All 41 entries tagged Conferences

Dickens and the Visual Imagination @ University of Surrey 9th–10th July 2012 (day 2)

Follow-up to Dickens and the Visual Imagination @ University of Surrey 9th–10th July 2012 (day 1) from Charlotte's Research blog

Day 2 of Dickens and the Visual Imagination took us to the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Artin London. The wonderful cavern of an underground library provided the perfect setting for a day of papers that focused more specifically on art and film historians' perspectives on Dickens.

The day began with Lynda Nead's keynote "'To let in the sunlight': Dickens, Lean and the Chiaroscuro of Postwar Britain", a fascinating analysis of David Lean's 1946 Great Expectations. Nead started with some stimulating questions that pushed at the wider frameworks of the conference: what do we mean by "the visual imagination"? What is our "visual imagination" of Dickens: what do we imagine when we think of Dickens, and why? Nead began by thinking about how we read the relationship between text and film, arguing for a reciprocal relationship in which neither text nor film is privileged but rather seeing adaptation as a process of creative transformation evolving new forms and opportunities - this, she suggested, might offer one way in which to understand the concept of a visual imagination. With this in mind Nead moved on to read Lean's Great Expectations in the context of postwar Britain, providing a detailed analysis of a selection of stills from the film which focused on the complexity of Lean's use of black and white.

The use of chiaroscuro - the interplay between light and shadow- constructs a subtle "language of shadow" which achieves a rich depth to images, and constructs an aesthetic of decay and ruin which was highly resonant with the postwar Britain in which the film was produced. Nead seemed to be suggesting that the aesthetic language of the film is not "Dickensian" as such, but rather creates a visual language of its own that very much belonged to the moment in which the film was made.

The next panel on Perception and Perspective began with Andrew Mangham's paper (read by Greg Tate) on Dickens, Hogarth and Perspective, an interesting analysis that took Dickens's references to Hogarth in the preface to Oliver Twist as a starting-point for identifying a Hogarthian sense of visual perspective in Dickens's realism. Janice Carlisle followed with an exploration of Great Expectations and JMW Turner's painting; this worked towards centring Estella in the novel's visual economy, particularly in terms of how Estella constructs Pip as artist. Aleza Tadri-Friedman presented on "Art Appreciation and Visual Perception in Dombey and Son", considering the recurrence of art throughout the novel with a particular focus on how the transgressive Edith Granger is positioned within wider debates about art and perception in the nineteenth century; in another indicative text-illustration reading, Tadri-Friedman looked at the interplay between the narrative construction of Edith through Dombey and Carker, and the illustration that accompanies one key scene in this narrative.

Panel 2 explored Dickens and Painting, beginning with Dehn Gilmore's "Reading the Dickensian Gallery" which suggested ways in which art and artistic vocabulary in Dickens might offer a new way of understanding Dickens's relationship to his early reviewers. Pat Hardy's Dickens and Portraits looked at the ways in which Dickens employs the language of portrait painting, focusing on Bleak House which represents a key moment in engaging with ideas around portraiture, exploring key ideas about physiognomy and using this not only as a way in which to read individuals, but also with an interest in how people see one another. Vincent Alessi finished with a paper on the influence of Dickens on Vincent van Gogh, offering a complex examination of van Gogh's development as a painter and analysing particular paintings of or influenced by Dickens.

The day concluded with a final keynote presentation by Kate Flint on the subject of "Pavement Art". Flint began with a short story by Dickens, "His Brown Paper Parcel" ("Somebody's Luggage"; All the Year Round, 1862 Christmas edition), in which the narrator is a pavement artist: why, Flint asked, would such a figure be so interesting to Dickens? In what followed, Flint offered a wonderfully rich exploration of pavement artists in the nineteenth century and explored the questions raised through this unique form of visual culture. Pavement art occupies an interesting, often contradictory, space: it is emphemeral yet immobile/immoveable; outside of institutions and the marketplace, yet necessarily public and invites the viewer to participate in a form of artistic patronage; often produces a copied image but never produces a definitive replica and depends upon being constantly reproduced; creates delight amongst its audience through the process of its creation more than in existing as a finished product. Pavement art troubles and challenges the definition of art and artist, and in turn raises complex questions about the relationship between author and art work, raising issues of ownership and authorship, creation and performance, and the position of art in the public sphere- all especially important to Dickens at a time when he was touring the country performing extracts of his own work in his final years. Ideas were raised here too about the mobility of the artist and the circulation of art, resonating with the rise in print circulation throughout the nineteenth century and Flint picked up on this relationship, as well as questions around the legitimacy of wandering and loitering.

Illustration of a pavement artist from The Graphic, September 1874

Flint's talk provided a stimulating end to the day, and in its analysis of a different form of culture also spoke to some of the issues that Lynda Nead had raised in questioning the idea of the visual imagination: there was here an idea about how we might define the visual imagination as being, like pavement art, something transient, ephemeral and almost impossible to truly grasp, something forged and re-forged in different contexts and places, resisting (or defeated by) the permanence of the art forms that it tries to get a hold of, and always part of a process of creative transformation that evolves, adapts, and opens up new possibilites for interpretation.

Charlotte Mathieson : 11 Jul 2012 22:21 |  Tags: Art Charles Dickens Conferences Dickens 2012 English |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Dickens and the Visual Imagination @ University of Surrey 9th–10th July 2012 (day 1)

Writing about web page http://www.ias.surrey.ac.uk/workshops/dickens/

Dickens's Dream, Robert William Buss (1875)

This two-day conference at the University of Surrey and the Paul Mellon Centre in London gave a fascinating array of responses to the idea of Dickens and the visual imagination, from Dickens's engagement with visual material, the interplay between text and image in his writing, and the lasting influence of Dickens in visual culture.

The conference began with Andrew Sanders's keynote on "Dickens's Rooms". Sanders covered a myriad of rooms - prison cells, grand rooms, poor rooms, ship berths, empty rooms, and many more - often drawing on both written description and accompanying illustrations, the latter often playing against or revealing more about the text, particulary in the inclusion of objects, portraits, and the interplay of light and shadow within rooms. Sanders's discussion focused particularly on class and characterisation, offering some suggestive insights about the wider textual resonances of small details of rooms.

Illustration "I am hospitably received by Mr Peggotty" from David Copperfield

The first panel I attended took London as its theme. Christine Corton presented on "London Fog: from the Verbal to the Visual", exploring the particular visual resonances of the fog metaphors that Dickens frequently employs in his writing on London - such as the variety of different colours that the fog takes (the "pea-souper" of Bleak House, for example). This gave a greater complexity to the use of fog as a metaphor for ambivalence, and revealed the changing nature of fog throughout Dickens's writings. The murkiness of London was also present in Ursula Kluwick's paper on "The Dickensian Thames in Word and Image" which looked at the interplay between visual and verbal representations of the River Thames in Dickens's writing. The river frequently features as dirty and unhygenic, echoing contemporary concern over the condition of the river by those calling for sanitary reform; it is also used as a metaphor for the moral corruption of London, although takes on a contradictory, more pleasant appearance in rural scenes. However, Kluwick noted that in accompanying illustrations the river is often less prominent, obscuring these issues to suggest ambivalence at facing up to the state of London.

Illustration of Quilp's death from The Old Curiosity Shop

A final paper in this panel by Estelle Murail took us above the city to look at the influence of sketches and panoramas on Dickens's cityscapes. Sketches and panoramas are different forms of urban representation, the former a detailed close-up of particular sites whilst the latter provides a sweeping vision of the city recreated in an all-encompassing visual experience. A panorama by Rudolph Ackermann challenges this, as Ackermann incorporated detailed sketches into his construction of the panorama, and Murail used this as a basis to explore how Dickens's writing also challenges the distinction between the two modes of viewing the city, moving between panoramic perspective and the detail of a sketch. Murail finished with some indicative ideas about the function of technologies of vision in the new landscape of modernity, drawing on Wolfgang Schivelbusch's ideas about the urban panorama teaching a particular mode of vision that served as preparatory for the panoramic perspectives of the railway journey.

The next panel focused on architecture and interiors, starting with a paper by Emma Gray on Victorian domestic interiors in Dickens's writing. Emma spoke last year at my conference on Rural Geographies of Gender and Space 1840-1920, and it was interesting to hear her discussion of country houses such as Tyntesfield and Hughenden Manor in the context of Dickens's writing. Gray suggested that Dickens's depictions of domestic interiors often resonate with the work of distinguished decorators JG Crace & Son, and she analysed scenes such as the redecoration of Dombey's house in Dombey and Son and the handling of the Veneerings in Our Mutual Friend through contemporary fashions in home decoration. Clare Pettitt considered Dickens's response to visual material during his time in Italy in the mid-1840s, suggesting that his viewing of Baroque art and architecture effected a profound stylistic change in his work of the period, opening up a new understanding of historical time and mode through which to understand the present through reference to the past. Dominic James finished the panel with a paper that considered the depiction of gothic art and architecture in The Old Curiosity Shop, in which the contemporary ambivalence to the gothic revival is revealed in complex and contradictory ways.

A second keynote by Sambudha Sen concluded the day. In a paper titled "City Sketches, Panoramas and the Dickensian Aesthetic", Sen explored how Dickens constructed an urban aesthetic heavily influenced by visal technologies such as sketches and panoramas. Discussion focused on Bleak House which Sen argued demonstrates an impulse to grasp visual modes of representing London, constructing a spatial aesthetic that contrast with Thackeray's Vanity Fair in which time provides depth and organisation to social experience. This provided a rich and detailed reading with which to finish the first day of the conference, and I'll be thinking more on Sen's reading as I come to revise work on Bleak House this week.

The first day also provided two opportunities to enjoy visual material associated with Dickens. At the University of Surrey we viewed "Dickens Illustrated", an exhibition of illustrations from and inspired by Dickens's works - a nice opportunity to see a huge range of editions of Dickens's works, from the earliest editions illustrated by Phiz to more recent childrens' books and comics inspired by his writing. After the conference, we headed to a reception at the Watts Gallery in Compton, where an exhibition on Dickens and the Artists is currently on display, exploring the influence of Dickens on artists of the 19th century such as the image of the conference, Buss's "Dickens's Dream". This was an excellent end to the day, and apt preparation for the art history focus of day 2, on which more in my next post.

"The Watts Gallery is a place where the past meets the future,

where myth joins reality,

where the principle of beauty embraces the facts of truth"

(Andrew Motion)

Charlotte Mathieson : 11 Jul 2012 16:57 |  Tags: Art Charles Dickens Conferences Dickens 2012 English |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

'What connection can there be?': Objects, People and Place, c.1851"; paper at MIVSS, 29th June

On Friday 29th June, I presented a paper at the Midlands Interdisciplinary Victorian Studies Seminar which focused on the theme of "Victorian Things Revisited" (full conference write-up here). My paper "'What connection can there be?': Objects, People and Place, c. 1851" represents a new direction in my work, developing a gradually emerging interest in material culture and the ways in which objects can be reconsidered in the context of space and mobility.

The paper originated in some research on Bleak House last summer, when I began to think more about the significance of the Great Exhibition for the national-global relations in the novel. I was particularly interested in some images by George Cruikshank (below), and the many questions they open up around the relationship between people, things, and place. As I blogged at the time, in looking at these images one can't help but recall the central question of Bleak House: "what connexion can there be [...] between many people in the innumerable histories of this world, who, from opposite sides of great gulfs, have, nonetheless, been very curiously brought together!”

Cruikshank's images illustrate the text of Henry Mayhew's comic novel 1851: or, the Adventures of Mr and Mrs Sandboys and family who came up to London to 'enjoy themselves' and to see the Great Exhibition, and it was this that formed the focus of my paper. Most attention to this text has focused on the glimpses Mayhew gives us of the Exhibition, where we find an interest in the objects on display, the new people present in an internationalised London, and the potential social good of the Exhibition (against the backdrop of Mayhew's other work of the same year, London Labour and the London Poor). But what interested me most was the way in which the narrative surrounding this also demonstrates a continual interest in things, people, and place, and their changing relations to one another. As the Sandboys family make their way to and around London, they encounter a continual stream of comic accidents and misfortunes in which people and things repeatedly surface and come into contact in unexpected ways. In particular, it's the connections forged through the mobility of people and things, and the implications for the space of the nation, which emerges as a key question of the text.

The wider framework for this reading, which I'm still teasing out somewhat, is the move towards thinking about objects in the context of global networks of mobility. This has emerged particularly in the context of imperial networks of commodities, and John Plotz's Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move is a fascinating study of objects "on the move", suggesting that pieces of "portable property" become resonant repositories of national identity in an increasingly global, mobile world. Plotz's main concern is with objects moving out from Britain, and his reading of "reverse portability" is concerned primarily with identifying an "imperial panic" raised by objects coming into Britain. I think, though, there's a lot more to be said about the circulation of objects (both British and foreign) within Britain not just as producing an adverse imperial reaction but also for the narratives of national identity, and physical traces of national space, that mobile objects create. There is, too, further scope for thinking about the ways in which objects function within a world being physically reshaped through mobile networks; objects make visible the abstract concept of a compressing world space, leave tangible traces of the connectedness of the nation to wider networks of mobility.

These are ideas that I'll be exploring as I develop the paper further, and the discussion that followed was extremely helpful in shaping some of the directions this will take. I'll be thinking more about 1851 alongside Bleak House, another novel written in the wake of the Great Exhibition and similarly preoccupied with the connections between people and things on the move; I was reminded, though, that there's the potential for connections to work as a more positive, benevolent force in Dickens, whereas my reading of Mayhew focused more on the anxiety surrounding these interactions. There's also more to be said around ideas about bodies and/as places/things: my discussion of body-thing interactions started to stray into ideas around embodiment and of the body-as-place, with feminist geography theory lurking in the background; in my next reading of the text I'll be thinking more about the mobility of the gendered body and the more nuanced readings of place/space relations that this might open up.

I'm entering into discussions of objects from the perspective of someone more familiar with ideas around space and mobility rather than material culture and I've still got a way to go with fully drawing out the nuances of these arguments - and I'm aware that a lot more reading (and re-reading) on material culture awaits - but I'm excited by the wealth of ideas this has opened up; it feels like this work will be productive both in terms of the perspectives on objects and material culture that it provides, and for refreshing my thinking on mobility and space.

Charlotte Mathieson : 05 Jul 2012 16:10 |  Tags: Conferences Material Culture Mivss Victorians |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Victorian Things Revisited @ Keele University, 29th June 2012

This meeting of the Midlands Interdisciplinary Victorian Studies Seminar focused on the theme of "Victorian Things Revisited", seeking to explore where the "material turn" has taken us in Victorian Studies and what new possibilities for research still remain. Throughout the day, each of the 6 presenters approached the theme of material culture from a different angle, demonstrating the rich diversity of approaches to material culture and opening up many new possibilities for new directions in this research.

The day started with a panel comprising of myself and Mary Addyman, a first-year PhD student also based in the Department of English here at Warwick. I gave a paper titled "'What connection can there be?': Objects, People and Place c. 1851", which I'll write about in a separate post as the panel generated a lot of ideas that I want to follow up in more detail. Mary's paper explored new research into the collection of Richard and Henry Cuming, a father and son who collected a vast array of objects from the 1780s to 1900, including geological and archaelogical artefacts, art, textiles, ceramics, Egyptian objects, and objects representative of British social history - including everyday packaging. The disorganisation and variety of the Cuming collection goes against our usual understanding of the Victorians as systematic collectors imposing order in a disordered world, but Mary sought to find a more nuanced reading of the way in which this disorganised mode of collecting might be read, thinking about the collector recording his place in the world and the sense of responsibility to future generations involved in this accumulation and preservation of the present. Mary ended by considering the temporality of collecting, drawing out some fascinating links between collecting and geology.

Image from Southwark Collections

In the second panel, two papers centred around objects that sit at the intersection between bodies and things and trouble the binaries between living and dead, natural and artificial. Julia Courtney (Open University) raised the question of "Living Things?" in her paper on Victorian taxidermy. This focused first on taxidemied animals and birds that are posed in scenes that recreate their "natural" environments, and then on animals that are anthropomorphised in artificial scenes, such as a scene of mice sat at a table playing cards. This raised interesting questions about the relationship between bodies and things, the point at which a body becomes a "thing", and by what means the status of "thing" is ascribed. Courtney also thought about the differences in cultural appreciation for taxidermied animals, comparing the Victorian fashion for and fascination with taxidermy as something that evokes a pleasurable response, versus the rather more reluctant way in which taxidermy is viewed - with humour? disgust?- today.

Walter Potter's Red Squirrels Playing Cards, c.1871

Courtney was followed by Michael Lee (Leeds Met) whose body-object discussions took a literary turn in a paper on "Eating Things in Lewis Carroll". Lee began with a theoretical exploration of the different conceptualisations of things and objects, raising the question "what kind of a thing is food?" His subsequent discussion of Alice in Wonderland suggested that through Carroll's use of food the borders between different types of things are blurred: food is a social thing which moves within a network of circulation that supercedes the human. Food also troubles the boundaries of body/thing and life/death: the body itself has the potential to be a thing that can be consumed, moving from subject to object status. In networks of consumption, Lee suggested, everything is edible and everything is social.

In the final panel of the day we moved towards science and industry. Stella Pratt-Smith's paper "Material, Manufactured, Modern: the Science of Victorian 'Thing' Culture" posited a more thorough understanding of the relationship between science and material culture: science was not just one aspect of Victorian material culture but central to allowing that material culture to come about. Her paper demonstrated how putting Victorian things into the contexts of their production, exploring and understanding how things were made, is not only illuminating for our understanding of particular Victorian objects but also for interpreting the significance of the Victorians' fascination with things. Pratt-Smith's discussion of the science of various objects, such as the development of purple dyes that held a particular allure and new glass technologies, provided a fascinating insight into the scientific developments fuelling material culture. This was particularly interesting in light of the recent Transforming Objects conference: Stella referred to Jim Mussell's discussion of chlorodyne (and I must thank Stella for her generous mention of this blog in her talk and handout!), and I was also reminded of Eugenia Gonzalez's talk on narratives of doll production.

Stephen Etheridge (Huddersfield) finished the day with a paper on "Brass Instruments, Bandsmen and Working-Class Identity: Brass Bands in the Southern Pennines and the creation of working-class identity, 1840-1900". Etheridge began by noting the overly romanticised notion of brass bands as symbolic of northern working-class culture, but moved in to offer a more nuanced understanding of the role of brass bands in the Southern Pennine region and the various ways in which bands featured as a centre-point of masculine working-class identity. Etheridge noted the strong community element of this identity: bandsmen forged a strong group identity within their band and were well known within the local community, and this was strengthened by the competitiveness between bands from different towns. But there was also a particularly strong individual identity forged through relation to one's own instrument: after the death of a player the instrument would feature as a strong reminder of the individual, often proudly displayed in his memory - we were also shown the image of a gravestone decorated with a trombone engraving. Here again the intersections between people and object, life and death, and the permanence of objects in comparison with the mortality of people - taking us full circle to the ideas raised about collections in Mary's paper.

There were many interconnections arising throughout these papers, more than I could hope to cover here, and I was struck by how such a diverse range of perspectives on material culture could simultaneously raise so many points of interaction. This was interdisciplinarity at its best - balancing breadth and depth, generating new ideas without losing particularity or focus, and enabling stimulating and lively discussion in each of the question sessions. The day revealed material culture to be a thriving area of study with many possibilities for new directions and approaches, suggesting that this is an area which we can keep visiting and revisiting for some time to come.

Charlotte Mathieson : 02 Jul 2012 16:40 |  Tags: Conferences Material Culture Mivss Victorians |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Transforming Objects @ Northumbria University, 28–29th May

Writing about web page http://www.transformingobjects.blogspot.co.uk/

This two-day conference at the University of Northumbria brought new perspectives to the study of material culture by focusing on ideas around objects and transformation, both in terms of the movements of objects, and the processes of change that objects themselves might effect. Papers from a wide range of disciplines, covering the 18th-20th centuries, looked at a fascinating array of objects: shawls, tea, glass, medicines, art, feathers, paper, dolls, rags, post and clocks, were just a few of the things discussed.

The first panel on "Transforming Objects in Gaskell" opened up a rich discussion of material culture in Elizabeth Gaskell's works, initiating wider contexts of domesticity, industrialisation and imperialism that recurred throughout the following two days. Alison Lundie's paper on clothing and needlework in Gaskell looked at how character and identity can be interpreted through objects of domestic arts in Gaskell's works, and focused in particular on shawls which are especially desired garments; Lundie illustrated this with beautiful images of Gaskell's own shawls. Her discussion included Miss Matty's Indian shawl in Cranford, and the factory workers' shawls in Mary Barton; this intersected nicely with the next presenter Tara Puri, whose paper on "unstable objects" in North and South included Indian shawls as part of a wider discussion about symbols of middle-class domesticity which also included tea and calico. The relationship of these objects to the representation of Margaret Hale brought out ideas around bodily presence and sexuality, and the role of imperial objects in the constructiong of middle-class English femininity. Both papers hinted towards physical borders of the self, touch, and embodiment that, to me, resonated with Kate Smith's paper at the Spaces of Work conference I attended recently. With this paper in mind, I was particularly interested in two points Lundie had made in her discussion of shawls and Mary Barton - about how factory workers are referred to as "hands", and the references to literal hands in the text. I wondered afterwards (in a not entirely coherent comment!) about how ideas around hands might interplay, literally and metaphorically, with the use of shawls and other textiles.

An afternoon panel on "altering states" looked at the power of objects to transform from one state to another. James Mussell's paper on chlorodyne raised wider questions about framing of discussions of material culture and the secret lives of things: we come to know and understand the material world through the narratives we create about it, and uncovering material history is thus a process of "telling tales about the tales that were told" about objects. His narrative of chlorodyne was a fascinating exploration of the ways in which legal and medical discourses intersect with the physical experience of the body, highlighting that medicine's powerful transformative effects on the body is situated within a wider context of authoritative discourses that speak for the body. Mark Blacklock followed with a paper on "Hinton's cubes" and late-19th century theories of 4-dimensional space, which discussed the role of objects in altering conceptual thought and opened up ideas about the relationship between things and thought.

The next morning, I chaired a panel on "Transforming objects and the creation of nation" in which themes of travel and networks of circulation were central throughout. Ruth Scobie began with a paper on Elizabeth Montagu's feathered objects, featured in William Cowper's poem "On Mrs Montagu's Feather Hangings." As in the first panel, the intersection of femininity, domesticity and imperialism came to the surface here, but Scobie looked at how the feathers - as items obtained specifically through acts of violence - made particularly visible the tensions between exotic desirability and destructive violence inherent in colonial encounters. Emalee Beddoes' paper also looked at an imperial commodity within English national space, discussing tea advertisements as an emblem of Britishness in the 19th century. Advertising played a crucial role in normalising tea from exotic artefact to everyday domestic object. Middle-class femininity featured strongly in this, with adverts typically using women; if men featured in adverts, it was typically only in the context of the international, public sphere.

The next two papers turned from objects to travellers: Maria Grazia Messore discussed Daniel Defoe's A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, a piece of travel writing which seeks to construct an idea of English national identity through the process of travelling the nation, and particularly emphasises the importance of trade and the figure of the merchant in this identity. I was interested in the importance of the circuit in this delineation of national space: each route begins in and returns to London, thus insisting on the importance of London as the centre-point of the nation - but also, with London being the centre-point of an international network of trade, thus emphasising the signficance of the global in the idea of the nation. The final paper of this panel, by Fariha Shaikh, drew on emigrants' narratives to consider travellers' objects and the ways in which travelling objects construct ideas of space for the traveller. Shaikh noted that in emigrants' accounts, much attention is given to the physical positioning of objects and everything being in its right place, and she considered how this suggests a reconceptualisation of the journey space as not so much an invisible backdrop to the journey, but as a space to be worked through, experienced and reshaped by the traveller.

The final panel I attended gave a fascinating account of paper in its many and various forms. Claire Friend discussed the process of making paper in 18th century Edinburgh, from collecting the rags and scraps that were used as the basic material, to the finished product - of which there were over 300 types being made in Edinburgh alone. Eugenia Gonzalez then looked at objects made from paper: dolls, which often had faces made from papier-mâché. Gonzalez's paper explored narratives of doll production, i.e. books which informed their young readers of how dolls were made, again raising interesting questions about the intersection between objects and narrative processes, as well as the desire to know the secret histories of things and how they came to be. Katie McGettigan brought together several strands of discussion in a paper that considered the material form and circulation of the book, demonstrating Melville's engagement with the literary marketplace and the idea of book as object through a series of metaphoric connections between books and whales in the text.

Two keynote papers also provided stimulating ideas and perspectives on the conference theme. John Holmes spoke about the pre-Raphaelites and science, which proved to be a fascinating exploration (and demonstration) of interdisciplinarity in arguing that the pre-Raphaelites transformed what art could achieve through an engagement with science, which in turn transformed how science represented itself. Sarah Haggarty's paper returned to ideas of national circulation, space and time; I particularly enjoyed her comments on the postal service and its role in transforming the experience of time, in which individual sense of temporality depends upon a regulated, national system of circulation.

As well as the academic discussions that ensued from these excellent papers, a particular highlight for me was participating in the Roundtable discussion on blogging. The theme of our discussion was single- or multi-author blogging, but in the hour and a half we ranged over issues of academic identity, narrative voice, the importance of "impact", web presence, and the different forms that academic blogging might take. Lucinda Matthews-Jones, who chaired the roundtable, has done an excellent job of capturing the discussion in a blog post for JVC Online- which is itself a great example of a multi-author blog and well worth a read for Victorianists!

My thanks again to the conference organisers for inviting me to join the discussion, and for an extremely interesting two days of thinking about things! It's proved very timely as the next event of the Midlands Interdisciplinary Victorian Studies seminar is on the theme of "Victorian Things", and I'll be giving a paper titled "What connection can there be?: People, Objects and Places, c. 1851". The paper draws out some ideas around material culture, national/global networks, and the Great Exhibition, so the Transforming Objects conference has provided a useful stimulus for developing these thoughts.

Charlotte Mathieson : 02 Jun 2012 17:22 |  Tags: Blogging Conferences English Gaskell Material Culture Objects Travel Victorians |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Unplanned Wildernesses: Narrating the British Slum 1844–1951 @ Uni of Warwick, 19th May

"Unplanned Wildernesses: Narrative the British Slum 1844-1951" was a one-day conference, held at Warwick and organised by Gabrielle Mearns, which opened up a fascinating range of perspectives on British slums from the mid-19th to mid-20th century.

Gabrielle's opening remarks positioned the slum as a site of contestation in a range of debates over gender, class and race, and a space that challenges representation, and papers throughout the day explored the full extent of these remarks. Seth Koven's keynote began by taking this idea of the power contest to the smallest-scale place within the slum: the body. In particular, he focused on a young woman from the slums, Nellie Dowell, and two competing accounts of her body: medical records that document her hospitalisation for chorea (rheumatic fever), and her letters to her friend Muriel. Koven began by questioning why, as a historian, reading the medical records felt a far more invasive act than the intensely personal letters, and the paper that followed offered various answers to this. In the first part he constructed a narrative of Nellie through her medical records, intensely (and invasively) detailed accounts of her bodily state; Koven positioned these within discourses of "technologies of interiority" and explored ideas around the individual body within the regimented instituition of the hospital. Nellie's letters to Muriel provided a different narrative of her illness, one which opened up deep intimacy and forms of desire that were suggestive of something deeper than friendship; Koven raised the possibility (and difficulties) of reading unknown queer desire, but what was particularly interesting here was the way in which illness provided the means through which that desire operated, opening up the boundaries of the bodily self/ other and a language of exchange and connection. Returning to his initial question about the historian's position to subject material, it was clear that this latter material felt less invasive because of its voluntary nature, rather than the involuntary nature of institutional documentation, and Koven drew on Spivak to leave us with questions about "(how) can the Cockney subaltern speak?"

The first panel saw a paper from Warwick's Mick Carpenter and Alice Mah who are undertaking a project on Coventry's slum history - an act of reclaiming an "outcast slum", as the city's pre-war urban history has received little attention. They charted the 19th century development of the city, which effectively skipped the normal processes of the Industrial revolution and underwent rapid urbanisation in the late-century period; as such, it is a "non-classical" slum, and their project is understanding this history through local accounts, collections and narratives. This was followed by Christopher Bischof's paper on slum schools, looking at the role of teachers who chose to work at these schools and their relationship to the slums which they lived and worked on the edge of; this put them in an ambivalent relationship to the space of the slum, and raised questions around the borders of respectability in the slums, and urban environments more widely. Indeed a running theme of the morning was the idea of encounter between the personal and professional, the body and the institution, in urban locations.

Borders and boundaries was also a theme throughout the panel I chaired on "Slum Geographies". Jessica Hindes' paper looked at G.W.M. Reynolds' Mysteries of London, beginning by raising questions around the representation of the space of the slum through different genres, particularly the Gothic - modes of representation more typically found in descriptions of European castles become transferred to the London streets. Jessica thought in particular about the spatial dynamics of above/below ground which opened up a different mode of spatial structure, and one which was appropriate to her final point that just as the Gothic taps into the deepest layers of the psyche, the slum holds the secrets of society itself. New forms of mapping the slum were also a theme of Eliza Cubitt's paper on Arthur Morrison's A Child of the Jago. The slum on which this narrative is based is represented on an OS map of the city only as a blank space, unrepresentable and unmapped; Morrison's account creates a fictional mapping of the space which, interestingly, is still bordered by the "real" streets surrounding the slum. Eliza's paper explored the relationship between text and map, including a fascinating visual re-mapping of the text through a 3D simulation that recentred the importance of embodied experience in mapping. Nell Stevens' paper also considered competing spatial discourses through looking at the Salvation Army's practice of rewriting popular music-hall songs with Salvationist lyrics; this was a popular way of appealing to the urban poor, but Nell also suggested that it reflected the broader Salvation Army project of remapping London spatially, and considered the role that music played in this project.

In all of these papers I was really interested by intersecting themes of the competing modes of both spatial and textual representation taking place over the slums, the questions over the boundaries of the slum and its relationship to the surrounding urban space, suggesting perhaps that the way in which these narratives sought to spatially and textually contain the slum was underpinned by an anxiety about its potential uncontainability. As much as these discourses sought to articulate the problem of the slum it was obvious, too, that the slum made visible a whole host of problems of modernity: not just its problematic socio-economic changes, but also wider conceptual questions about the relationship between different places in a changing world-space. This is, of course, drawing more on my own research framework than that proposed by the papers themselves, but it felt like one useful way of positioning and contextualising the ideas around modernity, space and representation that the slum poses. All in all a useful and productive day, and great to hear such a range of perspectives on the British slum.

Charlotte Mathieson : 19 May 2012 21:40 |  Tags: City Conferences English Slum Urban Victorians |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Spaces of Work, Britain 1770–1830 @ University of Warwick, 28th April 2012

This one-day conference held at the University of Warwick provided an excellent interdisciplinary analysis of the intersections between space and various forms of work in the Romantic period.

The discussions began with Karen Harvey's paper "Thinking through Boundaries: The House, Gender and Work" which explored masculinity and domesticity in the eighteenth century. Harvey began by suggesting a conceptual shift from the use of the word "home" to the concept of "the house" in studies of domesticity, positing that "house" can be used to signal more than the physical shell but that it carries a set of meanings that are distinct from the idea of "home". Harvey then turned to look at masculine identity and the house, exploring men's role in the management of the house through a selection of notebooks of 18th century men. These displayed the active role of men in household management, and demonstrated the irrelevance of the division between discourses of home, work, business and so on. She ended by moving out to the position of the house in the wider space of national community, and how men's domestic management helped to understand the porosity of the house to the wider world. The paper drew on her recently published book The Little Republic: Masculinity and Domestic Authority in Eighteenth-Century Britain which I'm hoping to read at some point.

Of the papers on the two panels that followed, I was most interested in Kate Smith's paper on "The Work of Shopping". Smith argued for a reconceptualisation of shopping as "work", by way of offering a renewed understanding of critiques of female shopping - which become repositioned as critiques of the public act of female work. Smith looked at how shopping could be understood as skilled work, involving embodied knowledge, active participation, and a keen eye for quality; this focused in particular on the importance of female hands, looking at the surrounding contexts of female hands as signifiers of identity and class status, and the problematic visibility of female hands on display when shopping. This opened up an interesting set of intersecting discourses between embodiment, space and work, drawing out new ways of understanding the typical discourses around female bodies in public spaces; I was also reminded of ideas around the meanings of skin as a physical boundary, and associated issues around encasing the female body.

Other spaces of work discussed throughout the day included the bookshop, rural spaces, wharfs and warehouses, and theatres - a rich and varied set of contexts that made for an interesting and engaging day.

Charlotte Mathieson : 09 May 2012 20:13 |  Tags: Conferences English Literature Nineteenth Century Space |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Talking blogging @ Transforming Objects Conference

Writing about web page http://transformingobjects.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/conference-roundtable.html

A quick post to say that I'm very pleased to have been invited to participate in a roundtable on blogging at Transforming Objects, a conference at the University of Northumbria on the 28th-29th May 2012. The discussion is on single- and multi-author blogging, and I'll on the panel with James Mussell, Kieran Fenby-Hulse, and Martin Eve, all of whom are outstanding bloggers and I'm sure the topic will generate some stimulating and fruitful discussion.

May will be a good month for Victorianists as JVC online are holding a bloggers' fair to showcase Victorian blogs throughout the month. I'm pleased to be a part of this and looking forward to finding even more blogs to subscribe to!

Charlotte Mathieson : 20 Apr 2012 17:06 |  Tags: Blogging Conferences |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Dickens's World, 7th–8th March 2012

Follow-up to Dickens's World Online Conference from Charlotte's Research blog

This week I "attended" Dickens's World, a free online conference at which I was an invited discussant. The conference was a fascinating event, with both the quality and quantity of papers exceeding my expectations - keynote video addresses, papers and special virtual issues of existing Dickens scholarship presented a wealth of information for Dickens scholars and enthusiasts across the world. Such was the volume of material that I've only watched the keynotes and read a selection of the main papers and articles, whilst the special issues will have to wait until I'm back to research time. A few things particularly took my interest, and I thought I'd draw together my comments and thoughts here.

The conference opened with a keynote address "Beginning the World" from Professor John Bowen, exploring travel in Dickens's life and works. Bowen began by giving a sense of the "world" in which Dickens moved, discussing Dickens's own interest in and experience of travel, before focusing on a novel in which the idea of "the world" is a central concern, Bleak House. Bowen highlighted the recurrence of the phrase "in the world" throughout the novel, a matter of some interest in a novel which aims to present a complete world in its expansive vision of society. Bowen suggested that the very idea of "the world" is an uncertain concept, further emphasised through repeated references to "the earth" as perhaps a more physical locating of the abstract idea. This provided an interesting perspective to my work on the novel, and I hadn't realised just how many uses of the phrase "in the world" occur in the text. As I suggested in the comments, the sense of ambivalence around the idea of "the world" is further underscored by the restricted physical “world” within which Bleak House operates, simultaneously entertaining the idea of "the world" whilst withdrawing into the nation. Bowen's discussion of Esther’s “beginning the world” at the end of the text further iterates this: the final “world”, the second Bleak House, is firmly situated within the heart of England at the northernmost location of the novel.

Bowen also drew out the global literary resonances of Dickens's writing, something explored more fully in John O. Jordan's paper "Global Dickens". Jordan provides an expansive overview of the circulation and critical reception of Dickens's works across the world, an ambitious and fascinating piece of work full of many interesting suggestions for further reading.

On the subject of global circulation and mobility, I also enjoyed reading Glen O'Hara's paper on the ‘Networked World’ of the 19th - early 20th Centuries in the first Special Issue. O’Hara's discussion of networks focused on the telegraph, advocating a note of caution as to how we read nineteenth-century technological development and the global connectedness enabled by such technologies - in the age of the internet we're too quick to assume that developments were as fluid as they might seem. As with the development of transport networks of the period, the telegraph displayed uneven patterns of development and intensified national tensions. As other papers hinted at, such developments occur within a complex field of meanings and reading the Victorian “response” is never simple, often fraught with ambivalence and anxiety.

I'm looking forward to discovering more from this conference, and reflecting more on the format of the online conference; one thing I noticed with this is that you really do create a very individual conference experience and I'm sure interpretations and perspectives differ a lot as a result, so I'll be interested to hear what others thought and to read all the comments on the conference papers. This was a timely stimulus for me, though, as I'll be getting back into lots more travel research and blogging over the coming weeks.

Charlotte Mathieson : 10 Mar 2012 17:46 |  Tags: Charles Dickens Conferences Victorians |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Dickens's World Online Conference

Dickens's World is an online conference that will be taking place over the next couple of days, starting at 8am on 7th March. I am an invited discussant for the event, which will involve commenting on papers, video addresses, and the reading room resources.

The program looks very interesting - I'm particularly looking forward to John Jordan's "Global Dickens" and Prof David Paroissien's keynote address on "Shifting Perspectives in Dickens's Fiction".

If you haven't registered there's still time to join the 500 delegates! This is my first online conference so it'll be an interesting experience, and I'll blog again after the event.

Charlotte Mathieson : 06 Mar 2012 18:20 |  Tags: Charles Dickens Conferences |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem