“THE DYNAMITER is a hugely inventive & brilliant book, at once a political thriller, a blackly comic satire, & a female adventure”
Robert Louis Stevenson & Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne married #OTD, 19 May, 1880. In this article, Prof Penny Fielding explores the dangerous #collaboration between RLS & his wife: granting female agency on the page & in life
CFP: ‘We Are Amused’: Victorian Humour & the Digital
7–8 Nov, Université Caen Normandie
Exploring intersections between #19thcentury#humour & the digital, & investigating the migration of jokes, squibs, spoofs & parodies, verbal & visual, from the pages of #Victorian comic periodicals to 21st-century screens
The Scottish Novel in 1824
1 July, University of Edinburgh – free
This one-day in-person symposium marks the bicentenary of 1824, an ‘annus mirabilis’ in the history of Scottish fiction that saw the publication of two experimental masterpieces: James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs & Confessions of a Justified Sinner, & Walter Scott’s Redgauntlet.
Save the date! The next 19th Century Dress and Textiles Reframed "At Home" online talks will be on Sunday, June 30, "focused on photography and its connections to 19th century fashion".
Programme:
📸 Robyne Calvert: Artists & Photographic Fantasies
📸 Erika Lederman: 'Counterfeit Specimens'. Isabel Agnes Cowper's Needlework Photographs for the South Kensington Museum
📸 Beatrice Behlen: Mrs Broom's photographs of suffragettes
A SCANDALOUS 1865 DIVORCE case offers a window into New York high society—the defendant was a cousin of Edith Wharton, no less—and the time’s changing attitudes about marriage, women’s rights, and sexuality. Great balance of gossip and context. B PLUS
“I was in love with the book. In pure, ignorant defiance of the decree of the Iowa Writing School that controls almost all modern fiction, Galt tells without showing.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin discusses John Galt’s ANNALS OF THE PARISH
“[Galt’s] realism is hard-headed, his compassion is tough-minded, his humour contagious but tainted with the sense that chaos and catastrophe are never far away.”
The Doings of Doyle podcast
Episode 50: The Surgeon of Gaster Fell (1890)
A close look at a deeply personal story that draws on the sad case of Arthur Conan Doyle’s father. Featuring redactions, dreamy rooms, the Foreign Legion, fairy art, & dodgy lodgers …
Finally, on Sunday April 28, there'll be another "At Home with c19th Dress and Textiles Reframed" event!
Programme:
🧵 Linda McShannock - A Living for the Earnest, A Fortune for the Capable: Dressmaking in Minneapolis, 1880-1920
🧵 Cecilia Soares - A transatlantic wardrobe: an analysis of the Belle Époque sartorial goods from the Ivy House Museum, in Vassouras, Brazil (1870-1910)
🧵 Alden O'Brien - TBD
Byron’s poem ☝️ borrows from the Scottish song “The Jolly Beggar”—often attributed to King James V (who reputedly liked to disguise himself as “the Gudeman of Ballangeich” to enjoy amorous adventures)
“No Englishman of Byron’s age, character, and history would have had patience for long theological discussions on the way to fight for Greece; but the daft Gordon blood and the Aberdonian school-days kept their influence to the end.”
—Robert Louis Stevenson, MEMORIES & PORTRAITS – available on @gutenberg_org
📖 What can the correspondence between the Marquise of Nisa and the Countess of Palmela, mother and daughter, tell us about the transmission of behavioural models?
In 1889, #ArthurConanDoyle & #OscarWilde sat down for dinner with J.M Stoddart, editor of Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine.
There, Wilde agreed to write “The Picture of Dorian Gray”, & Conan Doyle “The Sign of Four” – one of his most famous #SherlockHolmes stories.
Now, Conan Doyle’s letters recounting that fated dinner and his sole handwritten #manuscript of “The Sign of Four” are being auctioned by Sotheby’s New York.
The artist Isaac Levitan born a poor Jew in Lithuania (1860 - 1900), ventured into different genres, but his talent was only fully revealed in his depiction of nature. Like no-one else, he conveyed the mood of melancholy in landscape.
Levitan gained recognition only at the end of his short life - at 37, he became an academician of landscape painting and, at 39, died in Moscow from a heart aneurysm. A sad tale. One of the artists I most admire.