SecretVictorianist Profile

Latest Blog Posts

• Lucia Madness at the Metropolitan Opera, New York City
  on Mar 29, 2015 in New York City Opera Scotland Theatre Walter Scott
  Last week, the Secret Victorianist, along with some student friends, attended MetStudents’ #LuciaMadness event before a production of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor at the Metropolitan Opera. The Secret Victorianist at the Metropolitan OperaMary...
• Art Review: “Nature and the American Vision: The Hudson River School” (L.A. County Museum of Art, Los Angeles)
  on Mar 22, 2015 in America American Art Classics Los Angeles New York City Race Review
  The other week, the Secret Victorianist left behind the cold of New York to visit the West Coast of the US for the first time. Although much of my visit was spent basking in the sun in Santa Monica and Malibu, there was still time to soak up some nin...
• A Victorian Alphabet: A Retrospect
  on Mar 16, 2015 in A Victorian Alphabet Neo-Victorianism
  Eighteen months ago, I began a series looking at twenty-six themes and topics in Victorian literature linked to the letters of the alphabet. Now, having recently posted Z (for Zuleika!), I’ll be recapping what we covered and linking to any posts yo...
• A Victorian Alphabet: Z is for Zuleika
  on Mar 7, 2015 in A Victorian Alphabet Max Beerbohm Oscar Wilde Oxford
  After 25 letters in my Victorian Alphabet, I’m cheating a little bit here, as Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson, or An Oxford Love Story wasn’t actually published until 1911. But, having recently finished reading Rupert Hart-Davis’s Letters...
• Theatre Review: An Octoroon, Branden Jacob-Jenkins, Theatre for a New Audience (Brooklyn, New York)
  on Feb 22, 2015 in America Brandon Jacob-Jenkins Dion Boucicault New York City Race Review Theatre
  Every other review I’ve read of Soho Rep’s An Octoroon, which premiered last spring and has now reopened at the Theatre for a New Audience in Brooklyn, opens by mentioning how obscure playwright Dion Boucicault is, not to mention h...
• A Nineteenth Centuryist in Washington D.C.
  on Feb 17, 2015 in America American Art Film Henry Adams Race Science Washington D.C.
  Rather appropriately for the President’s Day weekend, the Secret Victorianist spent the last few days in Washington D.C. It was my first visit to the US capital, and partially inspired by my recent review of Henry Adam’s Democracy, which provides...
• Be my (Victorian) Valentine?
  on Feb 8, 2015 in Charles Dickens Charlotte Bronte Elizabeth Gaskell Emily Bronte Henry James Jane Austen Mary Elizabeth Braddon Oscar Wilde Thomas Hardy Valentine's Day
  Last February, I shared some inspiration for literary lines to use whatever your romantic situation on Valentine’s Day. And this year, I’m bringing you even more potential card-fillers (thank me later!). Can you name the novel for each line?The E...
• A Victorian Alphabet: Y is for Why Yellow??
  on Jan 31, 2015 in A Victorian Alphabet American Aubrey Beardsley Charles Dickens Charlotte Perkins Gilman H.G. Wells Henry James Joris-Karl Huysmans Max Beerbohm Oscar Wilde Paris
  Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper(1892) is a staple nineteenth-century text for students of literature in the English-speaking world, and especially the US. The 6,000-word short story is an account written in the first person of a wom...
• "We'll Always Have Paris": The Met's La Bohème and Henri Murger’s Scènes de la Vie de Bohème
  on Jan 25, 2015 in French Henri Murger New York City Opera Paris Theatre
  Some texts have an afterlife which is entirely reflective of the spirit in which they were written. One of these is Henri Murger’s Scènes de la Vie de Bohème (1851).The other week I attended the New York Metropolitan Opera’s wonderful productio...
• The Secret Victorianist at the Met: Madame Cézanne and Death Becomes Her
  on Jan 18, 2015 in America American Art Fashion French New York City Paris Review
  Yesterday, I visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art here in New York to see two very different exhibitions of a nineteenth-century flavour.Madame Cézanne in the Conservatory (1891)Madame Cézanne, which runs until 15th March 2015, brings together 24...
• The Nineteenth-Century House of Cards
  on Jan 10, 2015 in America American Henry Adams New York City Washington D.C.
  “Who then is right? How can we all be right? Half of our wise men declare that the world is going straight to perdition; the other half that it is fast becoming perfect. Both cannot be right. There is only one thing in life that I must and will hav...
• Review: Hester, Margaret Oliphant (1873)
  on Jan 2, 2015 in George Eliot Margaret Oliphant Review
  A couple of posts back I looked at what literary realism is – and why it mattered so much to the Victorians – using George Eliot’s Adam Bede and Middlemarch as illustrative examples. Margaret Oliphant saw her own writing as much inferior to tha...
• A Victorian Alphabet: X is for Xmas
  on Dec 21, 2014 in America American Christmas Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Poetry
  Merry Christmas for a second year from the Secret Victorianist! Last year, at Christmas, I treated you to a tricky literary quizand suggested some nineteenth-century party games to try with friends and family. This year, I’m taking a look at a Chri...
• Theatre Review: Creditors, August Strindberg (Phoenix Theatre Ensemble, New York)
  on Dec 16, 2014 in August Strindberg Henrik Ibsen New York City Review Theatre
  August Strindberg’s Creditorsis a stark, brutal and intensely modern play, first performed in 1889. It’s a play without embellishment and with total focus on its three characters, who play out the plot in a series of intense duologues, ultimately...
• Review: Poor Miss Finch, Wilkie Collins (1871-2)
  on Dec 7, 2014 in John Ruskin Review T.S. Eliot Wilkie Collins
  Illustration from Poor Miss FinchWriting in the 1880s, John Ruskin was dismissive about the merits of Collins’s Poor Miss Finch, summarising its plot as evidence of its ridiculousness: ‘the heroine is blind, the hero epileptic, and the obnoxious...
• English Literature Study Skills: What is Realism?
  on Nov 30, 2014 in George Eliot Study Skills
  Rosamond Vincy and Tertius LydgateAt some point, probably quite early, in your degree in English Literature, you’ll be asked to write an essay on realism. You might already have a pretty good idea what that’s likely to mean (chunky novels, lots o...
• 100th Post: 100 Reasons to Read Victorian Literature
  on Nov 18, 2014 in Milestones
  It’s my hundredth post as the Secret Victorianist and, to celebrate the occasion, I’m giving you 100 REASONS to read nineteenth-century literature. Grab a dusty ‘classic’ from your bookshelf, hotfoot it to your local charity shop or get...
• Review: Pollock's Toy Museum, London
  on Nov 10, 2014 in Charles Kingsley Charlotte Bronte Lewis Carroll London Review Theatre Thomas Hughes
  To this crib I always took my doll; human beings must love something, and, in dearth of worthier objects of affection, I contrived to find a pleasure in loving and cherishing a faded, graven image, shabby as a miniature scarecrow. It puzzles me now t...
• Art Review: The Art of Mourning, The Morbid Anatomy Museum, Brooklyn, New York
  on Nov 3, 2014 in America Art Elizabeth Barrett Browning Halloween New York City Paris Review
  To round off the Halloween weekend, I paid a visit to one of New York’s spookiest spots and lesser-known museums – a building stocked with taxidermied animals, human skulls and dead things in jars – the Morbid Anatomy Museum in Brooklyn.While t...
• A Victorian Alphabet: W is for Witchcraft
  on Oct 29, 2014 in A Victorian Alphabet America Christopher Marlowe Elizabeth Gaskell Halloween John Ford Oxford Thomas Dekker Thomas Hardy Thomas Middleton William Rowley
  With Halloween just around the corner, I thought I’d use ‘W’ in my Victorian Alphabet to look at a subject not often associated with the nineteenth-century – witchcraft.Those interested in witchcraft and the supernatural most often turn to Ea...