Dr Charlotte Mathieson

Project report by Dr Charlotte Mathieson, University of Surrey. The report formed part of a British Academy funded mid-career fellowship award. The report describes Dr Matthieson's findings within the Boots archive and describes the social influences on the culture of suntanning in the early 20th century.

Data collected in the project "Cultures of Suntanning in late 19th to mid-20th century Britain", British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship award number MCFSS22\220038. Archive Dataset lists identifying details for all archive resources that were consulted during the project, with a note as to whether data was collected from each source. Literary dataset lists identifying details for all literary resources consulted during the project, including digital concordances where used, with a note as to whether data was collected from each source. The raw data collected cannot be made open access due to archive/copyright restrictions. The identifying details provide enough supplementary information for researchers to locate these resources.

The introduction takes as its focus the book’s subtitle, ‘Cultural Responses to the Sea’, and aims to understand the relationship between culture and the sea, and to define the concept of the ‘sea narrative’ that forms this volume’s core. It begins by situating the book’s unique study of sea narratives within the field of cultural histories of the sea, discussing processes of narration, the relationship between different cultural forms, and the idea of sea narrative that is posited in the subsequent chapters. It then considers the transcultural scope of the collection and explores how the contributions work within national and transnational contexts, and draws out transnational connections that emerge across the volume as a whole.

This article argues that despite apparently being the most ‘national’ of his novels, Bleak House is actively engaged with mid-nineteenth-century global travel culture and that reading the text through its mobile structures offers a productive framework through which to reconsider the novel's nation-building practices. It explores the relationship between space, mobility, and social relations in the novel, reading Dickens's employment of mobile structures in the text as evidence of a deep anxiety about the preserve of national place in an era of global modernity and revealing the impossibility of denying Britain's inextricable connection to the modern world.

This article situates Charlotte Brontë’s writing within the context of mid-nineteenth century discourses of gender and travel, and posits that Brontë contributes to the discursive construct of the flâneuse through her writing about women walking the city in her letters from Belgium and in the novel Villette (1853). Through a critical framework drawing together literary historicism on women in the Victorian city and mobilities theories of embodied and sensory movement, the analysis reveals how Brontë foregrounds the experience of the body in her writing of women walking, and uses this as a mode through which to explore gendered discourses of mobility, and especially women’s urban walking. It argues that Brontë offers a new model of female urban spectatorship which privileges the body of the flâneuse as the prime site of knowing the city; this positively reconfigures the possibilities for autonomy and agency that urban walking affords, while at the same time making the body a site through which ambivalence about women’s mobility is expressed. The article reveals Charlotte Brontë to be a writer actively engaged with discourses of mobility and modernity that have been overlooked in her work, and situates Brontë as a significant contributor to debates about women and the city. It advances literary histories of city walking by locating Villette as a key participant within the field, and contributes to Brontë studies by revealing new perspectives on the significance of women’s travel in her works.

This paper explores the materiality of skin as it is figured and re-figured through sunburn and suntanning descriptions in nineteenth-century culture. In nineteenth-century literary representations, the suntanned skin of white, British subjects is depicted through a rich array of terminology attending not only to the transformation of colour but also to the surface texture of the skin. This article identifies that, amid changing ideas about the embodiment of self within the skin, suntanning representations bring to the surface a particular ambivalence around the stability of the skin that manifests through explorations of the reconfiguration of the skin surface. The article analyses the language of suntanning to explore, firstly, how the action of sunburn and tanning reveals the skin as unstable and susceptible to the invasive actions of the sun, endangering the boundary-lines of the physical and conceptual self; and, secondly, instances in which suntanned skin is conceptualised through likeness to material objects in a way that metaphorically and conceptually hardens the skin and self against the wider world.

Mobility in the Victorian Novel explores mobility in Victorian novels by authors including Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot and Mary Elizabeth Braddon.

The essays in this collection focus on the ways rural life was represented during the long nineteenth century. Contributors bring expertise from the fields of history, geography and literature to present an interdisciplinary study of the interplay between rural space and gender during a time of increasing industrialization and social change.

Transport in British Fiction is the first essay collection devoted to transport and its various types horse, train, tram, cab, omnibus, bicycle, ship, car, air and space as represented in British fiction across a century of unprecedented technological change that was as destabilizing as it was progressive.

Interrogating the multiple ways in which travel was narrated and mediated, by and in response to, nineteenth-century British travelers, this interdisciplinary collection examines to what extent these accounts drew on and developed existing tropes of travel. The three sections take up personal and intimate narratives that were not necessarily designed for public consumption, tales intended for a popular audience, and accounts that were more clearly linked with discourses and institutions of power, such as imperial processes of conquest and governance. Some narratives focus on the things the travelers carried, such as souvenirs from the battlefields of Britain’s imperial wars, while others show the complexity of Victorian dreams of the exotic. Still others offer a disapproving glimpse of Victorian mores through the eyes of indigenous peoples in contrast to the imperialist vision of British explorers. Swiss hotel registers, guest books, and guidebooks offer insights into the history of tourism, while new photographic technologies, the development of the telegraph system, and train travel transformed the visual, audial, and even the conjugal experience of travel. The contributors attend to issues of gender and ethnicity in essays on women travelers, South African travel narratives, and accounts of China during the Opium Wars, and analyze the influence of fictional travel narratives. Taken together, these essays show how these multiple narratives circulated, cross-fertilised, and reacted to one another to produce new narratives, new objects, and new modes of travel.

Long held as Britain's 'national poet', Shakespeare's role in the 2012 London Cultural Olympiad confirmed his status as a global icon in the modern world. From his prominent positioning in the Olympic and Paralympic ceremonies, to his major presence in the cultural programme surrounding the Games, including the Royal Shakespeare Company's World Shakespeare Festival and the Globe's Globe to Globe Festival, Shakespeare played a major role in the way the UK presented itself to its citizens and to the world. This collection explores the cultural forces at play in the construction, use and reception of Shakespeare during the 2012 Olympic Moment, considering what his presence says about culture, politics and identity in twenty-first century British and global life.

The essays in this collection focus on the ways rural life was represented during the long nineteenth century. Contributors bring expertise from the fields of history, geography and literature to present an interdisciplinary study of the interplay between rural space and gender during a time of increasing industrialization and social change.

This line from George Eliot's 1859 novel Adam Bede, reflecting on the thoughts of young, naïve country girl Hetty Sorrel as she falls in love with the older, wiser and wealthier gentleman Captain Arthur Donnithorne, provides an indicative point from which to begin a discussion of sex, courtship and marriage in Victorian literature and culture, opening up many of the ideological tensions and wider cultural resonances that these terms and their intersections produced. In the naïvety of Hetty's innocent unknowing and shapeless expectations, Eliot signals the problem of ignorance about sex prevalent among young women in the period; in the assertion that ‘a novel' would provide Hetty with a guide to understanding, we are reminded of the centrality of courtship and marriage in structuring many novels of the period, as well as the cultural work that literature played in ‘shaping' the ideas of its readers

The collection uses the concept of the ‘sea narrative’ as a lens through which to consider the multiple ways in which the sea has shaped, challenged, and expanded modes of cultural representation to produce varied, contested and ...