December
ontinuing to mine the riches of the Hathi Digital Library's web versions of Illustrated London News, which Google has scanned, your webmaster added some interesting material to various areas of the site, and using ABBYY FineReader software, he produced the text from the page images in the Hathi Digital Library's web versions of this periodical. The new documents and images include artworks, such as Edward Hodges Baily’s Sir Charles Metcalfe (as well as a portrait and obituary of the sculptor) and William Behnes’s portrait medal of Robert Vernon, and additions to the history section, including “Gallant capture of a Slaver by H.M.S Rattler.” The Illustrated London News’s serio-comic article on London fogs prompted the creation of a new section on the Victorian environment, and this newspaper’s continuing interest in contemporary technology also enriched our sections on Victorian railways as we added “The Needham-Market Station on the Norwich and Ipswitch Railway,” “Railway Monopoly,” “Arrival of Cattle at the Railway Terminus, Euston-Square,” and a half dozen other images railways and articles about them, include one on a train crash in India.
Several of the articles excavated from Illustrated London News combined religious and social history, such as “The Jewish Question:” The Illustrated London News defends the right of Rothchild and other Jews to serve in Parliament and the related “Baron Rothschild taking the oaths in the House of Commons”. Others concerned Victorian fears of Roman Catholicism, such as “Papal Agression,” an article which reported various hostile responses to the Pope's re-establishing bishoprics and archbishoprics in England and the association of High Church Anglican religious services with Roman Catholicism. Your webmaster also created an eleven-part series centering on the 1850 anti-Catholic riots in Stockport. The ILN obituaries often provide valuable information that complements materials we already have, as did the one for F. D. Maurice. We have a new section entitled “London Scenes,” which thus far contains material on range of topics, including the financial crash of 1866, construction of the Embankment, which changed the face of London, and commentary about the Derby, fashionable sections of town, and Christmas pantomime.
Illustrated London News also provided images contemporary architecture, including of St. of the interior and exterior John's College Chapel, University of Cambridge, and various churches, including two by George Gilbert Scott — Camberwell Church and Christ Church, Ealing.
Philip V. Allingham shifted his attention to a different Dickens novel — Our Mutual friend — contributing scans of several dozen illustrations by James Mahoney plus providing the passages illustrated, interpretative commentaries, and comparative images by other illustrators.
At the beginning of the month, Jacqueline Banerjee enjoyed reviewing Cynthia Gamble's Wenlock Abbey, 1857-1919 and this prompted a new section on embroidery, both domestic and secular, with several new pieces included. After that she worked with Chris Bell again to expand the accounts of Landseer's lions in Trafalgar Square, and Thomas Milnes's lions in Saltaire. In this connection, she opened a new folder on the portrait-painter John Ballantyne, who famously painted Landseer at work on his lions. Milnes's postmortem sketch of Wellington was also incorporated in the account of his statue of Wellington in this section. Joe Pilling's latest and very welcome review, of Jo Manton's Sister Dora: A Life of Dorothy Pattison, then prompted a piece about her statue in Walsall (the first public statue of any woman outside the royal family).
Later in the month JB added an essay on George Meredith and Emilie Maceroni — Emilie inspired Meredith's heroine in his "Italian novels" — and several new pictures and commentaries for Meredith's gallery. Two interesting new items relating to Meredith were a study and drawing by Rossetti, who used Meredith's portrait as the head of Jesus in Mary at the Door of Simon. She next added portrait of Emily Brontë, and a discussion of Ada Lovelace, following a visit to the exhibition on Lovelace at the Science Museum, Kensington: Ada Lovelace: Pioneering Computer Programmer?
Many thanks to Joe Pilling for another thorough and informed review, this time on Angus Hawkins' hefty two-volume biography, The Forgotten Prime Minister: The 14th Earl of Derby.
Thanks to Sarah Colegreave Fine Art for permitting us to include on this site three works by Frederic Shields: Head of a Girl, Cottage Interior, and Apple Blossom. Thanks, too, to Liss Fine Art for Barmaid from the London Characters series.
Andrzej Diniejko contributed “Benjamin Disraeli’s Vivian Grey as a Silver-Fork Novel With a Key.”
Derek B. Scott, our Music Editor, contributed “Music and social class in Victorian London, plus a review of E. D. Gregory’s Victorian Songhunters: The Recovery and Editing of English Vernacular Ballads and Folk Lyrics, 1820-1883,” and a performance of the parlor ballad, I’ll Sing Thee Songs of Araby.
Tim Willasey-Wilsey, who has created a section on the British West Indies within the British Empire section, contributed “Jamaica and the British Caribbean. An Introduction,” “Georgian Jamaica and its public buildings,” “The Anglican churches of eighteenth-century Jamaica,” “The Great houses Jamaica,” and “The Jamaica Coffee House in the City of London,” all of which he illustrated with his own photographs. Landow then added from The Illustrated London News “The Jamaica Commissioners’s report on the Jamaica insurrection condemning the conduct of Governor Eyre and his subordinates.”
Thanks to Rob Poole who shared a drawing of a railway tunnel that shows the opposite end of one depicted by Nieman Smith, and thanks to Caroline Rumsey for correcting an error made when we re-organized the Cruikshank folder.
As the year ends the site had 86,066 documents and images.
November
fter ten days back home in Rhode Island, your webmaster returned to Germany to give a talk at Key Ideas and Concepts of the Digital Humanities, a conference hosted by the Technische Universität Darmstadt. The conference took place in the Georg Christoph Lichtenberg House, the former home of Prince Otto Heinrich zu Schaumburg-Lippe, who had it decorated in art nouveau tiles and woodwork.
Earlier visits to American museums provided enough material to open a new section on American sculptors working in nineteenth-century Italy that ties in nicely to Jacqueline Banerjee’s earlier essays on the Brownings in Italy and the expatriates in Italy. The Boston Museum of Fine Arts, which has an extensive collection of work by these sculptors, has in its collections Thomas Ridgeway Gould’s Cleopatra Chauncey Bradley Ives’s Pandora, Hiram Powers’s Eve Disconsolate and Faith, Randolph Rogers’s Nydia, the Blind Girl of Pompeii, William Wetmore Storey's Sappho, Venus Anadyomene, and Medea. The MFA also has an interesting gothic revival hall stand designed by Christopher Dresser and manufacturered by Coalbrookdale Iron Works.
Looking through photo files of material from museums in Europe and the U. S., Landow created a section on “Beheading Women,” which includes two dozen photographs of paintings and engravings of Salome plus others of Judith and other women like Queen Tomyris, some who appear as heroines, others as villains. Your webmaster next reviewed Alison Matthews David’s fascinating — and disturbing — Fashion Victims: The Dangers of Dress Past and Present. Trawling issues of the Illustrated London News in the invaluable Internet Archive produced images and information that supplemented material we already have online, including Marshall Wood’s bust of H.R.H. the Princess of Wales, Joseph Durham’s Chastity, images of sports (the Eton-Winchester cricket match and a national ladies archery contest at Alexandra Park), the demolition of the old Battersea Bridge, a progress report on the Albert Memorial with details of its construction, a portrait and obituary Sir Joseph Paxton, Alexander Munro’s Undine, John Birnie Philip’s Richard Oastler (a monument to the man who campaigned against child labor) and a nice article with four images about George Stevenson’s locomotive works in Newcastle-on-Time plus a dozen detailed Paris fashions plates and accompanying detailed descriptions, which led to creating an index pages for what people wore in the 1840s, ’50s, and ’60s. The Illustrated London News also provided information and images of architecture in South Asia: All Saints’s Church in Bhopal and the Albert Hall in Jeypore. Landow ended the month with “Columbia Market, Bethnal Green (1869), designed by H. A. Darbishire” — one of miss Burdett Coutts’s most extensive (and well conceived) charitable projects.
Philip V. Allingham has begun work on illustrations of Dickens in the Household Edition by Felix O. C. Darley, thus far completing commentaries on two dozen plates.
This month Jacqueline Banerjee has been looking at some churches. She rewrote her earlier entries on Benjamin Ferrey's Christ Church, Esher, with the welcome addition of interior pictures from contributing photographer John Salmon. Then came Holy Trinity, Llandudno in North Wales, and Richard Norman Shaw's very distinctive church in Staffordshire, All Saints, Leek. The photos here came from a new contributor, Michael Critchlow: many thanks! They included church furniture like this unusual font by William Lethaby, and a whole series of wonderful Burne-Jones and Morris windows. They included some church embroidery, which prompted opening a new section on this craft. Besides the well-known artists were two who needed introductions, so JB also made new indexes for Sir Ninian Comper, both in the architecture section and in the stained glass section; she said a little too about the stained glass firm, A. L. Moore & Son.
Other contributions that came JB's way were from Chris Bell, a member of the Milnes family, who sent in a timeline for, and a note on the birthdate of, the sculptor Thomas Milnes, accompanied by photos of his grave. These small pieces represent a great deal of research: we are grateful again that Chris shared it with us. Our regular political history reviewer, Joe Pilling, reviewed the diary of Sir Edward (Eddy) Walter Hamilton, a top civil servant with an important role in that service (for example, he organised Gladstone's funeral). He lived at Whitehall Court, the subject of one of Joseph Pennell's most evocative night scenes, so JB added that too. At the end of the month, she also wrote about S. S. Teulon's Holy Trinity Church, Northwood, in Hillingdon, which apart from anything else has a wonderful array of stained glass by Teulon himself, Burne-Jones, James Powell & Sons, Comper and others. Joe Pilling sent in another review, too, this time of Paul Brighton's fascinating Original Spin, about political "spin" operating even in Victorian times.
Tim Willasey-Wilsey contributed a photograph and text for Edward Hodges Baily’s bust of Robert Southey and “The Battle-Field of Chillianwallah,” an 1853 article from the Illustrated London News to go with his essay on the subject. In addition, he opened up a new section on the West Indies, beginning with The Statue of Admiral Lord Rodney in Spanish Town, Jamaica that commemorates the British victory over the French fleet that preserved British colonies in the Carribbean, and “In search of the Ferry Inn, Jamaica.”
Joe Pilling reviewed Paul Brighton's Original Spin: Downing Street and the Press in Victorian Britain
Tony Schwab has contributed “The Unlikely Collaboration of Dickens and Darwin: A Closer Look at the Three Reviews.”
Thanks to James Spates for sharing “Will it last? — Ruskin's criticism of modern ephemerality” with our readers.
As of the twenty-third, the site has 85,412 documents and images.
October
our webmaster’s two-week trip to Prague, Dresden, Wittenberg, and Berlin produced interesting comparative material, including a series of photographs of the Czech city’s Church of Saints Peter and Paul, a building that combines Gothic Revival architecture with Art Nouveau painted decoration, and also additional images, including night views, of St. Vitus Cathedral, which raise the question, does it embody Gothic survival or revival? Prague, which is far richer in Art Nouveau than any city in the U. K., provided examples of architectural detail, ceramic tiles, painting, and sculpture.
Philip V. Allingham has completed his series of illustrated essays on the individual plates in C. E. Brock’s illustrations of Dickens’s The Cricket on the Hearth: A Fairy Tale of Hearth and Home.
Jacqueline Banerjee returned to some photographs she took last year, and added a gallery of new pictures to Sarah Losh's St Mary's, Wreay, in Cumbria, and St George's, Jesmond, with T. R. Spence's stunning mosaic scheme, a selection of his stained glass there, Ralph Hedley's woodcarving, and George Frampton's memorials to Charles Mitchell and his son, Charles William Mitchell. Filling a gap that she found in the stained glass sequence, she added two late-Victorian panels from the Booth Museum of Natural History in Brighton, together with a piece on the quirky little museum itself. This was followed by Peter Price's Castle Arcade, Cardiff, and John Nash's Park Village East and his very first independent work, a terrace on Great Russell Street. She also reviewed a welcome new book about the sculptor Benjamin Creswick.
Many thanks to Joe Pilling again for a review of an earlier but valuable account of James Covert's A Victorian Marriage: Mandell and Louise Creighton. Also to Dr J. Ken Roberts and his friend, Dennis Eaton, who sent in more pictures and information about St Cybi's Church, Holyhead, which prompted a spate on new work on it, and especially on its stained glass windows from the Morris Co., Kempe and others, all listed in the Related Material for the church. This included a brief note on a new stained glass maker, John J. Jennings.
Simon Cooke contributed “The Aesthetics and Economics of Novelty Bindings,” which is accompanied by many beautiful photographs of Mauchline-ware binding's, which consisted of a combination of leather, wood, and photograpghic or other images, and those with the appearance of polished leather or tortoise shell created by pulped paper bound together by an industrial gum.
Andrzej Diniejko, Contributing Editor for Poland, contributed “A Quest for the Eternal Feminine Ideal in Thomas Hardy’s The Well-Beloved.”
Thanks to Sussain’s Auctions of Chicago, Illinois, for notifying us about the sale of Henry Moore’s Off St. Catherines After a Gale and permitting us to include it our section for that painter.
Thanks to Michael Haskell, a ninth grader from Hilliard, Ohio, who reported some typographical errors.
As of the eighteenth the site had 84, 789 documents and images.
September
eptember saw the completion of the first phase of reconfiguring the site to make it better accessible to readers using smart phones. What remains? Reformatting the sections containing Spanish and French translations, and exchanging the old diamond-shaped homepages for authors, artists, and a few subjects for lists that will work better. (Only about a dozen remain.) We welcome on board Dr. Mark Bernstein, Chief Scientist and CEO of Eastgate Systems, who has helped with HTML and CSS in the past, as a member of the editorial board who will be in charge of designing changes to our style sheets — that is, to our basic formatting and page/screen design.
Shortly before setting out on a two-week trip to Europe, your webmaster came upon an interesting review, which prompted brief comments about “Wellington as pragmatic Tory politician” and “Wellington at Waterloo.”
Philip V. Allingham has completed his series of comparative essays about both Charles Green’s illustrations of A Christmas Carol and the same artist's illustrations for Dickens's The Haunted Man. After moving from snowy and cold Ontario, PVA has returned to the balmy climate of Vancouver, leaving it briefly to give a talk in Poland. In between unpacking his books and getting a ticket for his jaunt to Krakow, he began twenty-five commentaries on the illustrations of A Christmas Carol by Charles Edmund Brock , completing the first five before his departure.
Jacqueline Banerjee reviewed Gavin Stamp's handsome new Gothic for the Steam Age: An Illustrated Biography of George Gilbert Scott, and added an account of Scott's grand funeral in Westminster Abbey to the Scott section. She also formatted and illustrated several reviews. Joe Pilling reviewed two books: the new edition of Denis Judd's Palmerston, and John Cooper's The Unexpected Story of Nathaniel Rothschild. Hugh Clout's review of William Whyte's Redbrick: A Social and Architectural History of Britain's Civic Universities, and Gilles Couderc's review of James Lyon's Charles Dickens, la musique et la vie artistique Londres l'époque victorienne, came to us from the online journal Cercles. Many thanks to all these reviewers for sharing their responses with us.
Photographer John Salmon sent in some more of his lovely photographs, this time of St Michael and All Angels, Ladbroke Grove, for which, and for the beautiful stained glass windows there, JB wrote a commentaries. Photographer Peter Loud also sent in some more great photographs, further examples of Ralph Hedley's marvellous woodcarvings in the choir of St Nicholas Cathedral, Newcastle, misericords and other curious features. After a trip to France, where she had been invited to read a paper at an international study-day on the sculptor Carlo Marochetti (in very daunting company!), JB settled down again to do some more reformatting, though only a very, very little compared to our webmaster.
Simon Cooke contributed “Henry Noel Humphreys as a Designer of Cloth Bindings.”
Diane Greco Josefowicz reviewed Pauline Conolly's The Water Doctor's Daughters, and Selby Whittingham reviewed Lawrence Gowing: Selected Writings.
Mike Hickox contributed “Shakespeare, Phrenology, and Henry Wallis's A Sculptor's Workshop” — his second essay on that painting.
Many thanks to Beth Newman, Associate Professor of English, Southern Methodist University, for giving a head's up about a bad link to an external site that has disappeared.
The Athens Institute for Education and Research (ATINER), a world association of academics and researchers, is organizing A Panel on Neo-Victorian Fiction: Excavating the Bygone in the Modern World, 3-6 January 2016, Athens, Greece.
On the twenty-first the site had 84, 573 documents and images.
August
s the month began, your webmaster continued the often dreary task of reformatting the site by completing work on several sections, including Gender Matters, Graphic Arts (Etching, Engraving, Lithography), Photography, Periodicals, and Music and Popular Entertainment.
Philip V. Allingham, who has completed most of the commentaries in the Green section, is working with GPL on adding to and improving the Phiz illustrations, beginning with a new folder for Dickens's Dombey and Son.
Jacqueline Banerjee, who has taken even more responsibility for the quality of the site, began the month modifying and improving work in the Places section. So far Derbyshire and Dorset have been spruced up. To Dorset, she added a photo-essay on Weymouth in (mainly) Victorian times, and another on the statue of Queen Victoria there. Other work this month included biographies of the artists Louisa Anne Beresford and Eleanor Vere Boyle, and some works by each, and accounts of two statues in Calcutta for people still held in much respect there, Sir Edward Hyde East and the educationist David Hare.
Many thanks to Richard Barnes for contributing the photograph of East's statue, also to to Christine Whittemore for a thoughtful comment on Mary Ward's Richard Elsemere, and to Helen Elletson, of the William Morris Society for contributing her picture of one of William Morris's Sussex chairs. Church photographer John Salmon has also sent in dozens of marvellous photographs, the first of which, documenting James Brooks's dramatic All Hallows, Gospel Oak, are now online.
Simon Cooke ended last month and began with new one by creating a new section on Edward Poynter's illustrations.
Sandra Ujpétery, a new contributor from Switzerland, contributed “A Corrective to common views of Smith's ideas of Laissez-Faire — Smith, Townsend, and the Workhouse Test Act” and revised the final paragraph in our essay on the Test Act in the section on the Poor Law. >/p>
On the 24th the site had 84,456 documents and images.
July
In the first two weeks or so of this month, your webmaster continued reformatting sections of the site, finishing architecture and illustration (except for parts of Phiz that Phillip Allingham is taken in hand), and the reformatting also involves exchanging our diamond-shaped design for various sitemaps (homepages) with lists that are easier to read on smart phones. Landow renamed the originally homepage for the site oldindex.html and included a link in the new one for those readers who prefer to use the old one whose design emphasizes that all the topics in the various icons constitute the idea or work of the author or artist in the center.
John Salmon joins us a contributing photographer. Jacqueline Banerjee and he teamed up to create photo-essays on the exterior and interior of William Butterfield’s St Mary Magdalene, Enfield. This has marvellous north and south wall-paintings by Nathaniel Westlake and stained glass by Heaton, Butler and Bayne, much of it, like the beautiful east window, by Butterfield himself, but including also James Clark's memorial window based on his famous World War I painting, The Great Sacrifice. This led to a biography of Clark and the inclusion of more of his works, like the touching Blind Mary (many thanks to Hartlepool Art Gallery's Charlotte Taylor for all her help). She also wrote an essay on the Victorian's restoration work on Westminster Abbey. She has started a Twitter account for our website, too! Please follow us on it, and add some replies!
Many thanks to the Reverend Canon Stephen Evans for updating us on the whereabouts of the altar before which the Brownings took their marriage vows. It was returned to St Marylebone Parish Church in 2012, in time for the bicentenary of Robert's birth. Thanks also to photographer Peter Loud, who contributed some photographs for Jacqueline Banerjee's last project this month, on the paintings and woodcarvings of Newcastle artist Ralph Hedley. In this connection, many thanks too to the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle, and the Shipley Art Gallery, Gateshead, for permission to reproduce paintings.
Simon Cooke completed “The Biblical Illustrations of Simeon Solomon.”
By the 27th almost 4000 documents and images were uploaded to the site, bringing the number of them to 84,338 as the Victorian Web grew slightly as the reformatting continues.
June
June began and continued very much the way May had gone — with your webmaster reformatting, reconfiguring, and updating the HTML documents in our architecture section. By the middle of the month he had completed the folder containing Gothic revival architecture in Poland and by the 25th completed architecture.
Jacqueline Banerjee’s “The Former Lower Chapman Street School, Shadwell, by E. R. Robson and T. J. Bailey” tells the story of an East End school begun in 1874 and extended a decade later that informs both our understanding of architecture and social history. Thanks once again to John Salmon for his pictures of the mosaics by John Standen Adkins in St John the Baptist, Holland Road, to which JB added commentaries and also to Cercles for sharing Fionnuala Dillane's review of "Nancy Henry's The Life of George Eliot: A Critical Biography, which JB formatted and illustrated. The rest of the month went on selecting, writing about and arranging nearly 200 more of John Salmon's splendid photographs, which included one set taken in St Edward the Confessor's Church, Romford, with its beautiful stained glass windows like Lavers & Barraud's Christ's Ministry; and another set taken in St Mary the Virgin, Great Warley, which contains a virtuoso Arts and Crafts interior by William Reynolds-Stephens. This prompted her to write an essay on Arts and Crafts or Art Nouveau? W. Reynolds-Stephens and the Interior of St Mary the Virgin, Great Warley. Many thanks again to John Salmon for his major part in these collaborative projects.
Simon Cooke continues his work on Simeon Solomon, scanning more than a dozen of his illustrations of the Old Testament to which has added commentaries.
Tim Willasey-Wilsey's contributions this month include Edward Richardson’s Memorial for Sir Robert Dick containing a biography of its subject and William Salter’s portrait of Dick. He also continues his work on the buildings of British India with Col. J. L. Caldwell and Captain De Havilland’s Madras Cathedral and “An exhalation from the earth” — his photo essay on Watson’s Hotel in Bombay. His work also includes Sir Francis Chantrey's monument to Bishop Heber in St. Georges Cathedral.
Ivo de Galan, a first-time contributor, shared with us an image of the manuscript of George Whyte-Melville's “A Child in the nursery crying” — a rare Crimean War poem — and an introduction to it. Later in the month he contributed images of two drawings in his collection, Sir Hubert von Herkomer’s charcoal portrait, Edwin Lord Weeks and Sir John Everett Millais’s Cows in a Field, a study for Millais's frontispiece to Trollope’s Orley Farm. Another new contributor, Tony Schwab, has sent us “A Bad Trip: The Trouble with Martin Chuzzlewit,” which contains a particularly interesting discussion of the way critics have distorted the character of Mark Tapley, because he is too good for their tastes.
Thanks to Arn Dekker for correcting the transcription of a name on one of Bowcher's medals.
By the twenty-ninth the site had 84,144 documents and images. As we winnow unneeded thumbnail images, we have uploaded 2781 documents — almost all re-formatted html with a view older images whose perspective distortions required fixing — but the site has only grown by a few documents in the past month!
May
s the month began, your webmaster worked with the owner of a large sculpture collection, who wishes to remain anonymous, adding a considerable number of works to the site. After sizing the images, adjusting their colors, and creating the htmls, Landow put the following works of sculpture online: M. Berry’s Mary Harvey Hart, two bas reliefs by Benjamin Creswick (In the Chapel and Under the Spreading Chestnut Tree), Richard Garbe’s porcelain bas-relief, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth William Goscombe John’s maquette for The Guardian Angel, Hamo Thornycroft’s Winged Assyrian Sphinx, Sydney March’s three works assocated with the Boer War (Lord Kitchener , Robert Baden-Powell and Lord Roberts), A. Bertram Pegram's Father Time.
The new medals from the same collection added to the site include the Art Union commemorative platter containing nine medals by the Wyons and other artists, Charles John Allen’s Kanthack medal, Gilbert Bayes’s Cobbett Medal for the Worshipful Company of Musicians, Frank Bowcher’s Centenary of the Linnaean Society, Darwin and Wallace Medal, Homage of the Empire Medal Franco-British Exhibition medal, Aimé-Jules Dalou’s Journée remplie, Ernest George Gillick's Royal Academy of Arts School medal, Edward Carter Preston’s George V Jubilee Medal 1910-1935, Louis Frederick Roselieb's Canterbury Camera Club medal, Paisley Philosophical Institution medal, and The Southend-on-Sea Photographic Society medal.
Working with Philip V. Allingham, Landow created a section for C. E. Brock with 30 illustrations of Dickens's Christmas Books: Our contributing editor from Canada provided scans of the plates and information about them and Landow then resized them, adjusted color and contrast, created a final version of an index for Brock. As time permits, Allingham will add his usual documents containing the text illustrated, detailed commentaries, and comparisons with work by other illustrators of the same works. On the 12th he completed the first if them, Brock's frontispiece for A Christmas Carol — He had been Tim's blood horse all the way from church. More to come!
Allingham, who is about to become an emeritus member of the faculty at Lakeland University, leave Ontario, and return to Vancouver, has not slowed the rate of his contributions even while packing books and moving house! Over the past three weeks he has also contributed 100 image scans of Charles Green's wonderful illustrations of works by Dickens. Thus far he has also completed almost all the commentaries and sets of comparative images for the 31 plates in The Chimes.
Jacqueline Banrejee created a new section on John Raphael Roderigues Brandon, which includes four buildings and an extensive biographical introduction. She also added Sir John Belcher’s Colchester Town Hall and Victoria Tower, Essex (1897), which replaced Brandon and Blore’s 1845 structure. Turning to photography, she created a long overdue section on Lewis Carroll, which includes a dozen photographs and her incisive commentaries. She also formatted and added illustrations to Joe Pilling's review of Edward Wakeling's Lewis Carroll: The Man and His Circle. and Ingrid Hanson's review of Wilkie Collins: A Life of Sensation, the latter kindly shared with us by the online jpurnal, Cercles.
Then began a collaboration with a very welcome new contributor, John Salmon, who sent in splendid photographs of James Brooks's church, St John the Baptist, Holland Road, Kensington, and George Gilbert Scott's St Mary's (New) Church, Stoke Newington. These involved adding commentaries and writing a short biography of James Brooks, as well as biographies of the sculptors J. E. Taylerson and Richard Westmacott, Jr. , and an account of the stained glass firm, Percy Bacon Brothers, in order to introduce the lovely samples of their work found in these churches.
Simon Cooke continued his Millais project by contributing almost 40 image scans of his illustrations for Trollope's Orley Farm with accompanying commentaries plus a multi-part essay, “Godfrey Sykes and the front cover of The Cornhill Magazine” and “Tennyson on Book Illustration.”
Derek B. Scott contributed another performance of a Victorian parlour song — Alice, Where Art Thou? (1861), lyrics by Weillinton Guernsey (1817–1885), music by Joseph Ascher (1829–1869).
Diane Greco Josefowicz transcribed, edited, and linked “The Fossil-Finder of Lyme-Regis,” an article from the 1857 Chamber's Journal.
Tim Willasey-Wilsey has written another of his photo-essays that recovers a significant element of almost-forgotten colonial and military history, this one with a religious importance as well — “The Afghan Church in Mumbai and the Guild of the Holy Standard.”
Robert Freidus contributed photographs of both the interior and exterior of Lewis Cubitt's King's Cross Station, London (1852).
Susan Guralnik, M.A. reviewed Seth Koven's The Match Girl and the Heiress.
Thanks to Renee Benham for correcting a date.
On the 25th the site had 84,207 documents and images as reformatting and winnowing documents continues amid a flood of excellent contributions.
April 2015
pril began with your webmaster working 8-9 hours a day converting the footer icons to the new format. Thus far the sections on genre, history, religion, and sculpture have seen completion as well as about half the authors discussed on the site. On the seventh Landow traveled to London were he met with half a dozen contributors and visited several important exhibitions, including the Tate version of the sculpture show that began in New Haven, for which he wrote ““The Elephant in the Room”: Sculpture Victorious comes to Tate Britain.” Next came “The Delights of Neo-Decadence — a Review of ‘Savage Beauty’ at the Victoria & Albert Museum.”
He also photographed the outsides of two important Anglo-Catholic (or High Church) churches — St. Barnabas Pimlico and the nearby sister-church St. Mary the Virgin (also known as St. Mary's Bourne Street). Returning on a Saturday morning when Mr. John Boshier, the friendly and informative guide at St. Barnabas, opened it to visitors, Landow created a series on the church's interior, including its mosaics and stained glass.
Philip V. Allingham has added Charles Green’s illustrations of Dickens’s The Chimes and begun to enlarge the section on Charles Pears as well.
Jaqueline Banerjee has added photo essays on William Morris's Kelmscott House in Hammersmith and his Albion Printing Press, and the interior of Winchester Cathedral and George Gilbert Scott's Choir Screen there. She has also formatted and illustrated some fine new reviews, the first two shared with the journal Cercles: Timothy Brittain-Catlin's review of Oliver Bradbury's Sir John Soane's Influence on Architecture from 1791: A Continuing Legacy, Jules Gehrke's review of Michele M. Strong's Education, Travel and the "Civilisation" of the Victorian Working Classes, and Joe Pilling's review of Daisy Hay's Mr and Mrs Disraeli, A Strange Romance. She then wrote a short biography of Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker, the influential botanist and adventurous plant-collector, because Dr Jim Endersby of Sussex University kindly let us take some excerpts from his books on the history of science, three of which (listed at the end of Hooker's biography) are on Hooker. Another was on the eugenicist Sir Francis Galton, entitled here "Sir Francis Galton and the 'Average Man'" — a specimen for whom Galton had little time. At the end of the month she formatted and illustrated another fascinating review from Cercles, on Harry Furniss's political caricatures and magic lantern shows, for which she also supplied some examples, including Furniss's famous depictions of a high-collared Gladstone.
Simon Cooke contributed several essays on Millais as illustrator, including “John Everett Millais as an Illustrator — Significant Gesture, Expressive Line, and Emblematic Detail,” “Millais’s Illustrations for Trollope,” and “John Everett Millais as an Illustrator and Interpreter of Trollope.”
Andrzej Diniejko continued his Hardy project with “Castles, cameras, and telegraphy — ancient and modern in Thomas Hardy's A Laodicean.”
Diane Greco Josefowicz contributed “Mary Anning (1799-1847), fossilist” and “Sir Henry Thomas de la Beche (1796-1855), geologist, paleontologist” to the new, reorganized geology section as well as adding her transcribed and edited web-version of “Mary Anning, The Fossil Finder (” an article that appeared in Dickens's All the Year Round.
Tom Ward kindly shared the introduction and discussion of indexing The Girl's Own Paper from his website.
Thanks to Melissa Shields Jenkins, Assistant Professor of English at Wake Forest University, for pointing to an error in the book review section.
Continuing to prune the site of unneeded thumbnails and footer icons, it still grows, though more slowly, and now has 83,561 documents and images as of the twenty-seventh.
March 2015
or the first week of March, your webmaster found himself occupied with — no, consumed by — a major project: creating a web version of Charlotte Gere's Victorian Jewelry, a particular challenge because so much relevant visual material in modern museums and Victorian publications has recently become available and deserves to be linked to this important text. By the 14th this valuable resource that links to everything on the site from railways (gold earrings were made of miniature locomotives!) to Egptomania saw completion.
Offers to reconfigure the Victorian Web (for a substantial fee) pour in several times a week, but when Chris Reynolds wrote from the UK with suggestions that we should modify our formatting easier to read on iPhones and other smart phones and tablets, he offered some important suggestions, one of which we have begun to implement — replacing our image-based icons with text-based navigation tiles, two of which you'll find at the bottom of this page. This approach, which obviates the need to create an image for each icon, has the further advantages of allowing us to provide them for authors, artists, and topics that have too few associated documents to warrant creating the oler images while also avoiding annoying variations in color and tone of the image-based footer icons. One problem we haven't solved yet: getting your webmaster's beloved Oxford font to work on our servers. Take a look at one group of documents for which this time-consuming conversion has been completed.
Continuing his enormous Dickens illustrators project, Philip Allingham has competed the section containing eighty of Kyd’s character portraits and added the following illustrated essays on Harry Furniss's illustrations of Oliver Twist: Nancy in hysterics, Rose and Nancy, and Fagin and Noah understand each other.
Jacqueline Banerjee has created a new section on Julia Margaret Cameron thus far containing a biography, bibliography, and eight of her photographs. This was followed by a set of Daniel Maclise's illustrations for Cameron's translation of the popular ballad Leonora, and then by work on the artist, etcher and illustrator William Strang — a biography, four paintings (including her favourite, The Love Letter), ten etchings (including a particularly characterful self-portrait) and two of his popular pencil and chalk portraits. Then she returned to India again with Baron Carlo Marochetti's Angel at the Cawnpore Memorial, some of the material for which came from Caroline Hedengren-Dillon (many thanks, again!), and Walter Granville's Cawnpore Memorial Church. Along the way, she also wrote about Marochetti's Crimean War Memorial for Scutari. At the end of the month she sent in two more paintings by Richard Dadd, with commentaries: Mercy: David Spareth Saul's Life and Contradiction: Oberon and Titania.
Tim Willasey-Wilsey contributed another of his essays about the British in South Asia — “A melancholy monument to the ravages of disease in British India” — plus photographs of William Brodie’s 93rd Highlanders Indian Mutiny Memorial in St Giles Cathedral, Edinburgh, and William Birnie Rhind’s Black Watch War Memorial
John Sankey reviewed Public Sculpture of Sussex by Jill and Peter Seddon and Anthony McIntosh. Laurent Bury reviewed Béatrice Laurent’s Sleeping Beauties in Victorian Britain Cultural, Literary and Artistic Explorations of a Myth.
Gerald Roberts, author of Gerard Manley Hopkins, a Literary Life (Macmillan, 1994), has contributed “Victorian Exiles: Gerard Manley Hopkins and Robert Louis Stevenson.”
Jim Spates has kindly shared Some thoughts on Mike Leigh's Mr. Turner from his blog, Why Ruskin
Joe Leggiero sent in an example of stained glass from the worksop of Heaton, Butler and Bayne.
On March 30th, the site had 83,390 documents and images — a net loss of 14 of them since dozens of unneeded thumbnail images and footer icons have been discarded as we convert to text-based navigation tiles.
February 2015
rawing upon the collection of the Guildhall Art Gallery, which has encouraged us to places works from their collection on this site, and the Internet Archive, your webmaster created a new section on the paintings of John Gilbert, R.A. and added commentaries to various paintings in the Guildhall collection, including three works by James Clarke Hook, W. J. Baker’s The Pool of London, John William Godward’s The Betrothed, Henry Holiday’s The Burgesses of Calais, Frederic Lord Leighton’s The Music Lesson, John Liston Byam Shaw’s The Blessed Damozel, Daniel Maclise’s Banquet Scene in Shakespeare's 'Macbeth', Henry Pether’s The Custom House and Pool of London by Moonlight and Gun Wharf, Tower of London, Joseph Severn’s Isabella and the Pot of Basil, Clarkson Stanfield’s The 'Victory' Towed into Gibraltar and Oxwich Bay, and Marcus Stone’s Married for Love.
Philip V. Allingham opened the month with a biography of George Cruikshank and an essay on “Cinematic Adaptations of A Christmas Carol, 1908-2009,” after which he added Frederic W. Pailthorpe’s twenty-one colored illustrations of Dickens's Oliver Twist. Continuing his work on Kyd, he added several dozen more character portraits from Dickens. Finally, he and GPL wrote “‘Well, Oliver, how do you like it?’: Dickens, Funerals, and Undertakers.
Before her trip to India in February, Jacqueline Banerjee wrote commentaries on Rossetti's La Ghirlandata; Albert Goodwin's The Toiler's Return, Sir John Gilbert's A Girl with Fruit, two works by John Everett Millais (My First Sermon and My Second Sermon) and John Whitehead Walton's The First London School Board, a painting that records momentous developments in social history. Then she reviewed the splendid new rehang at the Guildhall Art Gallery, where these and many more paintings are currently displayed.
After her return she contributed her photo essays, “Humayun’s Tomb and the Victorians,” “The Red Fort, Delhi: Walls and Gateways,” “British Army Barracks and Offices at the Red Fort, Delhi,” and a much amplified revision of “‘The Epic of the Race’: The Indian Uprisings of 1857” plus commentaries on Luke Fildes's Naomi and Millais’s My First Sermon and My Second Sermon.
Andrzej Diniejko contributed “Under the Greenwood Tree: Thomas Hardy's Early Masterpiece” and “Subversion and Self-reflexivity in Thomas Hardy's The Hand of Ethelberta.”
Simon Cooke has created a section for the illustrator Paul Gray, which thus far includes a biographical introduction and eight examples of Gray’s work.
Tim Willasey-Wilsey brings us another essay from British India in Victorian days — “The high hopes and sad demise of the Indus Flotilla.”
Joe Leggiero shared a photograph of his stained glass Head of a Prophet supposedly created by Heaton, Butler and Bayne. Please contact the webmaster if you have any information on this piece.
The first international conference on "George Meredith and his Circle: International Communities and Literary Networks" is being hosted at Bishop Grosseteste University in Lincoln, UK, on 24-25 July, and organisers Dr Claudia Capancioni and Dr Alice Crossley have put out a call for papers. The keynote speaker will be the eminent Victorianist Professor Sally Shuttleworth of the University of Oxford, and there will be a chance to visit the archives of the Tennyson Research Centre in Lincoln. Anyone interested in attending should contact meredithconference@bishopg.ac.uk.
On the twenty-third the site had 83,053 documents and images.
January 2015
ontinuing to review exhibitions about Victorian death and mourning, your webmaster visited one entitled The Art of Mourning at a tiny museum in Brooklyn, New York, that bears an unusual and not entirely accurate name — the Museum of Morbid Anatomy. Next in line something more cheerful: the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Treasures from India: Jewels from the Al-Thani Collection. Snowed in with temperatures outside occasionally dropping to -3 Fharenheit (19.4 Celsius), GPL wrote “Risky Business,” a review of Aeron Hunt’s Personal Business: Character and Commerce in Victorian Literature and Culture. Once again mining the Magazine of Art, your webmaster found there materials to begin a section for a painter new to the site — E. J. Gregory. The 1884-85 Magazine of Art also provided images of individual works by artists for whom we already have sections, such as William Blake Richmond and William Lionel Wyllie, as well as artists new to the site, including Walter Langley, E. Blair Leighton, Seymour Lucas, James B. Linton, and J. R. Reid plus a new sculptor — Elinor Hallé, a pupil of Legros.
Philip V. Allingham added fifty characters from Dickens's novels that appeared on John Players cigaret cards by Joseph Clayton Clarke, who signed his work with his pseudonym “Kyd.” Next, he opened a section on a new illustrator, Maurice Greiffenhagen.
Jacqueline Banerjee started the new year by expanding her recent English Studies review of Marianne Thormählen’s The Brontës in Context for us, and then reviewing Neil Hultgren’s Imperialistic Melodramatic Writing: From the Sepoy Rebellion to Cecil Rhodes. She also expanded the first half of a double review she did for the TLS on Jeffrey Richards' The Golden Age of Pantomime, and part of an article for English Studies under the new title, "'True Visions' or 'Deluding Lies': Tensions in Walter Besant's The Ivory Gate." Her next contribution was a piece on Augustin Dumont's sculpture of the "Spirit of Freedom" in Paris inspired by recent events there.
Much of her time this month has been spent arranging, formatting and illustrating some valuable new contributions. Many thanks to Michael Blaker, R.E., who sent in two articles on Joseph Pennell: "The Opinionated Joseph Pennell" and "The Revival of the Artist-Etcher in the Victorian Era." Thanks also to Antoine Capet, reviews editor of Cercles for getting permission for us to reprint and illustrate Ellen Moody's review of Nora Gilbert's Left Unsaid: Victorian Novels, Hays Code Films, and the Benefits of Censorship, and Laurent Bury's review of The Ghost Behind the Masks: The Victorian Poets and Shakespeare. Another very welcome new contributor, Pradip Das, has sent in some chapters from his book on the Irish architect Henry Irwin who designed many buildings in India, prompting a revision of Irwin's index. The first part (adapted from Chapter 3 of the book) of Das's reconsideration of the Indo-Saracenic Movement sees him as "An Irish Engineer in Search of a Style." Two more chapters followed, on the Viceregal Lodge at Simla, and Irwin's work in Madras.
Nearer home, many thanks to Joe Pilling for a review of Andrew Roberts' Salisbury, Victorian Titan, putting the focus for a change on Queen Victoria's longest-serving Prime Minister. Then, at the very end of the month, JB was invited to the Guildhall Art Gallery's fabulous new rehang of its Victorian paintings. Very many thanks to Julia Dudkiewicz, Principal Curator for the rehang, and Sonia Solicari, returning Principal Curator, for taking me round and talking so knowledgeably about the paintings, and for giving the Victorian Web permission to put the collection up on our website — a formidable task. Examples so far are George Dunlop Leslie's light-filled Sun and Moon Flowers; A. E. Mulready's poignant Remembering Joys that Have Passed Away; and Thomas Faed's equally moving Forgiven.
Simon Cooke has written a series of essays on Thackeray as illustrator, which include “William Makepeace Thackeray and Book Illustration,” “Style and Purpose,” “Thackeray's Christmas Books,” “Thackeray’s Illustrations for Vanity Fair ,” Thackeray’s Illustrations for Vanity Fair ,” Vanity Fair: the full-page engravings,” Vanity Fair: the ‘small cuts’,” Vanity Fair: the the Initial Letters,” and Putting the Jigsaw Together.”
Moving from South Asia to Africa for his subjects, Tim Willasey-Wilsey contributed “Two neglected Boer War memorials and the uncertainties of history,” which includes a Johannesburg monument by Sir Edwin Lutyens.
Many thanks to Paul Crowther, Professor and Chair in Philosophy, National University of Ireland Galway, the National Gallery of Slovenia, and the Moore Institute, National University of Ireland, Galway, for permitting us to put up the entire catalogue of the Awakening Beauty exhibition, which includes more than one hundred works by Victorian painters. Thanks, too, to Dr. Katherine Miller Webber for creating the web version.
New Victorian Web Reviews: Kelsey L. Bennet has some good comments on the new edition of Juli Wosk's Breaking Frame: Technology, Art, and Design in the Nineteenth Century, and Ellen Moody has strong words about Nora Gilbert's Better Left Unsaid: Victorian Novels, Hays Code Films, and the Benefits of Censorship.
As of the nineteenth the site had 82,537 documents and images.
Last modified 5 January 2024