The 57th Annual VSAO Conference will take place on April 26, 2025, at Glendon College, York University. The topic for this year’s conference is: “Victorian Conviviality and Entertainments”. The full Call for Papers is listed below. Please consider submitting a proposal!
The Victorians loved their entertainments, whether those be music hall, tea parties, a picnic, a Punch and Judy show, or an amateur theatrical. Mirth and jollity often prevailed, not only in joyous seasons such as Christmas and New Year’s, but throughout the calendar. To make our annual spring conference even more congenial that it always is, the VSAO invites proposals for papers on Victorian convivial gatherings and pastimes, both public and private.
Papers might consider topics including, but not limited to:
Pantomimes
Puppet shows
Music hall
Parlour games
Board and card games
Croquet
Amateur theatricals and/or concerts
Private and public readings
Recitals
Dances and balls
Conversazione
Teatime rituals
Picnics
Visiting rituals
“At home days”
Baking
Philanthropic events
Clubs
Garden parties
Private views at art galleries and studios
The one-day conference will be held on Saturday 26 April 2025, at Glendon College, York University.Please send a 300-word proposal and 50-word bio (as MS Word documents) by 24 January 2025, to Alison Halsall, ahalsall@yorku.ca
I hope you are all thriving and looking forward to the holidays, which will soon be upon us. As past president of the VSAO, I would like to welcome Alison Halsall as our new president and to give you an overview of this past year’s events.
Our annual spring conference was held at Glendon College on April 29, 2023. This year’s theme was “Victorian Experiments: Science, Technology, and Art” and comprised two sessions, with a lovely lunch in between and the traditional sherry hour to wrap the day up at the end. In the morning session, we heard Holly Forsythe Paul (University of Toronto) on “Owen Jones, Innovation, and Opportunities for Women in the Book Arts”; Jennifer Bates Ehlert (Emmanuel College, Boston) on “Virtue, Technology, and Cloth: The Book Cover Designs of Sarah Wyman Whitman”’ Joanna Holliday (York University) on “Double Vision: Stereoscopy and the ‘Poor Man’s Gallery’”’ and Taylor Tomko (Western University) on “Snapshots Across the Veil: The Cyborgian Agency of Ectoplasm-Producing Mediums.” After lunch, we had Laura Johnson Dahlke (Salve Regina University), “Chloroform à la reine: How the Victorian Era Changed Childbirth Practices Forever”; Martin Danahay (Brock University), “Victorian Trauma: Railway Accidents, War and the Body”; Marlis Schweitzer and Sara Masciotra-Milstein (York University), “Performance and Medical Education: Bridging the Gap Between Public and Private Phrenology”; and Alanna McKnight (Toronto Metropolitan University), “Electric Corsets: A Shocking History.” The papers were all exciting and showed the great range of Victorian studies. We were delighted to see that Martin Danahay’s paper has now been published in Victorian Studies: Danahay, Martin. “Victorian Trauma: War, Railway Accidents, and the Vulnerable Body.” Victorian Studies, vol. 65 no. 2, 2023, p. 226-246.
This past November, we had a book launch, organized by Margo Beggs, for the edited collection Nineteenth-Century Women Illustrators and Cartoonists (Manchester University Press, 2023). The launch was held on Thursday, November 9, at 6:30pm, 1190 Bahen Centre at the University of Toronto. As the editor, I gave a brief overview of the book and talked about my chapter on Florence and Adelaide Claxton. Lorraine Janzen Kooistra and Marion Tempest Grant spoke about their chapter, “‘Working against that thunderous clamor of the steam press’: Pamela Colman Smith and the art of hand-coloured illustration.” Lorraine had brought in some of her collection of Smith’s wonderful work, which we could all look at. Margo then spoke about her chapter, “The ABCs of Amelia Frances Howard Gibbon: new views on her manuscript ‘An Illustrated Comic Alphabet.’” We had a lovely audience, who asked lots of thoughtful questions, and we finished up with snacks and drinks generously provided by David Latham and Alison Halsall. Thank you also to Alison Syme for setting up the room and the AV for us.
We are in the process of planning some exciting events for 2024.
VSAO members will have seen the CFP for our annual spring conference, but here it is again for all to read:
The 56th Annual VSAO Conference will take place on April 27, 2024, at Glendon College, York University. The topic for this year’s conference is: “The Victorian World [as] a Space of Invention”: Returns to and Revisions of the Nineteenth-Century Past. The full Call for Papers is listed below. Please consider submitting a proposal!
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“The Victorian World [as] a Space of Invention”:
Returns to and Revisions of the Nineteenth-Century Past
This year’s conference proposes to interpret the Victorian world as a space of invention, one that continues to offer opportunities for innovation and transformation for nineteenth-century creators and creators that followed.
Nineteenth-century writers, artists, and thinkers returned to past figures, narratives, and forms to define themselves in their contemporary moment and sometimes to reform their own disciplines during the Victorian period. As such, the past frequently offered a lens through which artists and creators could look at and critique their present moment. In Romola, for instance, George Eliot provides a detailed study of Florentine life during the Italian Renaissance, one that shared parallels with the philosophical, religious, and social turbulence of Victorian England. Likewise, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Pre-Raphaelites worshipped the abundance of detail typical of Quattrocento Italian art in the development of a new aesthetic that openly flouted the conventions of the Royal Academy of Art.
This tendency to look to the past to define one’s self and one’s aesthetic continues, while providing some insight into more contemporary concerns. Twentieth- and twenty-first-century creators continue to return to the nineteenth century and to particular Victorian art forms and narratives to reinvent, reform, or remediate them. A glance at a list of modernist and contemporary music, art, books, films, or television series confirms that a preoccupation with Victorian narratives is ubiquitous across media.
If, as Kate Mitchell suggests, “the Victorians continue to have meaning for us today because we continue to grant them meaning,” some of the questions that this conference looks to answer will include: What is it about Victorian source texts that preoccupy modern and contemporary adaptors? How is a Victorian aesthetic remediated in and by the adapted text(s)? What insights do these remediations and adaptations provide about contemporary preoccupations that are in turn projected onto the Victorians? VSAO invites proposals for papers on Victorian adaptations and their relationship with the arts and with daily life.
Papers might consider topics including, but not limited to:
The act/art of revision, return, and/or reform
Art and appropriation
Victorian medievalism and a fascination with the Renaissance
Return narratives; textual and aesthetic returns to the nineteenth century
Victorianism, Neo-Victorianism, and 21st-century Revisions of the Victorian
Reframing and reinterpreting (the) Victorians
Art as adaptation
Intertextuality and parody
Victorian invention and/or reinvention
Transposing the Victorians across time, space, and genre
Gender, Adaptation, and Postfeminism
Media Afterlives of the Victorians
Adaptation and Evolution
Inventors and authors, artists, or musicians
The one-day conference will be held on Saturday 27 April 2024, at Glendon College, York University.
Please send a 300-word proposal and 50-word bio (as MS Word documents) by 15 January 2024, to Alison Halsall, ahalsall@yorku.ca
Upcoming events for 2024 also include the joint ACCUTE/VSAO panel, “‘The Coming Universal Wish Not to Live’: Victorians and the Future,” to be held as part of the 2024 conference of the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English at McGill University in Montreal/Tiohtià:ke from June 12-15, 2024. Our wonderful graduate student reps on the ACCUTE Executive, Taylor Tomko and Nigel Finch, are currently vetting the submissions that we’ve received, and we’re looking forward to a terrific panel next June.
Thank you for reading and for supporting the VSAO! We’re looking forward to a joyful holiday and a wonderful New Year 2024 and want to wish you all the best.
The Victorians loved their entertainments, whether those be music hall, tea parties, a picnic, a Punch and Judy show, or an amateur theatrical. Mirth and jollity often prevailed, not only in joyous seasons such as Christmas and New Year’s, but throughout the calendar. To make our annual spring conference even more congenial that it always is, the VSAO invites proposals for papers on Victorian convivial gatherings and pastimes, both public and private.
Papers might consider topics including, but not limited to:
Pantomimes
Puppet shows
Music hall
Parlour games
Board and card games
Croquet
Amateur theatricals and/or concerts
Private and public readings
Recitals
Dances and balls
Conversazione
Teatime rituals
Picnics
Visiting rituals
“At home days”
Baking
Philanthropic events
Clubs
Garden parties
Private views at art galleries and studios
The one-day conference will be held on Saturday 26 April 2025, at Glendon College, York University.
Please send a 300-word proposal and 50-word bio (as MS Word documents) by 24 January 2025, to Alison Halsall, ahalsall@yorku.ca
***
Spring Conference 2024
“The Victorian World [as] a Space of Invention”:
Returns to and Revisions of the Nineteenth-Century Past
Glendon College, York University
2275 Bayview Avenue
Saturday 27 April 2024
9:30 am – 5:00 pm
9:30-10:20 am Registration and Tea (York Hall 317)
10:30-12:15 Morning Session (Glendon Hall 102)
Marjorie Stone (Dalhousie University)
“Aurora Leigh, ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon,’ and Sex Trafficking Debates in the Nineteenth and Twenty-first Centuries”
Rachel Friars (Queen’s University)
“‘No longer any I, only All’: Lesbian Gender Disruption in the Neo-Victorian Novel”
Charles Reeve (OCAD University)
“‘My strength, my comfort, my intense delight’: Elizabeth Murray’s Sixteen Years of an Artist’s Life in Morocco, Spain, and the Canary Islands”
Alisha R. Walters (Penn State University)
Histories of Feeling and Empiricism: Inventing Victorian Racial Science
12:30-1:45 pm Lunch (York Hall 317)
1:50-2:50 pm Keynote Address I (Glendon Hall 102)
Dennis Denisoff (Department of English, University of Tulsa)
“Natural Kinship: Inventing Intimacies in Fin-de-siècle Eco-Writing”
3:00-4:00 pm Keynote Address II (Glendon Hall 102)
Natalie Neill (Department of English, York University)
“Gothic (Re)Turns: Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Gothic Mash-Up”
4:00-5:00 pm Sherry Hour (York Hall 317)
^image c. 1886-1905, William Holman Hunt, “The Lady of Shalott,” Manchester Art Galler
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Spring Conference 2023
Victorian Experiments: Science, Technology, and Art
Glendon College, York University
2275 Bayview Avenue, Toronto
Saturday 29 April 2023
9:30
am – 5:00 pm
9:30-10:20 am Registration and Tea (York Hall 317)
10:30-12:15 Morning Session (Glendon Hall 102)
Holly Forsythe
Paul (University of Toronto)
“Owen Jones,
Innovation, and Opportunities for Women in the Book Arts”
Jennifer Bates Ehlert (Emmanuel College, Boston)
“Virtue, Technology, and Cloth: The Book Cover Designs of Sarah Wyman
Whitman”
Joanna Holliday (York
University)
“Double Vision:
Stereoscopy and the ‘Poor Man’s Gallery’”
Taylor Tomko
(Western University)
“Snapshots Across the Veil: The Cyborgian Agency of
Ectoplasm-Producing Mediums”
12:30-1:45 Lunch (York Hall 317)
2:00-3:45 Afternoon Session (Glendon Hall 102)
Laura Johnson Dahlke (Salve Regina
University)
“Chloroform à la reine: How the
Victorian Era Changed Childbirth Practices Forever”
Martin Danahay (Brock
University)
“Victorian Trauma:
Railway Accidents, War and the Body”
Marlis
Schweitzer and Sara Masciotra-Milstein (York University)
“Performance
and Medical Education: Bridging the Gap Between Public and Private Phrenology”
You are warmly invited to join us for this year’s Fall
Evening Lecture, Thursday 24 November 2022, at 6:30 PM in Sidney Smith Hall 2110, University
of Toronto
Kathryn Davies (University of York, UK)
The
legacy of Sacred and Legendary Art: Anna Jameson’s revolutionary guide
to Christian iconography
Anna
Brownell (Murphy) Jameson, undated, photograph from an engraving from the John
Ross Robertson Collection (JRR 983). Toronto Public Library, Toronto, Canada.
Kathryn
Davies is an AHRC (UKRI)-funded Art History PhD student at University of York,
UK. Her research interests lie in Medievalism, Gothic Revival art and
architecture, and the networks and modes of knowledge exchange that supported
these cultural and artistic developments in the nineteenth and early-twentieth
centuries. Davies’s
PhD research focuses on the iconographic writings of Anna Brownell Jameson
(1794-1860). Her series on Christian art had phenomenally broad appeal for
over 80 years — it was read by aspiring middle-classes, artists, intellectuals
and religious reformers alike — but Jameson has been excluded in all major
studies of iconographers and art historians to date, and has yet to be
adequately recognised as a key influence on public taste and understanding of
the medieval. Davies aims to
analyse and evidence her critical place within the Victorian Gothic
Revival more broadly, and to demonstrate her pivotal role in the development
of the modern disciplines of art history and iconography.
Victorian Experiments: Science, Technology, and Art
The nineteenth century saw the invention of the steam locomotive, the internal combustion engine, the first mechanical computer, the electric telegraph, practical photography, the telephone, the phonograph, the lightbulb, the bicycle, the zipper, and the x-ray, to name just a few technological innovations. As Victorian scientists and engineers changed life for most people, writers, musicians, and artists responded in multitudinous ways. The experimental model began to shape both the creation and consumption of art and literature. How did inventions like the telegraph and the telephone affect communication? How were communities altered by steam travel and the coming of early automobiles? What were the effects of photography and the development of moving pictures on the culture and social formation of Victoria’s Britain and its imperial holdings? VSAO invites proposals for papers on Victorian science and technology and their relationship with the arts and with daily life.
Papers might consider topics including, but not limited to:
Domestic life changes through technology
Servants and technology
Political cartoons, photographs, paintings, or other visual representations of technology
Sound reproduction, art, and literature
Gender, science, and technology
Photography and the fine arts
Steam travel and art
Leisure time and technology
Metaphors of technology and/or science
Spectacle and science or technology
Dangers of new technology
Embracing of or resistance to science and new technologies
Inventors and authors, artists, or musicians
Monarchy, science, technology
Literary or artistic movements related to science and technology
Fantasy, speculative fiction, and technology
Book production and technology
Empire and science and technology
Marketplaces and science and technology
Study of science and technology in schools, colleges, universities
Technological manuals and/or scientific texts
The one-day conference will be held on Saturday 29 April 2023, at Glendon College, York University.
Please send a 300-word proposal and 50-word bio (as MS Word documents) by 15 January 2023, to Jo Devereux: jdevereu@uwo.ca
VSAO Spring 2022 Conference: Spaces of Confinement, Correction,
and Spectacle
CFP
During the Victorian period, the idea of
space underwent radical change, from the widening expansion of empire to the
narrowing confines of the prison cell. While the massive structure of Joseph
Paxton’s Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition in 1851 both enclosed and
opened up the world to all classes of visitors, the restrictive, squalid spaces
of “back-to-backs” in cities such as Birmingham and Manchester confined the
working poor to the barest minimum of living spaces. Prisons like Pentonville
kept the prisoners in miniscule cells, in solitary confinement, and under
silence orders. In the world of entertainment, humans and animals were
frequently confined and displayed, for example, in circuses, freak shows, and
museums such as the Piccadilly Hall, all of which exploited the public appetite
for sensation and spectacle.
The VSAO warmly invites proposals for
papers on confinement, correction, and spectacle. Papers might include but are
not confined to:
Prisons, asylums, and other spaces of correction
Workhouses
Private hospitals and sanitoria
Circuses, sideshows, and freak shows
Anatomical and physiological museums
Zoos, zoological gardens, and public aquariums
Exhibitions, wax museums
The one-day conference will be held on
Saturday 30 April 2022, at Glendon College, York University.
Please send a 300-word proposal and
50-word bio (as MS Word documents) by 28 February 2022, to Jo Devereux: jdevereu@uwo.ca
I hope
you are well wherever you are and getting a chance to enjoy the merry month of
May, even in this difficult time. The VSAO has been active since the start of
2021.
In January, we held our first ever online VSAO Winter Evening Lecture. Simon Grennan, Roger Sabin, and Julian Waite presented a wonderful talk on the pioneering Victorian cartoonist Marie Duval. The talk, held as a Zoom meeting, was very well attended, and we had a terrific discussion after Simon, Roger, and Julian’s presentation. Be sure to get a copy of their newest book, Marie Duval: Maverick Victorian Cartoonist (Manchester University Press, 2020): https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526133540/marie-duval/
As well, you can check out The Marie Duval Archive, a free image archive of Duval’s known work, created by Simon, Roger, and Julian, at www.marieduval.org.
In April, our Annual Spring Conference was held as a webinar, owing to continuing COVID restrictions. The conference this year, “Light in Dark Places: Victorian Animals and Human Interventions,” was held via Zoom, and featured four fabulous papers: Sandy Burnley (Michigan State University), “And Say the Animal Responded? Lewis Carroll’s Unsympathetic Exchanges”; Joanna Holliday (York University), “Fleecing the Flocks for Profit and Patriotism”; Matthew Rowlinson (Western University), “Towards a Theory of Species-Lyric: Darwin, Swinburne, Biopolitics”; and Asha Hornsby (Queen Mary University and UCL), “The Pen and the Scalpel: Representations of Painful Vivisection in Victorian Britain.” The papers encompassed a wide diversity of approaches and topics, even within the rubric of Victorian animal studies, and a lively discussion during the virtual sherry hour followed the presentations.
Our upcoming events include the two joint VSAO ACCUTE “Eco-Victorian” panels at Congress 2021, hosted by the University of Alberta this year. The panels will take place online on May 31st at 9 am Mountain Time (11 am ET) and 11 am Mountain Time (1 pm ET) Please see details below:
Joint Panel with VSAO: ECO-VICTORIAN: WATER, LAND AND THE WORLD I
Chairs: Emily Rothwell, Carleton University, and Lin Young, Queen’s University
Presenters:
Marielle Lippmann, LARCA, University of Paris, “Terraforming England: Richard Jefferies’s Shifting Landscapes”
Alyce Soulodre, Queen’s University, “‘A land of swamps and evil things and dead old shadows’: Menacing Mires and Victorian Masculinity in H. Rider Haggard’s She and Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles”
Molly Dawe, University of Toronto, “Folklore, Myth, and Ecological Forgetting in George Eliot’s Adam Bede”
Jeffrey Swim, Western University, “Victorian Eco-Pagan Legacies: Richard Jefferies’ After London and the Future Swamp of Modernity”
Joint Panel with VSAO: ECO-VICTORIAN: WATER, LAND AND THE WORLD II
Chairs: Emily Rothwell, Carleton University, and Lin Young, Queen’s University
Presenters:
Michelle Elleray, University of Guelph, “‘Whirling through North and South’: Faith in Victorian Atmospheric Science”
Nahmi Lee and Thomas Stuart, Western University, “Pictures and Fancies: Lizzie Hexam and the Thames’s Affective Flow”
Joanna Holliday, York University, “Tides and Transformations: The Narrative Ecology of the River in News from Nowhere by William Morris.”
The panels are open to members of ACCUTE only. For information on ACCUTE, please go to https://accute.ca/
The VSAO is delighted to announce our upcoming Winter Lecture 2021, to be held via Zoom, Friday 29 January 2021, at 1 PM Ontario time.
Marie Duval: Maverick Victorian Cartoonist
Dr Simon Grennan
Professor Roger
Sabin
Dr Julian Waite
This lecture and discussion introduces
the work of Marie Duval (Isabella Tessier, UK, 1847–90), one of the most
unusual, pioneering and visionary cartoonists of the nineteenth century.
Duval’s cartoons, strips and illustrations
revolutionised print comedy. Her London characters became a mainstay of Judy magazine, a rival to Punch, and introduced its middle-class
readers to a lower-class milieu – domestic servants who get the better of their
masters, street urchins who terrorise the elderly, clowns who are miserably
unfunny. The most famous character was Ally Sloper, a boozy ne-er do well,
always in trouble with the police, the landlord, and his wife – developed by
Duval into nothing less than a national hero.
Simon, Roger and Julian will discuss
key themes of Duval’s vision and production, relative to wider historic,
social, cultural and economic environments. They identify her as an exemplary
radical practitioner, especially significant for importing ideas from the stage
to the page, and for confounding gender expectations. She emerges as a key
figure in the new congruence between performance, illustration, narrative
drawing and novels.
The lecture also outlines a journey of rediscovery,
progressing from an unprecedented range of primary sources and bringing
together the fields of Comics Studies, Theatre Studies, Comedy Studies,
Periodical Studies and Women’s Studies. It aims to restore the maverick Duval
to her rightful place in history.
The Marie Duval Archive, a free image archive of Duval’s
known work, has also been created by Simon, Roger and Julian, at www.marieduval.org
Simon Grennan is Leading Research
Fellow at the University of Chester
Roger Sabin is Professor of Popular
Culture at the University of the Arts London
Julian Waite is an independent scholar and former Senior Lecturer in Performing Arts and Programme Leader MA Drama at the University of Chester
Images:
1. Marie Duval ‘Frontispiece’ from Judy, or The London Serio-comic Journal Volume 18, 1875
2. Marie Duval ‘Dramatic Criticism 1883’ from Judy, or The London Serio-comic Journal Volume 32, page 27, 1883
For information on how to join the meeting, contact Jo Devereux: jdevereu@uwo.ca
