The Secret Victorianist at the UK Blog Awards 2014

On Friday night I was lucky enough (thanks to your votes!) to attend the awards ceremony for the UK Blog Awards 2014 at Grange St. Paul’s here in London. The awards recognise the best of British blogging talent and celebrate the diversity of subjects people like to read and write about online – from weddings to automobiles, health and fitness to PR, and, the category my blog was nominated for, Arts and Culture.

Blogging can feel like a private and confessional activity, even if you don’t write about your own life. I post from bed, dream up blog topics in the bath, and have been known to steal WiFi from unsuspecting neighbours while staying with my grandmother just to respond to your comments. So attending an event as the Secret Victorianist for the first time was novel and a little nerve-wracking. Meeting each finalist at the awards gave an instant insight into someone else’s private world. I met people who dedicate hours of their time to writing about food or beauty products outside their nine to five, students using blogging to help them secure jobs after graduating, those who run organisational blogs for whom this was a work event and, occasionally, men and women for whom their blogs are a full time occupation, with more clicks equalling more food on the table, or an extra pint at the pub.

While this was a competition then, there was definitely an atmosphere of camaraderie, as no two blogs are ever on the same topic. Arts and Culture alone included everything from crocheting to folk music to mediaeval manuscripts. Our category judges were Richard Moss, Editor of the Culture 24 website, and Claire Barlow, Regional Manager for Arts & Business North West, and the task of picking out winners mustn’t have been easy. Carli Palmer, a judge for the Retail and Fashion category, who works as a Social Media and Content Marketing Manager for House of Fraser, told me the judging process took her a solid weekend of reading - not just the blogs themselves, but bloggers’ various social channels. For each category, there were 10 shortlisted finalists, and, on the night, the judges awarded one or two Highly Commended awards, before announcing the category winner.

I was surprised and delighted to be Highly Commended for best individual Arts and Culture blog, along with Urban Kultur. After only 10 months of blogging, it’s wonderful to know that people enjoy what you’re writing and have supported your efforts by voting. The category was won by Skyliner – a wonderful blog on the cultural heritage of Manchester which I keep up to date with by following @custardlove on Twitter. The full list of shortlisted blogs in our category can be seen here and are well worth checking out! The awards night was a great experience and made me even keener to keep sharing what I love about literature with you on my site and follow up with the people I meet through the blog in the real world too.

In my next posts I’ll be back to my normal blogging topics, reviewing Esther Waters which I wrote about in my recent post on ‘invisible’ nineteenth-century pregnancies, and picking up with ‘Q’ in my Victorian Alphabet. If you have any suggestions for what you’d like to read about on the blog, or know of any exhibitions, events and performances coming up which are likely to interest me and other budding Victorianists, then, as ever, let me know – by commenting below, tweeting @SVictorianist or getting in touch via Facebook.

Teaching (Victorian) Literature; or the True and Lamentable Story of Literary Murder

Along with Shakespeare, the Victorian novel is perhaps the greatest victim of the British schooling system. For many, the only nineteenth-century novel they will ever read is a Bronte, Dickens or Hardy ‘ploughed’ through over months of tedious class group reading and beaten to death through ridiculous exercises and slavish commitment to assessment objectives. During my time in school English classrooms I liked literature despite (not because) of how it was taught and, several years on, here are some personal reflections on what works and what doesn’t when introducing students to weighty, complex but rewarding texts.

A schoolroom

 Don’t pretend English is Maths:
I can imagine this stroke of ‘genius’ as it came to my disgruntled, disillusioned GCSE teacher. Her students hated English, hated her, and seemed certain to hate the selection of Victorian stories on the supernatural we were to tackle for coursework - H.G. Wells’s The Red Room (1894), Wilkie Collins’s The Ostler (1855), Charles Dickens’s A Confession Found in a Prison (1840-1) and Edgar Allen Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher (1839). What if she could only harness our superior attainments in Mathematics! We were soon set to work on graphs, designed to chart how suspense was created and varied throughout a short story, mapping how key moments in plot affected our (hopefully equally susceptible) nerves.

The results were disastrous. Some science-loving students had their suspicions that English was far from academically rigorous confirmed as people bickered over whether a door slamming was a 6, 7 or 8 out of 10. Our teacher muddled her terms, as war erupted over labelling the x and y axes. And most of the room couldn’t even remember the events we were meant to be ranking from the Poe, they had found the prose so impenetrable.

An alternative: Talking about the ways suspense can be created could be really fruitful, but only talking about plot ignores the very language students are meant to be learning to analyse. Why not show students a suspenseful scene from a modern movie dealing with the supernatural and then get them to write it in the first person, using some techniques employed by the authors of these (first person) stories? Concentrating on what language can add – what it is, rather than what it isn’t – is the way to explain its value.

Don’t tell students the ‘answer’:

‘Why does Eustacia marry Clym?’ (in Hardy’s The Return of the Native, 1878), ‘How does Tennyson feel about war?’ and ‘Are we meant to like Nelly?’ (E. Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, 1845-6) were all questions with set answers, which could be neatly bullet-pointed and forcibly ingested ahead of exam time, when I was first asked to consider them. This isn’t fun for anyone, especially not the teachers who have taught the same set texts for years, and it’s not reflective of the moral questioning and skilful ambiguity which pervades much of the writing of the period.

An alternative: Encourage debate, get students to argue a point both (or even more than two) ways and suggest how this potential for discussion can be a strength, not a fault of great writing. This will help those approaching literature academically for the first time get better at differentiating between tones, recognising subversion and appreciating nuances of expression.

Don’t ‘do context’: 

Students who are perfectly capable of A Level standard history work, are routinely fed the kind of facts about Victorians which decorate the walls of primary schools as soon as it comes to adding ‘context’ to their English essays. Apparently, Victorians treated women badly, liked trains, were upset by Darwin, were very uptight about sex and that’s about it (okay, well maybe the last one wouldn’t be included in a younger children’s collage).

The alternative: Context isn’t an extra in English. Historical and social contexts should inform how students read and interpret literature at every point. The best way to approach this is by simply reading more – about the period or just from within the period. Rather than focussing on one novel the whole time, the more successful students will read around the subject. You will perform better if you’ve read more than one novel by the author you’re studying or by one of his or her contemporaries - not because you can name drop, but because you’ll have imbibed more about the time.

What were your experiences (good and bad) of nineteenth-century literature at school? Scarring? Inspiring? And, if you’re a teacher, how do you approach long and difficult novels with your classes? Let me know below, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist. And if you enjoy the blog, please VOTE for the Secret Victorianist in the UK Blog Awards!

Vote for the Secret Victorianist in the UK Blog Awards 2014

If you like reading about all things Victorian on the Secret Victorianist blog, please vote  in the UK Blog Awards 2014, where the blog is competing in the Arts and Culture category.

This year, I've blogged about topics as varied as blockbuster movies, corsets, incest, Dr Who and hair extensions. I've watched ballets and plays, taken trips to art galleries and helped you all plan nineteenth century-inspired tours of Oxford.

If you enjoyed discovering more from nineteenth-century literature with me then please take the time to vote (and check out the other entrants!). The awards can be found tweeting @UKBlogAwards.