Victorians! discussion

Here is a new thread for posting links about all things Victorian.

I quite often come across a great article, image, piece of info or website or blog that I think people in this group would love so let's have a place to put them!

If your link belongs to any of the other threads (i.e. it relates to a specific book we are reading etc) then please do continue to post in that thread where members can easily find it.

This thread is for general links - the only rule is that it relates to the Victorian era (both UK and rest of world). It can be about cooking, traditions, the Victorian family - whatever you think will interest us!

Here are some blogs that I love to look at that deal with the Victorians:

The Little Professor

Victorian Geek

Everything Victorian and More

Here are some websites that deal with the Victorian era and also Queen Victoria:

Mostly Victorian

Queen Victoria Revealed

The Victorian Era

Victorian London

The Victorian Peeper


The Virtual Victorian

Your list could also include The Victorian Web.
http://www.victorianweb.org/

Thanks Everyman - that's a good one I didn't know about.

Please keep adding more as you come across anything interesting, guys. This is a thread for you to add links.

The Victorian Literary Studies Archive - Hyper-Concordance
http://victorian.lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/...

This is a great way to find passages, quotations, etc. by book or author. The site has British, Irish, and American authors who wrote during the Victorian period (and some others).

I like

David Perdue's Charles Dickens Page
http://charlesdickenspage.com/

Stuff on the novels, a timeline, articles on topics such as Dickens and Christmas, and a map of Dickens' London.

Thanks everyone, I like these sites!

Having been born and bred in the original County of Radnorshire (it is now part of a much bigger administrative unit called Powys), I would like to encourage members who are interested in rural life in the Victorian era to dip into the Diaries of Rev Francis Kilvert. He was Curate of Clyro in the Wye Valley from 1865 until 1872 and his diaries present a stark picture of class, poverty and deprivation in one of the remoter parts of Britain at that time.

David wrote: "Having been born and bred in the original County of Radnorshire (it is now part of a much bigger administrative unit called Powys), I would like to encourage members who are interested in rural lif..."

Thanks for that! I do have the Folio edition of his Journal of a Country Curate on my shelf, but never got around to reading it. I'll pull it off and add it to the even more active pile!

May I humbly proffer forth my own website, which is borne out a love for all things Victorian?

www.lordlikely.com - chronicling the adventures of Victorian aristocrat Lord Likely (in a rather bawdy manner, so do not visit if easily offended!)

Hope you enjoy it, chums!

What's the usage? Cooking, home medicine, what?

ETA: Seems to be a synonym for "tonka bean." Has been used as a substitute for vanilla, in perfume, in the treatment of whooping cough, and to flavor tobacco. Currently banned in the US by the FDA. (Contains an anti-coagulant, can be dangerous in the wrong quantities.) Comes originally from French Guiana, in the Amazon basin.

I was interested - I'd never heard of them before, either.

Andy wrote: "May I humbly proffer forth my own website, which is borne out a love for all things Victorian?

www.lordlikely.com - chronicling the adventures of Victorian aristocrat Lord Likely (in a rather bawd..."

I like your website Andy, very fun

Ah! Thanks, Anna. I was wondering what negus was yesterday. (They drink soup with negus in it in one of Miss Austen's novels.)

We're having the kind of weather for negus, I think. Very wet and depressing.

I may go fondle my wool. Or read a book!

Susanna wrote: "We're having the kind of weather for negus, I think. Very wet and depressing."

Count your blessings. Mid-90s here in the Northwest, two consecutive records. Not record heat for some places, but very few houses up here have air conditioning, so we just aren't equipped to deal with it. Normal high this time of year is mid to upper 70s.

This is the hottest and most humid summer I can ever recall here in the Midwest. Regularly 90-100 with extremely high humidity levels. Last summer we ran the a/c 1 day, but it's been on this summer for about 4 weeks now. This week it finally started to cool off, and seems to be perfect weather for sitting outside with my coffee and book in the morning.

Sorry - that's a total digression from the main topic, but couldn't help add in my weather comments!

Oh, it's still warm (currently 88), but we have a front stalled out on top of us, and the humidity's through the roof.

And I suspect no thought was given to servant comfort.

Anna wrote: "I wonder how much thought was given to servant comfort?"

What's less than zero?

The horses, now, they had to be taken good care of. They were valuable and cost money to replace. The servants, well, not so much.

Very weird weather to be doing Christmas knitting, that's for sure.

Stop with all the talk of hot weather!!! Not because it is off-topic but because we have had the worst summer I can remember here in north England! The whole of August has literally been a wash-out and I am fed up of it. WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!!!

Boof, I would GLADLY trade homes with you for the summer! I love rainy, dreary, gray weather (having lived in Seattle as a child, I guess) but now live on the edge of the Mojave Desert. We get rain maybe three or four times a year...if we are lucky. And the summers....arrgghh!!

Not much except for the later end of the period.

All of Oscar Wilde's plays are Victorian, and the early George Bernard Shaw.

I read a wonderful book recently called The Victorian House by Judith Flanders. It gives the Victorian perspective of a home where each chapter features a room or function of the house and it was totally captivating.

Yes, that's excellent, Inside the Victorian Home: A Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England.

Palawa wrote: "I read a wonderful book recently called The Victorian House by Judith Flanders. It gives the Victorian perspective of a home where each chapter features a room or function of the house and it was ..."

Ooh, this sounds amazing! I'll have to hunt around Amazon for a copy. Anything about lifestyles in the Victorian Era I find so fascinating. It's definitely the time period I'd want to visit if I could choose any!

Sarah wrote: "Ooh, this sounds amazing! I'll have to hunt around Amazon for a copy. Anything about lifestyles in the Victorian Era I find so fascinating. It's definitely the time period I'd want to visit if I could choose any!
"

You might be disappointed. Furniture was massive and dark, everything was overdecorated, flocked wallpaper was in fashion. Primitive plumbing, poor heating, dim candlelight and then perilous gaslight.

Here's one I might buy:
What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew: From Fox Hunting to Whist-The Facts of Daily Life in Nineteenth-Century England

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19...

I'm currently reading What Jane Austen Ate etc. It's interesting, but Inside the Victorian Home is much better. (I gave it 5 stars. What Jane Austen Ate will probably get 3.)

I know this was posted in Aug.:

Re: Victorian Plays--most have been forgotten because they're awful melodramas or are no longer amusing. But Wilde's stuff is still funny, because he pokes fun at the wealthy and the egotistical. In fact a An Ideal Husband was filmed about 10 years ago with gorgeous Rupert Everett and the hunky Jeremy Northam.

The precursor to musicals was operetta, by composers such as Offenbach (Orpheus in the Underworld), Lehar (The Merry Widow), Strauss (Die Fledermaus), Gilbert and Sullivan. These were written for trained operatic voices, unlike today's musicals, but had spoken dialogue, unlike opera. The best, the 3 I've cited among them, are still being, performed today, usually in opera houses. The plots are awful, but the music is glorious.

Here's a reference on operetta, of which I'm a longtime fan.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operetta

Rochelle wrote: "Here's a reference on operetta, of which I'm a longtime fan.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operetta"

Rochelle thanks for the info, I really like Offenbach!

Last week I read "An Ideal Husband" and loved it. I haven't seen the film version, but I think I can get copy of dvd.. is it worth? I've got really disappointed with most of the Wilde film adaptations

You'll have to decide if it was worth it, but here's a review:
http://www.filmcritic.com/reviews/199...

Rochelle wrote: "You'll have to decide if it was worth it, but here's a review:
http://www.filmcritic.com/reviews/199..."

Thanks a lot Rochelle, I'll see if I can get copy of dvd, I didn't know Julianne Moore was on it, I love that woman.

Rochelle wrote: "Here's a reference on operetta, of which I'm a longtime fan. "

Gilbert and Sullivan, absolutely!

The following links were recommended in the book Victorian England: Second Edition by Sally Mitchell:

Nineteenth Century City

BBC History: Victorians

Victorian London

Bruce Rosen's Victorian History

Victoria Research Web

The Victorian Web Guide from the Education Resource Service

You'll have to do old-fashioned research. Those plays have been forgotten.

If you're doing Great Britain, don't forget the music halls.

I found a magazine a long time ago called Victoriana, and it was
a very beautifully illustrated magazine, for anyone that loves Roses and Stationery, and what not.

Anna wrote: "Okay. I have another one. This is from a contemporary historical fiction novel. A character came to lunch late, turned down the meat but said he would have some of the 'cold shape.' What is a cold ..."

You're right, Anna. From the Shorter OED: "A mould for forming jelly, blanc-mange, etc. into a particular shape; a portion of jelly, blanc-mange, etc. moulded into an ornamental shape 1769."

Anna wrote: "They couldn't think of a better name for it than 'cold shape'?"

Doesn't sound very appetizing, does it?

Some great links and book recommendations here. Thank you one and all.
G x

I happened to stumble upon a couple of really great websites this morning. I could spend hours and hours on these! Thought some of you might wish to see them.

http://www.nines.org/

http://www.victorianlondon.org/

Have fun! If you've seen these websites before, please forgive my posting them!

Bookmarked, and bookmarked! Thanks for sharing, Ellen!

Jacqueline wrote: "Bookmarked, and bookmarked! Thanks for sharing, Ellen!"

You're quite welcome, Jacqueline! I can get lost on websites like NINES, you know? LOL!!

Anna wrote: "Ellen, these are great! Thank you. I wasted several hours at work yesterday in the disease section of the dictionary. Fascinating!"

You're so welcome, Anna. I just really enjoy finding websites that have lots of information pertaining to my interests, don't you? And these were too good to keep to myself, you know? I know what you mean - I can "waste" (not really a waste if I'm learning, right?) hours and hours looking at information! So much fun!! Thanks again!

Anna wrote: "I just found this as the result of comment in the Cranford buddy read thread.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:11-..."

Wow! This is wonderful, Anna! Thanks so much for posting the link. And have a wonderful night!

Digitizing Dickens' Household Words/All the Year Round journal - online editors needed

Hi, I'm new here - hopefully this is the right place to post this.....

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/...

Excerpts from the Aug. 6 article:

For 20 years, a tuppenny weekly magazine run and edited by Charles Dickens was eagerly awaited by a readership who, each Wednesday, were given not only colourful reportage of the events of the day but also drip-fed instalments of what later became the writer's most famous books.

Modern academics hope the populist appeal of the journal – called Household Words when it began in 1850, then changed to All the Year Round in 1859 when Dickens dropped his publisher and went it alone – can be rekindled.

Volunteers have been invited to help bring all 1,101 editions into the digital age, making them accessible to an audience as wide as the 300,000 Victorians who bought the periodical weekly.

The bicentenary of the birth of Dickens is on 7 February 2012. The tiny team at the University of Buckingham hoped to have the journals online by then but, while the pages have been scanned, they now need to have the inevitable computer-made errors edited out – and for that only the human eye will do.

The sheer number of pages –30,000 – poses a problem when it comes to meeting the target date. So a call to the keyboard has gone out to all amateur copy editors with access to a computer.

In their day, these were phenomenally respected journals, carrying installments of Great Expectations, Hard Times, North and South and The Woman in White, as well as poetry, investigative journalism, travel writing, popular science, history and political comment.

The three billion words contain both historical gems detailing the lives, the social problems and the politics of the Victorians, and a literary treasure trove of the works of Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Sala and Elizabeth Gaskell

Charles Dickens
Elizabeth Gaskell
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Wilkie Collins
George Sala
Great Expectations
Hard Times
The Woman in White
North and South

The Angel Out of the House: Philanthropy and Gender in Nineteenth-Century England looks interesting; haven't read it. Don't know if this is quite what you want?

I think Virginia Woolf also wrote on the subject of "The Angel in the House."