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…
Tag: natural history
‘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 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….
This particular web: a week with George Eliot at Dickens Universe 2017
I at least have so much to do in unravelling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and…
‘A fairyland amongst the wildflowers’, Realism and Romance in the works of Beatrix Potter
An eager student of both the arts and the sciences Beatrix Potter’s childhood was equally enchanted by the discovery of…
Survival of the Thesis, Writing Advice from Charles Darwin
NB: For more on Charles Darwin’s outlook on human emotion see the article that prompted this post Thomas Dixon’s piece…
The Strange Story of Anna Kingsford
[ illustrations ‘Cold Wind’ & ‘Fake it till you make it’ by Rovina Cai] As the only Victorian medical student at…