British Association for Victorian Studies Annual Conference 2013
‘Nineteenth-Century Numbers’
Royal Holloway, University of London 29-31 August 2013
Revised Programme 3
CONFERENCE OUTLINE AND OVERVIEW
Thursday 29 August
11am onwards Registration
1pm Plenary: Poovey
2.30pm Tea/Accomm. Chk-In
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
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Thursday 29 August
11am onwards: Registration: Moore Management Building Foyer. Luggage storage and room
keys available for residential delegates.
1pm: Auditorium Plenary Address: Professor Mary Poovey, NYU: ‘Nineteenth-Century
Numbers Three Ways’
Chair, Ruth Livesey, Royal Holloway
2.30 pm: Tea [campus accommodation available for check-in from 2pm]
3pm Panel Session A
A1 Auditorium 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 MX034A Measurement and Risk
Chair, tbc
Irene Wiltshire: ‘The Age of Measurement: The Rise of Land Surveying and its Challenge to
the Romantic Aesthetic’
Anna Mohr, ETH Zurich, ‘Travelling Numbers: Medicine, The Empire and the Making of
British Statistics’
James Kneale and Samuel Randalls, UCL: ‘Bean Counters? Weather, Climate and Insurance
Calculations in Britain, 1840-1900’
A3 MX001 Numbering the Mass and the Spaces of Fiction
Chair, Robert Hampson
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 MBS02-3 Dickens and Commodities on the Move
Chair, Cathy Waters
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 MX034B Surplus Women?
Chair, Rosemary Mitchell
Arlene Young, Manitoba: “Vast Crowds”: Middle-Class Women and Victorian Office Work’
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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 MBS0-16 Empires and Others in Fiction
Chair, Nick Freeman
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: Auditorium 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 MX001 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 MBS0-16 The Economics of Popular Entertainments
Chair, Juliet John
David Coates, Warwick: ‘Outnumbered? The Economics of Victorian Private and Amateur
Theatricals’
Claire Robinson, Birmingham: ‘Pantomime and the Bankruptcy of Captain Bainbridge, 1889’
B4 MBS02-3 Family and Excess in Victorian Fiction
Chair, Richa Dwor
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’
B5 MX034A Technology, Sound and Vision
Chair, James Emmott
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”’
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Nicole Bush, Durham: ‘Many into One: Making the Moving Image in the mid-Nineteenth
Century’
B6 MX034B The Ages of Men
Chair, Julie-Marie Strange
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’
6pm MX001 BAVS Postgraduate Professionalisation Seminar: ‘Not Just a Number:
Victorianists and the Job Market’.
Commentators: Gowan Dawson, Holly Furneaux, Juliet John, Rosemary Mitchell.
7pm Dinner, Founder’s Dining Hall (Residential Delegates Only)
8pm MBS02-3 BAVS Executive Committee Meeting
4
Friday 30 August
9am Auditorium Plenary Address: Alice Jenkins: “Would Ten Bears Fit?” Victorian
Literature, Mathematics, and the Search for a Common Context’
Chair, Juliet John, Royal Holloway
10am Coffee
10.45am Panel C
C1 Auditorium Statistics, Sympathy and Passion
Chair, tbc
M. Eileen Magnello, UCL: ‘Passion, Darwin and Victorian Statisticians’
Guy Woolnough, Keele: ‘Counting the Residuum’
Emilie Taylor-Brown, Warwick: ‘Gregarious Gregarines and Parasitic Vectors: The Parasite as
Numeric Anxiety in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Science’
C2 MX0-16 Childhoods Lost
Chair, Anne Varty
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 MBS02-3 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’
Michael Parrish Lee, Leeds Met: ‘Writing the Malthusian Body: Parasitic Food Plots in
Gissing’s New Grub Street’
C4 MX034A 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 MX034B The Many and the One in Mayhew
Chair, Ruth Livesey
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’
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C6 MX001 Things Victorian in Bulgarian Research: Literary and Cultural Perspectives
Chair, Juliet John
Vladimir Trendafilov, Sofia: ‘The Dickens Case in Bulgaria: Three Stages of Reception History
Milena Kirova, Sofia: ‘Bulgaria Imagined: English Travel Notes from the Mid-Nineteenth
Century’
Yana Rowland, Plovdiv: ‘The Critical Reception of Tennyson in Bulgaria, 1884-present’
12.15 Lunch
1pm Auditorium British Association for Victorian Studies AGM
2pm Panel Session D
D1 Auditorium Mathematics and Writing the Human
Chair, Alice Jenkins
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 MX001 Corpus Stylistics in Dickens and Beyond:
Chair, Cathy Waters
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 MX034A Measuring Sameness and Difference
Chair, Mark Knight
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 MX034B Numbers on London’s Streets
Chair, Rohan McWilliam
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 MB0-16 Quantifying Ethics
Chair, Wendy Parkins
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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 MBS02-3 Managing Over-Population
Chair, Alex Murray
Dan Bivona, Arizona State: ‘”The Coming Universal Wish Not to Live”: Regression Towards
the Mean of Suicide in the Late Nineteenth Century’
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 MBS04-5 Prosody:
Chair, Anna Barton
Marie Banfield: ‘Number and Verse: the New Prosody and Metrical Experiments of G.M.
Hopkins’
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 MBX034A Religion and Numbers
Chair, Matthew Bradley
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 MBX034B Dickens, Structure, and Numbers II
Chair, Juliet John
Margaret Kolb, Berkley: ‘Historical Erasures: Hard Times and the Threat of Numbering Time’
Neil MacFarlane, 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 Auditorium Measuring Criminal Bodies
Chair, Helen Rogers
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 MBS02-3 Infinity and Final Causes
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Chair, Lori Lee Oates
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 MBS016 Sizing Up: Animal Shapes, Sizes, Numbers and Nuisances
Chair, Gowan Dawson
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 MX001 Transport
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 Auditorium Plenary Address: Theodore Porter: ‘Tabular Unreason: The Origin of
Eugenics in the Evidence-Based Asylum’
Chair, Carolyn Burdett, Birkbeck, University of London
6.30 pm Curator’s Talk and Tour, Laura MacCulloch, RHUL Picture Gallery, followed by
Sponsored Wine Reception and Canapes in the Picture Gallery
8 pm Dinner Founders Dining Hall: all delegates
Saturday 31st August
9am Panel Session F
F1 MX001 ‘Reading Dickens and Collins By Numbers’: A Round Table on Online Reading
Projects’
Chair, Kim Edwards
Holly Furneaux, Leicester; Andrew Mangham, Reading; Joanne Shattock, Leicester; Peter
Orford, Buckingham.
F2 MBS02-3 Replication and Visual Culture
Chair, Michael Hatt
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 MBS016 Feeling and Infection in the Crowd
Chair, tbc
8
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 MBX034A Infinity, Sequence, and Self in Nineteenth-Century Poetics
Chair, Joseph Bristow
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 Auditorium New Directions in Quantitative and Qualitative I:
Chair, tbc
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’
Helen Rogers and John Herson, LJMU: ‘A New Agenda for Online Quantitative and
Qualitative Analysis of Working-Class Autobiography’
F6 MBX034B Long, Short, and Serial Forms
Chair, tbc
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 Auditorium Creation, Technology, and Reproduction:
Chair, Amelia Yeates
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 MX001 New Directions in Quantitative and Qualitative II
Chair, Alice Jenkins
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 MBS016 Madness, Disease and Measurement
Chair, Helen Rogers
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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’
G4 MX034A Abstraction, Quantification and the Self
Chair, tbc
Alex Murray, Exeter: ‘The Vitality of Dorian Gray: Wilde and Post-Darwinian Life’
Harro Maas, Utrecht: ‘Prudent Victorians and the Political Economy of Accounting
Claire Wood, Leicester: ‘Making the Dickens Bicentenary Count’
G5 MX034B Seeing with Numbers
Chair, tbc
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’
12.30pm: Auditorium Closing Plenary Michael Hatt, Warwick: ‘Numbering Sculpture’
Chair, Joseph Bristow, UCLA
1.30pm Conference Close: Packed Lunch
2.30pm MBS02-3 Journal of Victorian Culture Board Meeting
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