Commentary
In the last few decades the nineteenth century has been one of the most productive areas for interdisciplinary research in all kinds of topics of cultural study. Part of the reason is that the need to understand our own contemporary world requires us to understand better how it came into being. The changes in the twentieth century in art, ethics, ideology, politics, industrialism, and international relations had their origins in the previous century. The nineteenth century was also the first era in which mass communication and steam-driven travel made it possible for larger global communities to be in touch with the cultural and historical life of other countries. Intellectual, political, and commercial life between Europe and the United States drew all these countries into closer contact, if not always into better understanding of each other. Now, digital scholarship is allowing us to look at more aspects of interdisciplinary study of the century by combining images and texts in ways that were once prohibited by the economic constraints of print media.
The scholarly commentaries in this section are focused on the theme of love and seduction at approximately mid-century, about 1840 to 1870. They comment as well on related subjects such as adultery, prostitution, breach-of-promise, divorce, and the like, as well as providing critical treatments of such specific events as the Beecher-Tilton case or the love affair between Mabel Todd Loomis and Austen Dickinson.
Commentary
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Patricia Anderson, from When
Passion Reigned: Sex and the Victorians
(1995)
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Françoise Barret-Decrocq,
Love in the Time of Victoria: Sexuality, Class and
Gender in Nineteenth Century London
-
Nina Baym, from the "Introduction"
to The Hidden Hand, by E.D.E.N. Southworth(1997)
-
Patricia Cline Cohen,
The Murder of Helen Jewett: The Life and Death of a
Prostitute in Nineteenth-Century New York
from Chapter 9, "Reading and
Imagination," and Chapter 10, "Tracing Seduction"(1998)
-
William A. Cohen,
Sex Scandal: The Private Parts of Victorian
Fiction
Chapter 1, "Sex, Scandal, and
the Novel"(1996)
-
T. J. Edelstein, from "Augustus Egg's
Triptych: A Narrative of Victorian Adultery,"
Burlington Magazine
(1983)
-
Alan Fischler, from "Love in the Garden: Maud, Great Expectations, and W.S.
Gilbert's Sweethearts"
SEL
(1997)
-
Trevor Fisher, from "Introduction: The Mythology
of Victorian Values" and Chapter 1, "Women for Sale —
The Underbelly of Victorian Respectability,"
Scandal: The Sexual Politics of Late Victorian
Britain
(1995)
-
Ginger S. Frost,
Promises Broken: Courtship, Class, and Gender in
Victorian England
from Chapter 1, "The Legal
History of Breach of Promise," Chapter 2, "The Court of Public
Theatre," Chapter 5, "Broken Engagements in Victorian
England," and Chapter 6, "Premarital Sex in Victorian
England"(1995)
-
Marilynn Wood Hill,
Their Sisters' Keepers: Prostitution in New
York City, 1830-1870
Chapter 3, "'No Work,
No Money, No Home': Choosing Prostitution" (1993)
-
Margaret Homans, from "Dinah's Blush,
Maggie's Arm: Class, Gender, and Sexuality in George Eliot's Early
Novels,"
Sexualities in Victorian Britain(1996)
-
Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz,
Rereading Sex: Battles Over Sexual Knowledge and
Suppression in Nineteenth-Century America
from Chapter 14, "Sex Talk in
the Open"(2002)
-
Winifred Hughes, from The
Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s
(1980)
-
H. Montgomery Hyde ,
A Tangled Web: Sex Scandals in British Politics and
Society
from Chapter 4, "Some
Victorian Sex Scandals"
1986
()
-
Catherine Judd,
Bedside Seductions: Nursing and the Victorian
Imagination, 1830-1860
from Chapter 2, "'Thy
Magic Touch': Nursing, Sexuality, and the 'Dangerous
Classes' (1829-1880)"(1998)
-
Richard A. Kaye,
The Flirt's Tragedy: Desire Without End in
Victorian and Edwardian Fiction
from Chapter One(2002)
-
Laura Hanft Korobkin, from "Silent Woman, Speaking
Fiction: Charles Reade's Griffith Gaunt
(1866) at the Adultery trial of Henry Ward Beecher"
The New Nineteenth Century: Feminist Readings of
Underread Victorian Novels
(1996)
-
George Landow, from William
Holman Hunt and Typological Symbolism
(1979)
-
Barbara Leckie,
Culture and Adultery: the Novel, the Newspaper, and
the Law, 1857-1914
from Chapter One(1999)
-
Jeremy Maas,
Holman Hunt and the Light of the World
from Chapter 3, "A Light
Industry"(1984)
-
Patricia Mainardi,
Husbands, Wives, and Lovers: Marriage and Its
Discontents in Nineteenth-Century France
(2003)
-
Linda Nochlin, from "Lost and Found: Once More the Fallen Woman"
Art Bulletin
(1978)
-
Bill Overton,
The Novel of Female Adultery: Love and Gender in
Continental European Fiction, 1830-1900
from Chapter 1, "Female
Adultery, Ideology and the Nineteenth-Century"(1996)
-
Joan Perkin, from Women
and Marriage in Nineteenth-Century England
(1989)
-
Tony Tanner,
Adultery in the Novel
from Chapter I,
"Introduction"(1979)
-
F.M.L. Thompson,
The Rise of Respectable Society: A Social History of
Victorian Britain, 1830-1900
from Chapter 3,
"Marriage"
1988
()
-
Altina Waller,
Reverend Beecher and Mrs. Tilton: Sex and Class in
Victorian America
from Chapter One, "The
Brooklyn Scandal"
1982
()
-
John Evangelist Walsh,
This Brief Tragedy: Unraveling the Todd-Dickinson
Affair
Chapter 2, "Mrs. Todd: Two Men
for Me"(1991)
-
Jeffrey Weeks,
Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality
Since 1800.
from Chapter 2, "'That
Damned Morality': Sex in Victorian Ideology"(1981)
-
Larry Whiteaker,
Seduction, Prostitution, and Moral Reform in New York,
1830-1860.
Chapter 8, "Moral Reform: From
Suasion to Coercion"(1997)
