraints of Victorian marriage and gender expectations.Less

10 Dante’s Beatrice and Victorian Gender Ideology

Julia Straub

in Dante in the Long Nineteenth Century: Nationality, Identity, and Appropriation

In 1859 William Gladstone commissioned a painting from William Dyce which became known as Beatrice. A portrait of a young woman wearing a plain Renaissance dress, Beatrice is one of the first ... More

In 1859 William Gladstone commissioned a painting from William Dyce which became known as Beatrice. A portrait of a young woman wearing a plain Renaissance dress, Beatrice is one of the first Victorian paintings depicting Dante's muse and reflects an obsession with Beatrice and the Vita Nuova, which is typical of the mid and late-Victorian reception of Dante. The Victorian Beatrice is usually associated with Pre-Raphaelite artworks, especially those by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Many of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Beatrices fit into either the category of the ‘beautiful dead woman’ or that of the male artist's cipher or projection screen. In contrast, the different Beatrices this chapter introduces possess a powerful and animate aura: they are alive, and the realm they inhabit is not so much a land of shadows, but the social environment of the Victorian here and now. The first part looks at her exploitation in Victorian literature, especially in the hands of John Ruskin, who saw Beatrice as a model for the behaviour of English women. In the second part, a critical response to such processes of idealization is discussed. George Eliot's Romola, a novel which consciously revises the use of a literary figure such as Beatrice, contains complex criticism of the kind of female idealization perpetuated by poetic traditions.Less

Introduction

Catherine Maxwell

in Second Sight: The Visionary Imagination in Late Victorian Literature

This book focuses on a range of authors from the late Victorian period, some canonical, some non-canonical, whose works, in addition to poetry, encompass a variety of literary forms such as the ... More

This book focuses on a range of authors from the late Victorian period, some canonical, some non-canonical, whose works, in addition to poetry, encompass a variety of literary forms such as the essay, the short story and the novel. The sublime is now treated as only one among a number of forms of imaginative vision used by chosen writers, all of whom are deeply indebted to Romantic influences. The analysis of the following writers – Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, Eugene Lee-Hamilton, Theodore Watts-Dunton and Thomas Hardy – centres on the iconic aesthetic image of the human face and form mediated through shadows, spirits, ghosts, corpses, body substitutes, paintings, sculptures or sculptural fragments, and finds certain repeated motifs, such as the non-finito, the Michelangelesque incomplete or unfinished body, the suggestive fragment and the allied, widely used figure of synecdoche, the part for the whole, which so often acts as stimulus for the visionary imagination. These repeated images or patterns of images illuminate each author's creativity, aesthetic practice and understanding of the imagination. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.Less

Plate

in Britain's Chinese Eye: Literature, Empire, and Aesthetics in Nineteenth-Century Britain

This chapter describes how the circulation of patterned porcelain allowed the Chinese garden to be understood as a domestic commodity, and also explains how the increasingly mechanized production of ... More

This chapter describes how the circulation of patterned porcelain allowed the Chinese garden to be understood as a domestic commodity, and also explains how the increasingly mechanized production of that commodity revised British creative and narrative self-conception. It connects artistic technique, commercial conditions, and consumer practice in describing the ways that domestically manufactured pieces of porcelain became identified primarily as Chinese objects wielding Chinese visual influence. In the transformation of British commodities into Chinese objects, we can connect the economic conditions described by traditional theories of consumer practice with the newer critical category of thing theory through rhetorics of political and racial difference. The chapter begins by considering Romantic-era satires on blue and white china in the first decades of the nineteenth century and then moves on to descriptions of the porcelain-collecting practices of Whistler and Dante Gabriel Rossetti in the 1860s.Less

An English Craftsman Discovers World Music

Harry Liebersohn

in Music and the New Global Culture: From the Great Exhibitions to the Jazz Age

A. J. Hipkins started out as a piano tuner who taught himself equal temperament tuning and became the leading British authority on string and keyboard instruments as well as an advocate for musical ... More

A. J. Hipkins started out as a piano tuner who taught himself equal temperament tuning and became the leading British authority on string and keyboard instruments as well as an advocate for musical instruments and traditions from around the world. His horizons expanded as he met Chopin and championed the expressive style of his music versus the virtuoso but mechanical fashions of his time. His research recounted but criticized the development of the piano as a history of mechanical progress; at the same time he prized early music and the expressive qualities of historic instruments. Members of the Arts and Crafts movement including Lawrence Alma-Tadema welcomed Hipkins into their social circle; Hipkins commented on the role of musical instruments in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s paintings. Hipkins was a musical instrument adviser to the Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886. Drawing in part on its displays, Hipkins produced an illustrated picture volume of early modern and extra-European instruments that made the case for valuing worldwide musical traditions. He also helped Charles Day with the writing and publication of his book on Carnatic music. Hipkins’ rejection of evolutionary schemas and relativization of Western harmony were notable elements of his advocacy of non-Western music.Less

The Germs of a Genre: The Germ and the Oxford and Cambridge Magazine

Koenraad Claes

in The Late-Victorian Little Magazine

This chapter offers a working definition for the little magazine genre, explained as dependent on the peculiar position these publications occupied in the wider periodical marketplace. It then looks ... More

This chapter offers a working definition for the little magazine genre, explained as dependent on the peculiar position these publications occupied in the wider periodical marketplace. It then looks at two titles that have been suggested as the starting point for this genre: the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s journal TheGerm (1850—e.g. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, William Holman Hunt), and the closely linked Oxford and Cambridge Magazine (1856—e.g. William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones) that anticipates the message of the Arts & Crafts Movement, in which several contributors would be involved. Finally, the early tendencies in these journals towards a conceptual integration of their contents and the formal / material aspects of the printed text is related to the mid- to late-Victorian ‘Revival of Fine Printing’, which is argued to develop alongside the little magazine genre.Less

Hopkins and the Lost Beloved: The Making of ‘A Voice from the World’ and ‘Binsey Poplars’

Catherine Phillips

in Poetry in the Making: Creativity and Composition in Victorian Poetic Drafts

This chapter examines the development of two poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins: the first, ‘A Voice from the World’, was written as a response to Christina Rossetti’s ‘The Convent Threshold’ and Dante ... More

This chapter examines the development of two poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins: the first, ‘A Voice from the World’, was written as a response to Christina Rossetti’s ‘The Convent Threshold’ and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘The Blessed Damozel’. The extant fragments of Hopkins’s poem suggest his undergraduate poetic ambition to rival the Rossettis in tackling metrical and emotional complexities. The second poem examined is ‘Binsey Poplars’, which belongs to 1879, when Hopkins was a parish priest in Oxford. In it Hopkins struggles to express deep feelings about the destruction of nature, absorbing ideas from poems written by his father, R. W. Dixon, and John Clare. ‘Binsey Poplars’ is also of interest at present because a new holograph, with unique readings, has recently been purchased at auction by the Bodleian. In examining both poems, the chapter explores the concatenation of sources of inspiration and something of Hopkins’s development in handling emotional subjects.Less

Invariant Forms: “[T]he bonds of verse”: Form as Discipline

Andrea Henderson

in Algebraic Art: Mathematical Formalism and Victorian Culture

In the later nineteenth century formal regularity was regarded as the hallmark of mathematical and scientific inquiry as well as the burgeoning “social sciences” and the arts—all presumed to be ... More

In the later nineteenth century formal regularity was regarded as the hallmark of mathematical and scientific inquiry as well as the burgeoning “social sciences” and the arts—all presumed to be governed by formal “laws.” But insofar as formal regularity was seen to characterize natural and civil law, it allowed for an equivocation between them, such that formal laws might be understood to be not an abstraction from but an imposition on content. Thus conceived, form and content could actually be at odds, and this would have important implications for the arts. In the context of linguistic and literary study, the structures of languages and literatures were often allied with formal law while individual words were perceived as rich in meaning but wayward. Max Müller’s philology, Coventry Patmore’s prosody and poetry, and Christina Rossetti’s poetry all present form and content as being in tension, locked in a struggle for domination.Less