Since the publication of The Madwoman in the Attic, several Hopkins critics have speculated that the poet’s wish for ‘masterly execution’ appears to betray his own fear of becoming unmanly or effeminate in his art and life. My intention is…

Nineteenth-century girlhood was imagined as a decisive period of liminality: distinct from both childhood and adulthood, it shaped the womanhood that followed it. Shipboard diaries written by emigrants engage with a similar period of transformation. Discussing three diaries written by…

This article considers the rise and fall of Ida Rentoul Outhwaite’s antipodean fairyland, her pictorial alternative to the masculinist vision of Australia at the nominal end of its colonial thraldom to Britain. Unlike their mischievous and anachronistic antecedents from Victorian…

This essay reads Tom Phillips’s stunning and still in-process artist’s book A Humument (1966-) as exemplar of a non-hermeneutic vein of neo-Victorian textual production that stands as playful foil to the more familiar, suspicion-inflected appropriations of the nineteenth century that…

This article considers the history of the dramatic monologue with a focus on the neo-Victorian poetry of Mick Imlah (1958-2009). Beginning by identifying the inherent strangeness of the monologue form by looking at the ongoing debates on the relationship between…

British feminist author Sarah Grand was regarded at the fin-de-siècle as one of one of the boldest revolutionaries of the New Woman movement. Modern feminist scholars have generally endorsed and emphasised this perceived radicalness. However, Grand’s subversiveness is negated by…

In 430 BC Greek playwright Euripides transformed the mythological figure of Medea into the proto-typical murdering mother when he put a dagger in her hand and had her slaughter her two young sons. Euripides, at the same time, created the…

“Trust your senses not your neighbours.”
– London Transport security notice.

In the wake of 9/11 and the London bombings of 2005, public safety campaigns in London featured signs with the above warning on the underground and at bus…

In an 1882 article on ‘A Grave Subject’, the photographer George Bradforde wrote:

How the relatives can bear to look upon these photographs I cannot understand, unless they have a peculiar love of the horrible. For my part I…

Romantic friendship between women has been a fertile ground for explorations of Victorian sensory culture, inciting nuanced attention to the emotional and erotic components of intimacy. Work in this area has advanced our understanding of the histories of gender, sexuality…