The Top 10 Blog Posts from the Secret Victorianist

I can hardly believe it, but I’ve now been running this blog on nineteenth-century literature and culture for over a decade! The blog has changed a lot over the years as I’ve made the move from London to New York City, my interests have evolved, and I’ve become a published author myself. 

So, in a belated anniversary celebration, I decided to look back through the archives to revisit my top 10 performing posts of all time. 

1. Are YOU an Elizabeth Bennet?

I started my blog with a bang and a LOT of enthusiasm, publishing 13 posts in the first month alone (nowadays my goal of two a month is more achievable). This post, a tongue-in-cheek look at whether I would cut it as an Austen heroine, was one of them. Pride and Prejudice (1813) remains such a cultural touchstone I’m not surprised this article still sees traffic every day—I mean, the 1995 BBC adaptation even got a shout-out in the recent Barbie movie!

2. Tennyson’s ‘To Virgil’: An Exercise in Analyzing Poetry

You’ll see a lot of poetry-focused posts in this top 10 list, which was initially surprising to me. When I write about poetry my promotional posts don’t gain a lot of traction on social media, but when it comes to search engine traffic, those articles rise to the top. My hypothesis is that students are stumbling across my blog when looking for homework help analyzing poems like Tennyson’s ‘To Virgil.’ I can only hope they’re enjoying my write ups, and not just plagiarizing my analysis!

3. Introducing Victorian Poetry to Children

More poetry, but this time with a #KidLit twist. In this blog post I share some more accessible Victorian poems to get children excited about reading verse from the period. 

4. The Best and Worst Tropes in Historical Fiction

This 2018 post is focused on my personal opinions about what works and what doesn’t when it comes to historical fiction tropes (and spoiler alert: I’ve already changed my stance on a few of these issues!). I’d be fascinated in hearing other readers’ views on this topic and what makes a historical novel great to them. 

5. ‘This Genealogical Passion’: Hardy, Incest and Degeneration

The high bounce rates I see from this page suggest that maybe an academic blog on nineteenth-century literature and culture isn’t quite what people are looking for when they Googled “incest” (!), but despite this I selfishly wish more people would read Thomas Hardy’s The Well-Beloved (serialized 1892), one of the strangest Victorian novels out there.

6. Review: Against Nature (À Rebours), Joris-Karl Huysmans (1884)

I’ve written quite a lot about nineteenth-century French literature over the years, but this review of the premier text of the French Decadent movement is far and away the best performing.

7. A Victorian Alphabet: W is for Witchcraft

In 2013-2015 I published a series of posts making a nineteenth-century connection to every single letter of the alphabet (yes, some were easier to think up than others!). While the Victorian period isn’t the one we most associate with witchcraft, this post has been a perennial top performer, especially as we approach Halloween. Here, I focus on the accusations of witchcraft leveled against the character of Eustacia Vye in Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native (1878). I also link to my review of Elizabeth Gaskell’s novella, Lois the Witch (1861).

8. A Victorian Alphabet: K is for ‘The Kraken’ (Tennyson, 1830)

More poetry and more Tennyson! In this post I take apart every line of this short and powerful poem about a creature from the deeps. 

9. Misconceptions about Victorian Literature

As a blogger focused on nineteenth-century literature and culture, I often have to contend with people’s preconceptions and misconceptions about what Victorians were like. In this early blog post I tackle the misinformation.

10. A Dickensian Masterclass in Repetition

This is the only writing craft post to make the top 10 and I’m not surprised it’s about lessons we can learn from the master of Victorian literature himself—Charles Dickens. While I do references Dickens’s most famously repetitious passages—the openings of Bleak House (serialized 1852-1853) and A Tale of Two Cities (1859)—it’s his lesser-read 1848 novella The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain that I do a close reading of here.

What would you like to see me write about next as the blog goes into its second decade? Let me know—here, on Facebook, on Instagram, or by tweeting @SVictorianist. Interested in getting regular updates from my blog and on my fiction? Sign up to my monthly email newsletter here.

The Craziest Deaths in Victorian Novels

Happy Halloween, everyone! Today’s festivities have put me in a macabre and morbid mood so for today’s blog post, I’m running through some of the best (or worst?) ways to die in a Victorian novel. If you like your fictional deaths as strange, memorable and zany as possible, you’re in for a treat. 

My Halloween costume this year

Spontaneous Combustion

Who could forget the strange demise of Mr. Krook in Charles Dickens’s masterpiece Bleak House (1852-1853)? His death is the most famous literary example of human spontaneous combustion i.e. when a person goes up in flames for no reason at all. 

Railway Accident

Victorians were terrified of newfangled train travel and, if we’re to believe the novels, for good reason! There are options here: die instantly in a crash or suffocate to death in a tunnel. Or, if you’re Isabel Vane in Ellen Wood’s East Lynne (1861), become disfigured in a derailing before returning to your family in disguise to act as governess to the children you abandoned to run off with your dashing and dastardly love.

Baby Farm

Your odds of surviving infancy weren’t great in the nineteenth century. But they were even worse if you were divided from your mother and put in a “baby farm” i.e. cheap daycare where you were, at best, neglected and, at worst, given poisoned formula. Check out George Moore’s 1894 novel, Esther Waters, for more on this practice.

Switching Places with a Doppelgänger 

Finding someone who looks just like you = all fun and games, until they find themselves destined for the guillotine, and you take their place in a heroic act for the woman you love…according to Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities (1859), anyway.

Sibling Violence

Who hasn’t bickered with a sibling? But let’s just hope your brother isn’t Little Father Time from Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895), who commits a grisly murder/suicide. 

Fire!

If you’re a madwoman who lives in an attic (like Bertha in Charlotte Bronte’s 1847 Jane Eyre) or a crazy old maid who wears her wedding dress every day (like Miss Havisham in Charles Dickens’s 1860-1861 Great Expectations), step away from the candle! 

Consumption

Yes, you’ll still die. But you’ll look beautiful doing it, just like many Victorian heroines. “Consumption, I am aware, is a flattering malady,” Charlotte Bronte wrote in 1849. I’ll take her word for it.

What other literary deaths have I missed? Do you have a favorite strange nineteenth-century character ending? Let me know—here, on Facebook, on Instagram, or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

My nineteenth-century-set novel, Bronte’s Mistress, which includes one example from this list, is available in hardcover, paperback, audiobook, and e-book right now. For regular updates on my blog and writing, sign up to my monthly digital newsletter below.

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VIDEO: Victorian Gothic Panel, hosted by the Mysterious Bookshop, NYC

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.

Top 10 Victorian/Nineteenth-Century Halloween Costume Ideas

Halloween is nearly upon us and every self-respecting Victorianist is contemplating stepping back in time and into the breeches of our favourite historical characters—real and imagined.

Below is a list of the Secret Victorianist’s top picks of nineteenth-century-inspired costumes for you to consider.

1. Miss Havisham

The perennial bride in Charles Dickens’s 1860-1861 Great Expectations is a killer Halloween choice. White dress? Check. Veil? Check? Grey hair and cobwebs? For extra Gothic flare consider singeing your gown and adding dramatic flames. Who says a wedding dress need only be worn once?

2. Queen Victoria

That’s right—go as the monarch of the era herself, with Prince Albert in tow if you’re after a couples’ costume. Otherwise, embrace widowhood and dress head to toe in black.

3. A character from Pride and Prejudice (zombies optional)

Who doesn’t want to an excuse to unleash their inner Lizzie Bennet? Grab some friends and argue about who is each sister if you’re not lucky enough to have found your Darcy. The Pride and Prejudice with Zombies movie is recommended Halloween viewing and could also provide a fun twist on the costume idea.

4. Long John Silver

Before Captain Jack Sparrow lit up our screens it was Long John Silver, the villain from Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1882 Treasure Island, who was the world’s most famous fictional pirate. This costume is all in the accessories: strap on a wooden leg, perch a parrot on your shoulder and grab a map marking the way to those elusive pieces of eight.

5. Abraham Lincoln

The United States’ most-distinctive nineteenth-century president is a great costume choice. The top hat and facial hair will make you instantly recognisable, even if you don’t want to shell out on realistic historical garb.

6. Florence Nightingale

While others are donning their ‘sexy nurse’ outfits, dress up as the lady with the lamp, who tended to British soldiers during the Crimean War.

7. Napoleon

The French emperor shares the laurel with Queen Victoria for the most famous nineteenth-century look. Don’t forget the hat, the epaulettes, or, our course, the pose.

8. The Statue of Liberty

This famous gift from the French to the American republic was dedicated in 1886. Dress in copper tones, rather than green, for a true nineteenth-century feel.

9. Dracula

What could be more classic for Halloween than to dress as the count from Bram Stoker’s 1897 classic. Many won’t know the story’s Victorian provenance though, so try to read the novel before you go to your party!

10. The Nutcracker and Sugar Plum Fairy

If you’re itching for Halloween to be over, Christmas can come early with your costume choice. The ballet was first performed in 1892 and is great Halloween inspiration. Don your tutu to be the Sugar Plum Fairy, look distinguished in your red coat as the nutcracker himself, or maybe even go for a giant rat costume.

Do you have any other Victorian/nineteenth-century costume ideas (or pics!) to share? Let me know—here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

(Super)natural horror in Wilkie Collins

Halloween is only just behind us and, since last week when I recommended his A Terribly Strange Bed (1852), I’ve been diving deeper into some unsettling and atmospheric short stories penned by Wilkie Collins.

The Ghost Story, R. Graves (1874)

This week I’ll be talking about two 1855 stories — Mad Monkton and The Ostler, the latter of which was the first piece of Collins I ever read as part of the English Literature GCSE syllabus.

These two stories share several similarities. Both revolve around the idea of warnings, alerting men to the circumstances of their own deaths but ultimately unable to save them. Each story is narrated by a male character who stands apart from the central action and is, especially in Mad Monkton, sceptical about the possibility of ghostly apparitions. And in both cases, while the most obvious explanation for the plot is supernatural, there are other possible interpretations.

In Mad Monkton there may be no ghost at all. Alfred could simply be suffering from a madness that runs in his family:

It was equally clear that [Alfred Monkton’s] delusions had been produced, in the first instance, by the lonely life he had led, acting on a naturally excitable temperament, which was rendered further liable to moral disease by an hereditary taint of insanity.

And Isaac, the eponymous ostler in the second tale is discredited as a witness to the possibly demonic forces that seem to pursue him through Collins’s focus on his lack of natural intelligence:

Naturally slow in capacity, he had the bluntness of sensibility and phlegmatic patience of disposition which frequently distinguish men with sluggishly-working mental powers.

Our desire to attribute these stories to ghostly interference then could be because this is the less terrifying option. For Collins, the fact that there could be something innate inside us, something passed on by our bloodlines, something we are unable to change, is more horrific than the idea that we could be a victim of circumstance or supernatural forces.

Monkton’s end is all the more tragic if his quest to find his uncle’s body was ill-informed and unnecessary all along. It is possible that Isaac could have had a happy marriage had he and his mother not drawn parallels between his bride and a single nightmare. And maybe Rebecca Murdoch the real life drunken wife is more terrifying than a murderous ‘dream woman’.

Collins’s most terrifying proposition to us is that the scariest stories are part of our nature — not dictated by something external to it.

Illustration by F.S. Coburn (19th-century)

What would you like to see the Secret Victorianist read next? Let me know — here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

Have a Very Victorian Halloween!

In honour of this Halloween season, the Secret Victorianist brings you five top tips for having a spooktacularly Victorian October 31^st!

Martita Hunt as Miss Havisham in the 1846 Great Expectations

1. Read a Victorian ghost story

You might associate Victorian ghosts with Christmas and Charles Dickens’s ever popular A Christmas Carol (1842), but they are plenty more spine tingling reads to dip into before December. Check out some Sheridan Le Fanu (review here) or quake at Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Body Snatcher (1884).

2. Dive into a scary story with no ghosts at all

Some of the scariest nineteenth-century reads aren’t supernatural at all. I’d recommend Wilkie Collins’s A Terribly Strange Bed (1852), which I read for the first time recently. Unsavoury characters, an ingenious murder device and an intriguing frame narrative set this one apart.

3. Even better – read one of these stories aloud

Dim the lights, huddle round the campfire, and rekindle the Victorian tradition of reading aloud to family and friends. Bonus points for your best Tennyson-inspired voice!

4. Slip into a Victorian inspired costume

There are so many Halloween costume ideas out there for the budding Victorianist. Some of my favourites: find a tattered white dress and act the eternal bride Miss Havisham, grab a friend to go as Jekyll and Hyde, or perch a toy raven on your shoulder and you’re an instant Edgar Allen Poe.

5. Binge watch Steampunk’d

Don’t fancy painting the town red on a Monday night? Have a low key Halloween by binge watching the show that pitches makers of Victoriana against each other – Steampunk’d. I just discovered it on Netflix and am gutted GSN ruled out a second season.

The judges on Steampunk'd

Did you have any Victorian-inspired fun this Halloween weekend? Let me know what you got up to – here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist.

The Birth of the Frankenstein Myth: Happy Halloween from the Secret Victorianist

Few works have been so continuously adapted as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus (1818), and few have led to so much confusion about the tale and the actors in it, down to the very names of student Victor Frankenstein and his un-christened monster.

To celebrate this Halloween, I thought I’d write a blog post, looking back at the ‘birth’ of the Frankenstein myth and the moment the scientist gives life to his monster.

Boris Karloff who played the monster in three films between 1931 and 1939

Shelley writes:

It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.

How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful! Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun-white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.

The night-time setting of this moment of animation has been preserved in many versions of the story, but, if you’ve not read the novel before, you may be surprised to find certain details ‘missing’. Frankenstein’s power to grant life to a body crafted from cadavers is left deliberately vague. The scientist will not share this secret with Captain Walton to whom he tells his strange tale, and, in Shelley’s version, there are no lightening bolts or sparks of electricity.

Charles Ogle as the monster in 1910

With the tunnel vision that a first person voice can provide in fiction, Shelley directs us to telling details. We know the monster is alive because he ‘breathed’ but Shelley also hints that his life is not purely physical. The first thing Frankenstein notices is the opening of the creature’s eye, suggesting to us that this monster has an inner life, and its own perspective, from the moment of its birth.

Frankenstein’s monster is also better looking than we might have thought him. ‘Lustrous black’ hair and ‘pearly white’ teeth are not exactly the attributes we have come to associate with this Halloween favourite. While some of the reasons for Frankenstein’s disgust are rooted in the appearance of the monster (not many people, it’s true, can pull off black lips or look good with watery eyes!), much of the horror he feels could indeed be a manifestation of his own guilt at taking on the role of a creator.

His observation, in particular, that the monster’s ‘yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath’ could just be the skewed perspective of the maker who has worked to connect these arteries and muscles. One reason this paragraph is frightening for the reader is because it reminds us that our own bones and sinews don’t lie that far below our skin.

Iconic literary moments can often come to surpass the words they were first written in, but there’s always something to be gained from going back to the beginning and analysing the language that made them so powerful.

Are you doing anything inspired by the nineteenth century this Halloween? Let me know – here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist!

Art Review: The Art of Mourning, The Morbid Anatomy Museum, Brooklyn, New York

To round off the Halloween weekend, I paid a visit to one of New York’s spookiest spots and lesser-known museums – a building stocked with taxidermied animals, human skulls and dead things in jars – the Morbid Anatomy Museum in Brooklyn.

While the museum houses objects from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, its current exhibition (running until January 2015) is centred on the ‘art’ of mourning and is, subsequently, quite nineteenth century in focus. As any lover of Victorian literature will know from the many, many deathbed scenes to be encountered in the period’s novels, high infant mortality, famous mourners (e.g. Queen Victoria herself) and an obsession with sickness, led to something of a cult surrounding death and remembrance. The objects this exhibition celebrates were the physical manifestations of this and originated in both America and Europe in the period.

L'Inconnue de la Seine

The exhibition is small but varied. There are portraits, painted post-mortem (see my discussion of a fictional example of one of these in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh here). Many of these are of children and infants, made more cherubic by being painted surrounded by clouds, although their faces all bear the hallmarks of death. There are many photographs of corpses – sometimes in coffins, sometimes in bed and often posed alongside living family members. And there are the mourning clothes – veils and bonnets – which point to the formalised strictures and social conventions surrounding mourning at the time.

But there are many items stranger than this… Here too are death masks, including an example of one of the most famous, L’Inconnue de la Seine – a mask taken from an unknown woman with a mysterious smile who drowned herself in the Seine in the 1880s. There is a lot of hair work – with the deceased’s hair being braided into rosaries and intricate decorations or incorporated into mourning scenes displayed in shadow boxes.

What seems so strange to modern viewers looking at all of this is that these items are very much made for display. Now, death is hidden away, sanitised and dealt with away from the home. The exhibition curators make an interesting point when they reference how the growth in popularity of professional funeral parlours meant the removal of death from the family parlour, and even the renaming of the room as a living room.

The Secret Victorianist visits the Morbid Anatomy Museum

Importantly though, despite how strange some of these mourning rituals might seem today, this isn’t a freak show. It’s a bit like looking like an old graveyard – beautiful, curious, with an occasional tinge of sadness. If you’re in the area, I’d definitely recommend visiting the exhibition, but not as a replacement for a haunted house. The museum is a quiet place to walk around and is also home to a library where visitors were reflectively leafing through books on medical history and anatomical art. One of them was wearing a top hat and, somehow, he seemed the most at home.

Do you know of any other nineteenth-century attractions in New York the Secret Victorianist should visit? If you do, then let me know – here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist!

A Victorian Alphabet: W is for Witchcraft

With Halloween just around the corner, I thought I’d use ‘W’ in my Victorian Alphabet to look at a subject not often associated with the nineteenth-century – witchcraft.

Those interested in witchcraft and the supernatural most often turn to Early Modern literature (Marlowe, Middleton, Greene, Rowley, Decker and Ford), especially as the mid-1600s saw the last execution of a witch in England, or to writings centred on the Salem Witch Trials in America, later in that century. Yet superstitions surrounding magic – and particularly women as workers of evil magic – were prevalent in the England, especially in rural communities, in the Victorian period.

Any visitor to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford (yet another city attraction which any budding victorianist should check out) can see English objects from the period with magical uses (e.g. a witch in a bottle, a pig’s heart struck through with pins and nails for warding away evil spirits) and the topic makes its mark on literature too.

Elizabeth Gaskell turned to the past and to Salem for her novella Lois the Witch (1861), which I wrote about previously, but Thomas Hardy is the writer whose interest in rural traditions gives us a picture of contemporary (or near contemporary) superstitions about witchcraft.

Le Chapeau de Brigand, Thomas Uwins (1833)

In The Return of the Native (1878) the heath dwellers are deeply suspicious of Eustacia Vye and the combination of her position as an outsider, dark beauty and lonely habits leaves her open to the charge of being a witch. In fact, this is how we are first introduced to her:

"He means, sir, that the lonesome dark-eyed creature up there that some say is a witch—ever I should call a fine young woman such a name—is always up to some odd conceit or other; and so perhaps 'tis she."

"I'd be very glad to ask her in wedlock, if she'd hae me and take the risk of her wild dark eyes ill-wishing me," said Grandfer Cantle staunchly.

"Don't ye say it, Father!" implored Christian.

Eustacia’s youth and beauty means that Timothy (the first speaker) is loath to call her a witch, while at the same time it is her attractive ‘wild dark eyes’ which make such an identification probable. As the novel progresses what we might dismiss as superstitious prattle from the locals becomes an important plot point. Eustacia is suspected to such a degree that she is physically assaulted in church, having been blamed for the illness of Susan Nunsuch’s children:

“We hadn't been hard at it for more than a minute when a most terrible screech sounded through church, as if somebody had just gied up their heart's blood. All the folk jumped up and then we found that Susan Nunsuch had pricked Miss Vye with a long stocking-needle, as she had threatened to do as soon as ever she could get the young lady to church, where she don't come very often. She've waited for this chance for weeks, so as to draw her blood and put an end to the bewitching of Susan's children that has been carried on so long. Sue followed her into church, sat next to her, and as soon as she could find a chance in went the stocking-needle into my lady's arm."

Susan Nunsuch’s victimisation of Eustacia sets in motion the closing events in the novel. She counters the girl’s suspected magic with her own, creating, attacking and eventually burning something resembling a voodoo doll she fashions to resemble Eustacia:

From her workbasket in the window-seat the woman took a paper of pins, of the old long and yellow sort, whose heads were disposed to come off at their first usage. These she began to thrust into the image in all directions, with apparently excruciating energy. Probably as many as fifty were thus inserted, some into the head of the wax model, some into the shoulders, some into the trunk, some upwards through the soles of the feet, till the figure was completely permeated with pins.

Eustacia’s death, which could be attributed to accident or suicide, could equally have a supernatural explanation because of Susan’s actions here. Witches might not be being burned at the stake in Victorian England but being suspected of witchcraft could, it seems, be equally life destroying.

This, of course, is not Hardy’s only treatment of superstitious traditions – consider Midsummer Eve in The Woodlanders (1886-7) or the role of Stonehenge in Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891). All too often the Victorian period can seem all too familiar and knowable, but there is plenty, even in realist fiction, for lovers of the uncanny this Halloween season.

What should be ‘X’ in my Victorian Alphabet? Please help me out! Let me know here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist!