Search

Drawing upon Michael Waters’s and Sarah Bilston’s studies of Victorian literary representations of gardens, this article delves into scenes, activities, and imagery related to gardens and gardening in Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son. Examining these “garden elements” in the novel, it explores how seemingly apolitical garden scenes and gardening activities were embedded in Victorian schemas of gender and class configuration. Specifically, it analyses how Dickens skilfully exposes the unjust exploitation of women and the working class by a capitalist economy that prioritised the bourgeois male elite. The article argues that through his depiction of the transformative changes taking place in Staggs’s Gardens, Dickens expresses a cautious optimism towards the emerging railway economy, subtly suggesting that it has the potential to benefit the working class and supplant the out-dated mercantile economy symbolised by Dombey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The British Army during Victoria's reign has been portrayed as an institution standing awkwardly next to British society. Legal authorities and academics have used military law as an example, noting the military's "capricious" legal processes in contrast to the predictable civilian experience. Rather than understanding military legal processes though, academics tend to focus on discipline or penalties foreign to today's mind. This article draws evidence from centuries of legal development and late-nineteenth-century sources to demonstrate a far greater commonality between civilian and military legal experiences. The military's legal tradition describes, in part, the military's position as a rare example of a truly "British" institution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Queer Economic Dissonance and Victorian Literature" is a scholarly monograph that explores the intersection of economic desire and interpersonal relations in nineteenth-century literature. The book examines various economic strategies depicted in Victorian fiction and non-fiction prose, challenging the emerging norms of economic discourse. The author analyzes works by authors such as Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Mary Seacole, and Oscar Wilde, highlighting the diverse and unconventional economic practices portrayed in their writings. The book offers a nuanced and historical perspective on Victorian desire and its significance in affective relationships beyond the heterosexual dyad. [Extracted from the article]

Copyright of Black Sea / Karadeniz is the property of Black Sea / Karadeniz and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This study aimed to elaborate on the relationship between social issues during the Victorian era and Nice Girl syndrome, as demonstrated in Elizabeth Gaskell's Ruth. A qualitative descriptive method was employed to achieve this objective, incorporating Alfred Adler's Individual Personality approach and Beverly Engel's Nice Girl syndrome as the grand theory. Data on female characters' behaviour and thoughts in Elizabeth Gaskell's Ruth were collected and analyzed using Adler's and Nice Girl syndrome theories, respectively. Furthermore, the dialogue and monologue of female characters were also considered. The results showed that social issues such as social class, Victorian family, Victorian ideal womanhood, and Victorian religion and morality related to Nice Girl syndrome during the Victorian era influenced and contributed to the formation of Ruth's female characters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians of science and religion need to pay more attention to how historical-critical scholarship influenced perceptions of the relationship between science and religion in the Victorian era. In this paper, I would like to begin redressing this problem by examining how the rise of biblical criticism in general, and the issues of Christology in particular, had influenced views of the relationship between science and religion at the end of the nineteenth century. Indeed, almost all members and promoters of ‘scientific naturalism,’ including the Victorian coterie of the X-Club, Thomas H. Huxley, John Tyndall, and Herbert Spencer, among others, constructed their views on sciencereligion relations in response to historical-critical scholarship. Moreover, even the so-called ‘cofounders’ of the ‘conflict thesis,’ John W. Draper and Andrew D. White, were significantly affected by this literature. That is, developments in biblical criticism directly impacted how White, Draper, and others of their ilk understood the relationship between science and religion. By examining more carefully how historical criticism played a significant role in the thought of these writers during the Victorian period, I hope to relocate the origins, development, and meaning of the science-religion debate at the end of the nineteenth century [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces and explores the 3.5-million-word Victorian Anti-Vaccination Discourse Corpus (VicVaDis). The corpus is intended to provide a (freely accessible) historical resource for the investigation of the earliest public concerns and arguments against vaccination in England, which revolved around compulsory vaccination against smallpox in the second half of the 19th century. It consists of 133 anti-vaccination pamphlets and publications gathered from 1854 to 1906, a span of 53 years that loosely coincides with the Victorian era (1837–1901). This timeframe was chosen to capture the period between the 1853 Vaccination Act, which made smallpox vaccination for babies compulsory, and the 1907 Act that effectively ended the mandatory nature of vaccination. After an overview of the historical background, this article describes the rationale, design and construction of the corpus, and then demonstrates how it can be exploited to investigate the main arguments against compulsory vaccination by means of widely accessible corpus linguistic tools. Where appropriate, parallels are drawn between Victorian and 21st-century vaccine-hesitant attitudes and arguments. Overall, this article demonstrates the potential of corpus analysis to add to our understanding of historical concerns about vaccination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article of Shannon Forbes “Equating Performance with Identity: The Failure of Clarissa Dalloway's Victorian “Self” in Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway” deals with the critique of Virginia Woolf for the Victorian ideas of the identity and unity of the Ego and the identity and unity of consciousness. The article is about the novel Mrs. Dalloway. It examines some of the feminist and psychoanalytic implications of this critique and outlines some important parallels with the essay A Room of One’s Own by Woolf. The early feminist writing of Woolf is viewed in the light of the psychoanalytic doctrine of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan that undermines the claims of the ethics of the 19th century that the subject must be consistent and monolithic and anything else should be considered unhealthy. The article elaborates on the episodes in Mrs. Dalloway where Clarissa enjoys the walks in London precisely for the purpose of borrowing from the orderliness of the modern city and putting her own personality in order. Clarissa presents the meetings with Peter and Septimus as overburdening because of their questions is she happy and how does she feel. Judith Butler is quoted revealing the performative meaning of Mrs. Dalloway’s actions and her life as a performance. Luce Irigaray is quoted in feminist perspective. She comments on the mirror-function of female personality in patriarchal society, which keeps the female identity always fragmentary and dependent. Clarissa Dalloway hopes for her party to resolve all that. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the notion of constitutional deliverance within the Victorian settlement. The expression points to the way constitutional arrangements react to threats that may disrupt the politico-legal order. Rooted in constitutional morality, it entails executing justice, restoring order, and protecting individuals' rights and freedoms. To this end, it analyses Phineas Finn, Phineas Redux, and The Prime Minister, i.e. three of the six Anthony Trollope's Palliser Novels, and explores whether the freedom of the press executed constitutional deliverance in the Victorian era. The essay will focus on Mr Quintus Slide, the editor of the People's Banner, whose acts of moralisation seem to fit into the (political and biblical) notion of deliverance. The article argues that Slide used the press not to deliver the Nation, but to avenge his own interests. In so doing, he contradicted the idea of constitutional deliverance as embedded in Parliament, where the anointed Monarch summons His body politic to execute justice and protect it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wolf Rock Lighthouse is a Victorian era masonry structure located in an extreme environment facing the fiercest Atlantic storms off the southwest coast of England whose dynamic behaviour has been studied since 2016. Initially, a modal test was used to determine modal parameters; then, in 2017, a monitoring system was installed that has operated intermittently providing response data for a number of characteristic loading events. These events have included wave loads due to storms, a small UK earthquake, helicopters landing on the helideck, and the grounding of a ship on the reef. This is believed to be the most extensive experimental campaign on any structure of this type. This paper briefly describes a unique project involving the characterisation and measurement of dynamic behaviour due to different forms of dynamic loading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a trans intervention in Victorian studies and historical extension of recent work in trans studies, this article argues that the theorisation of natural laws in mid‐nineteenth century, British physiology produces a 'preliminary cisness' in Victorian sexual science. By then juxtaposing George Eliot's Adam Bede with work by Herbert Spencer and George Henry Lewes and undertaking a close study of the characters Hetty Sorrel and Dinah Morris, this article suggests that Eliot offers social sympathy as a non‐cis, epistemological alternative to the ethical risks of pre‐cis sex. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Responding to the U.S. Supreme Court's 2022 reversal of Roe v. Wade, I produced the following conceptual writing. I took alternating lines from works by two well-known 19th-century British authors, one an anti-feminist woman and the other a pro-feminist man, pasting them line-by-line into one document. The resulting mashup text presents a contradictory, destabilizing view of women's rights and responsibilities. The back-and-forth of each author's strong opinion from over 130 years ago takes on strange contemporary relevance reflective of women's ongoing second-class status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Cahiers Victoriens & Edouardiens is the property of Presses Universitaires de la Mediterranee and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Cahiers Victoriens & Edouardiens is the property of Presses Universitaires de la Mediterranee and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Cahiers Victoriens & Edouardiens is the property of Presses Universitaires de la Mediterranee and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Women diagnosed with melanoma have better survival than men, but little is known about potential intervention targets to reduce this survival gap by sex. We conducted a population‐based study using Victorian Cancer Registry data including 5833 women and 6780 men aged 15 to 70 years when diagnosed with first primary melanoma between 2007 and 2015. Deaths to the end of 2020 were identified through linkage to the Victorian and national death registries. We estimated the effect of age at diagnosis, tumour thickness and tumour site on reducing the melanoma‐specific survival gap by sex (ie, interventional indirect effects [IIEs]) on risk difference (RD) scale. Compared to women, there were 211 (95% CI: 145‐278) additional deaths per 10 000 in men within 5 years following diagnosis. We estimated that 44% of this gap would be reduced by a hypothetical intervention shifting the distribution of melanoma thickness in men to be the same as that observed for women (IIEthickness RD 93 [95% CI: 75‐118] per 10 000) and 20% by an intervention on tumour site (head and neck/trunk vs upper limb/lower limb; IIEsite RD 42 [95% CI: 15‐72] per 10 000), while an intervention on age at diagnosis would have a negligible effect. Tumour thickness, tumour site and age at diagnosis mediated 65% of the effect of sex on 5‐year melanoma survival in Victoria. Of these factors, tumour thickness had the most considerable mediating effect, suggesting that effective promotion of earlier detection of melanoma in men could potentially nearly halve the gap in melanoma‐specific survival by sex. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Florence Nightingale rose to fame early in 1855 at a time when provincialism was assuming unprecedented importance in Victorian culture. The London papers The Times and the Illustrated London News linked Nightingale to the typically provincial domain of the parish and the home: her public image reflecting the wish to extend domestic comfort to soldiers, adrift on foreign land and neglected by uncaring military authorities. Nightingale's campaigns to improve soldiers' conditions then galvanized the charitable enthusiasms of households across Britain and its colonies, as the public sent contributions ranging from knitted slippers to bedsheets repurposed as wound dressings on ships to the Crimea. Nightingale subsequently introduced army reading rooms stocked with works of regional and provincial fiction, either as actual volumes or as instalments in periodicals such as Household Words , to bring the imaginative connections between the parish and the Scutari hospitals closer still. While recent work by Stefanie Markovits and Holly Furneaux has shown how the cultural lives of 'home' and 'the East' were closer than previously thought, I contend that two distinctively provincial features of Nightingale's place within the conflict have not been sufficiently recognized. First, Nightingale drew on gendered notions of the home and domesticity that were crucial to the provincial as it gained appeal and meaning during the middle of the century. Second, in facilitating imaginative connections between soldiers and the reading public many thousands of miles away, Nightingale showed that the provincial operated most effectively at distance, where its effects were felt most strongly among an increasingly dispersed and fragmented nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout its serial run, Charles Dickens's Pickwick Papers (1836–7), was repurposed hundreds of times by the provincial press. From acting as innocuous filler material to making strategic political statements, provincial newspaper editors evoked, excerpted and adapted Pickwick as quickly as Dickens was penning the instalments, showing a keen responsiveness to political topicalities relevant to their reading communities. This article contends that these types of journalistic re-use benefit from being read collectively as a form of remediation, defined by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin as 'the formal logic by which new media refashion prior media forms'. It argues that these remediations are vital to understanding the politics of the provincial press because they became one method through which provincial newspapers articulated a localised response to the national political debates that raged following the 1832 Reform Act. As well as reflecting the political priorities of specific communities, these remediations nuance our understanding of Pickwick 's popularity by drawing attention to aspects of its construction that lent themselves to re-use. While explicit engagement with party politics is conspicuously absent from Pickwick , provincial editors capitalised upon this generality and imbued their re-workings of the serial with a partisanship that Dickens himself avoided, while using his name to substantiate and authorise their own pieces. In this respect, these remediations invite us to place Pickwick at the heart of political debate in the papers, by foregrounding the close relationship between newspaper politics, serial literature, and provincial identity in the 1830s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Benjamin Disraeli has often been represented as a mercurial self-fashioner who adopted various expedient personae over the course of his public life. The biographical emphasis on his eccentric personality has caused many historians to distance Disraeli from his nineteenth-century intellectual contexts in their analysis of his thought. Disraeli wrote within a literary culture that remained invested in the Bible as an important narrative authority. The poetry and fiction of the period inflected, transformed, and challenged this authority, but it also remained in purposeful conversation with the Bible as it forged new moral and literary territory. Disraeli participated in this discourse throughout his fiction, especially in two of his works: Alroy (1833) and Tancred (1847). In these novels Disraeli drew considerably on biblical patterns of kingship and nationhood and often used language from the King James Bible. In surfacing his interest in Scripture, this article suggests that Disraeli represented the Bible's ancient wisdom as an important bulwark against some of the fast-paced social and political changes of his time and particularly against the 'Whiggish' tendencies of his political opponents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In nineteenth-century Britain, the antivivisection movement attracted a striking number of authors, poets, and playwrights, who attended meetings, signed petitions, contributed funds, and lent their pens to the cause. However, the language of vivisection extended far beyond literature with a purpose, seeping into the heart of late-Victorian literary debates. This article explores analogies of writing as vivisection in literary-critical discourse. Surveying the newspapers and periodicals of the period demonstrates that such terminology was remarkably sprawling in terms of the genres and authors it was applied to and the meanings it conveyed. Essayists and reviewers also used metaphors relating to experimental physiology's modus operandi to shape and articulate key methodological and ideological principles that were emerging in late-Victorian literary-critical theory and practice. These included discussions of how to analyse living authors and contemporary works, conceptualizations of whether critical operations should produce social benefits, and considerations of the aesthetic and technical opportunities that literary or critical vivisection offered or, indeed, prevented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the evolving landscape of Victorian poetry studies, emphasizing its expansion beyond traditional boundaries. Topics include renewed interest in lyric studies and historical poetics, ongoing exploration of Victorian women's poetry with critical scrutiny of gender categorization, and a broadening of perspectives to encompass transatlantic, global, and ecocritical approaches.

The article focuses on the evolution of Victorian poetry scholarship over the past two decades. Topics include the methodological shift towards integrating historicist and formalist approaches, the expansion of literary analysis to include interdisciplinary and global perspectives, and the dynamic exploration of Victorian print and oral cultures.

The article focuses on the relevance of Victorian poetry in the context of contemporary global challenges, specifically climate change. Topics include the historical development of "women's poetry" and its implications for current gender discussions, the role of close reading as a unique methodology in literary studies, and the potential of humanities skills to offer valuable insights and resilience in a future increasingly dominated by AI.

The article focuses on the retrospective examination of Victorian poetry scholarship over the past two decades. Topics include the evolution of scholarly approaches in Victorian poetry, the impact of digitization on research access and methodology, and the expansion of critical perspectives, including anti-racist and ecocritical approaches.

The article focuses on the challenges and evolving perspectives in the study of Victorian poetry amid changing cultural and technological landscapes. Topics include the impact of digital databases on literary research, the cultural and institutional shifts affecting the humanities, and the potential transformation of literary scholarship in response to a secularized and digitized world.

The article focuses on the author's evolving engagement with Victorian poetry and its intersections with other literary traditions. Topics include the influence of "cultural neoformalism" on Victorian poetry, the exploration of nineteenth-century Australian poetry and its distinctiveness from British and American traditions, and the author's shift towards interdisciplinary collaboration and inclusion of marginalized voices in contemporary scholarly work.

The article focuses on the evolution of Victorian poetry over the past twenty years, particularly in relation to the scholarship trends and methodologies that have emerged. Topics include the rise of New Formalism and its impact on the analysis of poetic genres, the significant contributions and inclusion of Victorian women poets within the canon, and the increasing importance of anti-racist and ecocritical approaches in contemporary Victorian poetry studies.

The article focuses on the intersection of photography, novelty, and Victorian poetry, analyzing how these elements influenced the critical reception and commercial presentation of Victorian poetry. Topics include the significance of Isobel Armstrong's challenge to Victorian poetry criticism, the use of photographic illustrations in publications like 1891 Bodley Head edition of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "Casa Guidi Windows," and critical perspectives offered by Agnes Mary Frances Robinson.

The article focuses on feminist scholarship that explores the networks of support and collaboration between Romantic and Victorian women poets and visual artists. Topics include the recognition of class and gender bias in sister arts discourse, the expansion of the concept of "sisterhood" to include diverse identities and transimperial contexts, and the historical and contemporary intersections of poetry and visual arts in Britain, India, and the United States.

The article focuses on the challenges and evolving perspectives in the study of Victorian women's poetry. Topics include the enduring influence of canonical male poets versus the marginalization of women poets, the impact of historical and gender biases on scholarly attention, and the struggle to integrate lesser-known poets into contemporary academic discourse while maintaining their relevance and accessibility.

The article focuses on the evolving field of Victorian poetry studies, emphasizing the need for broader contextual analysis and interdisciplinary dialogue. Topics include the integration of literary theories and their application to Victorian poetry, the examination of racial and gender dynamics within the poetry, and the exploration of the intersection between poetry and religion.

In March 2022, we launched the Victorian Jewish Writers Project (VJWP), a digital collection of texts written by nineteenth‐century British Jews accompanied by short articles on significant authors, places, and events of the Anglo‐Jewish world. When we began building the collection in 2021, our conceptual framework was clear: Victorian Jewry is underrepresented both in Jewish Studies and Victorian Studies, so we would create a resource to supply primary texts and some analytical information to anyone interested. Despite our familiarity with archive theory, we considered our role in the project as little more than what Latour calls intermediaries, or "mere informants." Yet, the process of digitizing and publicizing a canon, particularly a canon tied to a cultural heritage, is an inherently social act, and in this article we will explore the modes of social engagement inherent in creating and maintaining digital archives. In particular, we make use of Latour's actor‐network theory to understand the relationships forged by archives in digital spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thomas Hardy'' The Ruined Maid (1866), has been extensively examined within the context of the nineteenth century. It is often regarded as a representation of social themes during the Victorian era, the plight of working-class women as victims of sexual exploitation, the depiction of fallen women, the challenges of prostitution, and the incorporation of local attributes associated with the Dorset dialect. Moreover, the text's discourse is typically interpreted as a dialogue occurring between two characters, namely Melia and an unknown speaker. However, this study introduces a novel perspective by identifying a third character inherent within the recounted interaction. Furthermore, this paper aims to deviate from conventional interpretations, instead, it concentrates on aspects of the verse that pertain to philosophical concepts such as the influence of social ideologies. This objective is achieved by following the semiotic approach; the words are meticulously analyzed to unveil their underlying meanings, drawing inspiration from the works of Ferdinand de Saussure and Roland Barthes. In addition, the notion of the gaze, as expounded by Michel Foucault, is engaged to shed light on the work's implications. The existentialist insights of Jean-Paul Sartre are also linked to the analysis. Furthermore, the poem's exploration of capitalism is informed by the views of Karl Marx, while gender-related aspects are interpreted through the lens of Simone de Beauvoir's theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports that women's rights leader Elizabeth Cady Stanton responded to a proposed bill that have essentially legalized prostitution in disgrace to the decency and humanity of the nineteenth century from the effete civilizations of the old world. Topics include relationship between sex workers and the suffrage movement is complex degrading and empowering for the women involved in the Victorian era; and conflicting priorities of women who had economic power and political equality.

The text discusses three books that explore the relationship between Victorian literature and the sea. "Down from London: Seaside Reading in the Railway Age" by Carolyn W. de la L. Oulton focuses on the emergence of seaside literature and the demand for print culture in seaside resort towns during the 1860s and 70s. "The Victorian Novel and the Problems of Marine Language: All at Sea" by Matthew P. M. Kerr examines the use of maritime imagery in Victorian literature and argues that modernism inherited a Victorian maritime self-consciousness. "Dockside Reading: Hydrocolonialism and the Custom House" by Isabel Hofmeyr explores the connection between Victorian Britain's maritime infrastructure and its colonial ambitions, focusing on the custom house as a site of colonial import controls. The books offer insights into the intersection of literature, culture, and imperialism in the Victorian era. [Extracted from the article]

This essay examines a trans literary history within nineteenth-century British reception of Sappho. Preceding and complicating the sexological language of inversion, Algernon Charles Swinburne's Poems and Ballads , First Series (1866) inaugurated an indexical relation between Sapphism and gender variance, which came to entail a complex practice of intertextual signaling and allusion organized around Sappho's poetry. This practice of trans Sapphism, which persists in Swinburne's later writings, was taken up later in the Victorian period by writers like Walter Pater, Michael Field, and Vernon Lee, becoming a signature for a literary subculture invested in exposing the tenuous conditions of gender through trans possibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since their inception, public libraries in the United States have been understood to be free for all to use. Yet throughout their history, socio-political currents and developments limited or barred access for certain segments of the population. The paper looks at the accessibility for women and Black Americans during the 1850–1950 period, taking into account the image of women in the Victorian and New South era, as well as the Jim-Crow segregation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Charles Dickens' The Mystery of Edwin Drood features Princess Puffer, who masters the tenets of Victorian hospitality while subverting their foundational purpose of social cohesion. This analysis explores Puffer's rhetoric of hostessing through the genre of Victorian etiquette books and its gendered advice about serving, eating, and drinking. But as the hostess of an opium den, she distorts that purpose by employing hospitality rituals-not for social cohesion, but for fragmentation, individually and nationally. Traditional fears about witchcraft and contemporary fears about female poisoners encapsulate the specter of female defiance. Princess Puffer's perversion of hospitality rituals casts her as a threat, as the antithesis of the Angel in the House, offering a vision of an England that is externally prosperous while deteriorating from within. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction theorizes hospitality as an ethical practice and looks at how technological and other cultural shifts in the Victorian period changed hospitality standards. Hospitality implicates various contexts, including charitable home visits, travel and tourism, and the domestic sphere. Examples from Victorian newspapers, periodicals, and fiction demonstrate attitudes on the parts of both hosts and guests. Spaces such as railway carriages and country houses offer instances where the traditional host / guest relationship was renegotiated. The Great Exhibition, as both an event and a space, represents the international scope of hospitality during Britain's era of imperial expansion. These various examples demonstrate the ubiquity of hospitality and its importance as a consideration in the ethics of social relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contemplates the idyllic imagery of Elizabeth Gaskell's rural texts in relation to the key visual motifs of the Internet aesthetic "cottagecore." Meanwhile, the paper also strives to highlight the importance of both the Victorian era, particularly its literature and art, with regard to this popular Internet aesthetic. With some brief references to influential figures of the age, the cultural timeframe surrounding Gaskell's rural fiction is shown to offer significant historical relevance to the romanticisation of the English countrycottage life. The literary and pictorial texts serve as examples of this cultural process. Considering the author's mostly ornamental use of cottages in Wives and Daughters as well as her employment of floral characterisation, the paper also highlights the visual aesthetics of the cottage art of Helen Allingham and Myles Birket Foster as well as rural depictions made by illustrators of Gaskell's provincial works that display the visual after-life of Gaskell's rural texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]