A new special issue of VP on material conditions is out & it’s a banger. It considers what it looks like to interrogate the protocols whereby intellectual production’s insides are quarantined from their constitutive outsides in conversation with Victorian poetry. muse.jhu.edu/issue/56685

If anyone needs an update: it grew on me. And there are a few more Dickensian easter eggs as the series progresses.

The brand new journal ‘Advances in Nineteenth-Century Research’ from @incsa.bsky.social is now LIVE! See here for my editorial which introduces the Forums section, for which I’m the section editor: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Delighted to see my chapter within the newly published Routledge Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell. Really proud of how this piece came together with Lizzie and Rebecca's excellent guidance (it's not about trees, for once), & now looking forward to reading the other chapters in the collection.

Come and join the chatter on *The Victorian Short Story: Influence, Innovation and Legacy*, a free Online Study Day by the Victorian Popular Fiction Association Friday 17th – Saturday 18th April Keynote Speakers: Dr Jen Baker, and Dr Victoria Margree victorianpopularfiction.org/the-victoria...

You can get 30% discount on *Theatrical Afterlives: Nineteenth-Century Women’s Novels on the Stage* if you order it directly from global.oup.com/academic/pro... Use the promo code AUFLY30 at checkout! ✨

Designed to look like books, these ceramic objects are actually flasks or hand warmers. They are thought to have been filled with hot water or coal to warm the hands of the wearer on a cold winter's day. They functioned as a sort of ceramic hot water bottle. The perfect gift for book lovers!

Really enjoyed this thought-provoking piece. I grew up in a town with a popular Ghost Tour; although in Stratford a lot of it was unsurprisingly Shakespeare-themed, I'm struck that the guide dressed up in Victorian (rather than 'Shakespearean') attire, which reflects a contextual point made here.

Applications for the 206/27 round of the C19 Matters Fellowship @ljmuofficial.bsky.social are now open! Details and benefits below and here: victorianist.wordpress.com/2026/03/27/n.... Deadline Monday 11 May 2026; please share widely! @bars.bsky.social @bavs-uk.bsky.social @drhorrocks.bsky.social

Anyone else out there watching or watched season 2 of The Artful Dodger? I'm about half-way through, & while it's still entertaining with likeable performances, it's not quite grabbing me like the first one (& is definitely more neo-Victorian than Dickensian this time).

Our 'clue' was clearly rubbish, because nearly everyone guessed it immediately. You can all stop asking, because we're finally doing it--William Thackeray's 'Vanity Fair' (1848)!!! Join us for the two-part adventures of Becky Sharp in a few weeks. BOTH episodes will drop the same day: 15 April.

CFP deadline this week for our Brontë Studies special issue on Poetry - the abstracts are starting to flock in - still time to send in yours!

Digital publication day! 🎉 I'm very proud of this little book on a difficult subject, one I take very much to heart (as I try to do with all my work, but especially this one). Gothic Dementia is free to download until April 12th! www.cambridge.org/core/element...

Great news & a much-needed 'Companion'! Can't wait to get my hands on this. 🥳

I'll be giving an online talk on Heidi Thomas's BBC adaptations of Gaskell's Cranford (2005) & Return to Cranford (2007) for @eilzabethgaskellsh.bsky.social on Wednesday 3rd June, 7pm-8pm UK time. Sign-up via the link for some noughties nostalgia! (tickets £6)

📚"Covers designed by folk who didn't bother to read the book" Episode 1: Florence Marryat's Blood of the Vampire (1897). This book features a female vampire who doesn't know she's a vampire, who drains life not blood, and is enjoying a holiday in a Belgian seaside town. #BadBookCovers #C19th

It's nearing 20 years since the last comparable volume on Gaskell was published (2007's Cambridge Companion), & I think in this case a new burst of critical attention to one of the most subtle & enjoyable of Victorian novelists is very much overdue.

The letters included in Gordon Haight's magisterial nine-volume edition of George Eliot's correspondence--almost 4,000 in all--are now freely searchable online, thanks to Dr. Beverley Park Rilett and her team at the GE Archive project. tinyurl.com/48hwzu7z #Victorian

Some exciting book post today - I received my contributor copy of The Routledge Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell, edited brilliantly by Lizzie Ludlow & Rebecca Styler! 👇 (1/4)

Race, Violence, and Form, co-edited with a writer of the most beautiful sentences, @cookiegoth.bsky.social, is out now. For more about the volume, see our blog post up at Liverpool UP blog:

To see a world in a grain of sand And a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand And eternity in an hour. -William Blake, Auguries of Innocence

Happy birthday William Morris, born on this day in 1834. He was inspired by nature and went on to design some of the most recognisable textile patterns of the 19th century. Do you have a favourite? Photos: 'Trellis', 'Pomegranate', 'Daisy', 'Acanthus'

JVC essay prize alert!

Coming soon to a fine bookshop near you: The Moonstone, in the pretty 'collectible classics' series from Flame Tree Publishing, introduction by me.

Running on fumes a bit at this point of my semester, but also grateful I get to teach Wilde AND Dickens back-to-back on the same afternoon.

Enjoyed today's #RSVPDigiEvent? Can't wait for more #19thC periodicals' chat? Our March event is just around the corner next Friday, March 6! @triproftri.bsky.social will talk to us about the "Racial Anxieties of Polite Culture in the Forget Me Not for 1825 + 1833." Register now!

Very happy to see this published. My co-conspirator in all things conference-related, @cbkenkar.bsky.social, and I are so proud of the students who wrote this review and grateful to everyone who made the event such a special one.

CFP: VPR will celebrate its 60th anniversary in 2027. We’re taking this historic occasion to capture the state of our field in a “KEYWORDS” special issue guest edited by Fionnuala Dillane, @jimmussell.bsky.social & @mdamkjaer.bsky.social. Proposals due March 30. Details: rs4vp.org/vpr-cfp-spec...

This is why in higher education you should not let your curriculum be driven by 'demand.' You need give students the precious opportunity to discover the things they don't already know they will be excited about.

BAVS Rosemary Mitchell Prize now open for submissions!

Deadline Day! If you have a good idea, please share it with me! @drchrislouttit.bsky.social bookshoplit.com/cfp-booksell...

It’s publication week for Tales of Health, a book that brings a medical humanities framework to the Romantic genre of the National Tale and its questions of health and citizenship.

Also, does it matter that the new Netflix adaptation has gone for Pride and Prejudice rather than Pride & Prejudice (a la 2005)? Discuss.

Just catching up with the online discussion board for my adaptations module, and a student is responding critically to the new Netflix Pride and Prejudice teaser trailer! A rare example of the worlds of my middle-aged, academic Bluesky feed & the lives of my Gen Z students colliding 🤣.

Enjoying the experience of teaching a text most of the students think isn't very good again, not only for the engaged discussions, but also for the eventual realisation for some that it is worth reading & analysing literature that isn't conventionally 'great' sometimes.

Regular readers of my skeets might remember that I recently-ish went to London to find out whether Jane Austen was gay and lo! the conversation piece I wrote the day afterwards has finally been published

Join the VPFA for a workshop on publishing Victorian Popular Fiction! ✅ Turning your thesis into a monograph. ✅ Writing a winning book proposal. ✅ Insights from the VPFJ editorial committee. ✅ Handling peer review & rejection 📅 26th February at 6pm 🔗 See your emails for the registration link!

As we are still in the thrall of winter, JOIN ME at the Viktor Wynd museum (online) with The Last Tuesday Society THIS Friday (27th Feb) at 8pm (GMT) where I will be chatting about child ghosts. A ticket gets you a (time limted) recording if you can't make it on the evening! url-shortener.me/E818

📢 We are delighted to announce that our newest special issue "Narratives of Solidarity vs. Narratives of Exclusion in Twenty-first-century Fiction and Performance" has officially been published! 📚 This issue comprises promising articles on #solidarity, community and #affect. More details👇:

Disability and the Gothic has now been published and is available online FOR FREE for the next 2 weeks. www.cambridge.org/core/element...

To mark the release of Emerald Fennell’s #WutheringHeights, @drclaireocall.bsky.social, #BrontëStudies Editor, has curated a selection of archival essays exploring the novel’s incredible afterlife. Free to access & perfect pre-reading🍿 www.tandfonline.com/journals/ybs... @tandfresearch.bsky.social

This time next month this book will be out in the world. If your institution subscribes to Oxford Academic, you can already access the digital version! global.oup.com/academic/pro... #JaneAusten #Adaptation #19thC @oupacademic.bsky.social @uv.es

Reminder: our Adaptation SIG event is this Wednesday 4pm (UK time) on Adaptation and Franchises! DM if you've not got the zoom link.

It’s going to sound quaint, but the best way to resist an AI takeover of the humanities is to assign physical books, sit around, read them, and argue about ideas. Academic has become such a competitive arena, that we ourselves are trained to look for the winning angle, instead of the best education.

I’m delighted to have been invited to speak at Leicester’s Centre for Victorian Studies Spring Seminar Series! Join next Weds 25th Feb 5.15pm GMT (in person or online) for a free talk on ‘Fevers and Flu at the Fin de Siècle’ on the theme of Victorian Bodies: www.tickettailor.com/events/centr... 🦠 📕

This piece actually offers an intriguing & slightly different perspective on the new adaptation, but is anyone else getting a bit tired of the endless discourse on Fennell's "Wuthering Heights"?

Give your lady what she *really* wants this Valentine’s Day — to read, like, and repost her WUTHERING HEIGHTS review for @newrepublic 💕 newrepublic.com/article/2063...

Lovey-dovey #Valentines kitsch everywhere leaving you cold? How about Victorian 'Vinegar Valentines' instead? In the 19th century, it was popular to send one of these to someone you didn't like. These are from the collection at the wonderful Museum of East Dorset - well worth a visit!

Registration is now live for my VPFA Study Day on 'Sensation Fiction and the Health Humanities'. It's free to attend, thanks to funding from the VPFA and the Health Humanities Hub at Loughborough University. The programme and the link to register here: victorianpopularfiction.org/sensation-fi...

So excited for this! Please send in your abstracts!!