Affective Accretion: Reconciling the Material and the Emotional in Studies of the Victorian Era
How do we approach an age that, increasingly, feels unanchored from our emotional present? Why do the outsized passions and…
Author: Rosalind White
I am a first-year PhD student at Royal Holloway looking at gender & emotions in the science & literature of the nineteenth-century. My research looks at how natural history in many ways dwelt within the feminine sphere of Victorian culture. And charts a more intimate, personal exploration of natural history that examines the lives of its practitioners beyond the impact of conventional watersheds.
“What of her glass without her?” Prismatic Desire & Auto-Erotic Anxiety in the Art & Poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Do check out my article in the latest issue of the Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies – “What of Her Glass…
Samantha Evans’ Darwin & Women
The latest publication from the Darwin Correspondence Project, Darwin and Women, begins with its own taxonomic quandary. From the outset…
‘I had no escape from it. I loved an animalcule:’ Romance Through the Microscope
Fitz-James O’Brien (1828-1862) was an Irish-American Civil War soldier and one of the forerunners of the Science-Fiction genre. His primary literary connection…
‘Walking into a living grave’: the Orchid Mantis & Alfred Russell Wallace
The orchid mantis, (Hymenopus coronatus) is renowned for its visual resemblance to an orchid in bloom. Its pink heart-shaped mid-and hind-legs…
The Victorian Kindle: Schloss’s Bijou Almanac
In the mid nineteenth-century no handbag was complete without a Schloss Bijou Almanac. Anticipating the portability of kindles and tablets,…
‘The Entomologist’s Dream’
In The Entomologist’s Dream (1909) by Edmund Dulac an entomologist – in a state of near collapse – bears witness to…
Mr Micawber the Hermit Crab
Welcome poverty!..Welcome misery, welcome houselessness, welcome hunger, rags, tempest, and beggary! Mutual confidence will sustain us to the end! –…
How the Victorian Craze for Conchology became a Billion-dollar Business
Throughout the nineteenth-century the mania for seashells steadily swelled; they featured on Christmas cards, and adorned countless keepsakes, jewellery, and furniture….
The Little King of Serpents: A Basilisk in the Archives
I stumbled upon these plates from a gorgeous book entitled An Essay Towards a Natural History of Serpents (1742) and had to share…