The (Good) Smells of the Eighteenth Century

Interested in smelling like the eighteenth century? Anyone who has read Jonathan Swift or Alexander Pope would probably turn down this offer, and yet that is the idea behind the fragrance brand Jo Malone London’s special cologne collection, Rock the Ages. My colleague Cassie Childs and I have written a review of the collection for ABOPublic, which you can read here. We had a great time trying each cologne and considering whether the scent captured our idea of the Tudors, the Georgians, Victorians, Edwardians, and modern Britain. The collection is a great example of how history can make its way into popular culture, and shape our perceptions of those periods–to the point that you may decide you actually do want to smell like Anne Boleyn or Jane Austen.

Placing the Author and Teaching the Nineteenth Century

The upcoming Placing the Author conference could not have been more timely for my nineteenth-century British novel course I taught this past spring semester. The conference focuses on literary tourism in the nineteenth century–visiting places associated with authors, including their homes, gravesites, and other significant locations. The conference’s website, including its blog and Postcard Project, were great teaching tools in helping my students think about why we are drawn to the places associated with the novels we read. I especially love that the conference website encourages virtual participation from an international audience who might not be able to attend the conference in England in June. The Postcard Project gallery is especially worth checking out–it features photographs and reflections from people at various sites associated with authors like Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, and the list goes on. In each post, the writer explains why they visited the place and what they got out of the experience. Perhaps you may have something to contribute yourself! I’ve contributed a blog post to the website on my experience using maps and other digital tools to help my students in their own imaginary literary tourism, which you can read here. The website is a great example of how the digital humanities can help create connections between scholars, instructors, and students across the globe.

Mapping the Nineteenth-Century British Novel

In my Nineteenth-Century British novel course this semester, we’re discussing representations of place in the novels we’re reading. I’ve created a Google map that will pinpoint each major location mentioned in order to help my students visualize the places they read about and to help orient them geographically as well as historically. We recently finished Jane Austen’s Persuasion and are currently reading Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, but I plan to add the other novels we’re reading to the map as we cover them: Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone, Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Of course, the difficulty of mapping some of the places is that they are fictional–they cannot actually be located on any map, as is the case with Austen’s Kellynch Hall and Bronte’s Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange. In order to place them on my map, I first follow the contextual clues given in the novels themselves. For example, Austen describes Uppercross as seventeen miles from Lyme. From there, I have to use a bit of creative license, such as using Bronte’s own Haworth and orienting Wuthering Heights in relation to it. I’m also benefiting from the work of others who have already mapped some of these locations, imagining where they could feasibly exist in England. This map from JASNA helped me with Persuasion, and this excellent reader’s guide to Wuthering Heights has been invaluable. It even includes mock-ups of both Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange, complete with outbuildings and floor plans.

This attempt to map fictional or imagined places reminds me of the ecocritic Lawrence Buell’s analysis of the way we can become attached to the places we read about: “The places that haunt one’s dreams and to some extent define one’s character can range from versions of actual places to the utterly fictitious . . . . But the fact that the imaginer hasn’t been there and maybe never will hardly lessens the intensity of such storied or imaged places to induce longing and loyalty . . .” (from The Future of Environmental Criticism, Malden: Blackwell, 2005, 73).

Photo credit: By User:(WT-shared) Burmesedays, SVG of the UK at Commons, Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection UK Maps, OpenStreetMap, User:(WT-shared) Paul. (:image:England Regions map.svg) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

Death Comes to Pemberley Review at ABOPublic

What does Jane Austen have to do with murder and mayhem? In  the imagination of the late mystery writer P.D. James, apparently a whole lot. Last month, PBS Masterpiece aired the BBC television adaptation of James’s novel, Death Comes to Pemberley. The miniseries imagines the afterlife of Austen’s characters from Pride and Prejudice. For me, the murder mystery meets period drama mashup worked, and I’ve written a review of the television miniseries for ABOPublic here. The miniseries is no longer available on PBS’s website, but anyone interested might want to watch for it to appear on Netflix or Amazon Instant.

My nineteenth-century British literature class spent a lot of time this semester discussing the afterlife of texts like Frankenstein, A Christmas Carol, and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in popular culture. It strikes me that Austen’s works, and Pride and Prejudice, has had the same kind of effect, and Death Comes to Pemberley joins a long list of Austen adaptations and remediations. Some of my own favorites in this category include the 1995 film Clueless (based on Emma) and both Helen Fielding’s 1996 novel Bridget Jones’s Diary and the 2001 film adaptation. A new favorite of mine is the clever 2013 Youtube series The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, which is definitely worth watching if this is a topic that interests you.

Mary Shelley and the Afterlife of Frankenstein

Mary Shelley

My British literature class just finished Frankenstein last week, and we ended our discussion by talking about the afterlife of the novel and its influence on popular culture. Neil Gaiman has written a really nice, though very brief article on the same topic for the Guardian‘s My Hero series. He touches on the topic of whether Frankenstein is an example of the gothic or the first work of science fiction. Regardless of how we classify the novel, he argues, “Ideas happen when the time is right for them.” And some ideas have a very long afterlife, indeed.

The Gothic Imagination

Eighteenth-century engraving of Strawberry Hill, the Gothic estate owned by Horace Walpole, author of The Castle of Otranto.

My Nineteenth-Century British Literature class begins our discussion of Frankenstein and the gothic novel tomorrow, and it’s too bad an international field trip is out of the realm of possibility because this new exhibit Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination at the British Library would be the perfect introduction to the gothic in literature and popular culture. The exhibit begins with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, and covers a wide range of territory, from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula to Alexander McQueen’s fashions and the Twilight series. There’s even a nineteenth-century vampire slaying kit on display! The Guardian has a nice article on the exhibit here.

National Theatre Live: Frankenstein

Frontispiece of 1831 edition of Frankenstein.

Last year I saw the National Theatre Live broadcast of Danny Boyle’s production of Frankenstein, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller. In this version of Mary Shelley’s novel, the two lead actors alternated roles as Victor Frankenstein and his Creature, a decision that wonderfully blurs the boundaries between man and monster, creator and creation. The performance I saw featured Miller as Frankenstein and Cumberbatch as the creature, and at the time I wished I had the opportunity to catch the second broadcast in which the roles were reversed. Fortunately, National Theatre Live is offering an encore showing next month of both versions of the production. You can visit their website here to see if the rebroadcast is playing in a theatre near you. If you have the chance to see either performance (or both), I’d highly recommend it.

Dido Belle and Abolition in 19th Century England

ABOPublic has a great review up about the recent film Belle (2013, directed by Amma Asante). Danielle Bobker gives a nice overview of the historical and social context of the movie, which is set in the late eighteenth century at the time of early movement to abolish slavery. While you’re there, you may also want to check out Leah Thomas’s “Framing Belle, Framing Racism,” in which she discusses Paula Byrne’s book Belle: The Slave’s Daughter and the Lord Chief Justice, which she wrote at the request of one of the film’s producers.  The picture above is a 1779 portrait of Dido Belle with her cousin Elizabeth.