December 2009
Your webmaster continued working on the Spanish version of the site, creating 60 odd documents about Victorian architecture in the Straits Colonies and a larger number on iron-and-glass architecture and buildings in London. When Brian Gross, who's promoting The Young Victoria, wrote to announce this film, that he tells us "your readers would love," GPL created a document with links to the elegant official movie site and images from it. This month the Victorian Web received essays from new contributors in the UK, Poland, and Iran, and GPL began working with the authors to prepare their work for the site.
After reading David S. Reynolds's John Brown, Abolitionist (which his daughter gave him as a present), GPL added two essays on Puritanism, Cromwell, Carlyle, and John Brown: "The Influence of Carlyle's Portrait of Cromwell upon John Brown" and "'Abolition is the offspring of Puritanism:' John Brown, the Puritan Heritage, and the American Civil War."
Jacqueline Banerjee, who contributed two essays accompanied by two dozen photos of Castell Coch by William Burges, also added to her work on Winchester, including photographs and discussions for the Guildhall, the house where Jane Austen died, and the history and buildings of Winchester College. She also added an essay and 12 photographs of Burges's All Saints, Fleet and created a new section on the sculptor Thomas Campbell, which includes his bust of Sir Robert Smirke and his equestrian statue of Sir John Hope, fourth Earl of Hopetoun.
Philip V. Allingham completed the first 23 commentaries on the illustrations of David Copperfield by Phiz.
Dr Andrzej Diniejko, Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Culture at Poland's Warsaw University, contributed "Thomas Carlyle and the Origin of the 'Condition of England Question'" and "Carlyle's Belief in Meritocracy and his Captains of Industry."
The site, which had 43,995 documents and images as of the 28th, passed 44,000 by the year's (and decade's) end, after I uploaded essays by the three editors and Andrzej Diniejko.
November 2009
Your webmaster continued working on the Spanish version of the site, and with the help of Ana González-Rivas Fernández, Assistant Professor at Madrid's Universidad Complutense (who also provided the first Spanish translator's bio), he put up more material from the sculpture section. He also worked with various contributors creating or editing htmls, and he reforamtted several hundred documents about book illustration, in the process creating a small section on German book illustration. Professor López-Varela vetterd and then e-mailed Terri Ochiagha Plaza's translations of the materials on Thomas Hughes, and GPL devoted a day to formatting them, which are our first complete section in Spanish on an author.
Jacqueline Banerjee began the month with essays and more than three dozen photographs of William Burges's magnificent Cardiff Castle. Her next contributions included photographs and comemntary on Sir George Gilbert Scott's University of Glasgow plus his (and Armstead's) monument for Bishop Wilberforce and the choir screen in Winchester Cathedral, J. W. Simpson and Edmund John Milner Allen's Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, and James Walker's Victoria Bridge. She also contributed a series on Winchester Cathedral, including not only Scott's work mentioned above but also Chantrey's monument to Bishop Brownlow North and Jones's to C. B. Pigott.
Philip Allingham completed commentaries for the first dozen illustrations by Phiz of David Copperfield plus all the plates, which GPL color corrected and sized.
Simon Cooke added to his work about British illustrators with essays on Richard Doyle and William Small, and he provided scans of illustrations by them as well as some by Daniel Maclise and Arthur Hughes. GPL sized and edited the images and created htmls for all of them.
Julian Rubin writes, suggesting a link to a site about the roots of wireless communication in the Victorian period and wrote a description of it for our readers. John Sankey shared more of his photographs and discussions of Brock's sculpture, including his medallion portrait of Queen Victoria, busts of Sir Henry Tate and Sir Augustus Harris, and the statue of Richard John Seddon in Wellington, New Zealand.
Professor A. K. Bakshi, Director of the Institute of Lifelong Learning at the University of Delhi, has written and received permission to use some of our illustrations in educational materials.
Emma Trehane writes to inquire if any readers of the Victorian Web have information that connects the writer and playwright J.M.Barrie with Lulworth Cove in Dorset.
As of the 30th, the site had 43, 450 documents and images.
October 2009
After your webmaster returned from delivering a series of lectures on new media, hypertext, and their educational and political effects at Universität Bayreuth, Germany, he began laying the groundwork for Spanish and French versions of the site that will be part of a three-year project entitled "Studies on Intermediality as Intercultural Mediation." This project has been conceived, organized, and directed by Professor Asuncion López-Varela Azcarte of the Facultad de Filologia de Universidad Complutense de Madrid and supported by grants from her university and from Madrid (Comunidad de Madrid CCG08-UCM/HUM-3851) and the Ministry of Science and Innovation (Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación MICINN FFI2008-05388/FISO).. After each lexia (or separate document) is translated, two readers will vet it, after which it will appear in the non-English versions of the Victorian Web. Landow created icons once Alfonso Sánchez Moya and Maya Zalbidea Paniagua corrected his suggestions for icons texts. Using Google Translate, he created a draft of a Spanish version of the section containing 34 works of Thomas Woolner, the Pre-Raphaelite sculptor, which Ms. Zalbidea Paniagua then corrected, herself translating the documents on Raffles and John Stuart Mill — the first Spanish text documents to go online! Next, he translated two dozen documents for the Albert Memorial plus the works of Joseph Durham and those of Edward Hodges Baily, best known for his statue on Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square.
Jacqueline Banerjee begins the month with Frampton's statue of Quintin Hogg, William Brodie's of Thomas Graham, Francis Chantrey's George IV and James Watt, John Henry Foley's Field Marshal Lord Clyde, Carlo Marochetti's James Oswald and The Duke of Wellington, John Mossman's of the explorer David Livingstone and the poet Thomas Campbell, Hamo Thornycroft's William Ewart Gladstone. Glasgow architectural sculpture includes Richard Ferris's Faith and Fortitude and Paul Montford's Philosophy and Inspiration.
Her contributions to the architecture section include the following Glasgow buildings and fountains: Alexander Beith MacDonald's The People's Palace and Winter Gardens, several architects' Scottish Temperance League Building, the Doulton Fountain, and the Cameron Memorial Fountain. Her travels produced 11 photos of Cardiff Castle by William Burges.
John Sankey shared his photographs and discussions of Brock's Lister and Sir Richard Temple. Derek B. Scott, Professor of Critical Musicology, University of Leeds, contributes another of his performances of Victorian popular music — the 1894 "If It Wasn't for the 'Ouses in Between".
Simon Cooke took time off from proofing his book on British illustrators that the British Library is publishing to send in introductions to the illustrations of Edward Burne-Jones, Arthur Hughes, Daniel Maclise, George Pinwell, and James Macneill Whistler.
Dr. Albrecht Geck, Privatdozent at the University of Osnabrück, writes to say that his book, Autorität und Glaube (Authority and Faith), in which a Victorian Web image of Tom Tower, Oxford, appears has just been published by Universitätverlag Osnabrück. Dr. Kurt Harris Chair, English Department, Southern Utah University, writes to let us know that he has created a Thackeray site.
Bruce Bumbalough, Watauga, Texasm writes to point out a broken link in the general bibliography section, and Shelley B. Aley, Associate Professor at James Madison University, writes to point out that one of our contributors used a portrait of the wrong Alexander Bain. Thanks.
September 2009
Before setting off for London, George Landow created a section and sitemap for Dombey and Son, adding a brief essay, "Toodle the Railway Man — Occupation as Character." After Marjorie Bloy, Senior Researcher for the Victorian Web back in 2000-2001, wrote to let us know the new URL for one of the sites she had linked, GPL changed 21 documents. Arriving in London, your webmaster took numerous walks around Trafalgar Square and down Piccadilly and and High Holborn, ultimately creating photographs and texts for Staple Inn, Waterhouse's Prudential Assurance Building, the Royal Academy, a night view of the National Gallery, and the following sculpture: George Gamon Adams's Charles James Napier, Behnes's Major General Sir Henry Havelock, and the World War I memorial in the Prudential Assurance Building, Toft's The Royal Fusiliers (City of London Regiment) Memorial on High Holburn, and good deal of architectural sculpture. In the process, he created a sitemap for war memorials, reformatting documents in that section and doing the same for the section on the nude in art.
After packing up and moving to Gower Street next to UCL, your webmaster created photographs and accompanying htmls for Sir Richard Westmacott's Duke of Bedford memorial and one of his favorite London buildings — the Arts and Crafts classic Mary Ward House, named after Matthew Arnold's famous novelist-niece and the first school with classrooms for disabled children. A visit to the V&A furnished information about the relations of Art Nouveau and dance, and photographs of Dalou's Bacchanal, a better version of Watts's Clytie, Drury's The Age of Innocence, and two fairy paintings by Joseph Severn and one by Etty. Taking a tour of Buckingham Palace permitted GPL to photograph the rear of the palace, back garden (really lawn), and the lake and create a sitemap for the palace, and while there he was able to take some additional pictures of the magnificent Victoria Memorial. Going to the Saturday food market near London Bridge produced photographs of the Globe Tavern, a 1872 pub, and the iron and glass markets, and walking to that a Spitalfield's Charles Harrison Townsend's Bishopsgate Institute. Walking around central London produced photographs of Sir Francis Chantrey's William Pitt in Hanover Square, statues of Science, Commerce, and Art on 70-71 New Bond Street. The section on iron-and-glass architecture and that on railway stations continues to expand with photographs of the entrance to the old Metropolitan Railway, Liverpool Street and Waterloo Stations (thanks to station reception for granting a photography pass).
When OpenHouse London 2009, which took place on the weekend of the 19th and 20th, permitted access to buildings not usually open to visitors, GPL took a series of photographs of some important churches: A visit to G. E. Street's St. Mary Magdalene in Paddington produced many images of the church, its sculpture, Salviati's mosaics, Holiday's stained glass, and J. N. Comper's Chapel of the Holy Sepulcher with its magnificent reredos and organ. A visit to E. B. Lamb's Parish Church of St. Martin (which Pevsner described as London's "craziest Victorian church") produced another large series. Another series of images made possible by OpenHouse London was Norman Shaw's Hampstead home and studio for Kate Greenaway. Walking from Belsize Park to Primrose Hill to Bloomsbury led to photographs of the Sir Cowasjee Jehangir Fountain in Regent's Park, and a quick ride on the tube to Oxford Circus produced the last series from this trip — an essay and a dozen images about Butterfield's All Saints, Margaret Street — he (almost) hidden treasure. This illustrated essay represents a new approach to putting large numbers of images about a single building or sculpture online: instead of creating an html for every image with approximately the same essay, it uses thumbnails linked to larger images rather than to htmls containing images. Will readers prefer it? Will the smaller number of html documents make it harder to find on Google, Bing, and other search engines?
More photos of stained glass and mosaics to come. . .
Philip V. Allingham and GPL completed the series of 28 illustrations by Fred Barnard for Dickens's biography in the Household Edition. PVA is at work on commentaries.
Jacqueline Banerjee added photographs and accompanying text for Lewis Vulliamy's Law Society, William Burges's Park House in Cardiff, Wales, and John Prichard and J. P. Seddon's Llandaff Cathedral, including stained glass windows by Morris and Burne-Jones and Sir William Goscombe John's statue of James Rice Buckley. Next follow a series on Waterhouse's Lloyds Bank in Cambridge and Edward Buckton Lamb's St. Simon and St. Jude.
David Humphreys, who writes, "when I teach the concept of the self-fulfilling prophecy, I use your image of Pygmalian(sic) and Galatea," kindly corrected the spelling in Gérome's painting to "Pygmalion." Normand Theriault e-mailed to let us know that the image of Tennyson's family tree had gone missing, and GPL replaced the corrupted image. Thanks. On 28 September the site has 42, 551 documents.
August 2009
George Landow spent most of the first two weeks of the month scanning, proofing, formatting, converting notes, and linking the first two chapters of Janet Larson's Dickens and the Broken Scripture, one of the most difficult such web conversions he'd ever done. He also mined Little Dorrit for Dickens's description of the India Docks and his views of the transformative power of Victorian railways and his dislike of medievalism on both aesthetic and political grounds.
As part of his work on Barnard's illustrations of Dickens, Philip Allingham contributed "The best of all Dickens illustrators:" A 1908 Review of A Dickens Picture Book" that summarizes late-Victorian views of the novelists's illustrators. He also sent in scans of a Barnard illustration that accompanied this review and another of George Cruikshank's The Ragged School, Smithfield, which contribution prompted GPL to create a sitemap and bibliography for ragged schools.
Jacqueline Banerjee contributed a review of a new book on London's Changing Riverscape, by Charles Craig and others, also adding photographs and accompanying discussions of Wapping Pier, London, E1, the West India Docks, Chamberlain's Wharf., Metropolitan Wharf, Columbia Wharf, and Oliver's Wharf to our new section on industrial architecture.
Next, she sent in photos and commentaries for monuments and memorial sculptures, including Robert Smirke's Wellington Monument, Goscombe John's Memorial to the Engine Room Heroes in Liverpool, the text for the Port Sunlight Memorial near Liverpool, and the Bellot memorial in Greenwich, by Philip Hardwick (which addition occasioned a great deal of reorganizing of the Hardwick family's index by GPL). She also added photographs of Thornycroft's Alfred the Great, and she and GPL added John Sankey's photographs and discussions of the following sculptures by Thomas Brock: Thomas Hughes, Gladstone, Brigadier General John Nicholson, Sir Rowland Hill, Sir Isaac Pitman, and Edwin Austin Abbey. To close out the month JB sent in and essay and 15 photographs of St. Fin Barre's Cathedral in Cork, Ireland, and following her two near-perfect templates GPL created the last 13 htmls.
Michael Philips, who wrote to inform us that he "produce[s] video guides of buildings and landmarks for www.iGuidez.com," invited us to link to his 120 videos of Belfast, such as this one for Lavery's Pub. Henry Reichold writes to inform readers of the Victorian Web about his detailed view of the Albert Memorial.
Ruth Howard, Curator, Vale and Downland Museum, writes for permission to use Dicky Doyle's The Battle of Ashdown that serves as an illustration in Tom Hughes's The Scouring of the White Horse. Magnús Einarsson write from Iceland for permission to use Tenniel's illustrations for the Alice books in "a sociology textbook" he is writing "for students in secondary school." (Some others also wrote for permission, which was denied, to use our materials for commercial purposes, in large part because we do not want the Victorian Web to compete with for-profit sources of images.
A young man named Todd wrote to "thank you for your Victorian Web website. My teachers touched on the Industrial Revolution as part of our history classes but for some reason or another they didn't explain how truly grim those times were." You're most welcome!
Brad Henry writes to point out that "In the opening sentence of your introductory article, 'this' century should of course be 'the last.' A common error among those of a certain age . . . (and of which I am one, so no offence intended)." None taken . . . and thanks. A quite grumpy Denis Green wrote to point out multiple typos in a scanned document — it seems the wrong version might have gone online erasing the proofread one. Michael Wyman writes with corrections to our essay on toy theatres and a citation to Google Books. Nancy Koester, Ph.D., writes to correct information about Annie Field. Thanks to all.
On August 31 theVictorian Web had 41,969 documents.
July 2009
Since both George Landow and Jacqueline Banerjee were on cruise ships during the last week of June — Banerjee on a cruise around the UK and Landow making his way from Nice to Paris by way of the River Rhône from Arles to Avignon, Lyons, and Tournon — little new material went online, but both took many photographs. GPL added a series of 10 photographs of Lyon's gothic revival Basilica de Notre Dame de Fourvière and its sculpture and another six of l'Église Saint-Ambroise in Paris. After finding two fifteenth-century sculptural allusions to Genesis 3:15's "bruising the serpent's head" in Viviers, he added them to the religion section under typology and created a new sitemap for that image so important to Hopkins and Browning. Similarly after coming upon Paul Auscher's 1904 Felix Potin Building on the Rue de Rennes in Paris, he added it to the section on Art Nouveau architecture and then created a new sitemap for it.
GPL's second visit in less than a year to the magnificent Musée d'Orsay — yes, a dirty job but someone's got to do it — added to the material on Art Nouveau design, including three examples of Hector Guimard's ironwork, another of his wooden chimney surround plus furniture by Van de Velde, Biegas, and Eckmann, and a wonderfully goth belt buckle featuring a bat.
After the Dutch architect and architectural theorist Lars Spuybroek kindly sent along a copy of his The Architecture of Continuity (Rotterdam, 2008), GPL, who is in the process of writing a brief essay on Spuybroek as a twenty-first-century Neo-Ruskinian, composed "Lars Spuybroek on the principles of Art Nouveau, " "Why Art Nouveau 'had to be short-lived'," and "Gaudí led the gothic away from revivalism."
JB's first July contribution took the form of identifying one of GPL's photographs taken a few years ago as Edinburgh's Buccleuch and Geyfriars Free Church of Scotland. Next came new photographs of Goscombe John's Edward VII and John Gibson's Suffer Little Children to Come to Me plus a new work by Gibson — his monument to Margaret Sandbach. Other works of sculpture include Joseph Durham's Florizel and Perdita and his Monument to Prince Albert overlooking the harbour, St Peter Port, Guernsey, which last contribution prompted GPL to put up his photograph of the original cast, which stands on a much more elaborate base near Royal Albert Hall; he then reorganized the Durham home page. She also sent in photographs on Francis Derwent Wood's Psyche and Fiametta and Sir William Goscombe John's William Edward Hartpole Lecky, M.P. and J. H. Foley's O'Connell Monument, plus a series of photographs of Fowler and Baker's Forth Bridge in Scotland accompanied by an essay. Let us not forget her series on the wonderful Glasgow School of Art!
JB's additions to the architecture section include 14 photographs of St. Matthew's Church on Guernsey and accompanying essay, St. John the Baptist and St. Augustine Church in Dublin, St. Colman's Cathedral in Cobh, Ireland, the Campanile at Trinity College, Dublin
On Fiammetta and half a dozen other photographs Ruth M. Landow, a new contributor, used her Photoshop skills to remove distracting backgrounds. Thanks!
Frank M. Turner, the John Hay Whitney Professor of History at Yale and the Director of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, contributed a long, detailed, and very favorable review of Shanyn Fiske's Heretical Hellenism: Women Writers, Ancient Greece, and the Victorian Popular Imagination. Jessica Courtney contributed "The development of the English language following the Industrial Revolution," which GPL formatted and edited. Thanks to Dr. Catherine Watts, Principal Lecturer, School of Language, Literature and Communication, University of Brighton, for recommending this essay.
Christina Beardsley, whose biography of F. W. Robertson the Lutterworth Press (UK) will publish, offered additional information and a correction that GPL added to our biography of the famous Anglican minister. Thanks!
Dr. Albrecht Geck, Privatdozent at the University of Osnabrück, Germany, wrote for permission to use our scan of Eastlake's drawing of Tom Tower, Oxford, for his book Authority and Faith "on the correspondence between Pusey and Tholuck," which Vandenhöck & Ruprecht in Göttingen will publish this September. Casey Reas of UCLA Design Media Arts writes to request permission to use "your photo of a Jacquard Loom" in FORM + CODE in Design, Architecture, and Art, which Princeton Architectural Press will publish in September.
By the 27th the site had 41,817 documents.
June 2009
After Jacqueline Banerjee sent in a photograph of a London-built hansom cab, pointing out that we had no sitemap for transportation, Landow created one, added his own photo of the York-London mail coach, and created a sitemap entitled "Omnibuses, Coaches, Carriages, and Other Horse-Drawn Vehicles," to which he linked four documents containing passages in which coaches play a significant role from Dickens's Pickwick Papers, Martin Chuzzlewit, and Bleak House.
Philip Allingham completed most of the task of scanning all 61 plates and related images of Fred Barnard's illustrations of David Copperfield and creating HTML documents for each plate: Allingham scanned all the images, GPL resized, straightened, and otherwise adjusted each image and also created an HTML template, which PVA then filled out. Extensive commentaries come next!
JB, who reviewed of The Statues of London, by Claire Bullus and Ronald Asprey, sent in some images of more recent sculptures as well as those of Stephen Poyntz Denning's painting entitled Queen Victoria, Aged 4, Sir John Steell's sculpture of Allan Ramsay, The Hub, Edinburgh, which has a Pugin spire; the National Portrait Gallery; and Burlington House in Piccadilly. JB sent in Punch cartoons on the subjects of bicyclists and the exclusion of women from universities.
She did not neglect London: the site now boasts new photographs of and essays about London's Old Bailey plus Frederick W. Pomeroy's two sculptures for it: Fortitude and Truth flanking a recording angel above the City of London Arms, and Justice.
JB also continued her series of photographs of Liverpool architecture and sculpture and accompanying essays, including those for with several on St. George's Hall, The Picton Reading Room, The Walker Art Gallery.and The William Brown Library and Museum (now the World Museum). The additions from Liverpool to the sculpture section include bas reliefs on the façade of St. George's Hall by Conrad Dressler and Thomas Stirling Lee, and John Warrington Wood's three works for the Walker Art Gallery — Michelangelo, Raphael, Queen Victoria visiting Liverpool in 1851.
Dr Neil S. Sturrock, Vice-Chairman CIBSE Heritage Group, kindly shared with us a great deal of new material on building services engineering, including a history of St. George's Hall and a heavily illustrated essay, "David Boswell Reid's Ventilation of St. George's Hall, Liverpool" (the world's first air-conditioned building) and others on Reid, including a biography and a study of his work on the Houses of Parliament. GPL then created sitemaps for both St. George's and this pioneering engineer.
Emily Doran writes from the Royal Academy of Arts in London to announce J. W. Waterhouse: the Modern Pre-Raphaelite, an exhibition running from 27 June to 13 September.
Annette Magid writes to invite papers for her Wilde session at the 2010 Northeast Modern Language Association meeting in Montreal
Eleanor Scoones, Assistant Producer at Silver River (an independent television production company in London making a new 4-part series on the history of the Grand Tour for Channel 4), wrote for — and obtained — permission to use GPL's photograph of the frieze on the Athenaeum Club: "We will be filming at the Parthenon in Greece and whilst there we would like Kevin McCloud to refer to a small black and white print of the photograph as he explains that the AthenaeumÍs frieze was copied from the Parthenon."
Angela Hazelton writes to point out that the url for one of our external links to material about the Great Exhibition had changed. Jennifer Green similarly points out that the link to a Carnegie-Mellon site on feminism no longer works and suggested another instead [A decade later Ryan W. wrote to update the URL]. Amanda Bierly wrote while I was on the way to Avignon that a typo in Terpening's biography of Richard Strauss gave an incorrect date. Thanks!
May 2009
Your webmaster created a sitemap for cultural institutions in London and edited a number of student essays for the site, including David Goff's "On Process and Persistence: Visions of Time in Pre-Raphaelite and Decadent Works," Olivia Harding's essay about fantasy ("The Ordinary and The Extraordinary"), Matthew Surka's "Pip Learns to Reject the Goddess of Getting On," "Surprizes and Surprizers in Great Expectations and Jane Eyre, " and "Celebrity, the Victorian Audience, Dickens, and Ruskin," Elizabet Piette's "London in Wilde and Dickens," "Life in Nineteenth-Century Prisons as a Context for Great Expectations," and Brian Alexander's "'Breach of Promise of Marriage': Miss Havisham and a late-Victorian lawsuit." After Joshua Vogel pointed out a broken link in the Freud section, I fixed it and reformatted the entire section.
As of the 25th, the site contained 41,325 documents and images.
Philip Allingham continued writing extended commentary on the illustrations by Phiz for Nicholaus Nickleby, and he also added an essay on Phiz's thirtieth plate for Martin Chuzzlewit.
Jacqueline Banerjee added "Women's Religious Orders in Victorian England," and she and GPL wrote "The Conventual Life and Victorian Culture." She also provided photographs of No. 17, Park Village West in Camden, London, which first housed these sisterhoods. In addition, she created a series of photographs and accompanying essays aboout items related to Crystal Palace Park in south-east London — eight of the Italian Terraces, three more of the Dinausaur Court, and another three of Woodington's bust of Sir Joseph Paxton. Next, JB provided photographs and text for Waterhouses's North Western Hotel and a discussion of the accompanying Lime Street Station, Liverpool, as well as the Crystal Palace Station in SE London.
Marie O'Brien, Collections Manager of the Saco Museum in Maine kindly provided a photograph of part of H. C. Selous's panorama illustrating Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. John Sankey shared with us a list of Brock's sculpture.
Luca Garuti, who is currently "studying at the University of Verona, Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literature," kindly e-mailed to point out that the documents for plates 6 & 7 in F. G. Kitton's illustrations of Dickens's The Mystery of Edwin Drrod had different text but the same image. Thanks!
April 2009
As of the 27th, the server tells me that we have 41,040 documents. Your webmaster spent much of the month preparing student work for the site and reorganizing and adding to the Beardsley section after receiving Yelena Primorac's "Illustrating Wilde: An examination of Aubrey Beardsley's interpretation of Salome."
Jacqueline Banerjee added two bas-reliefs at the foot of Nelson's Column: Woodington's The Battle of the Nile, and Watson and Woodington's The Battle of Cape St Vincent plus the Lewis Vulliamy's façade at the Royal Institution.
Pascal Debout of the Institut Charles Darwin International in Metz, Franz, writes to announce a Charles Darwin exhibition at the Park of Bagatelle in Paris from 29 May to the end of October 2009. Simon Cooke, who wrote his doctoral thesis on Henry Courtney Selous, contributed enough material to create an entire section for this important illustrator, including more than a dozen plates, biography, and a series of essays.
David Goff contributed A Mirror for Salome: Beardsley's The Climax, Athena's Gaze: Klimt and the Divine Artist, and "The Laws of Artifice: Aesthetic and Ego in Against the Grain." Steven De Luccia contributed Body as Metaphor in Dowson's "Nuns of the Perpetual Adoration", Mortality and Modernity Invade the Landscape [in Klinger's etchings]," and "Straddling the Margins of Society."
Mo Heard announces a 2010 essay contest on the subject of the magic lantern, shadow theatre, optical philosophical toys, panoramas, and dioramas.
Tony Willicombe of Penarth, Wales writes to remind us that Alfred Russel Wallace was a Welsh rather than an English naturalist. Trevor Brock, the minister of Great Victoria Street Baptist Church in Belfast, writes to correct the misidentification of photos of St. Patricks's Roman Catholic Church, and Paisley Mann writes to let correct a date in the DuMairier section. A reader identified only as Ferdi points out a typo in a date. Anne Rawkstar write from Malaysia to correct the Malay names of buildings in Kuala Lumpur. Thanks!
March 2009
The month began with 40, 572 documents on the site and ended with 40851 — these numbers thaks to Aloysius Tay Wee Kwok, IT Manager, University Scholars Programme at National University of Singapore, who kindly configured the main server to send weekly reports. George P. Landow and his students have created an annotated version of Carlyle's "Signs of the Times."
Phlip Allingham continues his commentaries on Copping's illustrations to Dickens's works.
Jacqueline Banerjee reviews Jeremy Paxman's The Victorians: Britain through the Paintings of the Age (2009) and the new third edition of Macmillan's London Encyclopaedia. In addition, she provides a series of photographs and commentaries on Morris's Red House and on the Palm House in Sefton Park, Liverpool, and a commentary on Richard Dadd's The Fairy-Feller's Master-Stroke. Her continuing work on sculpture includes a biography of Baron Henri-Joseph-François de Triqueti plus several of his sculptures, Flaxman's statue of Robert Burns, the Coade Lion on Westminster Bridge, new photographs of Gilbert's Queen Alexandra Memorial plus photographs and information about two works in London's Royal Insitution — J. H. Foley's statue of Michael Faraday and Thomas Woolner's medallion of John Tyndall.
Dr Hilary Grimes wrotes from Edinburgh Napier University to announce a new Robert Louis Stevenson Website. Deepti Kapoor writes suggesting linking to his site, which contains information of Jewish and Christian notions of passover as context for Rossetti's watercolor of that subject. Evelyn Rosenthal provided photographs of Teulon's St Stephen's Church, and Phil Beauchamp allowed us to use his photographs of George Heywood Sumner's sgraffiti in St Mary's Church, Sunbury.
David Goff contributed, "Burne-Jones and the Divine Unity," a discussion of one of Burne-Jone's late designs for a stained-glass nativity, "Companions for the Soul: Solitude and Kinship in [Christina Rossetti's] "The Thread of Life," and "Time and its Relics: Dante Rossetti's 'The Burden of Nineveh.'" Stephen Deluccia wrote "Setting, Perspective, and Context in The Annunciation, St Margaret's Church, Rottingdean," and Christina Rossetti's fragmentation of self
Rev. Simon Wooodley, the current rector of Bemerton, George Herbert's parish, writes to correct the spelling of the town in Dyce's painting of the poet in his garden there. Thanks!
February 2009
George P. Landow adapted several chapters from Gertrude Jekyll's works, including several dozen photographs, to create material on technology in the home, including Rushlight: How the Country Poor Lit Their Homes, The Evolution of the Fireplace, What the housewife used to cook meals: fireplace hangers, pot cranes, fire and cup dogs, tongs and other implements plus a section on rural working-class housing with an essay, "Cottages and Farms, especially in Old West Surrey." In addition, he created a section in photography containing a selection of her work in that medium plus several articles adapted from her writing about agricultural labor: ""From Hand Labour to Machine Work in agriculture": Work and New technologies in the Victorian Era," "Harvesting Corn," "Dibbles, Flails, and Wooden Ploughs," and "Country Occupations: Mowers, Sawyers, Cider-Makers, Copse-Cutters, Hurdle-Makers, Heath-Turf Cutters."
Philip V. Allingham scanned, partially formatted, and wrote the introduction and captions for both 14 illustrations Harry C. Edwards created for the American publication of Hardy's "Mastr John Horseleigh, Knyght" and the 30 illustrations Harold Copping created for Dickens's works.
Jacqueline Banerjee began the month by contributing Godfrey Sykes's monument to William Mulready at Kensal Green cemetery and Sir John Steell's bust of Florence Nightingale, as well as some more work on the public sculpture of Liverpool: Charles Bell Birch's sculptures of Major-General Earle and Disraeli, Sir Thomas Brock's Gladstone Memorial, Sir George Frampton's memorial statues for Canon Thomas Major Lester, Sir Arthur B. Forwood, and William Rathbone, Albert Bruce-Joy's Alexander Balfour, and Frederick William Pomeroy's Mgr. James Nugent and replicas in Liverpool of two famous London statues — Sir Alfred Gilbert's Eros and Frampton's Peter Pan.
Her contributions to the architecture section include a series on Liverpool: The Albert Dock and its Traffic Office (soon to be the home of the International Slavery Museum Research Institute and Education Centre) along with Gladstone's birthplace and other houses in Rodney Street, Liverpool.
Derek B. Scott, Professor of Critical Musicology at the University of Leeds, sent in his performance of "Ben Bolt," the song Trilby sings in DuMaurier's novel of that name. Anna Twomey sends in a description of her research on "the culture of working-class autodidacts," asking readers of VW for any suggestions (her e-mail address appears in her project description).
Students in Landow's courses at Brown University created several dozen essays and questions sets for George MacDonald's Phantastes and Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. David Goff contributed "Stopped in Motion: The Individual in Egg's Travelling Companions, "Truth and Falsehood in Ruskin's Modern Painters," and "Time and its Relics: Dante Rossetti's 'The Burden of Nineveh'" while Stephen DeLucia contributed "The interplay of form and content in 'The Palace of Art'" and "Symbolism Prefiguring Typology in The Girlhood of Mary."
Some time ago Vara Neverow sent along a copy of her Harcourt edtion of Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room, which used several of our images. Julie F. Codell, Professor of Art at Arizona State University, writes to report a batch of bad links that her students encountered in the list of Pre-Raphaelite associates. Thanks!
The month ended with 40,572 documents on site.
January 2009
George P. Landow began the month by sending an updated copy of the site to our mirror at Nagoya University, Japan, which Professor Mitsu Matsuoka has administered for the past few years. By the 26th 40,026 documents resided on the site. Some news related to the Victorian Web: After your webmaster decided to take offline its sister site, Postcolonial Literature and Culture www.postcolonialweb.org, Professor Yew Kong Leong [lyew at nus.edu.sg] volunteered to run the site on servers to which he has access. Those university teachers from Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United States who kindly wrote when the site disappeared will be very grateful. Thanks Leong!
GPL, prompted by the new section on Gertrude Jekyll (see below), used several of her books, including Old West Surrey (1904), to create long-needed material on housing for the rural working classes ("Cottages and Farmhouses"), rural clothing, including documents with Jekyll's photographs of the countryman's smock, countrywomen's headgear, and pattens, footwear to raise one above the mud. Hannah B. Higgins sends along a copy of her new The Grid Book (MIT Press), which contains GPL's photograph of a Jacquard loom.
Philip Allingham contributes a brief essay to accompany Fred Barnard's Mrs. Gamp, on the Art of Nursing, an illustration to Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit, plus commentaries on two illustrations of the same novel by Phiz. He also wrote a detailed discussion of the wrapper for serial issues of David Copperfield, examining how Phiz created his pictorial introduction to a novel about about which the novelist had uncharacteristically told him very little.
Jacqueline Banerjee sent in multiple photographs of Thomas Thornycroft's equestrian statues in Liverpool of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert; John Gibson's Suffer Little Children to Come to Me, Alexander Munro's bust of Josephine Butler accompanied by a biography of this important campaigner for women's rights, and Augustus Welby Pugin's gothic revival hall chair. Continuing her indefatigable proofreading, she caught a number of damaged images, errors, and inconsistencies.
Ray Sachs sent in the latest news on the Crystal Palace Campaign accompanied by both an 1864 plan of the park containing the palace plus a half dozen images of the master plans submitted to Bromley Council's Planning Development Committee. C. Aitchison Hull writes from the UK to notify our readers of her new site on the Victorian painter, Frederick Lee Bridell, and she also shared from her new book about Bridell a passage about the Anglo-American circle in Rome that included the Brownings. Vince Ciricola writes to let us know that his site to which his essay, "Sadi Carnot and the Conservation of Energy" links, has moved.
Christopher Arnander shared with us material about Gertrude Jekyll from his Jekyll Estate site, which enabled GPL to create a section for this painter, nature writer, and enormously influential garden designer to which which GPL added bibliographies and an essay, "Gertrude Jekyll's Word Painting."
Andrew Pinder, who writes from the U.K. to correct a factual error in the caption accompanying our photograph of Hangman's Cottage in the Hardy Gallery, also contributed an essay about the chronological setting of Hardy's "The Withered Arm, his views of capital punishment, and the Swing Riots of 1830" and The Dynasts: Dated, Durable, Defiant — A Performance Poet's Perspective.
Melisa Klimaszewski, Assistant Professor, Department of English, Drake University, and author of a forthcoming biography of Wilkie Collins, correctly identified the text inscribed on Holman Hunt's deathbed portrait of Charles Allston Collins as an edited excerpt from Charles' own A New Sentimental Journey (1859).
Dave Kruger points out a typo in Browning's "A Toccata of Galuppi's." Paula M. Krebs, Professor of English at Wheaton College, e-mailed with the information that two links in "Why did the British Empire expand so rapidly between 1870 and 1900?" had broken. Erl Johnston writes from Belfast to provide information about three Belfast buildings: he identifies one of our photographs as the former Diocesan Offices for the Church of Ireland designed by Lanyon, Lynn & Lanyon, points out that Samuel Stevenson designed the Technical Institution, and explains that it has been discovered that the Scottish Provident Institution is constructed of Glasgow Blonde sandstone. Thanks!
Last modified 5 January 2024