Pax Victoriana

PAX VICTORIANA: The Age of Victoria: the long 19th century in literature & everyday life ( © Sarah Ross 2018) * Follow PaxVictoriana on Twitter! ...where it's always... [background: 'Artichoke' wallpaper (in wine) by Morris & Co. (John Henry Dearle)]

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National Status of the Former (and Ongoing) British Empire

I've been doing research on the nationalities of all the former territories occupied, colonized, settled, controlled, or otherwise claimed by the British Empire. Short story: it's a mess.

But it also occurred to me in doing that that I couldn't find a good list of former colonies and territories that noted their status today (in Jan. 2024). So... here we are! I bet there are errors and I bet there are omissions, because – again – it's a MESS to get a clear picture of. And according to many legal historians and cultural studies scholars, that was and is on purpose.

Snapshots of those lists below -- but the full, and better-formatted version on my wordpress [because Tumblr didn't support the table I tried to make].

[* Denotes countries now in the Commonwealth of Nations.]

Again, I am sure there are issues here, as there have been contestations, debates, and challenges to the statuses of people born on land around the world that was once touched by British imperial boots.

For more on the CHAOS of those struggles, including the fundamental problem with establishing what “British nationality” even means, I highly recommend:

Ann Dummett and Andrew Nicol, Subjects, Citizens, Aliens and Others: Nationality and Immigration Law (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990).

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James Baldwin, on reading:

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people. An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian. His role is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are. He has to tell, because nobody else in the world can tell, what it is like to be alive. All I’ve ever wanted to do is to tell that. I’m not trying to solve anybody’s problems, not even my own. I’m just trying to outline what the problems are.”

(from interview in Life magazine, May 24, 1963)

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“It is never too late to be what you might have been.”

George Eliot (via naturaekos)

… Today in #LitBusters… Nope, that’s not a real quotation!

Or rather, that is not a real George Eliot quotation. Here’s author, scholar, and Eliot enthusiast Rebecca Mead (from My Life In Middlemarch):

“A quotation attributed to Eliot, ‘It’s never too late to be what you might have been,’ crops up endlessly on Twitter and on the websites of motivational consultants—although, after all my reading and all my questioning of scholars, I have yet to find it in her works. Its message, proposing the endless possibility of self-reinvention, seems precisely counter to what is implied by Middlemarch, which shows how it can grow altogether too late for lots of things” (Mead).

Instead, I always point people in the direction of Middlemarch’s cri du coeur from the still hopeful Dorothea, who hears about the fall in another character’s reputation and the way the entire town had turned against him by asking her friends, “What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?”

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Florence + The Machine - Big God

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In memory of #TabloidArtHistory: 

“Big God,” Florence + the Machine (2018) // The Mirror of Venus, Edward Burne-Jones (1875)

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Yet if one could give a sense of my mother's personality one would have to be an artist. It would be as difficult to do that, as it should be done, as to paint a Cézanne.

Virginia Woolf, “A Sketch of the Past” (on writing To The Lighthouse)

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Gentleman Jack (2019-) dir. Sally Wainwright

I was born like this. Why should I compromise myself?

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I quite agree with Dr Nordau’s assertion that all men of genius are insane, but Dr Nordau forgets that all sane people are idiots.

Oscar Wilde, letter 19 May 1897 (the day he was released from Reading Gaol) [qtd. in Ellman]

[montygreen]

Happy Indigenous People’s Day!

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Fate: 'That which has been spoken' about you, will lie down on the ground with, any time, day, any weather, there in that park, or any other Earth, I would.

Alice Notley, “Parts of a Wedding” (1986; excerpt)

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Just called to say...

MY OUP COVERS ARE A DELIGHT.

That is all.

[Image: my edit of an OUP-style book cover for Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day (1919), featuring Vilhelm Hammershøi’s painting of the British Museum from 1906.]

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There is something at work in my soul, which I do not understand.

Robert Walton, Letter II (Frankenstein [1831 edn.] by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)

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Of Candles and Lovers

I did another guest-blog for The Victorianist, the postgrad blog of BAVS, this time on Elizabeth Barrett (later - Browning), candles, and what literary studies means when you’re thinking materially. Check it out here!

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Sarah Ross works as a PhD candidate at Johns Hopkins University, researching instances of deliberate destructive fire across Victorian fiction and culture. Her essay, “Brave Hermeneutics, the…

My first-ever guest blogpost for the BAVS Postgrads’ blog, The Victorianist! On the matter of ‘Stop-Drop-and-Roll for Victorians,’ including fireguard skirts, flaming ballerinas, and at least one very distressed coroner. Find it here: https://victorianist.wordpress.com/2018/07/16/stop-drop-and-roll-for-victorians/

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Dressed in robes of flowing red velvet, she walked with her friends, stirring a cup of tea as she walked, half-way to the railway station in hot summer weather. There was no eccentricity that she would not have dared on their behalf, no sacrifice that she would not have made to procure a few more minutes of their society. Sir Henry and Lady Taylor suffered the extreme fury of her affection. Indian shawls, turquoise bracelets, inlaid portfolios, ivory elephants, ‘etc.,’ showered on their heads. She lavished upon them letters six sheets long ‘all about ourselves.’ Rebuffed for a moment, ‘she told Alice [Lady Taylor] that before the year was out she would love her like a sister,’ and before the year was out Lady Taylor could hardly imagine what life had been without Mrs. Cameron. The Taylors loved her; Aubrey de Vere loved her; Lady Monteagle loved her; and ‘even Lord Monteagle, who likes eccentricity in no other form, likes her.’ It was impossible, they found, not to love that ‘genial, ardent, and generous’ woman, who had ‘a power of loving which I have never seen exceeded, and an equal determination to be loved.’ If it was impossible to reject her affection, it was even dangerous to reject her shawls. Either she would burn them, she threatened, then and there, or, if the gift were returned, she would sell it, buy with the proceeds a very expensive invalid sofa, and present it to the Putney Hospital for Incurables with an inscription which said, much to the surprise of Lady Taylor, when she chanced upon it, that it was the gift of Lady Taylor herself. It was better, on the whole, to bow the shoulder and submit to the shawl.

Virginia Woolf on her great-aunt, Victorian photographer and hostess-or-else Julia Margaret Cameron

[Julia Margaret Cameron born #OTD (11 June) 1815. See more of her photographs, including her many portraits like the one below of her niece and Woolf’s mother, Julia Prinsep Jackson (later Stephen), here.]

(© Victoria and Albert Museum, London)