Forthcoming publication: Mobility in the Victorian Novel: Placing the Nation

I’m very pleased to say that my monograph Mobility in the Victorian Novel: Placing the Nation is scheduled for publication with Palgrave Macmillan in September 2015, and a short blurb and contents can now be found on the publishers’ website.

And here’s a quick preview of the various novels discussed in chapter:

Chapter 1: ‘Wandering out into the World’: Walking the Connected Nation

Charles Dickens, The Old Curiosity Shop

George Eliot, Adam Bede

Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

Chapter 2: ‘Flying from the grasp’: Embodying the Railway Journey

Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton

Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son

Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret

Chapter 3: ‘It’s all one’? Continental Connections

Charlotte Brontë, The Professor and Villette

Charles Dickens,  Little Dorrit

Chapter 4: ‘The distance is quite imaginary’: Travelling beyond Europe

Charles Dickens,  David Copperfield

Elizabeth Gaskell, Cranford

Conclusion: The Mobile Nation of The Moonstone

The Moonstone

Upcoming talk: Texts in Place/ Place in Texts symposium at Royal Holloway, 21st May 2015

I’m very much looking to speaking at the symposium Texts in Place/ Place in Texts at Royal Holloway on 21st May 2015, which brings together geographers and literary scholars to discuss their understandings of the relationship between texts and places.

My talk is titled “’The distance is quite imaginary’: locating the nation and the world in Dickens’s David Copperfield” and is drawn from a section of my forthcoming monograph which explores the representation of national and global spaces/places in the Victorian novel. Full abstract as follows:

“It is merely crossing,” said Mr. Micawber, trifling with his eye-glass, “merely crossing. The distance is quite imaginary.”

Mr Micawber’s humorous denial of the distance between Britain and Australia provides a comic strain to the emigration story of Dickens’s David Copperfield (1849–50), but its comedy belies an important point about the representation of place, and especially the national-global politics of representation, in the Victorian novel. In this paper, I will use David Copperfield to think about the representation of place in terms of narrative structure: how much narrative space is afforded to different places, how places are made more or less present through various representational modes, and how structures of nation and world intersect. I will suggest that David Copperfieldprovides an exemplary model of the structural delineation of place in the Victorian novel: a tight yet protracted core of the nation-space is set against an absent, often “imaginary”, world at large. Yet David Copperfield also calls for a closer reading of this structure, and I identify a paralleling of national and global places in the narrative to suggest how we might read for more subtle inferences of global resonances in the spaces of the Victorian novel.

New publication: “A Tale of Two Londons: Locating Shakespeare and Dickens in 2012”

Shakespeare on the Global Stage: Performance and Festivity in the Olympic Year, edited by Paul Prescott and Erin Sullivan, has just been published by Bloomsbury’s Arden Shakespeare series. The collection takes a range of perspectives on Shakespearean performance in 2012, emerging from the Year of Shakespeare project on the World Shakespeare Festival. I am pleased to have contributed a co-written essay, with Dr Peter Kirwan (Uni. of Nottingham) on “A Tale of Two Londons: Locating Shakespeare and Dickens in 2012”, which parallels the Shakespeare Festival and the Dickens bicentenary to explore the cultural politics of locating authors within national literary landscapes, and how this plays out within an international cultural context.

Book review: Michael Hollington (ed.), The Reception of Charles Dickens in Europe

In the new issue of Victoriographies (4.2) I review Michael Hollington’s The Reception of Charles Dickens in Europe (Bloomsbury, 2013). It’s an impressive two-volume collection of essays with 48 international contributors covering Dickens’s reception in 28 European countries. In the review I discuss the volume’s themes of national identity, the influence of Dickens on European authors, Dickens and the visual arts, as well as the substantive publication histories assessed in different national contexts.

Publication: “A brown sunburnt gentleman”: Masculinity and the Travelling Body in Dickens’s Bleak House

My article “A brown sunburnt gentleman”: Masculinity and the Travelling Body in Dickens’s Bleak House is now available online in the new issue of Nineteenth-Century Contexts (36.4) – a special issue on the Male Body in Victorian Literature and Culture, edited by Nadine Muller and Jo Parsons.

Shakespeare on the Road symposium, 11th October 2013

I spent Friday 11th October in Stratford-upon-Avon at the launch of Shakespeare on the Road, a project between the University of Warwick, Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, and Misfits, inc. to celebrate the 2014-16 anniversaries of Shakespeare’s birth and death. In what sounds like a rather wonderful (and enviable!) summer, the team are travelling across the United States visiting around 17 Shakespeare Festivals to provide an account of the as-yet-undocumented ways in which Shakespeare is performed, experienced and interpreted in US Festival settings.

This symposium marked the launch of the project and was an opportunity to discuss some of the initial questions proposed by and arising from the project. Throughout the day we heard a fascinating range of papers about different aspects of Shakespeare and/in the USA: Nicola Watson spoke about Shakespeare Gardens in the US as sites of memorial and commemoration that cultivate a particularly “English”, and feminised, space; Andrew Dickson talked about Shakespeare’s presence in the history of the American West – place-names, accounts of reading on the road – a theme picked up on later in Tim Lockley‘s paper on the appropriation of Shakespeare in the colonial period as a legacy of “Englishness”.

There’s also the long history of American interest in the Birthplace, including the (perhaps mythical) story of the American showman P.T. Barnum who, so it is said, tried to purchase the Birthplace in 1847 with the intention of shipping it to the USA where it would become part of his travelling circus (more on that here) – a point I picked up on at the end of my paper on the interconnections between literature, nation and place to pose the question: what if Barnum had been successful and transported the Birthplace away from Stratford-upon-Avon – so that it became, in the words of Dickens’s Wemmick, ‘portable property’? What might this lead us to ask about the location of national culture – is it in the walls of the house, the ground on which it stands, the national audience that experiences it, all of those things together; can national culture be detached from national place and still have meaning, and what alternative perspectives might new national contexts have generated?

Ideas of place were central to Stuart Elden’s paper on Shakespeare’s territories which, following on from his new book The Birth of Territory, began to explore the ways in which territory is used and understood in Shakespeare’s plays. Steve Purcell also raised questions about the appropriation of space in festival contexts, where the carnivalisation of outdoor spaces often plays a central role in crafting ideas and expectations around Shakespeare Festivals and Ruth Leary spoke about festivals from a cultural policy perspective, and posed interesting ideas about the idea of creative economy and cultural entrepreneurship today and in Shakespeare’s own activity.

I was pleased to have the opportunity to participate in such an enjoyable day generating some stimulating research questions, and it’ll be fascinating to see how the project develops over the next couple of years.

Bleak House – Cagliari lecture resources

For students at the University of Cagliari who attended my classes this week, here are some images and further reading that I referred to.

Bleak House

These two images are watercolours of the Great Exhibition by Henry Clarke Pidgeon, that I have written more about here:

You can read a contemporary response to the Great Exhibition here, and the full text of Dickens’s “The Last Words of the Old Year” (quoted on the handout) can be read online here. I have also written about the ideas of “people and things” at the Exhibition in the context of Henry Mayhew’s novel 1851 and Bleak House.

This image of the London slums is taken from this website on Victorian London where you can find some more contemporary writing about the slums and related issues.

Dickens’s writing on the Niger expedition is discussed in the book by Tim Carens cited on the handout, plus a number of others including Grace Moore’s Dickens and Empire (2004).

Finally, this podcast that I recorded for the University of Warwick’s Celebrating Dickens project is of relevance to some of the issues raised, and on the Celebrating Dickens website you will find many other podcasts and videos of interest to Charles Dickens’s life and times.

Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840-1920

Following my previous post about nineteenth-century rurality, I’m very pleased to say that Gender and Space in Rural Britian, 1840-1920 has been accepted for publication by Pickering and Chatto’s Warwick Series in the Humanities. Edited by myself and Dr Gemma Goodman, the collection brings together essays by a range of scholars from literary studies, history and historical geography, covering a diverse rural landscape both within and beyond Britain.

Here is a quick peek at the contributions we have lined up for inclusion:

‘Gertrude Jekyll: Cultivating the Gendered Space of the Victorian Garden for Professional Success’

Christen Ericsson (University of Southampton)

‘Women and the Country House: Matilda-Blanche Gibbs at Tyntesfield and Dorothy Elmhirst at Dartington Hall’           

Emma Gray (University of Bristol)

‘Women in the Field: Thomas Hardy and Richard Jefferies’

Professor Roger Ebbatson (Lancaster University)

‘Mathilde Blind’s “The Teamster”: Gender and the Rural Space’

Maija Kuharenoka (De Montfort University)

‘“Between two Civilisations”: George Sturt’s Constructions of Loss and Change in Village Life’

Dr Barry Sloan (University of Southampton)

‘At Work and at Play: Charles Lee’s Cynthia in the West’

Dr Gemma Goodman (University of Warwick)

‘Obliged to Remain: Being Rural in the Fiction of Violet Jacob and Mary and Jane Findlater’

Samantha Walton (University of Edinburgh)

‘Drowned Lands’: Charles Kingsley’s Hereward the Wake and the Masculation of the English Fens’

Dr Lynsey McCulloch (Coventry University)

‘“Wandering like a wild thing”: Rural walking in George Eliot’s early fiction’

Dr Charlotte Mathieson (University of Warwick)

“I never liked long walks”: Gender, Nature, and Jane Eyre’s Rural Wandering

Katherine F. Montgomery (University of Iowa)

‘From England to Eden; Gardens, Gender and Knowledge in Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out’

Karina Jakubowicz (University College London)

‘Space, Mobility, and Flexibility: Transnational Rural in Alicia Little’

Dr Eliza S.K. Leong (Institute for Tourism Studies, Macao)

I’m really excited to be working on such an interesting project and can’t wait to receive the submissions for review early next year.

 

Locating the local in William Cobbett’s Rural Rides

Over the past few weeks I’ve been working on the revised proposal for a co-edited collection on gender and rurality in the long Victorian period – the book, now titled Gendered Ruralities: Gender and Space in Britain, 1840-1920, emerged out of the Rural Geographies symposium held last year at Warwick. The essays cover a wide range of rural locations throughout Britain, exploring the particular ways in which gender is played out in rural environments – both shaping and shaped by the specific contexts of rural locations. Throughout the wide range of rural locations covered, in Britain and abroad, the collection builds up a multifaceted concept of rural gender identities, moving away from a static concept of “the rural”. A diverse set of perspectives on the relationship between rural and national identities also unfold, revealing rural places as points of negotiation between local, regional, national and international identities.

View of Dover in 1804; from http://www.dover-kent.co.uk/words/cobbett.htm

It seemed like a good time, then, to finally read the copy of William Cobbett’s Rural Rides (1830) that’s been sitting on my shelf for a few months. If you’re not familiar with the text, it’s a series of accounts of Cobbett’s rides through rural Southern England in the 1820s, charting the rapidly changing rural landscape as the effects of the agricultural revolution, urbanization and industrialization take hold. The writing moves between the detailed agricultural understanding of a rural labourer, the newness of a traveller’s perspectives, and the political outporings of one incensed at the government’s injustice towards rural communities.

Written just before the Victorian years, on which my research and the book collection focus, it’s been interesting to see how certain elements are anticipated and to get a detailed sense of the changes taking place in agricultural communities in these years. One thing that’s particularly interesting me thus far in my reading is the way in which Cobbett moves frequently between different points of perspective. His rides often move quickly through a succession of named places before arriving at a stop or point of interest that will prompt a longer observation, drawing the particularities of individual rural communities into a wider picture of the rural South, Cobbett using his perspective as an outside observer to make sense of the landscape as a whole.

In a similar vein, Cobbett frequently reaches viewpoints that afford a wider perspective on the surrounding landscape – I’ve come across 5 such instances just in the first 100 or so pages:

“we, having seen enough of the streets and turnpikes, took across over Merrow Down, and then mounted the ‘Surrey Hills’ so famous for the prospects they afford. Here we looked back over Middlesex, and into Buckinghamshire and Berkshire, away towards the North West, into Essex and Kent towards the East, over part of Sussex to the South, and over part of Hampshire to the West and South West” (p. 35)

“that chain of hills, which, in this part, divide Hampshire from Berkshire […] from which you can see all across the country, even to the Isle of Wight, are of chalk” (p. 65)

“[Beacon Hill] is one of the loftiest hills in the country. Here you can see the Isle of Wight in detail, a fine sweep of the sea; also away into Sussex, and over the New Forest into Dorsetshire” (p.77)

“the ground is pretty much elevated, and enables you to look about you. You see the Surrey Hills away to the North; Hindhead and Blackdown to the North West and West; and the South Downs from the West to the East” (p. 113)

“there is a hill which I came over, about two miles from Petworth, whence I had a clear view of the Surrey chalk-hills, Leith-hill, Hindhead, Blackdown, and of hte South Downs” (p. 116)

Each time the observation is focused not so much on the view, but on naming the counties or places that can be seen; only in a few instances does Cobbett give an impression of the landscape’s appearance or any indicators of aesthetic appreciation, instead focusing on giving a description which gives distinct, identifiable markers of place – names and directions. It serves to map out the surrounding area, almost plotting the coordinates so that we specifically locate each place and get a sense of its relational context to the surrounding area. These instances ensure that the wider perspective of the region, and nation, is always maintained, but they also focus on giving a very specific, relational sense of how each place is situated so that the view is at once broad and distinct.

The frequency with which these instances occur means that the reader is constantly called on to keep the wider map in view, repeatedly reiterating that the concerns of the rural locale are at once local, regional, national and even international – something very much at the heart of Cobbett’s writing, and indeed indicative of the way in which many rural contexts can most productively be understood.

Publication: Mobility, Space and the Nation in Bleak House

My article “‘A moving and a moving on’: Mobility, Space and the Nation in Dickens’s Bleak House‘ has today been published in the journal English via Oxford Journals advance access. The article will appear in print in December 2012 as part of a special issue on Dickens and Travel, following on from last year’s Dickens Day; I’m very pleased to be included in this volume and looking forward to reading the rest of the articles.

The link above follows through to the pdf, but you can also view the abstract and full text here.