Essays
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Authorship
This essay analyses the conflicted notion of authorship and traces the changes in literary life throughout the nineteenth century. It argues that with the cessation of aristocratic patronage and the…
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British Theatre in the Nineteenth Century
The nineteenth century was a theatrical century. It may not have been a century of great dramatic writing by conventional literary standards, but it was a century of energetic and…
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British Travel Writing, 1770–1914
This essay outlines some of the features and shifts in British travel writing from 1770–1914. It considers the impact of social and technological change on travel and on writing about…
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Illustration
This essay provides an overview of the development of illustration – the pictures that accompanied words on the printed page – into a dominant mode of representation in the nineteenth…
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Life Writing
Life writing flourished in the nineteenth century. Defined here as a personal narrative that meaningfully recounts the events and experiences of an individual life or lives, it was mainly non-fictional,…
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Nineteenth-Century Mediamorphosis: Transformations in Print Culture
Mediamorphosis – transformation in the organisation of the media – defines who we are, what we can communicate and to whom, what we can hear and from whom, and what…
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Popular Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain
The vast stream of cheap mass circulation print that flowed through nineteenth-century Britain – penny issue fiction, religious tracts, magazines, sheet music, and almanacs and the like – is frequently…
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Race and Theatre in Nineteenth-Century Britain
The early nineteenth century was a formative time for the construction and establishment of racial thinking. Theatre and performance played a crucial part in this, but also at points ironised…
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Readers and the Reading Public
This essay contextualises the broad increase in literacy and readership across the nineteenth century by considering the changes in educational standards, improvements to printing and communications technology, and legal reforms…
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Theoretical Approaches to the Reception of Popular Forms of Entertainment and Visual Culture
This essay explores theoretical approaches to popular reception, drawing on discussions in the fields of theatre history, art history, and the history of visual technologies. Across a range of popular…
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Women and Art
This essay traces the social and institutional barriers women artists encountered in the Victorian art world, detailing the challenges stemming from their unequal access to education, particularly their exclusion from…
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Women and Genre
This essay canvasses women’s practice over the nineteenth century of the three most prominent creative literary genres: fiction, poetry, and drama. It also discusses more briefly some of the many…
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Women and Performance in the Nineteenth Century
What would a history of nineteenth-century theatre look like if it were focused on the work of women? We know that women have always been active in the theatre, but…