Welcome!

I’m a historian by training, and a Victorianist by practice. I’m especially interested in the bits of culture that don’t fall neatly into the conventional domains of History, Art and Theatre History, or Literature, including public lecturing, periodicals and newspapers, ‘talk’ and cultural identities. I’ve recently take up the role of President of the British Association for Victorian Studies

News

The Gifford Lectures

It’s great to see my essay on the early decades of the Gifford Lectures finally published (Chris R. Brewer, ed., The Gifford Lectures. Advancing Natural Theology (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2026), 48-75. Very sad that Chris Brewer, editor and mastermind of the whole project, did not live to see the volume in print. But the volume as a whole is a tribute to Chris’s commitment to exploring and recounting the history of the Giffords.

Recent Blogs

  • The Greatest Living Victorians, part 2: the greatest living ‘Humbug’

    (This blog is a continuation of my previous post on the Pall Mall Gazette’s Christmas 1884 competition, in which the editor W.T. Stead asked his readers to nominate the Greatest Living Englishman [sic] in ten categories.) If Stead had hoped to create a particularly comment-worthy set of responses by including the greatest living ‘humbug’ as…

  • The Ten Greatest Living Victorians: the verdict of the readers of the Pall Mall Gazette, 1885

    It is something of a truism that the assembly of Victorian ‘greats’ canonised by contemporary culture bears little relation to popularity or influence visible during the Victorian period itself. In the case of literature, the spread of public libraries in the second half of the century created a considerable body of data about the circulation…