Welcome to the sometimes bizarre world of the Victorian periodical! The three blog posts below are all samples of the types of reading material to which Victorians were exposed on a daily basis. One is about gender, one about race/racial stereotypes, and one about whipping children (moral, educational, legal?). The images will get larger if you click on them.
Play around a little, get to know the Victorian sense of humor, and think about what it would have been like to read these three texts within the span of an hour or so as you perused the morning's edition of a magazine. Taken together, what do they make you think about? What types of thinking do they encourage or discourage? To whom are they addressed?
Make a comment below or in one of the other posts, or make multiple comments, addressing these questions. There are no right answers here, so it's just about your reactions.
Life in Victorian London
Fictions and Forms of Revolution: London 1848
Thursday, February 10, 2011
The Weaker Sex in Alarming Strength
What is this letter (probably false) saying about gender in the Victorian period? Why would he be "in dread of a wife"? How does this alter our standard conceptions of Victorian gender stereotypes?
Who Shall Escape Whipping?
What is the tone of this short article in Punch, thesame journal in which Vanity Fair first appeared?
What is it advocating? Does it seem odd to be writing about whipping children in the newspaper?
Battle of the Amazons
What type of event is being advertised here, in a poster from March 1848? What stereotypes are being employed?
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