Autumn 2011 Newsletter Hello, and welcome to the President Regenia Gagnier Autumn BAVS newsletter! Secretary Mark Llewellyn Greetings from bonnie Scotland! I‘m happy to be continuing in Treasurer editorship of the BAVS Newsletter from my new post as Lecturer in John Plunkett English Literature at the University of Aberdeen. I have a feeling it is going to be a cold Scottish winter so please send layer upon layer of Membership Secretary BAVS news to keep me busy and warm compiling the next issue: items Amelia Yeates are best as word attachments, please, to [email protected]. Newsletter Editor In this instalment we hear from our two graduate reporters on the Alexandra Lewis recent annual BAVS conference, ‗Composition and Decomposition‘, which took place on 1-3 September at the University of Birmingham. Communications Officer Congratulations to the organising committee on what was by all Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi accounts a stimulating and successful conference, and thanks to Melissa Score (Birkbeck, University of London) and Fariha Shaikh Web & Publicity Team (King‘s College, London) for their close observations which will, in Will Abberley Sarah Crofton written form, keep something of the energy of the event alive. In Claire Wood addition, Fran Scott, Ji Won Chung and Kate Scarth (University of Warwick) provide a robust representation of ‗Picturing Women‘s 2012 Conference Health: 1750-1910‘, which took place at the University of Warwick Organiser Anna Barton earlier this year. Committee Stephen Roberts (University of Birmingham) reports on the discovery Members of a long-lost oil painting and Rosemary Mitchell (Director of the Carolyn Burdett Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies) exhorts you to see ‗Art for the Simon Dentith Nation: Sir Charles Eastlake‘ at the National Gallery: but hurry, it Holly Furneaux Elisabeth Jay closes on 30th October! Rosemary Mitchell Galia Ofek ‗Abandoning the Past‘, the five-year Cambridge Victorian Studies Lyn Pykett Group Project, is gone but not forgotten; and there are notices that Paul White may be of interest to those who work on Wilkie Collins (a digital Arlene Young archive launched), Oscar Wilde (a summer seminar with grant to be Student Members Allison Neal Mary Shannon www.bavsuk.org had, provided you are a US citizen or permanent resident) and Octavia Hill (conference co- organiser wanted). Several forthcoming events are noted, including two in the next month: ‗Re-Imagining the Brontës: A Conference‘ (which I am organising, to be held at Senate House, London on Saturday 5th November: it would be lovely to see you there!) and ‗Wandering Feelings: The Transmission of Emotion in the Long Nineteenth Century‘ (at Queen Mary University of London, on 11th November). Calls for papers on Victorian Spiritualities; Sex, Pleasure and Coercion; Paranoia and Pain; Dickens; and Lights and Shadows of Scottish Fiction are issued, among others… …which brings me full circle to the plea for Victorian lights against the encroaching shadows of a fierce season: make your voice heard in the next (Winter) edition of the BAVS Newsletter. Academics and postgraduate students are warmly encouraged to offer articles for future editions of this newsletter. Whether you have organised a conference, attended an event or exhibition, or would like to draw attention to research projects that have recently been recognised by funding bodies, I would love to hear from you! For further information, and to forward review or research contributions, please contact me at [email protected]. Yours, Alexandra Dr Alexandra Lewis (University of Aberdeen) iDylls: Alfred Lord Tennyson, Idylls of the King, with decorations by G. W. Rhead and L. Rhead, 1898. Image courtesy British Library 19th Century Historical Collection App for iPad. 2 Current Exhibition (National Gallery) 4 BAVS Annual Conference: Reports 6 Conference Reports (Warwick and Birmingham) 12 Contents Forthcoming Events 16 Calls for Papers 21 Recent Publications 35 Notices 38 John Murdoch, Pictorial Tour Round India, 4th edition,1894. Image courtesy British Library 19th Century Historical Collection App for iPad. 3 Art for the Nation: Sir Charles Eastlake at the National Gallery (27 July to 30 October 2011) The exhibition currently showing at the six travel diaries, some of which are National Gallery, Art for the Nation, exhibited, and which are now edited by explores the role of Sir Charles Eastlake, Susanna Avery-Quash and published jointly director of the National Gallery from by the Gallery and the Walpole Society. 1855, in creating the national collection. Eastlake was also innovative in terms of Current Exhibition A run-of-the-mile history painter, but a exhibition techniques, being a pioneer of talented administrator, and a the now commonplace preference for knowledgeable art critic and collector, hanging paintings by school, period, and Eastlake was lucky enough to have the place of production. We owe to him the funds at his disposal to acquire some 150 wonderful collection of early Italian art in paintings for the Gallery, mainly medieval the National Gallery, which allows it to and early Renaissance Italian works (not represent so fully the conventional narrative to mention some additional canvases for of artistic development in the west. himself). His purchases for the collection include such outstanding works as Bellini's Madonna of the Meadow (which The exhibition is very small (although also appears in the exhibition) and Ucello's free!). This does allow you to concentrate Battle of San Romano (which does not). very fully on some of the representative Other works which show Eastlake's eye works on display, and the excellent for artistic talent and developmental accompanying panels, detailing Eastlake's trends are Catena's Saint Jerome in his journeys and experiences, and the process Study, a masterpiece of lineal and of acquisition. But I would like to have perspectival tranquillity in which the seen more attention to the role of his saint's accompanying lion sleeps like a 'incorporated wife', Lady Eastlake, formerly homely domestic tabby, and Pisanello's Elizabeth Rigby, famous or perhaps bizarre and golden Virgin and Child with infamous for her Quarterly Review critique Saints: naturalism and traditional codes of of Jane Eyre and her partisan involvement representation contend as a grumpy Saint in the annulment of Ruskin's marriage. The Anthony and a stylish Saint George view a tours became an artistic education for Lady vision of the Virgin within a cartoonish Eastlake, and A.M. Ernstrom has explored zig-zag insert. In the process of the intellectual partnership of the couple, acquisition, Eastlake developed proto- which I am sure will be further examined in scientific methods of authentication, the book accompanying the exhibition - which are partially reflected in his thirty- jointly authored by Avery-Quash and Julie 4 Sheldon, the editor of an much-needed commissioned the Houses of Parliament edition of Lady Eastlake's letters. It would frescoes), as well as the works of young, also have been good to see some would-be revolutionary artists in the Pre- contextualisation of the Eastlakes' taste for Raphaelite Brotherhood. But it is perhaps early Italian art within the art world of the unreasonable to expect so much of this 1840s and 1850s: 'Pre-Raphaelitism' small but interesting and illuminating permeated the institutions of the National exhibition. Gallery, and the Fine Art Commision (which Eastlake chaired and which Dr Rosemary Mitchell (B.A., D. Phil., Oxon., P.G.C in H.E., Open) Associate Principal Lecturer in History & Reader in Victorian Studies Director of the Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies Detail from: John Partridge, 'Sir Charles Lock Eastlake', 1825 Credit: National Portrait Gallery, London. 5 Reflections on ‗Composition and Decomposition‘, BAVS conference, University of Birmingham, 1-3 September, from our two postgraduate conference reporters used the concept of sexual degradation to This year‘s BAVS conference look at how so-called ―fallen‖ women were demonstrated that research into Victorian portrayed in melodrama and musical studies is as vibrant as ever, although it comedy. The stereotypical passive girl lured was also mindful that Arts and into disgrace and death held sway in Conference Reports Humanities departments in British melodrama for much of the century. But by universities face major funding the 1870s and 1880s, reflecting the challenges. My report as a BAVS Contagious Diseases Acts, the fallen woman observer bursary holder therefore focuses had become a threatening figure – ―decay on panels and plenaries that I attended incarnate‖ to society. However, another but also touches on some of the trope of melodrama, the savvy sidekick, BAVS discussions that took place on the future resurfaced in musical comedy. Here, for postgraduates and post-doctoral contemporary working girls, such as shop researchers. girls, are far from innocent or passive about the sexually exploitative world in which they It is impossible to do justice to such a live. Margaret Forsyth (Edge Hill diverse conference programme in one University) in her paper ―Sown in Labour‘s report. I heard many delegates comment Soil: Industrial poetry and the ‗factory that they were forced into very difficult girls‘‖ gave a different perspective on choices between equally alluring panels! working-class life, though she also Several threads examined the conference examined contrasts in depictions of themes of composition and ‗working‘ versus ‗respectable‘ women and decomposition, as well as recomposition, the ways in which working-class women in terms of social, political or cultural were both exploited by and liberated by contexts. Many papers were work. Looking at the decomposition of interdisciplinary, for example the panel identity, Alexandra Messem‘s (University of on Technologies and machines drew Portsmouth) paper on ―Decomposing the from literature and natural theology as body politic‖ showed how the novelist well as science. Methodology was George Egerton depicted the little-recorded examined in papers on constructing phenomenon of self-mutilation by late- archives and databases.