Paraphernalia! Victorian Objects

Helen Kingstone is Lecturer in Victorian Studies at the University of Glasgow. Her research addresses the relationship between memory and history in the nineteenth century, focusing on how writers in different genres and forms approached contemporary history. Her monograph Victorian Narratives of the Recent Past: Memory, History, Fiction was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2017. Other publications include articles on fin-de-siècle utopian fiction in English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 and in Utopias and Dystopias in the Fiction of H. G. Wells and William Morris, ed. Emelyne Godfrey (Palgrave, 2016), and others on literature and scientific ideas of progress in Nineteenth-Century Contexts and in Historicising Humans ed. Efram Sera-Shriar (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018).Kate Lister is a graduate of Leeds and Leeds Trinity Universities, and is currently Postdoctoral Research Associate at Leeds Trinity University. She is on the board of the International Sex Work Research Hub, the curator for the online research and archive project ‘Whores of Yore’. Kate has published articles on Victorian sexuality with Routledge, the Oxford Interdisciplinary Press, and Cambridge Scholars. She was the historical consultant for the Rosa Funded ‘Our Voices’ project on sex work in the city of Leeds, and has made numerous radio and television appearances about her research. Kate’s first monograph on nineteenth-century medievalism is forthcoming with the University of Wales Press.

• Table of ContentsIntroduction: Helen Kingstone and Kate Lister, ‘It’s a Victorian Thing’ 1 ‘A magic cave’: collecting objectsRohan McWilliam, ‘The Bazaars of London’s West End in the Nineteenth Century’ 10Anne Anderson, ‘The Bric-à-Bracquer’s Étagère or Whatnot: Staging ‘artistic’ taste in the Aesthetic "House Beautiful"’ 23Thad Logan, "Rossetti's Things: the Artist and his Accessories" 36 Ornaments: defining prosperity at home 47Silvia Granata, ‘The Dark Side of the Tank: the Marine Aquarium in the Victorian Home’ 48Ralph Mills, ‘A Chimney-Piece in Plumtree-Court, Holborn: plaster of Paris "images" and nineteenth-century working class material culture’ 59Julia Courtney, ‘Secret Lives of Dead Animals: Exploring Victorian Taxidermy’ 74 Decentring meaning: objects becoming things 86Valerie Sanders, ‘Objects of Anxiety in Nineteenth-Century Children’s Literature: Edith Nesbit and Frances Hodgson Burnett’ 87Francois Ropert, ‘Within ‘the Coil of Things’: The Figurative Use of Devotional Objects in the Poetical Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne and Oscar Wilde’ 99 Object or text? reading the body 111Heather Hind, ‘"Golden Lies"? Reading Locks of Hair in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret and Tennyson’s "The Ringlet"’ 112Sophie Ratcliffe, ‘The Art of Curling Up: Charles Dickens and the Feeling of Curl Papers’ 120 Objects in circulation: print culture 131Odile Boucher-Rivalain, ‘Woman’s Dress as a Polemical Object/Subject in the Mid-Victorian Period’ 132Alice Crossley, ‘Paper Love: Valentines in Victorian Culture’ 143Peter Yeandle, ‘Exotic Bodies and Mundane Medicines: advertising and empire in the late-Victorian and Edwardian press’

"Paraphernalia! Victorian Objects indicates that the study of nine-teenth-century material culture is by no means exhausted. The essays demonstrate that we need to continue reading this period through its objects in order to under-stand better the relationships between the fabric of the past and its representation."- Deborah Wynne, University of Chester, Literature & History