The Salt-Box

The North American Victorian Studies Association spring 2007 newsletter, which includes the big list of member books, is now up.

These three things are all related to Victorian literature and culture, and are very, very strange.

• “Experiments in Galvanism: Frog with Implanted Webserver.” When it’s installed at a gallery, museum patrons or internet users can make a dead frog jerk its legs. (Via BoingBoing.)
• A flash-based video game in which anime women in Victorian dress smack each other.
• “Charles Dickens and Cleavage by Super Amanda.” From the description: “can a chick in a black corset be taken as seriously as some of those tweedy university fuddy duddys we usually listen to”? (Via an anonymous colleague.)

• (Update 7/26:) A nanochip based on Charles Babbage’s difference engine. (Via Engadget.)

Finally, this has nothing to do with Victorian literature, but: I forgot to post a link to last week’s post at Bookslut.

At the Academic Commons today, I have a post introducing Collex, a search- and tagging- tool that allows researchers to move seamlessly among most of the major 19th-century digital collections.  Collex is one of the coolest early fruits of Jerome McGann’s NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-century Electronic Scholarship) group.

The new Victorian Studies (Winter 2007), and included in it is my review of J. M. I. Klaver’s The Apostle of the Flesh: A Critical Life of Charles Kingsley (Brill, 2006).  Here’s the first graf:

In 1872, Vanity Fair remarked that “Time and opinions move so fast that it is difficult to recall the period, though it is really so recent, when the Rev. Charles Kingsley, sometime author of ‘Alton Locke’ and now Chaplain to the Queen [ . . . ] was one of the most daring and advanced revolutionists of his cloth” (qtd. in Klaver 472; Klaver’s ellipsis).  Vanity Fair omits many reasons why Kingsley might fascinate modern Victorianists: his complex emphasis on manliness, masculinity, and the body; his immersion in scientific projects (sanitation reform) and debates; his jingoism and sense of national mission, even when these sanctioned brutal or near-genocidal violence; the conflict with John Henry Newman; his children’s books, especially The Water Babies (1863); and his interest in sexual satisfaction within marriage as an almost sacramental blessing.  And yet all too frequently, knowledge of Kingsley can devolve into the following series: muscular Christian; self-destructive combatant with Newman; author of Alton Locke (1850) and The Water Babies, plus a few other works.  J. M. I. Klaver’s The Apostle of the Flesh seeks to restore Kingsley to a more central place in the Victorian period.

Interested parties without access to Victorian Studies can e-mail me for the review.  My edition of Kingsley’s Alton Locke is due to Broadview in a mere six weeks!

Good to see some things never change.  This from Dickens’s short sketch, “The Election for the Beadle.”  The captain and the overseer lead opposing factions in the local parish; the overseer represents the vested interests, the captain instinctively opposes them:

Then the captain . . . boldly expressed his total want of confidence in the existing authorities, and moved for ‘a copy of the recipe by which the paupers’  soup was prepared, together with any documents relating thereto. ‘  This the overseer steadily resisted; he fortified himself by precedent, appealed to the established usage, and declined to produce the papers, on the ground of the injury that would be done to the public service, if documents of a strictly private nature, passing between the master of the workhouse and the cook, were to be thus dragged to light on the motion of any individual member of the vestry.