Patrick Leary

Sexualities in Victorian Britain "This book promises to lay to rest, once and for all, the early 20th-century truism that Victorians' primary relationship to sexuality turned on repression." —Mary L. Poovey, Johns Hopkins University ...

This 1996 collection of essays about Victorian sexuality is now open access, thanks to the Big Ten Academic Alliance www.fulcrum.org/concern/mono...

I met him once, and the feeling of awe when I shook his hand has never left me. A great and good man.

So glad to know about this book, Martin -- and about the series, too, which I've belatedly added to the list here: www.victorianresearch.org/journals.htm...

Also "Echoes of the Eighties: Leaves from the Diary of a Victorian Lady" -- now known, thanks to the inspired rummaging of Wildean John Cooper, to have been extracted from the diaries of the redoubtable Mrs Humphry Ward.
babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/mb?a=lis... #Victorian #19thCentury

Since I last shared a link to this little collection of "C19 literary life" books on HathiTrust (most of them memoirs, my favorite genre) I've added quite a few titles, including ones by such obscure scribblers as Comyns Carr, Fitzroy Gardner, and Lucy Walford.

So you find yourself doomscrolling through Bluesky and feeling more and more downhearted and then up pops an engrossing thread that a fave scholar has taken the trouble to put together and suddenly the world looks a little brighter. Thanks, @peteorford.bsky.social!

The Fetterman and Mangin books will be battling it out for the “Dems who like to hurt Dems” segment of the reading public.

Panizzi is such a hero.

Ambient Reading ‘The swing-doors swung open; and there one stood under the vast dome.’ IN THE 1830s, the Italian political dissident Antonio Panizzi became Keeper of Printed Books at the British Museum…

Book historian Bill Bell's latest blog post is a meditation on the liberating experience of the British Museum Reading Room. crusoesbooks.wordpress.com/2025/07/30/a... #bookhistory

Marvelous. @rs4vp.org take note!

Whoa—I didn’t know the RHS had *merch*! Cool.

Disneyland of the Dead - Longreads London’s Highgate Cemetery shows us just how hard it is to keep the dead buried.

"People living on the bottom floor of nearby apartments had to erect wooden defenses outside their windows to prevent coffins from crashing into their houses." longreads.com/2025/07/22/p...

Right? Poor guy—Frith is so cruel about the rosacea that I’m surprised he didn’t make GAS’s notoriously hideous nose bigger than he did.

Oscar, whom Frith intended to ridicule, of course turns out to be, to modern eyes, not only the most recognizable but by far the most appealing figure in the painting. All sorts of small surprises here, like M.E. Braddon, whose face is just visible over Trollope's right shoulder. #19th-c #victorian

W.P. Frith's 1883 painting, "A Private View of the Royal Academy 1881". The portion at right, with Oscar Wilde surrounded by admirers, is frequently reproduced.

A key to the Frith painting, showing the identities of most but all of the people depicted.

A pleasant Victorianist pastime: zooming in on the faces in Frith's "A Private View of the Royal Academy 1881" to see how many look familiar, then looking up the rest on the key to the painting:
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/co...
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/co...

And what a lousy historian he would have made...

Agreed—the BBC Tinker goes on way too long at the start with Tarr’s story, for one thing. But Smiley’s People is perfection. I’ve watched it too many times now, each time fully engrossed in the performances, to have any critical distance about it.

What about all the journals JHUP publishes? Are their contents licensed too?

What a sweet sound! You’ve made my day.

Same here. I need to get to SHARP -- the Rochester one was the same week as RSVP in Chicago.

HathiTrust, bless its sweet heart, has all 25 volumes: catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/00585...

Finally, the bringing together of the greatest history *brains* with a boatload of *cash*. Result: The Historians’ History of the World. This news just came my way (via a local bookshop) from Appleton’s Booklovers Magazine, November 1905. I sure hope it’s not too late to place my order.

I gave one such laserjet—it’s slow, noisy, and as heavy as a boat anchor. But by god it keeps on going.

I hadn't thought about this, but he's got a point.

Nice dish, though.

They can go to this link and click on "Subscribe" at left to sign up: list.iu.edu/sympa/info/v... If there's any difficulty or if they have any questions they can write to me directly at victoria-request@list.iu.edu . After 30+ years some out-of-date instructions are still out there, I'm afraid.

So cool. When I went to my 50th college reunion a couple of months ago, one of the alums I met, Tim Boyd, turned out to be the president of the Theosophical Society. Friendly, interesting guy.

Admiring the pollinator garden outside the local library yesterday I spotted this little guy among the yellow blossoms. Made my day.

1) Bill Cronon’s CHANGES IN THE LAND (1983)
2) Scrambled eggs and toast. #HATM

He married a Wilmette girl, Janet Shearon; they were together nearly 40 years. She used to come back home for her New Trier High School class reunions. A former classmate told me Janet was a really warm, special person.