Paraphernalia! Victorian Objects

Helen Kingstone is Lecturer in Victorian Studies at the University of Glasgow. Her research addresses the relationship between memory and history in the nineteenth century, focusing on how writers in different genres and forms approached contemporary history. Her monograph Victorian Narratives of the Recent Past: Memory, History, Fiction was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2017. Other publications include articles on fin-de-siècle utopian fiction in English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 and in Utopias and Dystopias in the Fiction of H. G. Wells and William Morris, ed. Emelyne Godfrey (Palgrave, 2016), and others on literature and scientific ideas of progress in Nineteenth-Century Contexts and in Historicising Humans ed. Efram Sera-Shriar (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018). Kate Lister is a graduate of Leeds and Leeds Trinity Universities, and is currently Postdoctoral Research Associate at Leeds Trinity University. She is on the board of the International Sex Work Research Hub, the curator for the online research and archive project ‘Whores of Yore’. Kate has published articles on Victorian sexuality with Routledge, the Oxford Interdisciplinary Press, and Cambridge Scholars. She was the historical consultant for the Rosa Funded ‘Our Voices’ project on sex work in the city of Leeds, and has made numerous radio and television appearances about her research. Kate’s first monograph on nineteenth-century medievalism is forthcoming with the University of Wales Press.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Helen Kingstone and Kate Lister, ‘It’s a Victorian Thing’ 1






‘A magic cave’: collecting objects
Rohan McWilliam, ‘The Bazaars of London’s West End in the Nineteenth Century’ 10

Anne Anderson, ‘The Bric-à-Bracquer’s Étagère or Whatnot: Staging ‘artistic’ taste in the Aesthetic "House Beautiful"’ 23

Thad Logan, "Rossetti's Things: the Artist and his Accessories" 36




Ornaments: defining prosperity at home 47
Silvia Granata, ‘The Dark Side of the Tank: the Marine Aquarium in the Victorian Home’ 48

Ralph Mills, ‘A Chimney-Piece in Plumtree-Court, Holborn: plaster of Paris "images" and nineteenth-century working class material culture’ 59

Julia Courtney, ‘Secret Lives of Dead Animals: Exploring Victorian Taxidermy’ 74




Decentring meaning: objects becoming things 86
Valerie Sanders, ‘Objects of Anxiety in Nineteenth-Century Children’s Literature: Edith Nesbit and Frances Hodgson Burnett’ 87

Francois Ropert, ‘Within ‘the Coil of Things’: The Figurative Use of Devotional Objects in the Poetical Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne and Oscar Wilde’ 99




Object or text? reading the body 111
Heather Hind, ‘"Golden Lies"? Reading Locks of Hair in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret and Tennyson’s "The Ringlet"’ 112

Sophie Ratcliffe, ‘The Art of Curling Up: Charles Dickens and the Feeling of Curl Papers’ 120




Objects in circulation: print culture 131

Odile Boucher-Rivalain, ‘Woman’s Dress as a Polemical Object/Subject in the Mid-Victorian Period’ 132

Alice Crossley, ‘Paper Love: Valentines in Victorian Culture’ 143

Peter Yeandle, ‘Exotic Bodies and Mundane Medicines: advertising and empire in the late-Victorian and Edwardian press’