December 2008
The most important news of the month — indeed of the past several years — is that, despite long-standing promises from the university's outgoing president, the new administration of the National University of Singapore has stopped both funding and sponsoring the Victorian Web and its two sister sites. The disappearance of our Singapore server might reduce our hits by one third until readers use our main server in New York. The manually updated mirror in Nagoya, Japan, remains online, however.
Jacqueline Banerjee wrote a substantial three-part essay on Hans Christian Andersen and the Victorians, which includes "Hans Christian Andersen and His Victorian Translators," "The Power of "Faerie": Hans Christian Andersen as a Children's Writer," and "The Impact of Hans Christian Andersen on Victorian Fiction." She also contributed photographs and discussions of Woolner's statue of John Stuart Mill, Brock's statue of Millais, and a biography of S. S. Teulon and a photograph and discussion of his St. Stephen's, Hampstead; in addition, she wrote text to accompany images by others of both Teulon's Elvetham Hall, Hampshire, and St Mary's Church, Sunbury.
James A. W. Hefferan, the Frederick Sessions Beebe '35 Professor in the Art of Writing Emeritus, Dartmouth College, reviews James O'Rourke' Sex, Lies, & Autobiography: The Ethics of Confession. Michael Rectenwald, Ph.D., Master Teacher of Writing at New York University contributed two long essays related to Victorian science: "Darwin's Ancestors: The Evolution of Evolution" and "The Construction and Deconstruction of Science in Middlemarch." Gary William Crawford writes to announce his online peer-reviewed journal, Le Fanu Studies. Peter Nicolson from Australia writes to suggest we link to his poetry and culture site; and we now link to his material on Elgar.
John Wexler of Edinburgh points out that "the spelling-checker gremlin has managed to subvert 'Sohrab and Rustum': the word 'Knesset' appears twice in place of the word 'know'st' (or conceivably 'kenst')." ("Know'st" is in fact correct.) Thanks!
November 2008
The month began with your webmaster in Singapore and Dr. Banerjee just back from Central Europe, and together, beginning with her essay entitled, "The Gothic Revival in Central European Architecture," they created a series of several dozen photo documents on St Vitus Cathedral in Prague and Budapest's Parliament House, Church of St. Matthias, and the Fisherman's Bastion. Next, GPL, who serves on the editorial board of the UK-based online journal Neo-Victorian Studies, created a section on this subject largely based on materials about relevant works of A. S. Byatt, Peter Carey, Jean Rhys, and Graham Swift that formerly resided in The Postcolonial and Postimperial Literature and Culture site (www.postcolonialweb.org), which I have taken offline, plus a few new ones about Michael Cox and Jasper Fforde. As of 31 November, the site had 39,743 documents, the increase of more than 500 due in large part to this migration of Neo-Victorian materials from the sister site.
Jacqueline Banerjee wrote "A Marvellous Man," a long, important review of Rosemary Hill's God's Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain. She also sent in scans of illustrations from the appendix of the 1872 edtion of Eastlake's A History of the Gothic Revival, including the interior of Butterfield's All Saints, Margaret Street, William Burges's Warehouse on Thames Street, London and his unexecuted design for a fountain plus Philip Speakman Webb's Worship Street row of shops. In addition, she contributed photos and documents for Sir Arthur Blomfield's St. Alban's Church in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Savi Munjal from the University of Delhi sent in a second contribution — Taming Heterotopia — The Spatio-Temporal Politics of Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton.
Brad Fruhauff writes from Loyola University in Chicago to notify us about two bad links in the Bleak House section, one created by the disappearance of an external site and another by my reformatting Johnson's book on Dickens. Douglas Golding, a guide at St Andrew's cathedral, Sydney, writes to correct the misidentification of St Mary's catholic cathedral as St Andrew's. Marion Durnin, a research student at Trinity College Dublin, pointed out that Samuel Carter Hall's reminiscences of Macaulay were mistakenly credited to his wife. Thanks!
October 2008
Funny how things come in pairs! immediately after I received an e-mail from Annie Pasqua, who wrote the music, lyrics, and libretto of Tess The New Musical, which has its own website, James Hyland wrote from London that he "will be performing in a new stage version of Hard Times (which [he] jointly adapted and devised from the novel by Charles Dickens) at the Warehouse Theatre, London (adjacent to East Croydon Train Station) from Friday 24th October to Sunday 16th November [more information including the production's website].
Your webmaster's travels to Singapore (where he gave a talk on The Victorian Web) and Vietnam produced interesting comparative materials, including series on both Saigon's 1886 Buu Dien Thanh-Pho [City Post Office] for the section on iron and glass and J. Bourad's Cathedral of Notre-Dame for that on the Gothic Revival. His weeks in Singapore allowed him to photograph (or rephotograph) a series of buildings embodying colonial versions of both Gothic and Classical Revivals: Classicism in the Straits Colonies appears, for example, in Raffles Hotel (where Kipling, Conrad, and Maugham stayed), the Singapore Cricket Club, Stamford House, the Singapore National Museum, Asian Civilizations Museum (formerly Government Offices), Old Parliament House, Victoria Memorial Hall (includes Old Town Hall), and even the characteristicaly Singaporean architectural form of the shophouse. St. Andrews Cathedral and the chapel of the former Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus, on the other hand, represent the Gothic Revival, and Lau Pa Sat Festival Market a rare surviving example of elaborate colonial iron-and-glass architecture.
Jacqueline Banerjee contributes a long, detailed essay on styles in domestic architecture before setting off for Eastern Europe. Before she did so she sent in a series on The Conservative Club.
Patrick Nicholas writes from Orvieto, Italy, to correct a typo in the Wilde section. Thanks! We ended the month with 39,050 documents.
September 2008
Your webmaster, who voyaged to Porto, Portugal, to deliver the keynote address about this site — "When a Wiki is not a Wiki: Twenty Years of the Victorian Web" — at a computer science conference, WikiSym2008, encountered several buildings of Victorian interest, including the Livraria Chardron, a three-floor bookshop with a gothic revival decorative scheme inside and out, and an equally amazing railway station that abuts directly against a mountain! A visit to Paris on the way home produced photographs of the another structure originally built to serve as a railroad station, Musée d'Orsay — formerly the Gare d'Orsay; these pictures include the iron-and-glass roof and exterior sculpture. Photographs of works at the d'Orsay and one of Guimard's famous entrances to the Paris Métro led to creating a new section on Art Nouveau, which includes not only links to the older sections for both jewelry and metalwork but also new ones on European architecture, including Antoni Gaudí's famous Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Famila and Casa Milà "La Pedrera," and his city park plus Puig i Cadafalch's Casa Ametller (all in Barcelona), a series on Osvald Polivka and Antonin Balšánek's Municipal Building in Prague and buildings in Budapest; the works from Prague and Budapest had earlier appeared in the section on British and European Aesthetes, Decadents, and Symbolists, to which links to the Art Nouveau sitemap and bibliographical items have been added. The Art Nouveau section also includes new material on furniture and interior design, such as François-Ruper Carabin's elaborate sculptural bookcase and Pierre-Adrien Dalpayrat Mantelpiece. We ended the month with 38,662 documents and images, according to the automatic script created by Aloysius Tay Wee Kok for our server.
Philip Allingham, who has contributed somewhat less than usual these last few months because he has been finishng his book on illustraton, sent in seven lovely photographs of Mai Dun Hill Fort [Maiden Castle], Dorset, and an accompanying essay explaining how Hardy alludes to this landscape in The Mayor of Casterbridge. He followed these Hardy-related photographs with two each of Hangman's Cottage and Maumbury Rings, Dorchester.
Jacqueline Banerjee contributed a good deal of material on Victorian architecture, including photographs and accompanying essays for several country houses: Pugin's Scarisbrick Hall in Lancashire and Albury Park in Surrey, Chartwell in Kent, Polesden Lacey in Surrey, and Wotton House also in Surrey. In addition, she wrote five important general essays: "The Great Housing Boom," "Country Houses," "Homes in the City and Suburbs, "Architectural Trades and Professions," and "Architectural Books, and Professional and Trade Journals" plus Gordon Square, Bloomsbury." Next, she created a series of essays and photographs about Bedford Park, London, an early version of the garden suburb, by Richard Norman Shaw, and E. J. May, and others, including homes, The Tabard Inn, St Michael and All Angels, and Martin Travers's stained glass St Michael slaying the dragon over the City.
Dr. Linda Wilson, Tutor, Open Theological College, University of Gloucestershire, provided enough materials on Marianne Farningham (1834-1909) to create a new section for this religious novelist.
Thanks to Benedict Heal of Newport Pagnell, Bucks., for pointing out a broken link in the sitemap for C. R. Ashbee and to Russell Perkin, Professor of English, Saint Mary's University, Halifax, N.S., Canada, for suggested that we include Thackeray in the list of famous Victorians who attended English public schools since his attendance was alrady mentioned in the Dr.Banerjee's "The Public School Experience in Victorian Literature."
August 2008
Thanks to Erin Sinesky Lovett of W. W. Norton, who sent along an advance copy of Michael Cox's The Glass of Time — a real page turner in the form of a Neo-Victorian sensation novel that GPL quickly read and reviewed. GPL also reformatted E. D. H. Johnson's The Alien Vision of Victorian Poetry as well as most of the Previctorian section of the site.
Philip Allingham wrote a biographical introduction for Archibald Standish Hartrick, who illustrated Thomas Hardy's "A Changed Man."
Jacqueline Banerjee contributed more photographs and essays on Cambridge, including a series on the the screen wall, King's College by William Wilkins and Sir George Gilbert Scott's St John's College Chapel and Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, whose restoration by Eugène-Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc inspired Scott. The amount of material on this university prompted GPL to create a new sitemap for it.
Dick Sullivan contributed "Matthew Arnold, "The Scholar Gipsy," and the Cumnor Hills."
David Page, Editor of the Kipling Journal, writes to announce the site's "New Readers' Guide to the works of Rudyard Kipling" and to inform readers of Victorian Web about "our searchable text-only archive of the Kipling Journal (other than the latest eight issues). Our Society recently decided to make this archive available to everyone, rather than just to members."
July 2008
This month ended with the site containing 38,112 files, having begun with 37,948 and your webmaster in Porto, Portugal, where he gave the opening talk at a one-day conference about wikis. While exploring the city's extraordinarily steep hilly streets, he came upon the Mercado do Bolhão, an example of nineteenth-century iron-and-class architecture. After adding some photographs of this market to our collection of British examples, GPL reorganized the sitemap for iron-and-class structures. The Maas Gallery catalogue for the 2008 summer exhibition provides images of works by many artists, some new to the site, such as Joseph Mosley Barber, Hercules Brabazon Brabazon, Charles Herbert Goetze, Henry Moore, Augustus Edwin Mulready, Maud Naftel, Emily Stannard, and George Winchester, as well as those whose works have already appeared here, including engravings by Herkomer, Head of a Man by Frederick Sandys, Saving of a Soul by James Smetham.
Jacqueline Banerjee began the month with a series of photographs and accompanying essays on sculpture, including H. H. Armstead's Founder's Fountain at King's College, Cambridge, E. H. Baily's William Wilkins, William Theed's Bust of an Unknown Woman, Richard Westmacott's William Pitt, and R. J. Wyatt's The Nymph Ino and the Infant Bacchus. Later she sent in the beginnings of a new series on the University of Cambridge, including several on George Basevi's Fitzwilliam Museum and Waterhouse's Red Building and college library at Pembroke College, as well as Pomeroy's Cromwell at St. Ives and Madingley Hall, a sixteenth-century English country house in Cambridgeshire extensively reconstructred by J. A Gotch, brother of the symbolist painter. Victorian restoration, here Gilbert Scott's, also provided the point of interest in her nine images of Ely Cathedral. She also compared brickwork on William Tite's Windsor & Eton Riverside Station, Datchet Road, Windsor, with the brickwork on the brick diapering on the Bishop's Palace at Ely.
Andrew Churchill and Tamsin Williams of the Watts Gallery, write with the welcome news that "the 3rd Watts Symposium will take place on 26 and 27 February 2009 at Guildhall, London and St Paul's Cathedral, and the Maas Gallery generously sent a beautiful catalogue along with their announcement of the summer exhibition it accompanied. Lexi Stuckey, MA candidate, University of Central Oklahoma, contributed a biographical introduction for Anna Eliza Bray, a cousin of Christina Rossetti who wrote novels and books on folklore. Dick Sullivan contributed two of his characteristically thoughtful essays — Matthew Arnold and the Twenty-first Century and Cardinal Newman and The Dream of Gerontius. Matt McGuire sent in a commentary on Thackeray's decorative initial P for Chapter 4.
Brad Fruhauff, Loyola University Chicago, notified your webmaster about broken links. Helen Small of Pembroke College, Oxford, writes to point out that in one essay Mary Elizabeth Braddon has somehow become Margaret Elizabeth Braddon! David Wilson writes from Switzerland to correct a few howlers in a discussion of Morris's "The Tune of Seven Towers." Richard J. L. Senior, a dscendant of Edwin Chadwick, wrote to correct an erroroneous date. Thanks to these attentive readers!
June 2008
Your webmaster spent the first ten days of the month adding photographs and text from Robert Bowman's Sir Alfred Gilbert and the New Sculpture, the catalogue of an exhibition that opened on 4 June at the Fine Art Society, London. This treasure trove of Victorian sculpture contained images of works not previously in The Victorian Web, such as Albert Toft's Maternity, Alfred Gilbert's Watts, Alfred Drury's Elsie Doncaster, Edgar Bertram Mackennal's Truth, Thomas Brock's Frederick, Lord Leighton, Kathleen Scott, Baroness Kennet's Laus Deo, Hamo Thornycroft's Warrior Bearing a Wounded Youth from the Field of Battle, The Bather, and The Stone Thrower plus new information and superior photographs of works already on site, such as Gilbert's magnificent St. George, Comedy and Tragedy, Icarus, An Offering to Hmen, and works by other sculptors (Dick, Onslow Ford, Leighton,Thornycroft).
Philip V. Allingham contributed "Michael Faraday's Popular Science Lectures, Percival Leigh, and Charles Dickens: Science for the Masses in Household Words (1850-51)" plus transcribing two of Leigh and Dickens's popularizations of the great scientist's lectures: "The Laboratory in the Chest" and "The Chemistry of a Candle."
Jacqueline Banerjee created several series of photographs and accompanying documents about Knightsbridge buildings that exemplify the dominant style of upscale domestic architecture in the 1880s and '90s, including eight of J. J. Stevenson's buildings on Pont Street, six of H. A. Peto and E. George's 52, Cadogan Square, and a Norman Shaw-like mansion block, as well a series on the mid-century row houses on Chalcot Square She also added introductions to Peto and George and wrote an essay on that popular combination of Queen Anne and Netherlandish architecture known as Pont Street Dutch.
Dick Sullivan continues his series of essays on The Persistence of the Victorians: Things Remembered and Things Forgot with "Vaughan Williams and The Lark Ascending," "The Last of the Victorians:June 2008," "Laurence Binyon (1869-1943)," "Sir Edwin Landseer Lutyens OM (1989-1944." Gordon D. S. Maddock, an Old Blundellian himself, contributed plans of Old Blundell's School to the Blackmore gallery.
May 2008
May began with 36,825 documents and images on the site; it increased to 37,456 by the 26th. After reading S. N. Behrman's delightful Portrait of Max, your webmaster contributed "Max on Music Halls," "Max Beerbohm creates a great fuss: the reaction to 'A Defence of Cosmetics,'" and a comparison containing parodies by both Punch and Lewis Carrol of a poem by Isaac Watts; he also added brief passages from Behrman on Beerbohm's caricatures, the Great MacDermott of music hall fame, and "Oscar Wilde's Arrogance."
Traveling to London to celebrate his forty-second wedding anniversary enabled your webmaster to meet with British contributors and with Jacqueline Banerjee, our U. K. editor. The sun shone — well, some of the time, thus is London, after all — permitting many photographs, including many of housing for rich and poor: the home on Cadgan Square that G. E. Street designed for himself as well as houses there by J. J. Stevenson and R. Norman Shaw. Other homes for the well-off include Philip Webb's for George Howard, a large Tudor Revival building in Herbert Crescent as well as several streets of high-end row houses, such as Palace Gardens Terrace, Belgrave Squuare, Cadogan Place, Flask Walk (Hampstead). Hampstead, which in Victorian times had a large working-class population, provided images of Willow Cottages, homes originally inhabited by watercress gatherers; The Flask, a local public house; and The Wells and Camden Wash Houses and Baths, which served whose homes had no running water. GPL also created a new sitemap for retail shops, arcades and other commercial buildings to which were linked photographs of B. Flegg, Saddle & Harness Maker and James Smith & Sons, the famous store for umbrellas and canes. He also began a new section on architectural sculpture, which thus far consists chiefly of a dozen bas reliefs, and several trips to the V&A produces images of works by Baily, Brock, Dalou, Gilbert, Stevens, Toft, Tweed, and Westmacott. In addition, GPL's walks around London produced photographs of statues of David Livingstone, Ernest H. Shackleton, and Robert Stephenson.
Philip Allingham sent in a portrait of Ruskin from the 1892 Illustrated London News, three plates for "To Please His Wife", and six for Hardy's "Wessex Folk."
Jacqueline Banerjee contributed a series of eight photographs and accompanying text about H. A. Darbishire's Holly Village, Highgate, North London created for Angela Georgina Burdett-Coutts as well; Sir James Pennethorne's 1832 houses in Park Village West; photographs of works by Burne-Jones, and additional details of Boehm's statue of Queen Victoria at Windsor. St George's Cathedral (Pugin), the Imperial War Museum (the old "Bedlam"), the New London Synagague, an essay on Victorian Judaism, and the a series on houses in Park Village houses, No. 1-7 by Charles Lee, James Pennethorne, John Nash, and his office.
Some additons to the new British and European Aesthetes, Decadents, and Symbolists materials: Ryan Wong contributed "Klinger, Symbolism and the Bizarre," Paul O'Leary McCann "Max Klinger's Incubus: The Dead Mother," and GPL created sections on Böcklin and Delville.
Don Harvey of Newport Beach, California, sent in several corrections for the text of Tennyson's "Ulysses." Susan A. Davi, Head, Collection Development, University of Delaware Library, corrected a misspelling on the list of Pre-Raphaelite web resources. The Reverend Ian Carmichael, Farmington Fellow, Harris Manchester College, Oxford, UK, corrected a real howler in the essay on William Whewell — two repeated paragraphs. Thanks!
April 2008
The month began with the site having grown to 35,819 documents. For his his seminar on Pre-Raphaelites, Aesthetes, and Decadents, your webmaster created a section on the paintings of Gustave Moreau, who is hardly a Victorian, and as part of that section he wrote an essay comparing this painter to the Pre-Raphaelites. At this point, GPL decided to enlarge the existing materials on the Aesthetes and Decadents, creating a new section on British and European Aesthetes, Decadents, and Symbolists that, since it no longer solely concerns English artists and writers, has a very different appearance than the rest of site with its green and yellow color scheme. To provide comparisons to British Victorian architecture, GPL also began a site on nineteenth-century American buildings, the first section of which comprises a half dozen styles of domestic architecture. [This link takes you to his favorite American Victorian home in Providence.]
The Huysmans project continued as Valerie Hsiung, who contributed "Baudelaire Bound by Naturalism in 'Metamorphoses of the Vampire'" created on annotations for plainsong and for the various exotic flowers to which Des Esseintes refers, including Cypripedium, Nepenthes, and Anthurium. She also wrote "In the Verge of the Unknown: Blackness, Space and Mood in Khnopff's In Fosset. An Evening." Paul O'Leary McCann created annotations for Fecamp Abbey and the Maurists as well as for various jewels mentioned in the text; Richard Stein, who wrote "The Decadent Greek Sphinx: Drtikol, Khnopff, Bernard, and von Stuck," provided notes on Saint Vincent de Paul and Rubens and The Feast of Herod, his verson of the Salome story. Seicha Turnbull wrote annotations for The Golden Ass of Apuleius and Paul Verlaine. Ryan Wong contributed annotations on Jan Luyken, a late seventeenth-century Dutch lithographer who life and work fascinated Hysman's protagonist, and The Psychomachia of Prudentius.
Jacqueline Banerjee reviewed Sybil Oldfield's Jeanie, an "Army of One": Mrs Nassau Senior, 1828-1877, The First Woman in Whitehall, and she also provided a biography of the illustrator Joseph Pennell (1857-1926) plus a dozen plates and commentaries from his series of drawings of London. She also contributed sets of photographs with commentary of Sir Joseph Edgar Boehm's bronze statue of Queen Victoria at Windsor and John Graham Lough's Stephenson Memorial, Newcastle.
Brian Elliott, webmaster of Christ Chuch in Esher, Surrey, sent in two photographs of the recently restored Walker organ, and Yaakov Eisenberg of New York corrected the transcription of James Clerk Maxwell's "Molecules." Antiquariaat Jan Meemelink, Den Haag ('s-Gravenhage ) The Netherlands, kindly permitted us to reproduce an 1855 plate of the Nepenthes to use as an illustration in the Hysmans project described above. Terry Scarborough, Professor of English, Okanagan College, Kelowna BC, Canada, contributed "Science or Séance?: Late-Victorian Science and Dracula's Epistolary Structure," and Matt Macguire, M. A. Candidate, Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England, sent in "The Retreated Narrator: Thackeray's Showman in Vanity Fair"
Dawn Carroll, E-Public Relations Officer for the National Museums Liverpool, writes to announce the Walker Art Gallery exhibition, Art in the Age of Steam, which includes Manet's The Railway (The Gare Saint-Lazare) and Egg's The Travelling Companions as well as many other major works; the exhibition runs from 18 April to 10 August 2008.
March 2008
Using Gimp (GNU Image Manipulation Program, free graphics software downloaded from the internet), your webmaster added blue skies to a few dozen architectural photographs in which the skies appeared whited out even though many of these images were made on sunny days. He also began the process of converting a web version of Sarah Cutts Frerichs's 1974 monograph on Elizabeth Missing Sewell, a High Church novelist and writer on women's education, for the inaugural Sarah Cutts Frerichs Lecture in Victorian Studies at Brown University's Cogut Center for the Humanities, which will take place on Tuesday, April 15, 2008. He added French and English versions of selected poems by Baudelaire to the materials on the Decadence.
Jacqueline Banerjee, who recently returned from India, sent in the first products of her travels — a life of A. O. Hume accompanied by photographs of the home of this graduate of the University of London who began as a colonial administrator and ended as founder of the Indian National Congress and famous ornithologist. She folowd this with "Home from Home: The Victorians in Simla," which are accompanied by a series of photographs of both landscape surroudning this summer capital of British India as well as Victorian buidings there: Christ Church, St. Michael's Cathedral, and Gaiety Theatre. Prompted by this new material, GPL reated a new section on British India, adding to the site material from the Postcolonial Web and images of landscape, buildings, people, and events from th New York Public Library site.
The month began with Dick Sullivan sending in an essay on John Clare, the Northamptonshire Peasant Poet, and "Sadness and Salvation: Six Victorian Poems," which begins with a discussion of one of Clare's poems. A few days later e-mail brought a review by Sharon Aronofsky Weltman of Oliver S. Buckton's Cruising with Robert Louis Stevenson: Travel, Narrative, and the Colonial Body. Rita Harris of Oxford has permited us to add her photographs and commentary about Margaret Giles's The Tortoise Boy (or Boy on a Tortoise). Tony Bentley wrote in with an explanation of the Duke of Wellington's original family name and to correct a statement about the number of children in his family.
Alpha S. from Shelton, Connecticut, writes to point out that contrary to the statement in the 1894 edition of his works, which is on this site, Edward Lear was the twentieth and not the twenty-first or twenty-one children. Bennie (BT) Robinson III writes to point out a typo. Thanks!
February 2008
The site has 35,409 documents and images as of 25 February. Charles L. Eastlake's A History of the Gothic Revival (1872), a treasure trove of information and beautiful images of architecture in this style, provided pictures and extensive commentary about churches and public buildings by James Brooks, William Butterfield, Benjamin Ferrey, George Goldie, A. W. N. Pugin. G. E. Street, and Alfred Waterhouse's Assize Courts, Manchester and New Buildings at Balliol College, Oxford The material added included not only churches but also country houses, such as those by William Burges, W. E. Nesfield's Cloverly Hall in Shropshire, J. L. Pearson's Quar Wood in Gloucestershire, W. Porden's Eaton Hall, J. Pritchard 's Eatington Park, Richard Norman Shaw's Leyes Wood in Sussex, A. Salvin's Scotney Castle, Sussex, W. White's Humewood in Ireland, and T. H. Wyatt's Orchardleigh Park in Somersetshire. Eastlake also provided entire chapters on Ruskin's importance and Pugin's biography, as well as shorter pieces on a range of relevant subjects, including Walter Scott's influence, the Gothic as a particularly functional style for domestic architecture, Barry and the Houss of Parliament. and material for an essay about the opposition to the style by both Evangelicals and Roman Catholics.
Judy Neiswander's e-mail about the Library of Congress's online collection of copyright-free images (see below) prompted GPL to create the html documents for numerous buildings and scenes, including Elmes and Cockerel's St George's Hall, Lime Street, Liverpool, Hardwick's Great Royal Western Hotel, Scott's restorations (Chester Cathedral, St Botolph's Church, Boston, Lincolnshire), Cambridge colleges (Jesus, St. John's), technology (water wheel, railways, windmill, steam paddlewheeler Boadiciea, and a steam tug towing a sailing ship), and resorts (Bath, Blackpool, Bognor, Brighton, Buxton, Herne Bay).
After GPL told Mark Bernstein, head of Eastgate Systems (www.eastgate.org — a firm with pioneerng hypertext and organization software), about the Library of Congress's online collection of copyright-free images, he suggested that the New York Public Library also had a site with much valuable visual materials, too, and he was certainly right! To begn with, GPL created two large sections of more than a dozen documents each of plates from the Audsley brothers' Polychromatic decoration as applied to buildings in the mediaeval styles and George Audsley and James Lord Bowes's Keramic Art of Japan — books with enormous value for study of the Medieval Revival and the Cult of Japan. The NYPL also provides images of British cavalry in India after the 1857 uprising and six images of British troops in the Crimean War, plus coats of arms of famous British public schools, such as those for Eton and Rugby, as well as various cities.
Philip Allingham provided materials to open a section on Eliza Lynn Linton, including an introduction to her life and works, a chronology, a list of the many periodicals in which she published, and a dozen illustrations by Arthur Hopkins for her novel, The Atonement of Leam Dundas. In addition, he completed a major project, scanning more than 60 illustrations by Fred Barnard of Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit and creating captions and commentaries.
Jacqueline Banerjee contributed three photographs of Joseph Durham's Matilda Fountain, and her multi-part essay on Victorian crime (accompanied by a photograph of Francis Galton's portable fingerprint kit and an illustration of hooligans from Walter Besant's East London) prompted the creation of a new section on crime in the age of Victoria. In addition, she provided photographs of George Gilbert Scott and Francis Skidmore's Hereford Screen (now in the V&A) and an essay on Skidmore, whose work she also identified on the Albert Memorial. Her other contributions involving works in the V&A include photographs and essays on Burne-Jones's tapestry Angeli Ministrante and glass panels, Penelope and Chaucer Asleep plus Rossetti's stained glass version of Wedding of St George and the Princess and Frampton's sculpture, Mother and Child. Other contributions include a photograph of a memorial plaque to the orientalist painter John Frederick Lewis in St. Mary's Church, Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, a memorial by Sir Francis Chantrey in the same church that enabled the creation of a section for a sculptor today perhaps best known for his gift to the Tate, and a 16-part collection of photographs and essays on Street's St James the Less, Westminster.
Judy Neiswander writes to inform readers of the Victorian Web that the Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Online Catalog is treasure trove of copyright-free images on all subjects. GPL and JB have already found more than a dozen late-nineteenth-century photographs of bridges, landmarks, and monuments. Dick Sullivan contributed "Some Thoughts on an Old Classic of English Studies: Mysticism in English Literature (1913) by Caroline F. E. Spurgeon (1869-1942) and essays on Edward Fitzgerald and Rubaiyat as well as A.C. Benson. Matthew Koyle sent in "George W. M. Reynolds: An Enigma in Print." Michael Miller writes to inform us that he has collected his Elgar reviews online. Margaret Loose, University of California, San Diego, writes to point out that www.emilybronte.org.uk now takes one to a commercial site discussing digital cameras!
January 2008
Your webmaster began the new year by scanning and editing two sermons by Robertson that compare Roman Catholic, Puritan, and Broad Church conceptions of baptism, and writing a review of Tim Barringer's excellent Reading the Pre-Raphaelites. Looking through some photographs of buidings in Hong Kong taken five years ago, he found several of both the Cathedral of St. John and Sir Aston Webb's Supreme Court building. This last item brought to three the number of buildings by Webb — enough to create a section for this architect, who also designed the façade of Buckingham Palace and the Cromwell Road portion of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Continuing through his photo archives, he came upon images of a number of churches in colonial Singapore: the Anglican St. Andrews Cathedral, the Armenian Church of Saint Gregory the Illuminator, the Roman Catholic Cathedral of the Good Shepherd, Chapel of the Convent of the Holy Infant Jesus, and Church of Sts. Peter and Paul. A 2002 trip to Australia similarly produced photographs of St. Andrew's Cathedral and the Observatory and Time-ball Tower in Sydney.
Philip V. Allinhgam, working with GPL, has created a section containing all 121 of George Du Maurier's brilliant plates for his own novel Trilby. He followed the DuMaurier plates with a dozen illustrations by Arthur Hopkins for Eliza Lynn Linton's The Atonement of Leam Dundas and two for A Rose in June.
Jacqueline Banerjee sent in photographs, captions, commentary, and essays for her continuing series on Victorian architecture: eight on John Johnson's Alexandra Palace and five on The People's Palace, which is now the Queen's Building at Queen Mary University of London; this series includes images of the interior of the Octagon, now the library at Queen Mary. She continued with a set of related photographs and commentary: E. M. Barry's Covent Garden (Royal Opera House) and the adjacent Floral Hall plus Flaxman's statue of Melpomene, the muse of tragedy, on the façade of the Opera House. In addition, she wrote the caption and commentary for two of GPL's photographs of St Paul's, Covent Garden, the "actor's church," and she photographed and wrote about King's Weigh House Chapel, Norham Gardens, and the Great Hall of G. E. Street's Law Courts, including H. A. Armstead's Street memorial.
Marilyn Thomas, Professor of English, Menlo College, shared with our readers the preface to her new book, The Diary: Sex, Death, and God in the Affairs of a Victorian Cleric as well as the final chapter of her biography of F. W. Robertson. Olivia Rickman of the Foundling Museum writes to announce an exhibition about Handel and the Crystal Palace, which will run from 23 November 2007 through 2 March 2008. Luca Montanarella of the European Commission Joint Research Centre writes from Ispra, Italy, to identify the location represented in a painting by Giovanni Costa.
Last modified 5 January 2024