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 Affinity (1999) and Fingersmith (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 Barnaby Rudge (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.

Neo-Victorian Things: Re-Imagining Nineteenth-Century Material Cultures in Literature and Film 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 volume offers 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 The Master 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.

This article examines the New York Times’ ‘Overlooked’ project, an online memorialising enterprise dedicated to providing ‘forgotten’ celebrities (mostly women) with retrospective obituaries. Launched on International Women’s Day 2018 with the aim of addressing the gendered and racialised inequalities inherent in obituary selection, the project attempts to rectify the NYT’s omission of notable figures from its obits section. Focusing on two case studies from the first cohort of these belated obits – Charlotte Brontë and Ida B. WellsBarnett – this article examines how the retrospective nature of the project affects the structure, content and function of the celebrity obituary. Considering the issues at stake in remembering and reframing ‘overlooked’ lives from the past, it questions whether focusing on historically overlooked celebrities works to redress social injustice and increase diversity of representation in the present.

Victorian Dress in Contemporary Historical Fiction is the first full-length study to investigate and attend to the deeply suggestive and highly symbolic iterations of Victorian women's dress in the contemporary cultural imagination. Drawing upon a range of popular and less well-studied neo-Victorian novels published between 1990 and 2014, as well as their Victorian counterparts, 19th-century illustrative material, and extant Victorian garments, Danielle Dove explores the creative possibilities afforded by dress and fashion as gendered sites of agency and affect. Focusing on the relationship between texts and textiles, she demonstrates how dress is central to the narrativization, re-formulation, and re-fashioning of the material past in the present. In its examination of the narrative trajectories, lively vitalities, and material entanglements that accrue to, and originate from, dress in the neo-Victorian novel, this study brings a fresh approach to reading Victorian sartorial culture. For researchers and students of Victorian and neo-Victorian studies, dress history, material culture, and gender studies, this volume offers a rich resource with which to illuminate the power of fashion in fiction.