About my website

My website takes its inspiration from two events.

• The name of this blog comes from a painted sign that I saw at the very centre of the regenerating Kings Cross area of London:

‘VICTORIAN is the NEW BLACK’ sign at Kings Cross

• The second event was Dr Nadine Muller’s amazing Neo-Victorian Cultures: The Victorians Now conference at John Moores University last summer, which opened my eyes to the remarkable range of neo-Victorian work happening across the world now.

So what is neo-Victorianism, and what does “Victorian is the new black” mean?

The Antipodean Neo-Victorian neatly describes neo-Victorianism as:

… the explosion of corsets, top hats, high tea parties, BBC adaptations of Dickens and Austen, tattoos of Alice in Wonderland, Steampunk everything, and novels set in smoggy London. It is the contemporary re-engagement with and the reimagining of the Victorian era.

As she also notes, Marie-Luise Kohlke, the founding editor of the Journal of Neo-Victorian Studies, calls neo-Victorianism “the afterlife of the nineteenth century in the cultural imaginary.” (If you want to read more about definitions, The Unhinged Historian has also helpfully pulled together some useful definitions from a variety of sources, both academic and non-academic).

To me, neo-Victorianism means the way that we view our 19th century ancestors and how those views are presented to us – through film, design, literature and even labels on bottles of gin. Or  to put another way, when we speak about the Victorians, it’s not only what are we saying about them, it is what we are also saying about ourselves.

And that slogan “Victorianism the new black” encapsulates this perfectly; it’s a perception that this particular historical period is the hottest thing on the market, on the shelves, on the catwalk, on our screens, on our bookshelves. And after the anti-Victorianism from the Modernist period onwards, with all those hoary myths about the covering of piano legs and Lytton Strachey’s iconoclastic Eminent Victorians (1918) (Matthew Sweet’s brilliant Inventing the Victorians (2002) is a perfect primer in this regard), this is quite a sea-change.

So this blog will be a place to share and discuss my thoughts, jottings, impulsive musings, and more composed ruminations on Victorian interventions into our own everyday – and sometimes not so everyday, unless you’re seriously looking for this stuff – lives. From food and drink advertising to films and television, hopefully I’ll be able to touch on most (if not every) aspect of our lives to demonstrate just how much our lives are lived in the shadows of the Victorians – mostly in a good way, of course.

I will also share ideas from my other research interests, which revolve around the works of Charles Dickens – his imaginative relationship with the pantomime clown Joseph Grimaldi, adaptations of his work in any variety of media, his influence on the works of Salman Rushdie and his work as editor of Household Words and All Year Round (as part of my role as Assistant Editor on the DJO project).

So have a poke around, have a read of anything that interests you, and please let me know what you think about the Victorians today – I’d love to hear of any examples that you have.