Dr Danielle Mariann Dove

Drawing on existing work on the theoretical notion of the trace in neo-Victorian fiction, this article foregrounds the material trace as an appropriate framework for examining neo-Victorian gloves. Considering the ways in which gloves take on a ghostly life and agency of their own in neo-Victorianism, this article seeks to interrogate the material and spectral traces that they leave behind in Sarah Waters's  (1999) and  (2002). It aims to show the significance of sartorial matters in these contemporary re-imaginings of the Victorian period, and to examine neo-Victorian fiction's relationship with the traces and fingerprints of the past. Locating the glove as entrenched within cultural memory as an explicitly Victorian item, this article suggests that it acts as both a marker of Victorian situatedness and a palpable entity capable of transgressing the temporal, spatial, and sexual boundaries that exist between the past and present.

This special issue examines the complex ways in which dead celebrities were memorialised or forgotten, appropriated or overlooked in the interests of specific nineteenth-century cultural values. The essays collected here pay particular attention to the impact of a celebrity’s death on the material objects, spaces, and places with which they were associated and ask what the print reaction to the deaths of prominent nineteenth-century figures can tell us about the changing status and reception of certain celebrities. In doing so, the articles in this special issue illuminate the historical resonances and continuities between the Victorians’ intense preoccupation with eminent figures and our own contemporary fascination with celebrity culture.

This article traces the emergence of the ‘Dolly Varden’ dress, a brief sartorial craze that rose to prominence shortly after Charles Dickens’s death in 1870 and which remained in vogue until 1873. Inspired by the lively heroine of Dickens’s historical novel (1841), the Dolly Varden dress was a specific type of polonaise. Its appearance on the fashion market thirty years after the text’s initial publication is intriguing, yet only a handful of academic works have considered the significance of this sartorial style. Existing scholarship has tended to focus on the fashion trend’s connection with nostalgia and the expansion of commodity culture in the late nineteenth century. Contrary to these viewpoints, this essay argues that Dickens’s celebrity and his untimely death precipitated the trend for such a gown. Seeking to reframe the dress as a particular form of parasocial interaction, this article aims to reposition the women that wore it as active and autonomous fans. Considering the cultural and sartorial ends to which the Dolly Varden dress has been appropriated is significant, this essay argues, because it illustrates the iterability and enduring popularity of Dickens’s characters, whilst also contributing to our collective understanding of the influence of the death of a celebrity figure in the late nineteenth century.

 is the first volume to focus solely on the replication, reconstruction, and re-presentation of Victorian things. It investigates the role of materiality in contemporary returns to the past as a means of assessing the function of things in remembering, revisioning, and/or reimagining the nineteenth century. Examining iterations of material culture in literature, film and popular television series, this volume offers a reconsideration of nineteenth-century things and the neo-Victorian cultural forms that they have inspired, animated, and even haunted. By turning to new and relatively underexplored strands of neo-Victorian materiality—including opium paraphernalia, slave ships, clothing, and biographical objects—and interrogating the critical role such objects play in reconstructing the past, this volumeoffers ways of thinking about how mis/apprehensions of material culture in the nineteenth century continue to shape our present understanding of things.

In 1894 Henry James’ friend Constance Fenimore Woolson committed suicide, purportedly prompting James to dispose of her dresses in the Venetian lagoon, but the phantom-like dresses would not drown. While critics consider the tale of the “drowned dresses” unlikely, many writers of contemporary fiction include this symbolic scene in their works. Dove’s chapter examines Colm Tóibín’s re-imagining of this moment in his neo-Victorian novel  and argues that the dresses’ return from the lagoon might be read in light of agentic materiality. Drawing on the theoretical concept of new materialism, Dove explores clothes as haunted sites that disturb the central narrative and proposes that the animation of garments in this novel highlights the potential of material objects to narrate the stories of the past.