Australasian Journal of Victorian Studies

Notes on Contributors

2023-11-30T13:15:32+11:00

Review of Anthony Sullivan, War Against the Slave Trade

2023-11-14T12:31:36+11:00

Review of Kate Holterhoff, Illustration in Fin-de-Siecle Transatlantic Romance Fiction

2023-11-20T17:22:21+11:00

Review of Brusberg-Kiermeier Sublimation of Unfitness in Victorian Fiction

2023-11-20T17:14:21+11:00

Review of Sarah Green, Sexual Restraint and Aesthetic Experience in Victorian Literary Decadence

2023-11-19T22:01:41+11:00

Review of Dinter and Schafer-Althaus, Medicine and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, History, and Culture

2023-11-15T14:30:55+11:00

Water: An Introduction

2023-11-12T09:56:07+11:00

Editorial Introduction

Poetry: Alexandra Lewis

2023-05-12T15:27:31+10:00

Poetry: Shale Preston

2023-11-19T21:39:37+11:00

Poetry: Carolyn Oulton

2023-04-19T21:21:51+10:00

Poetry: Schuyler Becker

2023-11-15T06:32:11+11:00

Poetry: VJ Rene

2023-06-28T23:17:21+10:00

Haunted Atlantic Waters: The Historic Traumas of Impressment, Slavery, and Whaling in Elizabeth Gaskell's Sylvia's Lovers

2023-08-01T15:23:10+10:00

Keywords: Elizabeth Gaskell, Sylvia's Lovers, whaling, impressment, slavery, American Civil War

Gaskell’s choice of the important Yorkshire whaling port of Whitby (the novel’s Monkshaven) as the setting of Sylvia’s Lovers has a deep resonance. The Atlantic Ocean itself, so pervasively described in the novel as the primary element of Monkshaven’s atmosphere, is crucial to interpreting Sylvia’s Lovers as a novel of social protest. In Gaskell’s narrative, the Atlantic’s waters carry off impressed sailors during the early years of the Napoleonic Wars and are the killing grounds for whales in a brutal extraction ecology. The years in which Gaskell wrote her novel—during the American Civil War—evoke a third history throughout Sylvia’s Lovers: the horrific Atlantic slave trade and ongoing American slavery. Gaskell’s choice of Yorkshire as her setting, influenced by her recent writing of The Life of Charlotte Brontë, also suggests that Gaskell was thinking of British West Indian enslavement as well, a consistent background to the Brontë sisters’ novels from Emily’s Wuthering Heights to Charlotte’s Jane Eyre and Anne’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. The pervading Atlantic waters in Sylvia’s Lovers are haunted with these brutal histories of violent displacement and bloody carnage. The novel is thus not only the “saddest story I ever wrote,” as Gaskell stated, but also the most harrowing, with its insistent representation or allusion to three interwoven historic traumas against which the individual tragedies of Sylvia’s Lovers are enacted. Gaskell’s Atlantic imaginary is imbued with these histories of violent displacement from family, community, and natural environment, whether impressed sailor, enslaved black American, or harpooned and dismembered whale, its skeletal “great ghastly whale jaws, bleached bare and white . . . the arches over the gateposts to many a field or moorland stretch” disfiguring the landscape and haunting the narrative. Sylvia’s Lovers is an expansive and trenchant novel of social protest against all of these oppressions.

Wonders in the Deep: Sailors and the Imagination in the Poetry of William Wordsworth

2023-06-07T09:19:12+10:00

Keywords: Wordsworth; Poetry; Romanticism; maritime; sailor

The poetry of William Wordsworth is haunted by rootless mariners, filled with elevated powers of imagination and a fervent desire to share their gothic tales. Wordsworth’s sailor poems may be grouped into four classes: those in which a sailor or sailing features prominently throughout the poem (with “The Thorn” as the exemplar case); those in which a sailor or sailing features prominently in one part of the poem; those in which a sailor is missed by his family and friends; and those in which ships are observed, but sailors do not appear. Yet despite sailors’ quasi-poetic abilities, derived from their sublime experiences upon the waves, they are ultimately unable to articulate their experiences. Wordsworth’s sailors are imaginative, yet highly emotional; compelled to repeat their stories, but uninterested in dialogue; and eager to be heard, but incapable of integrating themselves into the community. They possess numerous poetic gifts, but their lyrical potential is stymied by the very qualities that lead them to sea in the first place. Their vast capacity for imagination and disposition to self-expression notwithstanding, sailors’ physical rootlessness and disinterest in community correspond to an inability to ground their words. Much as they wander across land and sea, they drift across the surface of language itself, never settling upon a solid meaning.

Neo-Victorian Oceanic Depths in Netflix’s 1899

2023-11-13T23:26:42+11:00

Keywords: Oceanic; 1899; Neo-Victorian; Gothic; Spatiality

This article dives into the oceanic waters beneath the steamship Kerberos in the neo-Victorian Netflix drama, 1899. It considers water as an elemental force, as an oceanic vastness and as a shifting surface beneath which lie unfathomable depths. It explores how water interacts with people and state-of-the art steamship technology at the close of the nineteenth century, facilitating long-distance travel and immigration to the United States. It examines the mystery and multi-dimensionality of water and its role as a metaphor for sunken memories, human displacement in time and space, and cartographic anxiety. It is about the freedom afforded by water which acts as a buffer to the conventionality of landlocked life. It is about the agoraphobia-inducing sight of seemingly endless waves and the claustrophobia of onboard existence. It positions water mutating from unthreatening conduit to aggressor, rising up to overwhelm a vessel with crashing waves or else bursting through its sides to drive out any air. It presents water as a lurking menace waiting to drown passengers in its deathly embrace. It is about lost ships and ghost ships and floating phantoms and how they play out on the television screen.

This article adopts a spatially inflected methodology influenced by Spatial Studies, the Nautical Gothic, Ocean Studies, and historically informed neo-Victorianism. It posits that 1899’s ocean constitutes more than mere scenery, and it argues that water is not limited to a function as the show’s aquatic backdrop but swells to influence plot; become a leading character; and is indeed indispensable to the entire production.

“The inevitable steam-boat”: Archibald John Little and steam navigation on the Yangtze river

2023-07-20T08:40:11+10:00

Keywords: Archibald John Little; Yangtze; navigation; progress; environment

In the second half of the nineteenth century the area surrounding the Yangtze river became increasingly crucial for Britons: they regarded it as their sphere of interest, firmly believed in its commercial potential, and thus strove to facilitate trade by introducing steam navigation beyond the Three Gorges. However, they encountered formidable obstacles, due to the nature of the river itself and to the opposition of Chinese authorities. Archibald John Little, a British merchant and author, played a prominent role in the opening of the Upper Yangtze to steamers, and discussed his project in print in order to gain the support of public opinion in Britain. Through a reading of his travelogue, Through the Yang-Tse Gorges, or Trade and Travel in Western China (1888), this paper explores the multi-layered significance that steam navigation on the Yangtze acquired for Britons: while it offered the chance to expand their economic power in the region, it was also a constant source of friction with Qing authorities, epitomising the difficulties that characterised the interaction between the two empires; for some, it also acquired the symbolic value of a challenge to demonstrate the superiority of Western technology and to force upon China a Western model of progress. Yet, the encounter with the river, which has been central to Chinese history and culture for two millennia, also challenged assumptions on the superiority of the West and its conquering attitude towards the environment; moreover, the opportunity to observe junkmen and trackers eroded received stereotypes about ‘the Chinese’, testifying to a degree of admiration and respect seldom voiced in this period. Crucially, Little’s account captured the overlapping of aesthetic, economic, and human considerations that characterised British discussions of the Yangtze, a unique environment which focalised, and partially reshaped, current views of China, its people and its nature.