Romantic Circles Reviews Re-Launched

Jack Cragwall has just announced the re-launch of Romantic Circles Reviews, now a blog in which reviews of recent work in Romanticism will be posted. The blog also includes the complete archive of previous reviews. This is a welcome event, as the site has been relatively dormant for a while now.

New reviews published today:

• Julia Carlson, reviewing Ron Broglio’s Technologies of the Picturesque: British Art, Poetry, and Instruments 1750-1830 (Bucknell UP, 2008);
• Dennis Low, reviewing Peter Swaab’s edition of Sara Coleridge’s Collected Poems (Fyfield Books / Carcanet, 2007).

Artful Dodgers: Marah Gubar on Children’s Literature

Oxford University Press has recently published a book by Marah Gubar entitled Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children’s Literature, which traces a sustained Victorian ambivalence about the Romantic idea of childhood innocence.

From the Oxford website:

“In a series of attentive close readings of both famous and unjustly neglected texts, Gubar shows how such writers as Lewis Carroll, Frances Hodgson Burnett, and J. M. Barrie often resisted the growing cultural pressure to erect a strict barrier between child and adult, innocence and experience. Rather than urging young people to mold themselves to match a static archetype of artless simplicity, they conceived of children as precociously literate, highly socialized beings who-though indisputably shaped by the strictures of civilized life-could nevertheless cope with such influences in creative ways.”

Table of contents:

Introduction: “Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast”

1. “Our Field”: The Rise of the Child Narrator

2. Collaborating with the Enemy: Treasure Island

3. Reciprocal Aggression: Unromantic Agency in the Art of Lewis Carroll

4. Partners in Crime: E. Nesbit and the Art of Thieving

5. The Cult of the Child and the Controversy over Child Actors

6. Burnett, Barrie, and the Emergence of Children’s Theatre

Forthcoming issue of Victorian Literature and Culture 37:2 (2009)

Although online access is not available as of this posting,  the newest issue of Victorian Literature and Culture 37:2 (2009) contains the following articles:

• “The Colonial Postcard: The Spectral/Telepathic Mode in Conan Doyle and Kipling” by BISHNUPRIYA GHOSH
• “‘Loathsome London’: Ruskin, Morris, and Henry Davey’s History of English Music (1895)” by BENNETT ZON
• “Oceana Revisited:  J. A. Froude’s 1884 Journey to New Zealand and the Pink and White Terraces” by ANNE MAXWELL
• “The Play with a Past: Arthur Wing Pinero’s New Drama” by HEATHER ANNE WOZNIAK
• “‘A Beautiful Translation from a Very Imperfect Original’: Mabel Wotton, Aestheticism, and the Dilemma of Literary Borrowing” by SIGRID ANDERSON CORDELL
• “‘A Preface is Written to the Public’: Print Censorship, Novel Prefaces, and the Construction of a New Reading Public in Late-Victorian England” by BARBARA LECKIE
• “Cosmetic Tragedies: Failed Masquerade in Wilkie Collins’s The Law and the Lady” by AVIVA BRIEFEL
• “Representations of the Abnormal Body in The Moonstone” by MARK MOSSMAN
• “The Tragic Mulatta Plays the Tragic Muse” by KIMBERLY SYNDER MANGANELLI
• “‘He Sings Alone’: Hybrid Forms and the Victorian Working-Class Poet” by KIRSTIE BLAIR
• “‘Love Yourself As Your Neighbor’: The Limits of Altruism and the Ethics of Personal Benefit in Adam Bede” by ILANA M. BLUMBERG
• “‘Awful Unknown Qualities’: Addressing the Readers in Hard Times“  by CAROLYN VELLENGA BERMAN
• “Popular Dickens” by LISA RODENSKY
• Work in Progress: “The Savage Genius of Sherlock Holmes” by ANNA NEILL

The website also announces a forthcoming special issue: “Volume 38, Number 2 (2010) with an Editors’ Topic, ‘Victorian Cosmopolitanisms,’ edited by Tanya Agathocleous and Jason R. Rudy”

Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies: Spring 2009 Issue Available

The Spring 2009 issue of the Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, edited by David Latham, is now available. It contains the following articles and reviews:

ARTICLES

• David Latham’s ““Shadows Hot from Hell”: Swinburne’s Poethics”
• L. Spates’s “Ruskin’s Dark Night of the Soul: A Reconsideration of His Mental Illness and the Importance of Accurate Diagnosis”
• D.M.R. Bentley’s “‘Polysemos, Hoc Est Plurium Sensum’: Dante Rossetti’s Paintings of Jane Morris”
• Ernest Fontana’s “Pre-Raphaelite Martyrdoms”

REVIEWS

• A Rossetti Family Chronology by Alison Chapman and Joanna Meacock (D’Amico)
• Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Victorian Visual World by Catherine Phillips (Nixon)
• William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones: Interlacings by Caroline Arscott (Frederick)
• Facing the Late Victorians: Portraits of Writers and Artists from the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection by Margaret D. Stetz (Bingaman)
• Art for Art’s Sake: Aestheticism in Victorian Painting by Elizabeth Prettejohn (Yeates)
• Moulding the Female Body in Victorian Fairy Tales and Sensation Novels by Laurence Talairach-Vielmas;  The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde by Jarlah Killeen (Pierce)

Ricks Reviews Plumly’s Posthumous Keats

Christopher Ricks reviews Stanley Plumley’s Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography in the New York Review of Books.

From the review:

“Stanley Plumly’s profoundly humane evocation of Keats’s life and his immediate afterlife is better than magisterial, for it is masterly….Plumly’s is a generous book, avowedly grateful to what he calls ‘the great 1960s biographies’ of Keats, that by Walter Jackson Bate, which I’d characterize as the most cognitive; by Aileen Ward, the most touching; and by Robert Gittings, the most practical. Plumly pays justified tribute to the fine editors, too, notably Hyder Edward Rollins, for Keats’s letters as well as all the papers of the Keats circle, and John Barnard, for the poems. These debts are honored; for his architectonics, Plumly is in debt to no one. Thanks to acts of arbitration that are not simply arbitrary, he is able to exercise to the full his own shaping spirit of imagination, and to have each chapter be ‘formed from a single image, theme, or object relative to Keats’s vulnerabilities as an individual and his strengths as an artist.’ The happy result, sensitive to the darkest unhappinesses, is a work that is markedly personal, while never becoming self-conscious, idiosyncratic, or eccentric.”

CFP: Special Issue of Victorian Review: “Victorian Natural Environments”

[as published on the Victorian Review website:]

Victorian Natural Environments

Special Issue of the Victorian Review (Fall 2010)

Submission Date for Complete Papers: 15 September 2009

The Victorian Review invites submissions for a special issue devoted to Victorian Natural Environments. Recently, various Victorianist scholarly approaches have begun noting points of confluence with environmental and ecological studies. This issue of Victorian Review is aimed at recognizing these recent insights, considering how notions of natural environments have made an impact on Victorian cultures and values. Essays that address the political role of different configurations of societies, species, living spaces and the planet itself are especially encouraged. What environments did Victorians recognize as natural and unnatural? How did issues of physical and psychological containment impact on Victorians’ sense of themselves as natural agents? What performative systems circumscribed people’s self-identification as human or not quite human? How do environmental, animal and posthumanist studies contribute to our understanding of Victorian identity and society?

Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

Environmental Art and Literature
Popular Science and Daily Lives
Paganism and Nature Spirituality
Acting Naturally in Different Class Contexts
Decadent Nature and Decadent Artifice
Aquariums, Zoos and Other Such Animal Environments
Genius Loci – Spirit of a Place
Anthropomorphism and Animals in the Domestic Environment
Eugenics, Social Darwinism and Criminal Neighbourhoods
Peacocks, Lap Dogs, and Other Animals of Artifice
Anthropology and Environments
Technological Environments and Nature

Essays must be between 5000 and 7000 words and formatted according to MLA guidelines. Queries and abstracts are welcome at any time, but please submit the full essay electronically to the guest editor by Sept. 15, 2009: Dennis Denisoff / Department of English / Ryerson University, Toronto / denisoff@ryerson.ca .

Wordsworth Summer Conference 2009: Program Available

The Wordsworth Summer Conference will be held in Grasmere July 27 – August 6, 2009, featuring keynote lectures by Nick Roe, Fiona Stafford, Paul Fry, Claire Lamont, Stephen Gill, Frances Ferguson, Gillian Beer, Richard Cronin, Yoko Ima-Izuma, Anne Wroe, Michael O’Neill, and Fred Burwick.

The conference program has been released and is available here as a Word document.

A full prospectus for the conference is available here as a PDF.

CFP: Material Cultures conference in Edinburgh, July 2010

The Centre for the History of the Book at the University of Edinburgh has posted the following call for paper proposals:

A three-day conference
at The UNIVERSITY of EDINBURGH
July 16-18, 2010

ROGER CHARTIER
JEROME McGANN
PETER STALLYBRASS

Following the Material Cultures conferences which took place at The University of Edinburgh in 2000 and 2005, the third in the series is scheduled to take place in July 2010. The key theme of the conference is ‘Technology, Textuality, and Transmission’, though proposals relating to all aspects of Bibliography and the History of the Book are
welcome.

• MATERIALITY AND TEXTUALITY
• ELECTRONIC TEXT
• THE CULTURES OF PRINT
• CENSORSHIP AND REGULATION
• COLLECTIONS AND THEIR PRESERVATION
• READERS AND READING PRACTICES
• TECHNOLOGY AND TRANSMISSION
• THE INFORMATION REVOLUTION
• GEOGRAPHIES OF THE BOOK

Proposals of 200-300 words are invited on these or any other topic related to the history of the book, to be sent no later than NOVEMBER 30, 2009, to Material Cultures, Centre for the History of the Book, University of Edinburgh, 22a Buccleuch Place, Edinburgh, EH8 9LW, or by email to materialcultures@ed.ac.uk

NCSA Conference: March 2010 at the University of Tampa

[From the NASSR-L listserv:]

CALL FOR PAPERS

31^st Annual Conference of the Nineteenth Century Studies Association

The University of Tampa, March 11-13, 2010, Tampa, Florida

Theatricality and the Performative in the Long Nineteenth Century

Dramatic expression and self-conscious performances marked almost every aspect of nineteenth century life and artistic culture, as theatrical turns and performative mindsets introduced in the 17^th-18^th centuries expanded in the 1780s through the beginning of World War One.  We invite paper and panel proposals that explore these themes and subjects in the long Nineteenth Century (1780-1914).  Papers might address the theatrical shows—whether serious drama, circus displays, vaudeville, operas, or Shakespearean revivals—that appeared in cities and towns on both sides of the Atlantic (as well as in more distant lands). Or they might investigate how politics, social events, military engagements, domestic affairs, public trials, crime reports, religious rituals, architectural spaces, sculptural moments, exhibition halls, artistic and musical compositions, and the early moving pictures of the cinema, assumed a  theatrical sensibility. Welcome also are proposals for papers and panels that bring scholarly and theoretical interests in performativity to bear on concepts of identity, individuality, and audience in the given era.

Please submit abstracts of approximately 500 words along with a brief (one page) c.v. to the Program Co-Chairs, Janice Simon (U of Georgia) and Regina Hewitt (U of South Florida) at the conference address ncsa2010@earthlink.net by Sept. 15, 2009.  Speakers will be notified by or before Dec. 15.

Any graduate student whose proposal is accepted may at that point submit a full-length version of the paper in competition for a travel grant to help cover transportation and lodging expenses.

Conference sessions will be held at the University of Tampa, a campus with both the historic late-19^th century Plant Hall (formerly the Tampa Bay Hotel) and a state-of-the-art conference center.  Accommodations will be available at the Hyatt Regency in downtown Tampa, a short walk from campus. For further information—available in midsummer—please visit the NCSA website http://www.english.uwosh.edu/roth/ncsa/ or contact Elizabeth Winston, Local Arrangements Director (U of Tampa), at the conference address ncsa2010@earthlink.net.

Emily Dickinson’s Correspondences from UVA’s Rotunda Digital Imprint

Although normally occupied with British literature, The Hoarding would like to announce the recent publication of a digital resource, Emily Dickinson’s Correspondences: A Born-Digital Textual Inquiry, edited by Martha Nell Smith and Lara Vetter, under the Rotunda Imprint of the University of Virginia Press.  This resource has now been aggregated into NINES, and NINES users can conduct full-text searches of the material (though a Rotunda subscription is required for complete access). See the NINES news blog for more.

The Dickinson editors describe their project in the following way:

“Unpublished in book form during her lifetime, the poems of Emily Dickinson were nonetheless shared with those she trusted most—through her letters. This XML-based archive brings together seventy-four poems and letters from Emily’s correspondence with her sister-in-law and primary confidante, Susan Dickinson. Each text is presented with a digitized scan of the holograph manuscript. These images have zoom functionality as well as a special light-box feature that allows users to view and compare constellations of related documents. Users may search by date, genre, manuscript features, and full text. Dating from the 1850s to the end of Dickinson’s life, the work collected here shows all the characteristics of the poet’s mature art.”

Spring 2009 issue of English Literature in Transition 1880-1920

The most recent issue (52:2) of English Literature in Transition 1880-1920 has recently appeared. It contains the following articles:

• Marysa DeMoor’s “John    Middleton    Murry’s    Editorial    Apprenticeships:  Getting    Modernist    ‘Rhythm’    into    the    Athenaeum,    1919–1921″
• David Sergeant’s “Changes    in    Kipling’s    Fiction    Upon    His    Return    to    Britain”
• Timothy S. Hayes’s “Colonialism    in    R.    L.    Stevenson’s    South    Seas    Fiction: ‘Child’s    Play’   in    the    Pacific”
• Allan H. Simmons’s “The    Collected    Letters    of    Joseph    Conrad:    A    Review    Essay”
• Linda Dryden’s “The    Penguin    Editions    of    Conrad’s    Novels:    A    Review    Essay”

This issue also includes reviews of books by Kingston, Li, Wearing (ed.), Freeman, Gordon, Hammand and Towheed (eds.), Marshall (ed.), Thain, Davis and Jenkins (eds.), and Pratt.

Readers may be interested in the series of books published by the ELT Press, including relatively recent titles on Kipling, Symons, Wilde, and Haggard.

Broadview Edition of De Quincey’s Confessions now available

Joel Faflak’s edition of Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater has been published this spring by Broadview Press. Margaret Russett calls it “by far the best paperback edition of De Quincey’s Confessions ever to be published.” Paul Youngquist observes that “the chief glory of this edition is its unflinching discussion of the history of opium as anodyne. Marshalling a wide array of primary material, Faflak reveals how eating opium—and writing about it—can be an activity rife with cultural implications and philosophical possibilities.” Here is the table of contents:

Introduction

Confessions of an English Opium-Eater

Appendix A: Related Texts and Prefaces

1. From Charles Lamb, “Confessions of a Drunkard” (1813)
2. From Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Kubla Khan” (1816)
3. From “Letter from the English Opium Eater,” London Magazine (1821)
4. From Appendix to Confessions of An English Opium-Eater, London Magazine (1822)
5. From General Preface to Selections Grave and Gay (1853)
6. From the Explanatory Notice to Volume Four of Selections Grave and Gay (1854)
7. From Prefatory Notice to Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1856)
8. From “The Dark Interpreter” (1845?)
9. Manuscript list for proposed plan of Suspiria de Profundis
10. From William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1850)

Appendix B:  Reviews, Letters, Notes

Appendix C: The Opium Question: History and Politics

1. From Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, The Six Voyages of John Baptista Tavernier (1677)
2. From Sir John Chardin, The Travels of Sir John Chardin into Persia and the East-Indies (1686)
3. From William Marsden, The History of Sumatra (1783)
4. From Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1806)
5. From David Ricardo, The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817)
6. From R.R. Madden, Travels in Turkey, Egypt, Nubia, and Palestine (1833)
7. From John Francis Davis, The Chinese: A General Description of The Empire of China and Its Inhabitants (1836)
8. From Samuel Morewood, A Philosophical and Statistical History of the Inventions and Customs of Ancient and Modern Nations in the Manufacturing and Use of Inebriating Liquors (1838)
9. From W.H. Medhurst, China: Its State and Prospects, with Especial Reference to the Spread of the Gospel (1838)
10. From Rev. Algernon S. Thelwall, The Iniquities of the Opium Trade with China (1839)
11. From Thomas De Quincey, “The Opium and the China Question,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (1840)

Appendix D: The Opium Question: Medicine and Psychology

1. From Andrew Baxter, An Enquiry into the Nature of the Human Soul (1737)
2. From George Young, A Treatise on Opium, Founded upon Practical Observations (1753)
3. From John Awsiter, An Essay on the Effects of Opium (1767)
4. From Samuel Crumpe, An Inquiry into the Nature and Properties of Opium (1793)
5. From “Dreams,” Encyclopædia Britannica (1797)
6. From Thomas Trotter, A View of the Nervous Temperament (1807)
7. From Robert Macnish, The Anatomy of Drunkenness (1827)
8. From “The Narcotics We Indulge In,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (1853)
9. From Mordecai C. Cooke, The Seven Sisters of Sleep (1860)
10. From Henry Havelock Ellis, The Dance of Life (1923)

Decadent Verse, 1872-1900: A New Anthology

Anthem Press has recently released Decadent Verse: An Anthology of Late-Victorian Poetry, 1872-1900, edited by Carolyn Blyth, as part of their new Anthem Nineteenth-Century Studies series. It unfortunately is priced at $175, which puts it out of reach for classroom use. Nevertheless, it may prove a useful sourcebook for research and teaching in the field.

Victorians Institute CFP: “Creativity and the Arts in Victorian Culture” (6/15/09; 10/16-17/09)

Victorians Institute Call for Papers
October 16 & 17, 2009
Converse College
Spartanburg, SC

CREATIVITY AND THE ARTS IN VICTORIAN CULTURE

KEYNOTE SPEAKER:  LINDA PETERSON, YALE UNIVERSITY

We are interested in papers examining a range of arts. Possible topics include:
-       high arts (painting, drawing, sculpture, music, drama, dance, and the
literary arts)
-       middle-brow arts
-       popular culture and art
-       folk arts
-       the arts and crafts movement
-       architecture and art
-       literary treatment of the arts and responses to arts
-       culturally significant aspects of these arts in their own right
-       additionally, as 2009 is the 200th anniversary of Tennyson’s birth, we
welcome papers that specifically address Tennyson’s relationship to, and
treatment of, the arts

Address questions, and send 250 – 500 word abstracts, to:

Anita Rose
Department of English
Converse College
580 E. Main St.
Spartanburg, SC  29302
Email submissions (preferred): anita.rose@converse.edu

By June 15, 2009

New Issue of the Victorian Newsletter on William North

From editor Deborah Logan, as posted on the VICTORIA listserv:

The Victorian Newsletter, Spring 2009 #115 is now available. This special issue, “The Elusive William North,” features new work on the short-lived Victorian author who, despite his apparent obscurity, had lunch with Franz Liszt and his image drawn by D. G. Rossetti.  Associated with the PreRaphaelites and with the mid-century New York bohemian literati, North was a novelist and journalist whose work seems more relevant to our time than his own. Contributors include Patrick Scott, Allan Life, Page Life, Lanya Lamouria, Rebecca Stern, Ed Whitley, and Rob Weidman. The issue features an extensive bibliography of work by and about North. For ordering information, contact:
deborah.logan@wku.edu — or — victorian.newsletter@wku.edu

Nineteenth-Century Contexts: Issue 31:1 (March 2009)

The newest issue of Nineteenth-Century Contexts is devoted to the special topic, “Reading the Past in the Nineteenth Century,” edited by Rosemary Mitchell and Anna Vaninskaya. It contains the following articles:

• Shafquat Towheed’s “Reading History and Nation: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Reading of William Forbes-Mitchell’s Reminiscences of the Great Mutiny 1857-9”
• Annika Bautz’s “Scott’s Victorian Readers”
• Rosemary Mitchell’s “Charlotte M. Yonge: Reading, Writing, and Recycling Historical Fiction in the Nineteenth Century”
• Anna Vaninskaya’s ,”Dreams of John Ball: Reading the Peasants’ Revolt in the Nineteenth Century”
• Michael Ledger-Lomas’s “First-Century Fiction in the Late Nineteenth Century”

This issue also includes reviews of books by Mazzeo (by Fitzgerald), Conn (by Round), Goudie (by Waterman), Snyder (by Courtemanche), Martin (by Belgum), Weierman (by Mielke), Sinnema (by Burke), and Gray (by Sandy).

Forthcoming is a special issue, “Painful Pleasures: Nineteenth-Century Politicized Spectacles in Britain, America, and France,” guest-edited by Teresa Mangum, and containing the following essays:

• Peter J. Manning’s “Cobbett’s Chopstick Festival: Event, Representation, Context”
• Charles D. Martin’s “Can the Mummy Speak? Manifest Destiny, Ventriloquism, and the Silence of the Ancient Egyptian Body”
• Susanne Berthier-Foglar’s “The 1889 World Exhibition in Paris: The French, the Age of Machines, and the Wild West”
• Teresa Mangum’s “Dickens and the Female Terrorist: The Long Shadow of Madame Defarge“

Pickering & Chatto: New Editions for Spring 2009

Five new editions of nineteenth-century materials have recently been published by Pickering & Chatto:

• The Selected Political Writings of John Thelwall, in 4 volumes, edited by Robert Lamb and Corinna Wagner: “This four-volume reset edition brings together Thelwall’s most important and influential political writing from across the genres, from scientific pamphlets and writings on the art of elocution, to political philosophy and journalism.”
• The Works of Lady Caroline Lamb, in 3 volumes, edited by Paul Douglass and Leigh W. Dickson: “This is the first edition to present Lamb’s works in a scholarly format. Graham Hamilton and Ada Reis have never been republished, and Gordon: A Tale has been misattributed to Byron. This edition will appeal to scholars of Romanticism and Women’s Writing.”
• Lives of Victorian Literary Figures, Part VII: Conrad, Haggard, and Kipling by their Contemporaries,  in 3 volumes, edited by Ralph Pite, Keith Carabine, Tom Hubbard, and Lindy Stiebel: “Pickering & Chatto’s highly successful Lives of Victorian Literary Figures series continues with the seventh installment…Carefully selected extracts from biographies, memoirs, diaries, private letters and other ephemera reveal how these iconic writers were viewed by their contemporaries.”
• Lives of Shakespearian Actors, Part II: Edmund Kean, Sarah Siddons, and Harriet Smithson by their Contemporaries, in 3 volumes, edited by Gail Marshall, Tetsuo Kishi, Jim Davis, Lisa A. Freeman, and Peter Raby: “This series features actors who were significant in their development of new and innovative ways of performing Shakespeare. Extracts from diaries, memoirs, private letters, obituaries and other rare ephemera are drawn together to build a contemporary account of their acting achievements and personal lives.”
• The Social Problem Novels of Frances Trollope, in 4 volumes, edited by Brenda Ayres, Christine Sutphin, Douglas Murray, Priti Joshi, and Ann-Barbara Graff: “This is the first modern, scholarly, annotated edition of Frances Trollope’s social problem novels. Trollope’s novels brought her readers into contact with a wide range of social issues. Her novels dealt with work issues, such as child labour, unsafe working conditions, excessive hours and poor wages.”

Pickering & Chatto: New Monographs for Spring 2009

The prolific Pickering & Chatto has thus far in 2009 released ten titles in Romantic and Victorian studies. Five of these are editions, which will be the subject of a separate entry. Five are monographs:

• Mei-Ying Sung’s William Blake and the Art of Engraving, which “closely examines William Blake’s extant engraved copper plates, a previously under-used resource, and arrives at a new interpretation of his working process….Sung argues that hammer marks to the reverse of the plates point to high levels of repoussage, suggesting that Blake revised and corrected his work more than was previously thought.”
• Michelle Faubert’s Rhyming Reason: The Poetry of Romantic-Era Psychologists, which “focuses on a hitherto little-known group of psychologist-poets who grew out of the liberal literary-medical culture of the Scottish Enlightenment. They used poetry as an accessible form to communicate emerging psychological, cultural and moral ideas – concepts which were echoed by… many canonical Romantic poets.”
• Preeti Nijhar’s Law and Imperialism: Criminality and Constitution in Colonial India and Victorian Britain studies “the shared experience of ‘dangerous’ groups of people in both India and Victorian England, as well as unique information on the status of South Asians in Britain,” and argues for the influence of colonial law on the British legal system.
• John Thelwall: Radical Romantic and Acquitted Felon, edited by Steve Poole, “draws together a range of essays from leading eighteenth-century and Romantic scholars. Thelwall’s manifold activities are considered in relation to each other, and contextualized within wider Romantic culture and politics.” Essays by Roe, Johnston, Barrett, Mee, Scrivener, and others.
• Ranald C. Michie’s Guilty Money: The City of London in Victorian and Edwardian Culture, 1815-1914, uses literary and popular novels to “interrogate the dialectic nature of two traditional views of the City as a global financial centre: London as a theatre of corruption, fraud and scandal; and as a place of unbridled success and power for the ambitious elite.”

April issue of Journal of Victorian Culture

In the new issue of the Journal of Victorian Culture , edited by Helen Rogers et al., the following articles appear:

• Paul Dobraszczyk, “‘Give in Your Account’: Using and Abusing Victorian Census Forms”
• Carolyn Burdett, “Sexual Selection, Automata and Ethics in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss and Olive Schreiner’s Undine and From Man to Man“
• Peter Garratt, “Ruskin’s Modern Painters and the Visual Language of Reality“
• Susan Shelangoskie, “Anthony Trollope and the Social Discourse of Telegraphy after Nationalisation“

There is also a rountable discussion of Isobel Armstrong’s recent book, Victorian Glassworlds, with contributions by Josaphine McDonagh, Chris Otter, Marcia Pointon, Claire Pettitt, Bruce Robbins, and Isobel Armstrong herself.

Rosalind Crone provides a review essay on “new digital resources in the history of crime,” with particular attention to Old Bailey Online project.  Matthew Rubery surveys digital audio resources in a review entitled , “Victorian Literature Out Loud.”

Reviews of books by Sally Ledger (Mee), Rohan McWilliam (Pettitt), Jason Edwards (Greenaway), and Nadia Valman (Briefel) round out the issue.

Forthcoming from Oxford UP: Books by Tuekolsky, Rubery, and Chase

In the next few months, just in time for summer reading, three new titles in Victorian studies will appear from Oxford University Press:

• Rachel Tuekolsky’s The Literate Eye: Victorian Art Writing and Modernist Aesthetics (slated for June 2009) “analyzes the vivid archive of Victorian art writing to reveal the key role played by nineteenth-century writers in the rise of modernist Anglo-American aesthetics….Well-known texts by Ruskin, Pater, and Wilde appear alongside texts belonging to the rich field of Victorian print culture, including gallery reviews, scientific treatises, satirical cartoons, and notes on early photography.”
• Matthew Rubery’s The Novelty of Newspapers: Victorian Fiction after the Invention of the News (also slated for June 2009) “explains why the Victorian novel is best understood alongside the simultaneous development of the news as a commercial commodity read by up to a million readers per day…Drawing on examples of periodicals from the period, Matthew Rubery reveals how the commercial press arising in nineteenth-century Britain profoundly influenced Mary Braddon, Charlotte Bronte, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Anthony Trollope, and many other novelists who all used narrative conventions derived from the press in their fiction.”
• Karen Chase’s The Victorians and Old Age (to appear in July) “examines old age as it was constructed in Victorian social and literary cultures…It traces the power and powerlessness of age through a range of characters and individuals as distinct from one another as Dickens’s inebriated nurse, Sairey Gamp, to the sober Queen Victoria; and it studies specific narrative forms for expressing heightened emotions attached to aging and the complexities of representing age in pictorial and statistical ‘portraits’.”

Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies 5:1 now available

From Melissa Purdue and Stacey Floyd, via the VICTORIA listserv:

We are pleased to announce that issue 5.1 of Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies is now available at www.ncgsjournal.com

This issue features the following articles and reviews:

Articles

• Scott Brennan-Smith, “Knight and Lady as One: The Reclamation of the ‘Feminine’ in William Morris’s Decorative Arts Designs”
• William Driscoll, “The Metaphor of Syphilis in Grand’s Heavenly Twins“
• Sharleen Mondal, “Racing Desire and the New Man of the House in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone”
• Sara Steger, “Paths to Identity: Dorothy and William Wordsworth and the Writing of Self in Nature”

Reviews

• Kay Heath, “‘Much Yet to Learn’: Feminist Age Studies and the Long Eighteenth Century.” Review of Devoney Looser’s Women Writers and Old Age in Great Britain, 1750-1850.
• Amy J. Robinson, “Friends or Lovers? Austen’s Modern Men.” Review of Michael Kramp’s Disciplining Love: Austen and the Modern Man.
• Brenda R. Weber, “Situating the Exceptional Woman.” Review of Linda L. Clark’s Women and Achievement in Nineteenth-Century Europe and Antonia Losano’s The Woman Painter in Victorian Literature.
• Lee Behlman, “On Not Knowing Greek: Victorian Women Writers and Classical Antiquity.” Review of Shanyn Fiske’s Heretical Hellenism: Women Writers, Ancient Greece, and the Victorian Popular Imagination.
• Susan David Bernstein, “Conversion and Convergence: Gendering Anglo-Jewishness in the Nineteenth Century.” Review of Nadia Valman’s The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture.
• Carol Engelhardt Herringer, “Critiquing Catholicism: Victorian Women Writers and the Secular Home.” Review of Maria LaMonaca’s Masked Atheism: Catholicism and the Secular Victorian Home.
• Éadaoin Agnew, “Invention and Reinvention: The Remarkable Stories of Anna Leonowens.” Review of Susan Morgan’s Bombay Anna: The Real Story and Remarkable Adventures of the “King and I” Governess.
• Joseph McLaughlin, “Modern Masculinities in an Age of Imperial Decline.” Review of Nalin Jayasena’s Contested Masculinities: Crises in Colonial Male Identity from Joseph Conrad to Satyajit Ray.

New issues of Wordsworth Circle, Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly

Just a brief announcement of the April appearance of the Autumn 2008 issue of The Wordsworth Circle (edited by Marilyn Gaull) and the Spring 2009 issue of Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly (edited by Morris Eaves and Morton Paley). Marilyn Gaull has recently relocated the journal to the Editorial Institute of Boston University, where it appears to be thriving.

This is the review issue of The Wordsworth Circle, and it contains reviews of approximately 25 titles in the field, including books by Geoffrey Hartman, Andrew Bennett, Paul Fry, Julie Carlson, Noel Jackson, Adam Potkay, John Strachan, Herbert Tucker, Michael O’Neill, Peter J. Kitson, George Levine, Julia Brown, and many others.

The Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly issue is focused on “Blake in the Marketplace 2008,” and features Bob Essick’s annual review of “significant works by Blake and his circle” that appeared for sale in the past year. The issue also features short articles by M. Crosby, Morton Paley, and G.E. Bentley, Jr.

Studies in Romanticism 47:4 has arrived

The Winter 2008 issue of Studies in Romanticism, edited by David Wagenknecht, has recently hit the library shelves (it will not be available online for 1 year, as per their rolling-wall policy). Here are the articles you’ll find there:

• David Simpson, “‘Which is the merchant here? and which the Jew?’: Friends and Enemies in Walter Scott’s Crusader Novels”
• Chad Wellmon, “Lyrical Feeling: Novalis’ Anthropology of the Senses”
• Paul Miner, “Blake’s ‘Tyger’ as Miltonic Beast”
• Ingrid Horrocks, “‘Her ideas rearranged themselves’: Re-membering Poetry in Radcliffe”
• Talissa J. Ford, “‘Jerusalem is scattered abroad’: Blake’s Ottoman Geographies”
• Eric Lindstrom, “‘To Wordsworth’ and the ‘White Obi’: Slavery, Determination, and Contingency in Shelley’s Peter Bell the Third

The issue also contains reviews of Tim Morton’s Ecology Without Nature (by Bridget Keegan), Anya Taylor’s Erotic Coleridge (by Chuck Rzepka), Regina Hewitt’s Symbolic Interactions (by Bruce Biederwell), and Sara Guyer’s Romanticism after Auschwitz (by Pieter Vermeulen).

New Issue of Victorian Literature and Culture

The March 2009 issue of Victorian Literature and Culture (Cambridge UP Journals), edited by John Maynard and Adrienne Munich, is available, offering a characteristically rich gathering of essays on such subjects as

• Chinese missionaries (Yue, Fiske),
• the Chartist epic (Gilbert),
• Ruskin and mountain climbing (Colley),
• race in Jane Eyre (McKee),
• marriage in Sonnets from the Portuguese (R. Williams),
• Lewis Carroll and Rabelais (Hennelly)
• the Victorian horse (Miele),
• Robert Browning’s “Clive” (Sifaki),
• sensation in Braddon (Badowska)
• Sarah Grand’s The Heavenly Twins (Lloyd),
• eugenics in Trilby (Vorachek),
• the aesthetic movement (Anderson),
• David Livingstone (Wisnicki), and
• Richard Burton (G. Booth).

There is also a group of essays on the afterlives of the Victorians, with contributions by Prettejohn (on Millais), Batchen (on photography), Sussman on Issac Mendes Belisario, and Weltman on Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd. An important review essay by Sally Mitchell on the current study of Victorian journalism, and another by Mark Knight on critical trends in Victorian sensation and crime fiction studies, round out the issue.

Recent titles from UVA Press: Liddle and Bushell

Two new titles in nineteenth-century studies have appeared recently from the University of Virginia Press:

• Dallas Liddle’s The Dynamics of Genre: Journalism and the Practice of Literature in Mid-Victorian Britain, in the Victorian Literature and Culture Series; this book offers “the first rigorous study of the relationship between mid-Victorian journalistic genres and contemporary poetry, the novel, and serious expository prose. Liddle shows that periodical genres competed both ideologically and economically with literary genres, and he studies how this competition influenced the midcentury writings and careers of authors including Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Harriet Martineau, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, and the sensation novelists of the 1860s.”
• Sally Bushell’s Text as Process: Creative Composition in Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Dickinson: “Bushell’s aim in Text as Process is to develop a research method for the study of compositional material…Bushell revisits issues of intention within process and makes this the center of her new approach, employing “case studies” of the work of three major nineteenth-century poets: Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Dickinson.”

Look also for Samuel Baker’s Written on the Water: British Romanticism and the Martime Empire of Culture, forthcoming from the UVA Press in July 2009.

“Blake at 250″: Essay Cluster in New Issue of Nineteenth-Century Literature

The Spring 2009 issue of the journal Nineteenth-Century Literature includes a cluster of essays on William Blake, written in celebration of the 250th anniversary of his birth (2007):

• Steven Goldsmith, “William Blake and the Future of Enthusiasm”; from the abstract: “In Blake we observe the transition from a theological concept of enthusiasm to a practice of literary-critical engagement as enthusiasm.”
• Denise Gigante, “Blake’s Living Form”; from the abstract: “This essay reads William Blake’s illuminated work Jerusalem: The Emanation of The Giant Albion as a key instance of living (or organic) form conceived according to biological principles in the period of Romantic vitalism, 1760–1830.”
• Nicholas M. Williams, “Blake Dead or Alive”; from the abstract: “William Blake’s interests in the living body and its aesthetic analogue, “Living Form,” underlie his attempt at representing motion, a hallmark of animal life…”

The issue also contains an essay by Adam Sonstegard on the American book illustrator Edward Windsor Kemble.

Spring issue of Victorian Periodicals Review out now

The Spring 2009 issue of Victorian Perodicals Review is now available. It contains

• Paul Fyfe’s prize-winning essay on “The Random Selection of Victorian New Media,”
• Margaret Beetham on Lancashire seaside publications,
• Richard Fulton on “The Sudan Sensation of 1898,
• Louis James on boys’ periodicals,
• Sally Mitchell on gender and ephemeral journalism, and
• James Mussell on “Cohering Knowledge in the Nineteenth Century: Form, Genre and Periodical Studies.”

From the editor: “With this volume the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals begins a new relationship with the Johns Hopkins University Press. To commemorate this occasion, we feature a blockbuster selection of articles featuring the latest research from RSVP officers, as well as the winning VanArsdel Prize graduate student essay.”

Romantic and Postromantic Poetry: Rothenberg and Robinson

Just out this year from the University of California Press is volume 3 of Poems for the Millennium: Romantic and Postromantic Poetry, a mind-expanding anthology of poetic writing in the Romantic tradition. You can find the table of contents (in pdf) here.

From the Press site: “Editors Jerome Rothenberg and Jeffrey C. Robinson bring a radically new interpretation to the poetry of the preceding century, viewing the work of the romantic and post-romantic poets as an international, collective, often utopian enterprise that became the foundation of experimental modernism. Global in its range, volume three gathers selections from the poetry and manifestos of canonical poets, as well as the work of lesser-known but equally radical poets. Defining romanticism as experimental and visionary, Rothenberg and Robinson feature prose poetry, verbal-visual experiments, and sound poetry, along with more familiar forms seen here as if for the first time. The anthology also explores romanticism outside the European orbit and includes ethnopoetic and archaeological works outside the literary mainstream. The range of volume three and its skewing of the traditional canon illuminate the process by which romantics and post- romantics challenged nineteenth-century orthodoxies and propelled poetry to the experiments of a later modernism and avant-gardism.”

Dissertation Fellowship in 19th-Century Media: Gale/Cengage

I take this as a promising sign for future relationships between scholars and commercial database-providers. Kudos to RSVP and Gale:

[As posted on the VICTORIA listserv by Patrick Leary]

The Gale Dissertation Research Fellowship in 19th-Century Media

The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP) is pleased to announce a new fellowship for 2009, made possible by the generosity of publisher Gale, part of Cengage Learning, in support of dissertation research that makes substantial use of full-text digitized collections of 19th-century British magazines and newspapers.   A prize of $1500 will be awarded, together with one year’s subscription to selected digital collections from Gale, including “19th Century UK Periodicals” and “19th Century British Library Newspapers.”

Purpose: The purpose of the Gale Dissertation Research Fellowship is two-fold: (1) to support historical and literary research that deepens our understanding of the 19th-century British press in all its rich variety, and (2) to encourage the scholarly use of full-text digitized collections of these primary sources in aid of that research.

Eligibility: Eligible for this award is any currently enrolled postgraduate student, in any academic discipline, who by the end of 2009 will have embarked on a doctoral dissertation or thesis that centrally involves investigation into one or more aspects of the British magazine and newspaper press of the 19th century.  Preference will be given to projects that are interdisciplinary in approach, and that propose to use methods of exploration that online collections uniquely make possible. The digitized collections used in this research may include those created by any publishers or projects, whether commercial or non-commercial.

Applications: Applicants should send a c.v., and the names and contact information of two scholars who are familiar with the applicant and his or her dissertation project; it is expected that one of these will be the student’s dissertation director. The project description (approx. 500-800 words) is the key element of the application. That description should concisely explain the aims of the proposed research and the expected role of full-text digitized collections in that research.

Applications for the Gale Fellowship for dissertation research to be undertaken in 2009-10 must be submitted in electronic form and sent to galefellowship@rs4vp.org by September 1, 2009.  Any queries about the application may be sent to the same address. Applicants will be notified by November 1, 2009. The successful applicant will be expected to submit a brief report to RSVP at the conclusion of the funded portion of the project, describing the results of the research.

For a PDF of this announcement, and for more information about the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals, please visit the Society’s website at http://www.rs4vp.org

New Books by Erik Gray, Andrew Miller, and Nicholas Frankel

The Hoarding is pleased to hail the appearance of three new books in Victorian studies:

Erik Gray’s Milton and the Victorians (Cornell UP) offers “detailed consideration of works by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, Matthew Arnold, Alfred Tennyson, and George Eliot,” and “shows how Victorian writers tended to draw upon the less sublime, more understated elements of Milton’s writings. In tracing the characteristically oblique influence of Milton on Victorian authors, Gray also draws attention to important aspects of Milton’s own work, notably the way it often depicts power being exerted indirectly.”

Andrew Miller’s The Burdens of Perfection (Cornell UP) is “a study of moral perfectionism in nineteenth-century British culture. Reading the period’s essayists (Mill, Arnold, Carlyle), poets (Browning and Tennyson), and especially its novelists (Austen, Dickens, Eliot, and James), Andrew H. Miller provides an extensive response to Stanley Cavell’s contribution to ethics and philosophy of mind. In the process, Miller offers a fresh way to perceive the Victorians and the lingering traces their quests for improvement have left on readers.”

Nicholas Frankel’s Masking the Text: Essays on Literature & Mediation in the 1890s (Rivendale) presents studies of “books by Oscar Wilde, Michael Field, George Meredith, the Rhymers Club, and William Morris, illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley, Charles Ricketts and William Hyde, typography by James McNeill Whistler and William Morris, and the literary implications of forgery, collecting, and typewriting.”

2009 NASSR Conference program: Duke, May 21-24

There’s just enough time left to plan a trip to Durham for the 2009 NASSR Conference; the program is available on this page.

Among the presenters and topics will be Frances Ferguson on progress, Rei Terada on Adorno, Ted Underwood on secularization, Gillen D’Arcy Wood on the nightingale, Mark Parker on the literary magazine, Michael Macovski on the Romantic museum, Piya Pal-Lipinski on phantasmic torture, Noel Jackson on melancholy, Jeffrey Robinson on Shelley and avantgarde Modernism, a roundtable celebrating the career of Robert Gleckner, Tillotama Rajan on excitability, Tim Michael on Shelley and skeptical idealism, Kevis Goodman on nostalgia, Michael Gamer on the collected author, Jonathan Mulrooney on Keats’s Hyperion, Denise Gigante on the essay form, Tom Mole on Byron in bronze, Nicholas Halmi on truth in Don Juan, Adam Potkay on post-modern ecology, Diane Hoeveler on the gothic and modernity, Mark Canuel on utility,…too many intriguing possibilities to list!  This promises to be a great conference.

New Stanford UP titles in 19th-Century Studies

Stanford University Press offers this spring the following new books in the field:

Eric Walker’s Marriage, Writing, and Romanticism: Wordsworth and Austen After War “reads conjugality as the compulsory ground of modern identity, an Enlightenment legacy we still grapple with today.”

Andrew Elfenbein’s Romanticism and the Rise of English asks why the history of the English language has largely disappeared from literary criticism, and argues “for the need to reconceptualize authorial agency in light of a broadened understanding of linguistic history.”

Jacques Khalip’s Anonymous Life: Romanticism and Dispossession argues that “Romanticism sustains an alternative model of being, one anonymous and dispossessed, one whose authority is irreducible to that of an easily recognizable, psychologized persona.”

Michael Marrinan’s Romantic Paris: Histories of a Cultural Landscape, 1800-1850 offers “a richly illustrated survey of cultural life in Paris during some of the most tumultuous decades of the city’s history.”

Look for Anne Frey’s British State Romanticism to come out from Stanford in December.

New Palgrave books: Forgery, Women’s Periodicals, Blake & Conflict

Palgrave/Macmillan continues to publish a large number of interesting titles in nineteenth-century studies. Among the books just out this spring are

Sara Malton’s Forgery in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, which focuses particularly on the forging of financial instruments “from Dickens to Wilde,” with chapters like “Only the Ledger Lives”: Financial Disease and Deception at Mid-Century” and “Apocryphal Business”: Eroding Standards of Value At Home and Abroad.”

Kathryn Ledbetter’s British Victorian Women’s Periodicals: Beauty, Civilization, and Poetry “explores themes and patterns of poetry publication in a variety of women’s periodicals published throughout the Victorian era to answer questions about taste, style, and the significance of poetry to our understanding of women’s lives in the nineteenth century.”

Blake and Conflict, a collection of essays edited by Jon Mee and Sarah Haggerty, rather loosely focused on the idea of contraries and conflict in Blake’s work; with contributions by Sari Makdisi, David Worrall, and Morton Paley.

Victorian Poetry: Tennyson at Two Hundred

The Spring issue of Victorian Poetry is out: “Tennyson at Two Hundred,” guest-edited by Chip Tucker. Wow, this is an incredible set of essays! Jim Nohrnberg’s 50 pages on “Ulysses” and Columbus and Erik Gray’s illuminating consideration of error in “The Lady of Shalott” are standout pieces for me so far.

From Tucker’s introduction:

“And now, on our guest-editorial terrace here, it is 2009 already, and the anniversary is Tennyson’s own. We bring in tribute, and with thanks to the especially hospitable accommodation afforded by this journal’s real editors, a full set of essays spanning an exceptionally long and distinguished poetic career, by unusually divers hands. We cheer the phosphorescence of rising stars in the field (Barton, Gray, Ranum), conjoined with the steady glow —hesperescence? see In Memoriam CXXI—of long established Tennysonians (Peltason, Shaw). Scholars better known as expert in other areas of Victorian literature and culture (Maxwell, Patten, Peterson, Taylor) affirm the Laureate’s centrality, and his eccentricity too, with a species of authority that eludes us who are lifetime acolytes. Graduate students (Hsiao, McCarthy, Ruderman, Tate) bring encouraging news from the fronts of current research, including both the retrieval of newly adduced historical contexts and the ongoing application of that no less basic research we call close reading. It is a particular honor to hail, in James Nohrnberg and William Pritchard, two distinguished visitors from elsewhere in the system of English studies: when such comets swim into our ken, they not only by their angle of vision shed new light on the heritage we keep, but also by their embassage uniquely affirm its value.”

Project MUSE link here.

Swinburne and BAVS/NAVSA conference programs

The conference program for the Swinburne Centenary conference to be held July 10 and 11 at the University of London has been released.  It looks like the entire Swinburnean world will be there.

Immediately following this will be the 2009 NAVSA/BAVS conference at Cambridge: the draft program is available on their site.  Looks to be a terrific conference. A sample session that caught my eye:

‘Uses, Re-Uses and Disposals’ (Fellows’ Dining Room)
Chair – Simon Dentith ( Reading)
Herbert F. Tucker (Virginia), ‘Indisposed:  Towards a Victorian Ecology of Junk’
Dino Franco Felluga (Purdue), ‘George Eliot, Lord Byron and What Must be Kept in the Act of Casting Away’
Nicholas Dames (Columbia), ‘Novel Uses for Biblical Form c. 1860’

New Ashgate titles in 19thC

Just got the new Ashgate catalog for 19th century studies. Here are my highlights:

Maria Schoina’s Romantic ‘Anglo-Italians’, which examines Byron and the Shelleys as expatriates in post-Napoleonic Italy. I have read or heard some pieces of this in advance, and I know that it will be an essential point of reference for Byron and Shelley studies.

Jonathan Shears’s The Romantic Legacy of Paradise Lost, a study of Milton and the Romantics that promises a fresh look at this important subject.

Catherine Waters’s Commodity Culture in Dickens’s Household Words looks like an interesting contribution to Romantic periodicals studies and material culture.  UPDATE, from the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals website: “24 March 2009: RSVP are delighted to announce that the winner of the Colby Prize is Catherine Waters for her book Commodity Culture in Dickens’s Household Words (Ashgate 2008). Professor Waters will give the Colby lecture at this year’s Annual Conference in Minneapolis.”

A collection of essays: The Unfamiliar Shelley, edited by Tim Webb and Alan Weinberg has lots on rarely-discussed Shelley works.

Looking forward to The History of the Book in the West, 1800-1914, edited by Stephen Coclough and Alexis Weedon — forthcoming at the end of 2009….

Wilde and his books

Thomas Wright has recently published Built of Books: How Reading Defined the Life of Oscar Wilde (Henry Holt), in which he examines Wilde’s reading habits, along with as many of the actual volumes Wilde read, in relation to his habits of mind and life. Apparently Wilde marked his books heavily, dog-earing pages, inserting flowers, etc. David Propson in the WSJ calls Wright’s book a “narrative bibliography” which strikes me as a promising genre. I don’t know how well it has been executed here, but I’ll be interested to see.

What is The Hoarding?

I’m starting this blog as a way of calling attention to new scholarly work in Romantic and Victorian studies, with attention to books, articles, digital projects, and conferences in the field.

My hope is that scholars in the field will find The Hoarding to be a useful place of resort to discover new publications and resources.

In the nineenth-century, hoardings — wooden walls thrown up around construction sites — were a favorite target of the bill-stickers, who would cover them with broadsides and posters announcing the latest publications, performances, and the like.

James Orlando Parry, "A London Street Scene" (1835)