Neo-Victorian Voices: Spirited, Julie Cohen (2020)

Welcome (or welcome back!) to my blog and to my Neo-Victorian Voices series, in which I review novels set in the nineteenth century but written in the twenty-first. This time, I’ll be discussing Julie Cohen’s Spirited (2020), which (spoiler alert) I loved!

Julie Cohen and I were previously on a panel together, celebrating the Brontes during the 2020 pandemic lockdowns (catch a video recording of the event here). And I recently had the pleasure of listening to her keynote at the Historical Novel Society 2022 conference. However, this was my first time reading one of her novels.

Set in the 1850s, Spirited tells the story of Viola (an amateur photographer grieving the loss of her beloved father), her new husband, Jonah, who’s keeping secrets about his time in India, and Henriette, a “medium” who’s adept at conning the bereaved. Even this short description gives you a good sense of some of the components that attracted me to the book. I love Victorian settings, a Gothic mood, and the very nineteenth-century fascination with pastimes which test the boundaries between the scientific and the supernatural. 

But I was surprised to find that Spirited also treats the reader to several queer love stories, to some first-class character and relationship development, even as the plot moves forward at a good pace, and to chapters set in a lesser-seen locale in historical fiction, Delhi. 

Cohen does a great job weaving the story threads of her different point of view characters and in withholding information from us without straining credulity (something I complained about in my recent blog on Elizabeth Macneal’s Circus of Wonders (2021)). The opening scene, Viola and Jonah’s wedding, was wonderfully atmospheric, but don’t let the first pages fool you: while the subject matter might sound dark, Cohen gives us moments of levity too, and, against seemingly all odds, delivers a happy ending. 

I’d recommend the novel to readers of Gothic, to people interested in nineteenth-century spiritualism, and to anyone who enjoyed Kris Waldherr’s The Lost History of Dreams (2019).

Which nineteenth-century novel would you like me to review next as part of my Neo-Victorian Voices series? Let me know—here, on Facebook, on Instagram, or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

Neo-Victorian Voices: The Lost History of Dreams, Kris Waldherr (2019)

The latest novel I’m reviewing as part of my Neo-Victorian Voices series, on works of fiction set in the nineteenth century, but written in the twenty-first, is Kris Waldherr’s The Lost History of Dreams, which came out earlier this year.

Waldherr’s debut work of fiction will delight fans of Victorian Gothic. There’s a brooding poet, who spends most of the novel in a coffin, as his fans and relatives argue over where he should be laid to rest. Our protagonist is a post-mortem photographer who’s haunted by the ghost of his wife. And the wider cast includes women who are all afflicted by something—be that grief, madness, consumption, or preternaturally white hair.

The settings are also well wrought, adding to the oppressive mood. Yes, there’s a creepy mansion, with an abandoned wing. There are rooms so gloomy our main character can’t see whom he’s speaking to. And you can’t get much darker than a hovel in the Black Forest, where some of our characters end up. Even a chapel constructed entirely of glass and the English seaside get a Gothic makeover. This is a novel with a consistent aesthetic and this is the focus on every page.

Kris Waldherr

It’s a little harder to connect with the characters. Robert Highstead, the main character, has a tragic backstory in the loss of his wife and an academic interest in Ovid, but it’s hard to describe his personality otherwise. He’s reduced to more of a frame narrator type (think Wuthering Heights or Lady Audley’s Secret) with Isabelle, the teller of the story-within-the-story about the poet and his wife, stealing the show. This is a novel that gives more nuance to its women than the men. The poet, Hugh de Bonne, for instance, comes off as your standard-issue Gothic villain, despite the devotion he inspires in his loyal followers.

Still, if you’re looking for a great Halloween read, look no further. “All love stories are ghost stories in disguise,” Waldherr tells us, and you’ll find few historical novels this year that are better costumed.

What novel should the Secret Victorianist read next as part of my Neo-Victorian Voices series? Let me know—here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

Art Review: Splendour and Misery: Picture of Prostitution, 1850-1910, Musée d’Orsay, Paris

Paris exists in the modern popular imagination globally as a city of romance—the picture perfect background to innumerable engagements, honeymooners and weekend breakers. Yet the City of Love also has a darker past, a reputation for which, in the nineteenth century, it was even more famous, as a spiritual home for Europe’s sex trade.

Rolla, Henri Gervex (1878)

Forget the stylised costumes of Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge (2001); the d’Orsay’s current exhibition, Splendour and Misery: Pictures of Prostitution, 1850-1910, is the first major art show dedicated to vice and contains 15 rooms of artworks (drawings, paintings, photographs and film), spanning the major art movements of the second half of the nineteenth century and beyond, and shedding new light on the practices of the trade.

Au salon, scène de maison close, Constantin Guys 

The show transports you from the streets of Paris, where both illegal and registered prostitutes rubbed shoulders with ‘respectable’ women, advertising their services with subtle visual cues, to the environs of the ballet, where many chorus girls led a double life, to the brothels (maisons de tolérance) where men could indulge in a variety of sexual pleasures at leisure, and, finally, to the pornographer’s studio where staged sexual acts, captured on early film, start to take on a decidedly modern appearance.

Les belles de nuit au jardin de Paris, Jean Béraud (1905)

The experience of visiting the show is designed to feel illicit. Deep red walls serve as a backdrop to the works, while velvet curtains veil those parts of the exhibition off-limits to under 18s, where crowds push to view daguerreotypes through peepholes and stand in awkward silence watching a reel of a nineteenth-century couple taking off layer upon layer of clothing before getting down to the deed.

Le Client, Jean-Louis Forain (1878)

Yet the major takeaway from the show isn’t to romanticise the work women at many social levels were often forced into due to lack of opportunities, education and equal pay.

Femme à La Voilette, Anquetin Louis (1891)

Venereal disease is a major subject and subtext for the works on show (there’s even a wax model taken from the marked face of a syphilitic woman), several of the paintings focus on the interiority and unhappiness of their subjects (for instance Edgar Degas’s L’Absinthe) and the realities of prostitution prove as fertile a ground for artists as the fantasies that surround it, with many works focusing on aspects of life at the brothel we might find mundane (like contemporary hygiene practices) or surprising (e.g. the homoerotic relationships between women living in close proximity to each other within these establishments).

L'Absinthe, Edgar Degas (1875-1876)

The exhibition’s title comes from Honoré de Balzac’s Splendeurs and Misères des Courtisanes (1838-1847) and there’s certainly a lot of splendour on show here too. There are the fine clothes of Jean Béraud’s belles de nuit, Edouard Manet’s infamous Olympia lounges naked and triumphant, and there are many paintings dedicated to recording the lives of the demi-mondaines—those women at the pinnacle of prostitution in the period, who enjoyed luxury and celebrity.

Olympia, Edouard Manet (1863)

When walking around the exhibition, it’s hard not to be struck by the sheer variety—of stories, social classes, sexual positions, body types. The curators choose to touch only briefly on the story of male prostitution (there are some early photographs of male/male penetrative sex on display), but the female sex worker is examined from every angle, always an object, frequently of lust, occasionally of horror, often of pity.

Rousse, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1889)

If you’re in Paris before 17^th January, the exhibition is worth every minute in line at the d’Orsay. It’s a window into Paris’s past and into the bedrooms of generations of its men and women.

Sur le Boulevard (La Parisienne), Louis Valtat (1893)

Do you know of any art exhibitions in New York you think the Secret Victorianist should visit? Let me know—here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

The Secret Victorianist at the London Metropolitan Archives: Victorian London in Photographs

Last weekend, I visited an exhibition at the London Metropolitan Archives that brings to life the city as it looked to the Victorians, through a selection of photographs from the period.

London is explored here from many angles – there are shots of the city skyline (dominated by St Paul’s Cathedral), but also photographs of children in the city’s slums and portraits of famous actors and madhouse inmates.

The exhibition at the LMA (London Metropolitan Archives)

It’s a strange mash up of the unknown and the familiar. London has changed a lot and yet there are still photographs that feel instantly recognisable, albeit that all the images, of course, feel more distant due to the black and white colouring.

The patients of Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum are among the most ‘modern’ human subjects in terms of their appearance. With hair clipped short and in less restrictive clothing than most of their contemporaries, they don’t feel very different at all – making their incarceration for their mental – and, it appears at times, physical – disabilities all the more shocking.

Whitehall from Trafalgar Square (1839)

What’s most revealing about the exhibition is what these early photographers thought to take photographs of – what, for them, was worth memorialisation. There are images of buildings doomed for demolition, demonstrating an early interest in conservation (and not just the conservation of buildings considered grand or opulent). And one of my favourite selections of images was an album of children attending a fancy dress party at the turn of the century, all decked out in costume.

Perhaps the images of most historical interest are those documenting the construction of Tower Bridge (1886-1894) and those of the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace (1851). These latter photographs were particularly notable for me, as, although I’ve read personal and fictional accounts of the Exhibition many times, I’ve never been able to see its impressive scale for myself.

Workers at the Crystal Palace

Those with an interest in early photographic methods will also enjoy seeing the small selection of cameras on show, although I wish there had been some more explanation of how these worked. And the vast array of photographers’ business cards in the exhibition aptly demonstrates the growth of this newly formed and booming industry.

Those visiting the Archives seemed mainly to be academics or those investigating their own personal family histories, but, since the exhibition is free, if you find yourself in Clerkenwell, why not drop in for a visit? Taking these photos took more than the press of a button and the quick application of an Instagram filter, and they are a valuable time portal allowing us to experience Victorian London today.

Children in fancy dress

You can visit Victorian London in Photographs at the London Metropolitan Archives in Clerkenwell until 29 October 2015.

Do you know of any New York City exhibitions you think the Secret Victorianist should visit? Let me know – here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.