Because Aymé Verd is a rare book in a poor state, this paper first describes it before introducing the concept of literary mystification. It then questions its intentio auctoris (Umberto Eco) stemming from its historical environment, its intentio operis thus exploring the concepts of authorship (Aymé Verd) and fatherhood and filiation (Aymé Verd), and its intentio lectoris, i.e. how the readers can perceive duplicity in horrible murders and bloody battles, and especially in the act of generating detective and dark novels. Mystification operates in fleeting references to W. Scott’s Quentin Durward, in suggesting parallels between religious reforms in France and Scotland where the memory of Queen Mary Stewart hovers over the widow of King Francis II and the deposed Queen of Scots. A study of Callet’s handling of onomastics shows the imitator failing to equal the famous Scottish Antiquarian’s art.
This article examines the functions of the uses of Scots in The Three Perils of Man, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, “Thrawn Janet” and Kidnapped, by examining the diegetic and symbolic functions of Scots-speaking characters in these works. If the use of Scots is a marker of Scottishness in these texts, it also introduces a form of polyphony in works that are predominantly written in Standard English. Scots can be a social, geographic and cultural marker, and, as such, it sometimes signals cultural clashes, for instance when it coexists with other languages, such as Gaelic or English, which signal different linguistic and cultural identities. Scots is also often associated with the return of a superstitious past in these works, usually as a type of speech the origin of which cannot be identified. The multiple Scots-speaking voices sometimes contradict the authority of the narrative voice, or that of other voices in the text. This paper focuses on the authority that is attributed to these Scotch-speaking voices. It aims to show that Scots enables Hogg and Stevenson to integrate a multiplicity of marginal voices in their fiction, in order to destabilise the rationalist and seemingly stable frame that the Victorian novel aspires to be.
The subject of this article is the Scottish thinker Patrick Geddes (1854-1932) and his international context with specific reference to France. Geddes’s follower Lewis Mumford gives us a sense of this when he wrote ‘Geddes’s Scotland embraced Europe and his Europe embraced the World’ (Mumford 383). Geddes was an inheritor of the Scottish enlightenment philosophical tradition of interdisciplinary thinking and aspects of that Scottish tradition, in particular the work of Thomas Reid, were models for French thinkers, inspiring among others Victor Cousin. The influence of Scottish ideas in France was balanced by the influence of French ideas in Scotland and, by the time Geddes was working, what has been described as the Edinburgh-Paris axis had been active since the early nineteenth century as a means of importing French political and scientific radicalism. This article explores that interrelationship between Scotland and France through Geddes’s work, not least through his activities in both Paris and Montpellier. Geddes found in French thinkers such as Élisée Reclus, Paul Reclus, and Charles Flahault both inspiration and audience for his own thinking. Geddes’s commitment to France was fundamental both to his intellectual development and to his career as a whole, whether one considers the growth of his ideas, his friendships, the cities he responded to, or the colleges he built. With respect to communicating his ideas internationally, his close involvement with the Paris Exposition of 1900 was invaluable. There one can note in particular his influence on India via Swami Vivekananda’s disciple Sister Nivedita, and on the USA via Jane Addams of Hull House in Chicago. He died at the Scots College (collège des Écossais) he had designed in Montpellier.
In the second half of the 19th century, the question of the development of prostitution was at the heart of political debates in Great Britain. To many politicians, social reformers and legislators, prostitution embodied the ‘great social evil’. It was considered to be at the origin of the spread of venereal diseases, which had to be controlled in order to ensure the social and economic prosperity of the British nation. Between 1864 and 1869, Parliament enacted a series of laws—the Contagious Diseases Acts—aimed at regulating prostitution in garrison towns, by introducing sanitary controls for prostitutes. These laws were never enforced in Scotland, and more particularly in Glasgow. Although the city displayed all the characteristics of a garrison town, the municipality implemented a unique method of controlling prostitution: the Glasgow System, based on the arrest and forced internment in totalitarian institutions of all young women who did not conform to Victorian standards of femininity and sexuality. These women were considered rebellious teenagers whose bad behaviour was preventing the city from socially flourishing. These internments were not simply intended to regulate prostitution, but to eradicate it and so reduce the social problems that tarnished Glasgow’s reputation, such as debauchery, violence and alcoholism. The Glasgow System, which affected thousands of young women, was however challenged in England in the 1880s, when the government faced growing opposition to the Contagious Diseases Acts. Testimonies from those involved in the Glasgow System were collected and analysed during two parliamentary commissions on the repeal of these laws in 1881 and 1882. They were then used as examples, modified and published in the English press, sometimes by defenders of the Contagious Diseases Acts, sometimes by their detractors, including politicians, doctors and women’s rights activists such as Josephine Butler. The Glasgow System thus fuelled political debates on prostitution and the standardisation of its control in the United Kingdom.
Before finding everlasting fame as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle became closely associated with his native Scotland’s whaling industry and its sailors when he worked as ship’s surgeon on the whaler Hope as a young man during his medical studies. Following this brief stint in the Arctic, the author wrote two articles on the subject, as well as two short stories entitled ‘The Captain of the “Pole-Star”’ and ‘The Adventure of Black Peter’. This article proposes the first cross-study of these two short stories in order to examine how Doyle explores the archetypal model of the Scottish whaler, in light of the decline of the whaling industry in the late nineteenth-century. Doyle delineates a typology of the Scottish Arctic whaler, with stereotypical and readily recognisable physical and psychological traits, which stands in stark contrast with the sceptical English narrators of the stories. Under the guise of a fixed and monolithic description, the archetype of the Scottish Arctic whaler nevertheless stands out as an imitable model that can be replicated, used, and discarded like a theatre costume, and proves a particularly porous and ambivalent construction. This ontological breakdown is however truly illustrated by the demise of the whalers, whose deaths mirror the reversal of the whale-hunt’s power dynamics, while embodying the disappearance of the whaling industry and an actualisation of the realist genre at the turn of the century.
The 19th century produced many famous and high-achieving Scots, and among them scientists, engineers, medical doctors and teachers are prominent. This essay reviews and explains the achievements of a few of them, and their impacts on the modern world. It positions their achievements in some historical context, explores the educational models which underpinned their success, and examines some of the legacies of those models, worldwide.
Akroydon model village, built near Halifax from 1859 onwards by Edward Akroyd, the industrialist after whom it is named, is less well known than some contemporary sites such as Saltaire. However, if one looks back at the project described by Akroyd in an 1862 presentation entitled On Improved Dwellings for the Working Classes with a Plan for Building Them in Connection with Benefit Building Societies, one is struck by an approach that goes beyond the paternalism of the time and envisages the initiative as a transition meant to produce developments with a long-term perspective. Considering both the debate on architectural choices and attempts to collaborate with existing institutions and associations, Akroyd clearly focuses on deep and lasting changes. His description also emphasizes the possibility of a rapid adaptation and application of the model in many other cities. Concerned about the impact of unsanitary environments, aware of the urgent need to provide better housing for a large part of the population, and well informed about the potential protagonists of change and the financial stakes, he takes a broad view of the contemporary and historical contexts, while adopting ambitious short-term goals, particularly with regard to access to home ownership for all. Despite the relatively limited impact of his undertaking, looking back at the context and presentation of the construction of Akroydon allows us to place the project in an intermediate position that already foreshadows, in some respects, the garden cities of the following century.
Picturesque and sublime Scotland, enhanced by legendary narratives, travel stories and tales of all kinds, has attracted and fascinated poets and artists for centuries. In the Parnassian and Romantic movements, some creators seemed dedicated to representing the nation’s beauties, and devoted to retelling its myths. Scottish history and royal figures have always interested and inspired European authors among whom François Coppée who decided that Prince Charles Edward Stuart would be the hero of his play entitled Les Jacobites (1885). He dramatised and theatricalised the events related to the 1745 Rising initiated by the young man followed by several clan chiefs. The study aims at showing how François Coppée’s choice of a Scottish setting and historic topic for his play suited a general atmosphere of Scottophilia, Ossianophilia and Celtophilia in nineteenth-century Europe and France. It is based on F. Coppée’s play-text, on its seven correlated engravings and on influential sources. It focuses on the trans-textual and inter-semiotic networks showing the circulation of representational figures and symbols. It focuses on the dialogical and ekphrastic relations between texts, pictures and contexts, which leads to the decoding and interpretation of a political meaning of Coppée’s drama at the time of its production at the Parisian Odeon Theatre.
A transitional writer between the Romantics and the Victorians, De Quincey left behind the portrait of a nostalgic man, resistant to change. Yet both individual and historical Times resist human interpretation: only the divine perspective can organize the apparent chaos and give it meaning, especially the titanic upheavals of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. The ‘law of antagonism’ gives us some of the keys to this contradictory world.
The article analyses Philip G. Hamerton’s book A Painter's Camp in the Highlands through the lens of the concept of elusiveness as theorised by Kenneth J. Shapiro. It shows how, based on a frustrating experience of painting outdoors and the contradictions between a desire for topographical realism and adverse weather conditions, Hamerton came to envisage a pre-Impressionist aesthetic.
Today, images are such an integral part of our daily lives that their existence is no longer questioned. Silver-based photography gave way several decades ago to digital photography. Easier, quicker and less costly to produce, these digital images quickly became the norm and ended up considerably replacing the images produced by silver salts. Nevertheless, photography, which in its day was produced in the darkroom, has recently been reconsidered. It is now recognized that this old-fashioned way of making images, using paper and light, positions photographic intention as the enchantment of an immortal gesture.
Photography started without a camera. Now, some photographers are choosing to do without it. This article explores the consequences of cameraless practices on the photographer's relation to both their subject and their art. To do so, it tackles more specifically the technique of the photogram (as well as that of the luminogram, which is one of its extensions). Starting with William Henry Fox Talbot and Anna Atkins's Victorian photograms, it then focuses on two contemporary British photographers, Susan Derges and Garry Fabian Miller. The point is to show how photography, when detached from the camera, can create anew a form of re-enchantment of the real, and of the natural world in particular.
Two self-taught figures in the history of 19th-century photography, Julia Margaret Cameron and Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a.k.a. Lewis Carroll, produced remarkable portraits, using cameras with heavy constraints that were nonetheless conducive to the creation of forms of narrative embodied in unexpected images. We will examine the conditions and contexts of what often remains enigmatic in two comparable practices of Victorian photography.
Starting with a brief presentation of the concepts of the Czech-Brazilian philosopher Vilem Flusser on photography, this essay examines the work of four experimental photographers in the Flusserian sense: the English photogrammists, Christopher Bucklow, Susan Derges, Adam Fuss and Garry Fabian Miller.
The distinctly necromantic vocation that Roland Barthes recognizes in photography, invoking its `spectrum', fits within a broader tendency to attribute mediumistic powers to it since its inception. Spirit photography thus emerges as an evident means to question the very format of photography itself, while also engaging us in the exploration of the relationships between texts and the images that haunt them. For this reason, we propose to examine, through significant examples drawn from reception testimonies of this imagery in France and England, what spirit photography does to observation and the writing of observation, focusing particularly on issues surrounding the revelation of the invisible by the mechanical object and the interplay between industrial modernity and ancestral remnants.
