This issue of 19 celebrates the work of Professor Hilary Fraser who was Geoffrey Tillotson Chair of Nineteenth-Century Studies at Birkbeck, University of London from 2002 to 2020. The issue contains contributions from twenty scholars working across disciplines all of whom take the notion of Victorian beauty as a unifying theme through which to explore and respond to Hilary’s wide-ranging body of work. From the Victorian fascination with the luminous effects of fireflies to the reworking of notions of Victorian beauty in post-war British cinema, the issue traces the idea of Victorian beauty through a variety of different contexts that include the mass production of art objects and the impact of new technologies, women’s roles within the Victorian art world, shifting museum acquisition practices, the development of aesthetic thought and ecological critique, and non-Western concepts of beauty and the Beautiful.
The cover image, chosen by Hilary, is Marie Spartali Stillman, Fiammetta Singing (detail), 1879, pencil, watercolour, and gouache, 75 × 100 cm, Private collection. Wikimedia Commons.
Editors: Victoria Mills (Guest Editor), Heather Tilley (Guest Editor)
Introduction
Articles
Poetics of the Steel Plate Engraving: Letitia Landon and Fisher’s Drawing Room Scrap Book
Isobel Armstrong
Issue 34 • 2023 • Victorian Beauty
Swinburne, Pater, and the Cult of Strange Beauty
Catherine Maxwell
Issue 34 • 2023 • Victorian Beauty
The Functions of Criticism and the Politics of Appreciation
Laurel Brake
Issue 34 • 2023 • Victorian Beauty
The Beauty of Fireflies: Transience, Myth, Bioluminescence, and Wonder
Kate Flint
Issue 34 • 2023 • Victorian Beauty
Forum
Translating the Beauty of Japan: Lafcadio Hearn’s Art Writing
Stefano Evangelista
Issue 34 • 2023 • Victorian Beauty
Michael Field, Pre-Raphaelite: One Play and Two Fair Beginnings
Ana Parejo Vadillo
Issue 34 • 2023 • Victorian Beauty
Looking Like a Woman, Dancing Like a Painting, Footing the Renaissance: Isadora Duncan and Botticelli’s Primavera
Lene Østermark-Johansen
Issue 34 • 2023 • Victorian Beauty
The Art of Feeling: Subjective Criticism and Emotional Resonance
Patricia Pulham
Issue 34 • 2023 • Victorian Beauty
Gallery
The Material and the Divine: Entwined Aesthetics in Alice Meynell’s ‘The Two Poets’
Lesa Scholl
Issue 34 • 2023 • Victorian Beauty
Beauty Both Ubiquitous and Exclusive: Emmeline Stuart-Wortley and the Great Exhibition
Daniel Brown
Issue 34 • 2023 • Victorian Beauty
Margarito d’Arezzo’s Virgin and Child Enthroned: Victorian Beauty Under Attack?
Susanna Avery-Quash
Issue 34 • 2023 • Victorian Beauty