British Association for Victorian Studies Annual Conference 2013
‘Nineteenth-Century Numbers’
Royal Holloway, University of London 29-31 August 2013
Revised Programme 1
CONFERENCE OUTLINE AND OVERVIEW
Thursday 29 August
11am onwards Registration
1pm Plenary: Poovey
2.30pm Tea
3pm Panel Session A
4.30pm Panel Session B
Friday 30 August
9am Plenary: Jenkins
10am Coffee
10.45am Panel Session C
12.15 Lunch
1pm BAVS AGM
6pm: BAVS Postgraduate
Professionalisation Seminar
2pm Panel Session D
7pm Dinner Founder’s
Dining Hall (Residential
Delegates)
8pm BAVS Executive Cttee
Meeting
3.30 Panel Session E
Saturday 31st
9am Panel Session F
10.30 Coffee
11am Panel Session G
12.30 Plenary: Hatt
1.30 Packed Lunch and
conference Close
2.30pm Journal of Victorian
Culture Editorial Board
Meeting
5pm Tea
5.30 Plenary: Porter
6.30 Curator’s Talk and Tour:
Picture Gallery, followed by
Conference Wine Reception,
Picture Gallery
8pm Dinner Founder’s Dining
Hall
1
Thursday 29 August
11am onwards: Registration: Moore Management Building Foyer
1pm: Plenary Address: Professor Mary Poovey, NYU: ‘Nineteenth-Century Numbers Three
Ways’
2.30 pm: Tea
3pm Panel Session A
A1 BAVS President’s Panel: The Victorian Economy: New Directions in Research
Chair, Rohan McWilliam
Peter Cain, Sheffield Hallam: ‘Imagined Economies: Keynes and the Future of Economic
History’
Donna Loftus, Open University: ‘Capital and Labour: Culture and the Categories of Economic
History’
Peter Gurney, Essex: ‘The Economy in the Popular Mind in Britain, 1840-1914'
A2 16 Measurement and Risk
Irene Wiltshire: ‘The Age of Measurement: The Rise of Land Surveying and its Challenge to
the Romantic Aeshetic’
Anna Mohr, ETH Zurich, ‘Travelling Numbers: Medicine, The Empire and the Making of
British Statistics’ [29th]
James Kneale and Samuel Randalls, UCL: ‘Bean Counters? Weather, Climate and Insurance
Calculations in Britain, 1840-1900’
A3 19 Numbering the Mass and the Spaces of Fiction
Jay Parker, Leeds: ‘Impervious to Fear! Democracy, Tragedy, and Terror in Conrad’s The
Secret Agent’
Peter Garratt, Durham: ‘The Feeling of Numerical Fact: Herbert Spencer, Realism and the
Status of Numbers’
Sophie Gilmartin, Royal Holloway: ‘An Echoing Footstep and the Tramp of the Mob: The
Impact of the Footstep on Victorian Writing’
A4 31 Dickens and Commodities on the Move
Emily Shackley: ‘Pickwickian Economics: Farcical Authority and Commodity Fetishism’
Hannah Lewis-Bill, Exeter: ‘Quantifying the Representation of China and Chinese
Commodities in Little Dorrit: Facts, Figures, and Flora Finching’
David McAllister, Birkbeck: ‘Ware Tu? Getting Lost in Dickens and Bradshaw’
A5 23 Surplus Women?
Arlene Young, Manitoba: “Vast Crowds”: Middle-Class Women and Victorian Office Work’
Margaret Denny, Columbia College, Chicago: ‘For Love and Money: Women Photographers
and the Illustrative Print’
Cordelia Smith, Birkbeck: ‘An Exhibition of 10,000 Pictures’: Art, Shopping and Fundraising in
the Late Nineteenth-Century’
A6 5 Empires and Others in Fiction
2
Philip Steer, Massey University: “Bare Statistics Read Like the Wildest Romance”: Australian
Gold, British Authors, and Sensation in the Victorian Novel and Political Economy’
Jacqueline Young, Hertfordshire: ‘The Power of Two: Gothic Doubles and the Chinese
Revolution’
David Agruss, Montana State U: ‘English Time and the Egyptian Other: Sexuality,
Temporality, and Orientalism in Richard Marsh’s The Beetle.’
4.30pm Panel Session B
B1: Dealing with the Many: New Approaches to Inmates and Institutions
Chair, Helen Rogers
Katherine Rawling: ‘The Individuality and Uniformity of Psychiatric Photographs: The
Camera and the Victorian Asylum’
Claudia Soares, Manchester: ‘“Personal Kindness and Individual Sympathy for Development
of their Nature”: Individuality, Nurture and Affection in the Nineteenth-Century Children’s
Institution’
Jane Hamlett, Royal Holloway: ‘“The Niceties of Curtain-Drawing”: Dormitory Life and
Material Culture in Schools for Middle-Class Girls, 1840-1918’
B2 Writing by Numbers: Year Studies in the Victorian Period
Chair, Wendy Parkins
Rosemary Ashton, UCL: ‘1858’
Gail Marshall, Leicester: ‘1859’
Nick Freeman, Loughborough: ‘1895’
B3 28 The Economics of Popular Entertainments
David Coates, Warwick: ‘Outnumbered? The Economics of Victorian Private and Amateur
Theatricals’
Claire Robinson, Birmingham: ‘Pantomime and the Bankruptcy of Captain Bainbridge, 1889’
B4 36 Family and Excess in Victorian Fiction
Clare Walker Gore, Cambridge: ‘Because we are too Many?: Numerous Families and
Disability in the Novels of Charlotte Yonge’
Sophia Hsu, Rice University: ‘Home, Biopolitics, and Too Many Women in White’
Lisa Hager, University of Wisconsin-Waukesha: ‘Financial Flirtations: The Marriage Market
and Stock Speculation in Ella Hepworth Dixon’s My Flirtations’
B5 8 Technology, Sound and Vision
Susan Zieger, UC Riverside: ‘Infinite Sets: Cigarette Cards, Collections, and Media Addiction’
Phyllis Weliver Saint Louis University: ‘Tennyson’s Recitations: “If I had heard him read
before I read”’
Nicole Bush, Durham: ‘Many into One: Making the Moving Image in the mid-Nineteenth
Century’
B6 24 The Ages of Men
Lisa Coar, Leicester: ‘Fat and Forty: The Mid-riff Crisis of the “Calculable” Gent’
Alice Crossley, Leeds: ‘Men of Murdered Halves: Male Adolescence in George Meredith’s
Fiction’
David Ibitson, Leeds: ‘Three’s a Crowd: Jerome K. Jerome and the Economics of Masculinity’
3
6pm BAVS Postgraduate Professionalisation Seminar: ‘Not Just a Number: Victorianists
and the Job Market’
7pm Dinner, Founder’s Dining Hall (Residential Delegates Only)
8pm BAVS Executive Committee Meeting
4
Friday 30 August
9am Plenary Address: Alice Jenkins: title TBC
Chair, Juliet John
10am Coffee
10.45am Panel C
C1 15 Statistics, Sympathy and Passion
Oz Frankel, New School: ‘Managing Facts and Figures: Parliamentary Papers and the Liberal
Subject’
M. Eileen Magnello, UCL: ‘Passion, Darwin and Victorian Statisticians’
Guy Woolnough, Keele: ‘Counting the Residuum’
C2 25 Childhoods Lost
Melissa Dickson, KCL: ‘The Multiplication and Mutation of the Arabian Nights in Early
Nineteenth-Century Britain’
Heather Scott, UCL: ‘The Angelic Number: Child Burial in the London Garden Cemetery’
Christine Chettle, Leeds: ‘Traumatic Numbers: Child Mortality Rates, Tale Types, and
Consolation Literature in George MacDonald’s Adela Cathcart’
C3 35 Liminal Spaces
Chair, Leda Kalogeropoulou
Beth Rogers, Aberystwyth: ‘Girls on the Borderland: Defining and Debating Adolescent
Girlhood in the Late Nineteenth Century’
Maria Damkjaer, KCL: ‘Making up the Numbers: Bad Magazine Fiction, Advertorials and
Other Genre Crossers’
C4 29 Dickens, Structure, and Numbers I
Chair, Jessica Hindes
Gowan Dawson, Leicester: ‘Dickens, Dinosaurs and Design’
Cole Wehrle, U Tx Austin: ‘I Really Should Have no Rest from Him’: Minor Characters and
Narrative Control in Dickens’s Bleak House’
Emma Curry, Birkbeck: ‘Doubling Dickens: Mirrors, Masses and the Multiplication of
Perspective in Barnaby Rudge’
C5 32 The Many and the One in Mayhew
Robert O’Kell, Manitoba: ‘Mayhew and the Rhetoric of Numbers’
Owen Clayton, Lincoln: ‘The Many Versus the One: Illustrating Individuals in Mayhew’s
London Labour and the London Poor’
Lesa Scholl, University of Queensland: ‘Starving to Excess: Irish Migrant Domesticity and the
Terror of the Ghetto’
C6 21 Parasitism, Mental Physiology and the Mass at the Fin de Siecle
Emilie Taylor-Brown, Warwick: ‘Gregarious Gregarines and Parasitic Vectors: The Parasite as
Numeric Anxiety in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Science’
Michael Parrish Lee, Leeds Met: ‘Writing the Malthusian Body: Parasitic Food Plots in
Gissing’s New Grub Street’
5
Gavin Budge, Hertfordshire: ‘Mass Culture as Mental Pollution: Mental Physiology and
Conceptions of Culture in the Victorian Period’
12.15 Lunch
1pm British Association for Victorian Studies AGM
2pm Panel Session D
D1 18 Mathematics and Writing the Human
David R. Sorensen, St Joseph’s University: ‘The Steady Turning of the Handle’: Mathematics
versus “Mathesis” in Carlyle’s Practice of History’
Tim Armstrong, Royal Holloway: ‘Hardy’s Maths’
Courtney Salvey, Kent: ‘Mathematizing Machines: Being Human in Victorian Industrial
Culture’
D2 9 Corpus Stylistics in Dickens and Beyond:
Michaela Mahlberg, Nottingham: ‘Dickens, Characterisation and the Corpus: Employing
Computer-Assisted Methodology to Study Textual Patterns in Dickens’s Novels’
Raffaella Antinucci, University of Naples, Parthenope: ‘“Numbers” and “Heaps of” Things in
Dickens’s Fiction’
Kathleen Pacious, NUI Galway: ‘Numbered Narrators: Rhetorical Statistics in Daniel Deronda
and Our Mutual Friend’
D3 20 Measuring Sameness and Difference
Richa Dwor, Leicester: ‘“Take Half a Pound of Matzo Flour, two ounces of chopped suet”:
Judith Montefiore’s The Jewish Manual (1846)’
Adrian Young, Princeton: ‘The Fate of the Bounty Mutineers and their Descendants as a
‘Social Experiment’ in Victorian Anthropology’
Jenny Holt, Meiji University, Tokyo: “A Profound Contempt for the Laws of Perspective”: The
Distortion of Size and Proportion in Victorian Literary Representations of Japan’
D4 12 Numbers on London’s Streets
Carlos Lopez Galviz, SAS, London: ‘Into, Out, and Across: Mapping Street Traffic in Victorian
London’
Matthew Ingleby, UCL: ‘No. 1 is an Egyptian Tomb! … No. 2 is a Swiss Chalet’: House
Numbers and Names in Victorian Suburbia’
Mary L. Shannon, KCL: ‘Street Numbers: Uncovering the Real Spaces of Bohemia’
D5 13 Quantifying Ethics
Chair, Wendy Parkins
Kirsten Harris, Nottingham: ‘Life be Cheap and Money Dear’: Taking Stock in Socialist
Periodical Poetry’
Dominic Rainsford, Aarhus: ‘Literature, Ethics and Mathematics: Calculating Suffering in
Victorian Texts’
Ingrid Hanson, University of Hull: ‘God’ll Send the Bill to You’: W.T. Stead and the Accounts
of War, 1899-1902.
D6 22 Managing Over-Population
Dan Bivona, Arizona State: ‘”The Coming Universal Wish Not to Live”: Regression Towards
the Mean of Suicide in the Late Nineteenth Century’
6
Lisa Robertson, Northampton: ‘From the Few to the Many: Illuminating Model Dwellings
with Ruskin’s Seven Lamps of Architecture’
Carroll Clayton Savant, U Texas at Dallas: ‘And the Women Shall Inherit the Earth: Late
Victorian Over-Population and the Condition of England on the Threshold in Gissing’s The
Odd Women’
D7 1 Prosody:
Marie Banfield: ‘Number and Verse: the New Prosody and Metrical Experiments of G.M.
Hopkins’
Jo Taylor, Keele: ‘The Metre’s All Wrong’: Challenging Christabel in Mary Coleridge’s ‘The
Witch’’
Laura Kilbride, Cambridge: ‘The Heavy-Monosylllabic-Eleventh-Syllable-of-the-DoubleEnding-Test’: A.C. Swinburne and ‘The Newest Shakespeare Society’
3.30pm Panel Session E
E1 14 Religion and Numbers
Mark Knight, Toronto: ‘Reading Victorian Religious Periodicals and the Limits of Painting
Religion by Numbers’
Sarah Flew, Open: ‘Statistics as to the Religious Condition of London’: How the Church of
England used Statistics to Shape Home Missionary Strategy in the 1850s and 1860s’
Niamh Brown, Glasgow: ‘Almanacs and Hymnals’
E2 30 Dickens, Structure, and Numbers II
Chair, Juliet John
Margaret Kolb, Berkley: ‘Historical Erasures: Hard Times and the Threat of Numbering Time’
Neil McFarlane, Birkbeck: ‘Decreasing the Surplus Population: was Scrooge Alluding to
Benjamin Franklin as well as Thomas Malthus?’
Peter Orford, Buckingham: ‘A Multidrood of Sins: the Repetition and Reputation of John
Jasper in The Mystery of Edwin Drood’
E3 26 Measuring Criminal Bodies
Edward Higgs, Essex: ‘Numbering Identity: Quantification and the Identification of the
Criminal in Nineteenth Century Britain’
James Poskett, Cambridge: ‘Seeing by Numbers: the Mathematics of Victorian Phrenology’
Marlene Tromp, Arizona State: ‘Volume of Blood, Quantity of Fibres, and Dimensions of
Lacerations: The Failure of Forensic Science’
E4 37 Infinity and Final Causes
Bethan Carney, Birkbeck: ‘Calculating Man’s Soul: Fairy-Tale, Fantasy and Empiricism in the
Nineteenth Century’
David Gillott, Birkbeck: ‘A Very Finite Kind of Infinity’: Samuel Butler, Agnosticism and the
Logical Incoherence of Scientific Naturalism’
E5 Sizing Up: Animal Shapes, Sizes, Numbers and Nuisances
Michael Worboys, Manchester: ‘Points Win Prizes: The Invention of Modern Dog Breeds’
Julie-Marie Strange, Manchester: ‘How Much is That Dog …? Scandal and Welfare in the
‘Points win Prizes’ Pedigree Culture: A Late Victorian Concern’
Neil Pemberton, Manchester: ‘Twelve Rats and the Ratcatcher’s Prank’
E6 11 Transport
7
Chair, Ruth Livesey
Jonathan Stafford, Kingston: ‘Temporal Flux in Nineteenth-Century Steam Navigation’
Diane K. Drummond, Leeds Trinity: ‘The British Imperial Imagination and “Mapping, Making,
and Marketing” the Railways of India, 1851-1900’
Eleanor Packham, Birkbeck: ‘A Passion for Size: Brunel’s Great Eastern and the Victorian
Numerical Imaginary’
5pm Tea
5.30 Plenary Address: Theodore Porter: ‘Tabular Unreason: The Origin of Eugenics in the
Evidence-Based Asylum’
6.30 pm Curator’s Talk and Tour; Picture Gallery, followed by Sponsored Wine Reception
and Canapes in the Picture Gallery
8 pm Dinner Founders Dining Hall
Saturday 31st August
9am Panel Session F
F1: ‘Reading Dickens and Collins By Numbers’: A Round Table on Online Reading Projects’
Holly Furneaux, Leicester; Andrew Mangham, Reading; Joanne Shattock, Leicester; Peter
Orford, Buckingham.
F2 10 Replication and Visual Culture
Eugenia Gonzalez, Birkbeck: ‘“Everywhere dolls, dolls, dolls!”: Aesthetics of Mass Production
in the Victorian Doll Industry’
Amelia Yeates, Liverpool Hope: ‘Seeing Double: Multiple Images of Femininity in NineteenthCentury Art’
Cristina Pascu-Tulbure, Bangor: ‘The Romaunt of the Rose: Chaucer Many Times Re-Told by
Burne -Jones’
F3 33 Feeling and Infection in the Crowd
Ella Mershon, Berkeley: ‘Maggot Numbers’: Putrefaction and the Politics of the Crowd’
Carolyn Burdett, Birkbeck: ‘Emotion is no Solitary Thing: Emotional Contagion and Aesthetic
Sharing’
Ruth Doherty, Trinity College, Dublin: ‘An Inexhaustible Reservoir of Concealment’:
Individual Characters and the London Crowd in Godwin, Poe and Wells’
F4 2 Infinity, Sequence, and Self in Nineteenth-Century Poetics
Anna Barton, Sheffield: ‘Love, told and untold, in the Victorian Sonnet Sequence’
Helen Luu, RMC of Canada: ‘The One and the Many: Splitting and Proliferating Selves in
Augusta Webster’s Dramatic Monologues’
Rachel Feder, Rutgers: ‘Inherited Infinities’
F5 7 New Directions in Quantitative and Qualitative I:
Luke Blaxhill, KCL: ‘Words by Numbers: Investigating the Language of Victorian Electoral
Politics with a Computerized Corpus’
Matthew Bradley, Liverpool: ‘”For We Are Many”: Number-Crunching the Afterlife at
Gladstone’s Library’
8
Helen Rogers and John Herson, LJMU: ‘A New Agenda for Online Quantitative and
Qualitative Analysis of Working-Class Autobiography’
F6 3 Long, Short, and Serial Forms
Christopher Pittard, Portsmouth: ‘Conjuring Numbers: Secular Magic and Serialisation in
Cranford’
Jessica Hindes, Royal Holloway: ‘An Encyclopaedia of Tales’: Working on Long-Form Serial
Fiction’
Leda Kalogeropoulou, Royal Holloway: ‘Women Writers and Short Fiction in The Yellow
Book’
10.30 Coffee
11am Panel Session G
G1 4 Creation, Technology, and Reproduction:
Alys Mostyn, Leeds: ‘De Quincey Squared: Multiplying Books and Selves’
Alice Barnaby, University of Bedfordshire: ‘Creative Repetition: Early Victorian Pin-Prick
Imagery’
Angela Dunstan, Kent: ‘Sculpture by Numbers: Replication, Reproduction and Thomas
Hardy’s The Well-Beloved (1892; 1897)’
G2 38 New Directions in Quantitative and Qualitative II
Zoe Alker, LJMU: ‘Revisiting the Mid Victorian Garrotting Panics in the Digital Era’
Alison Adler Kroll, Oxford: ‘Victorian Political Fiction and Diaries: Counting on Reform in
1867’
Jana Smith Elford, U of Alberta, ‘A Thousand Links: The Late Victorian Women’s Movement,
Social Organisation and Network Visualisation Tools’
G3 27 Madness, Disease and Measurement
Stef Eastoe, Birkbeck: ‘Who were the Idiots and Imbeciles? Observation, Knowledge and
Identification in Patient Classifications at Caterham Imbecile Asylum’
Helen Goodman, Royal Holloway: ‘Numbering the Mad: Counting and Categorization in the
Nineteenth-Century Lunatic Asylum’
Meegan Kennedy, Florida State: ‘Tables, Graphs, Words: Balancing Verbal and Visual
Narratives in Nineteenth-Century Britain’
G4 6 Abstraction, Quantification and the Self
Anne-Marie Millim, U of Luxembourg: ‘The Self in Numbers: Self-Assessment in the Victorian
Diary’
Alex Murray, Exeter: ‘The Vitality of Dorian Gray: Wilde and Post-Darwinian Life’
Harro Maas, Utrecht: ‘Prudent Victorians and the Political Economy of Accounting
G5 17 Seeing with Numbers
James Emmott, Birkbeck: ‘Seeing Statistically’
Kit Andrews, Western Oregon U: ‘J.H. Stirling, Hegel, and the British Idealist Critique of
Empiricism’
Derek Ball, Leicester: ‘“The Lower Sphere Might be Said, at a Rough Guess, to be Thirteen
Times Larger”: Mathematics in George Eliot’s Truth-Telling’
G6 34 Numbering Victorian Literature Now
Claire Wood, Leicester: ‘Making the Dickens Bicentenary Count’
9
Gillian Piggot, Middlesex: ‘Going Astray in the Middle East: Dickens and One Thousand and
One Nights’
12.30pm: Closing Plenary Michael Hatt, Warwick: ‘Numbering Sculpture’
1.30pm Conference Close: Packed Lunch
2.30pm Journal of Victorian Culture Board Meeting
10