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The Gas Stokers’ Case and the Freedom to Strike

MARK CURTHOYS

in Governments, Labour, and the Law in Mid-Victorian Britain: The Trade Union Legislation of the 1870s

This chapter examines the ruling issued by Sir William Brett in R v Bunn and Others (the gas stokers' case) and its implications for Britain's trade unions and their freedom to strike. Whatever its ... More

This chapter examines the ruling issued by Sir William Brett in R v Bunn and Others (the gas stokers' case) and its implications for Britain's trade unions and their freedom to strike. Whatever its basis, Brett's ruling has been described as one of the most momentous English court decisions of the nineteenth century. Strikers, whether trade unionists or not, found that a completely unexpected judicial intervention had ‘turned the whole flank of the Criminal Law Amendment Act (CLAA) of 1871’. A number of new issues were raised by the case: the judge's handling of the trial and his sentence on the gas stokers; the revival of the law of conspiracy in labour cases; the limits of the freedom to strike where the safety of the public was endangered; and the inequality of the Master and Servant Act, whose alteration was now added to repeal of the CLAA in the Trades Union Congress's programme, agreed at Leeds in January 1873.Less

Dracula and Detection: Among Genres II

John Wilson Foster

in Irish Novels 1890-1940: New Bearings in Culture and Fiction

This chapter begins with a discussion of Bram Stoker's Dracula and The Man. It then discusses the work of Elliot O'Donnell, including Werewolves. It then analyzes detective fiction.

All Red Routes: Blood Brotherhood and the Post in Doyle, Kipling, and Stoker

Kate Thomas

in Postal Pleasures: Sex, Scandal, and Victorian Letters

The British empire was made of colonies marked red on the map; an infamously disparate geography that was governed at a distance. These colonies were linked by a vast web of telegraph and postal ... More

The British empire was made of colonies marked red on the map; an infamously disparate geography that was governed at a distance. These colonies were linked by a vast web of telegraph and postal routes known as the "all red routes." This trope turned the language of blood ties into a prosthetic kinship relation, appropriate given that the bureaucracy of empire was held together by mobile homosocial bonds. This chapter focuses on America as the "lost boy" of the British empire, playing a defining role in the way that Victorians thought about the consequences of expansion. Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling and Bram Stoker were all invested in the late-century Anglo-American Reunion movement that ran a prominent campaign for an Imperial Penny Post under a rhetoric of brotherhood fuelled by fantasies of homosocial alliance and racial continence. The chapter concludes by pointing out that post-colonial theory’s structuring metaphor of "the empire writes back" is a postal metaphor, one that reverses fantasies of white brotherhood.Less

THE RECORDED VOICE FROM VICTORIAN AURA TO MODERNIST ECHO

John M. Picker

in Victorian Soundscapes

This chapter argues that while moderns used the gramophone to represent their concerns over the disintegration of artistic “aura” in an age of mechanical reproduction, Victorians used the phonograph ... More

This chapter argues that while moderns used the gramophone to represent their concerns over the disintegration of artistic “aura” in an age of mechanical reproduction, Victorians used the phonograph in ways that spoke to their own concerns over issues ranging from the domestic to the imperial. It presents a cultural study attentive to the varied, often contradictory later Victorian manifestations of the phonograph, in the publicity-related activities of Thomas Edison's London agent George Gouraud, who arranged for recordings to be made of Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson, as well as in works such as Arthur Conan Doyle's “The Voice of Science” and “The Japanned Box”, Bram Stoker's Dracula, and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The phonograph, with the power to record and replay, promised a special kind of communal integrity even as it extended a troubling sense of fragmentation. Through its mechanical reproduction of voice, it offered forms of control and interaction that late Victorians initially found not impersonal and fearful as moderns later did, but in a period of diminishing mastery over empire and the self, individualized, reassuring, and even desirable.Less

Atavism: A Darwinian Nightmare

Mighall Robert

in A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History's Nightmares

This chapter examines the historical motivations and emphases of Gothic fiction in England during the later part of the 19th century. It shows how changes in the perception of the scope and nature of ... More

This chapter examines the historical motivations and emphases of Gothic fiction in England during the later part of the 19th century. It shows how changes in the perception of the scope and nature of historical time encouraged the emergence of a new breed of Gothic fiction which betrayed a distinct biological and anthropological cast. The chapter explains how the works of Arthur Conan Doyle, Arthur Machen, and Bram Stoker provided new locations for the unwelcome past to survive into and threaten the civilized present.Less

Making A Case: Vampirism, Sexuality, and Interpretation

Mighall Robert

in A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History's Nightmares

This chapter explores the convergences and divergences of fictional and medico-legal discourse in Gothic fiction in England during the late Victorian period by focusing on the figure of the vampire. ... More

This chapter explores the convergences and divergences of fictional and medico-legal discourse in Gothic fiction in England during the late Victorian period by focusing on the figure of the vampire. It explains how the vampire played an important role in the definition of the category of the sadist, aided writers in their portrayal of sexuality, and helped science to explain moral monstrosity. It contends that Bram Stoker's Dracula provided the best example of Gothic fiction's departure from the aims and procedures of psychiatric discourse.Less

Fin de Siècle: Vortex of the Genres

James H. Murphy

in Irish Novelists and the Victorian Age

The last decades of the century saw great changes in the writing of fiction. In Britain, where George Moore, Oscar Wilde, and Bram Stoker were among the most prominent novelists, high-culture ... More

The last decades of the century saw great changes in the writing of fiction. In Britain, where George Moore, Oscar Wilde, and Bram Stoker were among the most prominent novelists, high-culture movements such as naturalism, decadence, and early modernism, vied with popular forms such as detective fiction, the imperial adventure, and science fiction. Authors like B. M. Croker wrote novels of life in India, while Robert Cromie was prominent in science-fiction and future-war fantasies. In Ireland groupings of writers wrote for differing audiences. Ulster fiction began to emerge in the north with Shan F. Bullock and others. Meanwhile, in the south, Anglo-Irish novelists like Somerville and Ross took to comedy and satire, while Catholic-intelligentsia writers began to scrutinize a changed society. Some novels explored the possibilities of the renewal of society while others interrogated the newer sets of relationships that were possible across traditional class lines and the great landlord–tenant divide, now that the latter was in the process of dissolving.Less

The Shipping Intelligence: Shipwrecks and Secret Tears from Dickens to Stoker

Matthew Rubery

in The Novelty of Newspapers: Victorian Fiction After the Invention of the News

Nowhere is the borrowing from newspapers by novelists so clear as in the case of shipwrecks, the most frequently reported disaster in the Victorian press. This chapter shows that novelists used this ... More

Nowhere is the borrowing from newspapers by novelists so clear as in the case of shipwrecks, the most frequently reported disaster in the Victorian press. This chapter shows that novelists used this wildly popular feature drawn from the pages of Lloyd's List to highlight the impact news could have on domestic life. Although the shipping news has often been regarded as an exclusively male interest of sailors, merchants, and investors, this section of the newspaper was read with equal fervor by domestic women separated by the sea from loved ones. We know this through a remarkable sequence of parallel scenes across the 19th-century novel in which the revelation of private love takes place at the moment when the newspaper ensures that the heroine's admiration will be shared by all of England. Novelists as different as Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, and Charlotte Yonge all recognized the counterintuitive way in which public media enabled the expression of private feeling, a response strikingly evident on dramatic occasions such as the loss of a ship at sea. Such scenes vividly illustrate a new approach to understanding catastrophe in Victorian fiction.Less

I Want To Suck Your …: Fluids and Fluidity in Dracula Porn

Laura Helen Marks

in Alice in Pornoland: Hardcore Encounters with the Victorian Gothic

This chapter explores the status, meaning, use, and conflation of gendered orifices and bodily fluids in pornographic adaptations of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. In speaking the supposed silences of ... More

This chapter explores the status, meaning, use, and conflation of gendered orifices and bodily fluids in pornographic adaptations of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. In speaking the supposed silences of Dracula, porn adaptations of the novel must carefully navigate gender and sexuality. These adaptations reveal how hardcore film as a whole operates on anxious ground similar to that of Stoker’s novel, simultaneously invoking and resisting sexual anxieties concerning gendered penetration, gendered fluids, and consumption. Dracula, as a culture text, mobilizes queered, gendered, and raced reformulations of consumer and consumed, queering ostensibly straight pornographies, destabilizing supposedly rigid gender dynamics, and resituating the colonial Other. Dracula adaptations invoke and redeploy the racialized implications of nineteenth-century vampirism, channeling racial and sexual subjectivity through vampirism. Dracula penetrates a supposedly sanctified pornotopia, enabling diverse and perverse sexual representations that are instructive in understanding pornography as erotically engaged with sexual fluidity, genre instability, and oscillating power dynamics.Less

Seerman: the rise of the psychic detective

Neil Cornwell

in Odoevsky's Four Pathways into Modern Fiction: A Comparative Study

This chapter notes early detective fiction in works by Schiller, Hoffmann and Poe, prior to an examination of the figure of the uncle in Odoevsky's The Salamander—this personage here being proposed ... More

This chapter notes early detective fiction in works by Schiller, Hoffmann and Poe, prior to an examination of the figure of the uncle in Odoevsky's The Salamander—this personage here being proposed as a proto-‘psychic doctor’. The discussion considers examples of such a figure, in Anglo-Irish and English literature up to the Edwardian era. It assesses works by Sheridan Le Fanu, Bram Stoker, Algernon Blackwood and, again, Hodgson. Such a protagonist is then seen to recede, in the main into a more parodic treatment. A concluding section notes the reappearance at least of such motifs in recent ‘metaphysical detective’ fiction.Less

Cults, Independents and ‘Guerrilla’ Filmmaking

Paul Grainge, Mark Jancovich, and Sharon Monteith

in Film Histories: An Introduction and Reader

This chapter focuses on alternative models of cinema, which flourished beyond the exclusive control of the major studios. This was related in no small part to occasional funding sources and ... More

This chapter focuses on alternative models of cinema, which flourished beyond the exclusive control of the major studios. This was related in no small part to occasional funding sources and specialised forms of institutional support that emerged for independent film. The video market, in particular, became a crucial source of funding through cassette presales. At the same time, international film festivals such as Cannes, Venice, London, Berlin, Toronto, Hong Kong and Pusan became an important showcase for raising public awareness of films produced outside Hollywood. The chapter also includes the study, ‘Gone With The Wind Plus Fangs’: Genre, Taste and Distinction in the Assembly, Marketing and Reception of Bram Stoker's Dracula by Thomas Austin, which examines the particular means by which film in the early 1990s was distinguished by a so-called ‘industrially motivated hybridity’. This describes the means by which film creates appeal not through any singular or unified style, but through promotional and conversational processes of fragmentation, elaboration and diffusion.Less

The Movement-Image: Horror Cinematography and Mise-en-scène

Anna Powell

in Deleuze and Horror Film

This chapter deals with mise-en-scène and various kinds of movement in horror cinema. The film theory shaped by psychoanalysis and semiology treats images as static, symbolic components of underlying ... More

This chapter deals with mise-en-scène and various kinds of movement in horror cinema. The film theory shaped by psychoanalysis and semiology treats images as static, symbolic components of underlying representational structures. It abstracts them from their moving, changing medium. Gilles Deleuze, on the other hand, endorses Henri Bergson's ‘vitalism’, or the ubiquitous presence of dynamic forces in his work, with singularities of style and expression. The ‘movement-image’ in process replaces language-like symbolic representation at the crux of the filmic event. Beauty is located not in formal balance but in the kinesthetics of perpetual motion. Horror film foregrounds the dynamics of movement. In Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula, for example, stasis is spectacularly defied. Even though a film's locale may be spatially constricted, as in a haunted house, movement still occurs. As well as its material force on the sensorium, horror film also opens up to the metaphysical elements of duration, via the special usage of light, spatial and temporal overlay, and other techniques.Less

“Shadows of the Coming Race”

Patrick Brantlinger

in Taming Cannibals: Race and the Victorians

This chapter surveys the rise of science fiction and the Victorians' response both to what evolution meant for the future and to new machines, especially new communications devices such as the ... More

This chapter surveys the rise of science fiction and the Victorians' response both to what evolution meant for the future and to new machines, especially new communications devices such as the telegraph and the typewriter. Edward Bulwer-Lytton's science fiction classic The Coming Race appeared in 1872. Victorians, including George Eliot, speculated about machines as a super-race that would one day replace humans. In the machinic throes of vampirism, Bram Stoker's Dracula represents a past in which imperialism and cannibalism were inseparable—a past that he threatens to turn into Britain's future by creating an ever-expanding race of vampires. Universal bloodthirstiness or vampiric cannibalism is the ultimate nightmare version of racial degeneration and also of going native.Less

Bringing the undead to life

Cristina Massaccesi

in Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror

This chapter details the production of Nosferatu (1922). In line with the preferred working pattern of Weimar cinema that placed at its centre the so-called ‘director-unit’ — a system whereby each ... More

This chapter details the production of Nosferatu (1922). In line with the preferred working pattern of Weimar cinema that placed at its centre the so-called ‘director-unit’ — a system whereby each film was the product of a closely knit collaboration of director, screenwriter, set designer, and cameraman — Nosferatu can be regarded not just as the product of the artistic genius of F. W. Murnau but also as the brainchild of at least three other men: the producer and set designer Albin Grau, the screenwriter Henrik Galeen, and, although to a somewhat lesser extent, the cameraman Fritz Arno Wagner. The chapter studies their personalities and careers. It then looks at the film's reception and the following controversy and legal action against Prana Film for the illegal use of intellectual property. Finally, the chapter assesses how similar Nosferatu really was to its literary source, Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897).Less

Literary Precursors

Doris V. Sutherland

in The Mummy

This chapter discusses the portrayal of mummies and ancient Egypt in fantastic literature. While not necessarily the basis of a coherent subgenre, mummies were a recurring theme in the supernatural ... More

This chapter discusses the portrayal of mummies and ancient Egypt in fantastic literature. While not necessarily the basis of a coherent subgenre, mummies were a recurring theme in the supernatural literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as authors of the fantastic found their imaginations fired by the latest developments in Egyptology. Stories from this period often differ significantly from the mummy films that would later develop in Hollywood, but certain aspects of them are nonetheless echoed by Universal Pictures' subgenre-defining 1932 film The Mummy. The chapter then describes haunted mummies and walking mummies. There are three writers in particular who stand out as the most likely influences upon Universal's The Mummy: Bram Stoker, Arthur Conan Doyle, and H. Rider Haggard.Less

‘Nineteenth century (up-to-date) with a vengeance’: vampirism, Victorianism and collage in Guy Maddin’s Dracula – Pages from a Virgin’s Diary

Dorothea Schuller

in Monstrous media/spectral subjects: Imaging gothic fictions from the nineteenth century to the present

This chapter discusses one of the most recent and – despite the absence of dialogue and anything resembling realistic acting – most faithful adaptations of Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), Guy Maddin's ... More

This chapter discusses one of the most recent and – despite the absence of dialogue and anything resembling realistic acting – most faithful adaptations of Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), Guy Maddin's 2002 film of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet's dance adaptation, set to the music of Gustav Mahler, Dracula – Pages from a Virgin's Diary. Maddin's ‘Victorian’ interpretation of Dracula is marked by an emphasis on the turn-of-the-century cultural contexts of the novel (gender, medicine, race, imperialism). The film presents 1890s England as seen through the eyes of a knowledgeable 21st century viewer whose close reading of the source text is shaped by critical discussions of the novel and the Dracula myth in popular culture. Vampirizing various cultural artifacts from Caligari to Coppola, Maddin's palimpsestic film ultimately manages to be both highly original and collage, both – in the words of Jonathan Harker's diary – ‘up-to-date’ and ‘nineteenth century […] with a vengeance’.Less

Death by orgasm: sexual surgery and Dracula

Marie Mulvey-Roberts

in Dangerous bodies: Historicising the gothic corporeal

Chapter 3 discusses how surgical treatment was used to ‘correct’ women who had strayed from their traditional gender role. This forms a subtext to Bram Stoker’s Dracula, a novel reflecting the social ... More

Chapter 3 discusses how surgical treatment was used to ‘correct’ women who had strayed from their traditional gender role. This forms a subtext to Bram Stoker’s Dracula, a novel reflecting the social and political instability of gender during the fin de siècle. Several members of Bram Stoker’s family were doctors and surgeons, from whom he acquired clinical and surgical details for the writing of Dracula. Cases from the history of sexual surgery, including those conducted by Stoker’s brother Thornley Stoker, parallel readings from the novel, where the destruction of the female vampire will be viewed as a deconstructed narrative of surgical horror and medical tyranny visited upon the female hysteric, along with other women deemed sexually perverse. As Andrew Smith expresses it, for the female hysteric, doctors were ‘Gothic figures, inflicting pain and distress either through neglect or through a misplaced sense of surgical bravado.’Less