Wendy Parkins

Mobility and Modernity in Women’s Novels, 1850s–1930s

Novels by women writers from the period of the 1850s to the 1930s frequently represent women in motion, whether travelling the Continent, leaving the family home for an independent life, walking through the countryside, or simply catching the train. Examining these diverse representations of mobility, this book argues it is possible to consider womens place in modernity and the opportunities for (or limitations on) womens agency in this period. Much previous discussion of womens mobility in modernity has focused almost exclusively on womens increasing movement within urban contexts but this book widens the frame to consider the mobility of the female subject beyond the city as well in order to demonstrate the complexities of the position and agency of modern women.

Feeling at Home: Gender and Creative Agency at Red House

Much has been written about Red House, the home of Jane and William Morris between 1859 and 1865, as an example of architectural innovation and a place of artistic fellowship. In accounts by Morriss contemporaries and subsequent scholars, Red House has also been represented as a site of conviviality, creativity and youthful idealism, where a utopian way of life proved unable to withstand the vagaries of mature responsibilities. This essay reconsiders the happy memories attached to Red House and explores how the affective investments that linked people, spaces and objects were created and enhanced by a shared process of creative improvisation there. Drawing on recent scholarly work on feelings, emotions and affect, this essay pays particular attention to the gendered experience of intimacy and creativity at Red House and seeks to redress a tendency to discount womens creative agency in the household. In the web of relationships at Red House, expressed and enacted through practices of creative labour and ...

Sufficiency and Simplicity in the Life and Writings of Edward Carpenter

Edward Carpenter, the sandal-wearing prophet of socialist self-sufficiency in the late nineteenth century, advocated the values of simplicity and self-sufficiency that was a source of inspiration to other late-Victorian radicals. On closer examination, however, Carpenter’s philosophy of daily life was one where self-sufficiency was grounded in a privileging of sensory and somatic experience that placed as much value on conviviality, creative self-expression and sexual liberation as on producing one’s own food, recycling and minimising unnecessary labour. As such, Carpenter offered a radical re-framing of sufficiency as an enriched mode of living and described how the ‘simplification of life’ opened up a world in which affective bonds between humans, animals, objects and the environment were given a new intensity and pleasure.

SILKWORMS AND SHIPWRECKS: SUSTAINABILITY IN DOMBEY AND SON

Seeking to prepare her friend Lucretia Tox for the revelation of Mr Dombeys engagement, Louisa Chick, Dombeys sister, turns to the natural world to illustrate the inevitability of change: Its a world of change. . . .Why, my gracious me, what is there that does not change! Even the silkworm, who I am sure might be supposed not to trouble itself about such subjects, changes into all sorts of unexpected things continually. (434; ch. 29) For Mrs Chick, the silkworm seems to exemplify the truism that change is a natural and inevitable part of life but, in the context of global sericulture, her example is perhaps more apposite than she realizes. Silk production not only radically terminates the natural metamorphosis from caterpillar to moth, it also constitutes an industry subject to the volatilities of global trade and regulation, the cycles of fashion, the impact of new technologies, not to mention the vagaries of disease, climate and habitat. While Britain had been importing raw silk from China in limited supplies from the eighteenth century onwards, by the time Dombey and Son was written, the devastation of sericultural crops in France and Italy by a disease which had been spreading since the 1820s allowed Britain to benefit from the treaty port system (established as a result of the Opium Wars) and re-export raw silk to the Continent (Ma 332–3). Thus, silk – circulating around the world, and linking producers of the raw material in India, China, or Japan with child labourers in Macclesfield, handloom weavers in Spitalfields, textile designers in France, and wealthy consumers in London – positions the humble silkworm within complex and dynamic networks of uncertain sustainability.

Feeling for Beauty

ABSTRACT May Morris (1862–1938), renowned craftswoman and daughter of William Morris, had an unconventional Victorian childhood in a home where all the members of the family were engaged in various forms of aesthetic labor, either as amateurs or professionals, and shared an aesthetic philosophy that blended the artisanal and the experimental from which would develop the Arts and Crafts movement. This article will examine the fragmentary recollections of her childhood recorded by May Morris in the introductions she wrote for the twenty-four-volume edition of The Collected Works of William Morris as a rich resource for Victorian sensory history because of the emphasis she places on the development of the childs sensorium, especially in relation to touch as the vital sense that linked family intimacy with creative activity. Employing the term “tactile aesthetics,” I show how, in the Morris household, the pleasurable sensual apprehension of the objects or materials worked by the hands of the craftsperson was inseparable from the complex feelings of connection with others. In such an environment, a feeling for beauty comprised a vital component of habitus, the embodied knowledges and aptitudes that, according to Pierre Bourdieu, are acquired from earliest childhood through the practices of everyday life within a specific social setting.