Perhaps no period better clarifies our current crisis of digital information than the nineteenth century. Self-aware about its own epochal telecommunications changes and awash in a flood of print, the nineteenth century confronted the consequences of its media shifts in ways that still define contemporary responses. In this authoritative new work, Paul Fyfe argues that writing about Victorian new media continues to shape reactions to digital change. Among its unexpected legacies are what we call digital humanities, characterized by the self-reflexiveness, disciplinary reconfigurations, and debates that have made us digital Victorians, so to speak, struggling again to resituate humanities practices amid another technological revolution. Engaging with writers such as Thomas De Quincey, George Eliot, George du Maurier, Henry James, and Robert Louis Stevenson who confronted the new media of their day, Fyfe shows how we have inherited Victorian anxieties about quantitative and machine-driven reading, professional obsolescence in the face of new technology, and more—telling a longer history of how writers, readers, and scholars adapt to dramatically changing media ecologies, then and now. The result is a predigital history for the digital humanities through nineteenth-century encounters with telecommunication networks, privacy intrusions, quantitative reading methods, remediation, and their effects on literary professionals. As Fyfe demonstrates, well before computers, the Victorians were already digital.

Broadway productions of musicals such as The King and I, Oliver!, Sweeney Todd, and Jekyll and Hyde became huge theatrical hits. Remarkably, all were based on one-hundred-year-old British novels or memoirs. What could possibly explain their enormous success? Victorians on Broadway is a wide-ranging interdisciplinary study of live stage musicals from the mid- to late twentieth century adapted from British literature written between 1837 and 1886. Investigating musical dramatizations of works by Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Christina Rossetti, Robert Louis Stevenson, and others, Sharon Aronofsky Weltman reveals what these musicals teach us about the Victorian books from which they derive and considers their enduring popularity and impact on our modern culture. Providing a front row seat to the hits (as well as the flops), Weltman situates these adaptations within the history of musical theater: the Golden Age of Broadway, the concept musicals of the 1970s and 1980s, and the era of pop mega-musicals, revealing Broadway's debt to melodrama. With an expertise in Victorian literature, Weltman draws on reviews, critical analyses, and interviews with such luminaries as Stephen Sondheim, Polly Pen, Frank Wildhorn, and Rowan Atkinson to understand this popular trend in American theater. Exploring themes of race, religion, gender, and class, Weltman focuses attention on how these theatrical adaptations fit into aesthetic and intellectual movements while demonstrating the complexity of their enduring legacy.

In lively, accessible prose, Victorians Undone fills the space where the body ought to be, proposing new ways of thinking and writing about flesh in the nineteenth century.

A new edition of the first book by the bestselling author of A History of the World in 6 Glasses-the fascinating story of the telegraph, the world's first "Internet," which revolutionized the nineteenth century even more than the Internet has the twentieth and twenty first. The Victorian Internet tells the colorful story of the telegraph's creation and remarkable impact, and of the visionaries, oddballs, and eccentrics who pioneered it, from the eighteenth-century French scientist Jean-Antoine Nollet to Samuel F. B. Morse and Thomas Edison. The electric telegraph nullified distance and shrank the world quicker and further than ever before or since, and its story mirrors and predicts that of the Internet in numerous ways.

Exploring how scholars use digital resources to reconstruct the 19th century, this volume probes key issues in the intersection of digital humanities and history. Part I examines the potential of online research tools for literary scholarship while Part II outlines a prehistory of digital virtuality by exploring specific Victorian cultural forms.

The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature offers 45 chapters by leading international scholars working with the most dynamic and influential political, cultural, and theoretical issues addressing Victorian literature today. Scholars and students will find this collection both useful and inspiring. Rigorously engaged with current scholarship that is both historically sensitive and theoretically informed, the Routledge Companion places the genres of the novel, poetry, and drama and issues of gender, social class, and race in conversation with subjects like ecology, colonialism, the Gothic, digital humanities, sexualities, disability, material culture, and animal studies. This guide is aimed at scholars who want to know the most significant critical approaches in Victorian studies, often written by the very scholars who helped found those fields. It addresses major theoretical movements such as narrative theory, formalism, historicism, and economic theory, as well as Victorian models of subjects such as anthropology, cognitive science, and religion. With its lists of key works, rich cross-referencing, extensive bibliographies, and explications of scholarly trajectories, the book is a crucial resource for graduate students and advanced undergraduates, while offering invaluable support to more seasoned scholars.

Over a century after the death of Queen Victoria, historians are busy re-appraising her age and achievements. However, our understanding of the Victorian era is itself a part of history, shaped by changing political, cultural and intellectual fashions. Bringing together a group of international scholars from the disciplines of history, English literature, art history and cultural studies, this book identifies and assesses the principal influences on twentieth-century attitudes towards the Victorians. Developments in academia, popular culture, public history and the internet are covered in this important and stimulating collection, and the final chapters anticipate future global trends in interpretations of the Victorian era, making an essential volume for students of Victorian Studies.

This book explores the significance of the now-lost pavilion built in the Buckingham Palace Gardens in the time of Queen Victoria for understanding experiments in British art and architecture at the outset of the Victorian era. It introduces the curious history of the garden pavilion, its experimental contents, the controversies of its critical reception, and how it has been digitally remediated. The chapters discuss how the pavilion, decorated with frescos and encaustics by some of the most prominent painters of the mid-nineteenth century, became the center of a national conversation about an identity for British art, the capacity of its artists, and the quality of Royal and public taste. Beyond an examination of the pavilion's history, this book also introduces a digital model which restores the pavilion to virtual life, underscoring the importance of the pavilion for Victorian aesthetics and culture.

In this vivid and accessible new account of the dawn of film in Britain, internationally respected film historian and curator Bryony Dixon introduces us to Britain's first cinematic pioneers – an eclectic mix of chemists, engineers, photography enthusiasts, fairground showmen and magicians – who in a few short years built a vibrant new industry. As she chronicles the emergence of the first embryonic film forms and genres, she reveals often surprising innovations, from cutting-edge science to ingeniously witty tricks and comedies, with filmmakers reflecting existing entertainment forms as well as advancing editing and cinematography in ways that shaped the art of film for many decades after. Dixon offers fresh insights by focusing on the films themselves – many of them only recently available to view – while building on the work of generations of scholars. In the process, Dixon makes a compelling case for the British filmmakers of the era as inventive and creative figures, every bit as influential as their more celebrated contemporaries in France and the US.