Ernest James Worman and the Victorian Genizah: A Salt-Miner's Tale of Romance, Tax Evasion, and Sudden Death (original) (raw)
Related papers
Journal of the History of Collections, 2019
The following article examines the Revd Greville John Chester’s activities in the Egyptian antiquities trade from 1889 to 1892, specifically his involvement in discovering and distributing Hebrew manuscripts from the now famous Cairo Genizah. Based on letters written by Chester to the Bodleian Librarian, E.W.B. Nicholson, as well as other supporting documentary evidence, this investigation provides insights into the early history of the Cairo Genizah manuscripts before Solomon Schechter’s celebrated ‘discovery’ of them in 1896/97. Overall, this article shows that the provenance story of ‘the Cairo Genizah’ is multi-faceted and needs to be subjected to much greater scrutiny. https://doi.org/10.1093/jhc/fhy023
Cambridge Genizah Studies Series, 2024
This collection of essays celebrates 50 years since the founding of the Taylor-Schechter Genizah Research Unit at Cambridge University Library. Three generations of scholars contributed their research and memories from their time at the GRU, stretching back to 1974. Their work comprises 18 articles on medieval Jewish History, Hebrew and Arabic manuscripts, archival history, and the story of the Cairo Genizah collections at the University of Cambridge. Together, they demonstrate the achievements of GRU alumni in advancing the field of Genizah Studies for more than five decades.
Addressed to the Nines: The Victorian Archive and the Disappearance of the Book
Victorian Studies, 2006
A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady, "But it's turtles all the way down!" (1) This paper is, in part, about the question of ground, a question that I would say lies at the heart or, rather, at the base of not only cyberspace but also postmodern culture generally. I wish also to continue a dialogue about Victorian studies itself, one taken up in a panel at the 2004 NAVSA conference by Amanda Anderson, Catherine Gallagher, and Matthew Rowlinson and published in the following spring issue of Victorian Studies. 1 I take as my point of departure Rowlinson's astute observation that "the association of NAVSA with a print journal establishes specificand arguably anachronistic-practices of reading and writing as the material basis of its members' collective identity" (241). He points out that NAVSA established this "arguably anachronistic" relationship despite the fact that "the founding of NAVSA. .. takes place in the context of far-reaching changes in the forms of scholarly publishing and communication" (241). Responding to Rowlinson's comments, I wish also to continue the discussion articulated by Anderson and Gallagher regarding the dominant theoretical maneuvers of the last twenty years of Victorian studies.
Editor's introduction and table of contents, Journal of British Studies, 52(4), Nov 2013
T his issue begins with a pair of articles that address two very different senses of time and chronological change during the long eighteenth century in Britain. Ted McCormick explores the relationship between long-term, deep histories of the creation of the earth and the multiplication of its many peoples, and the emergence of a new science of "political arithmetic" in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Amanda Vickery, in contrast, looks at time as lived experience, and at the gendered body in time.
2017
This dissertation addresses the problem of the gentry in late medieval England and how this problem led to a unique moment of social opportunity during the fifteenth century. Modern scholars have struggled to develop a comprehensive definition of the gentry as a social group because members of the gentry themselves had difficulty articulating their social position. The fourteenth-century English nobility's method of social closure through the hereditary summons to Parliament effectively divided the kingdom's aristocracy. Forced out of this elite group, the knights, esquires, and gentleman were left to develop their own separate group identity. In this they failed. Any sense of kinship among them, that together they formed a gentle community with its own culture, was disrupted by that culture's overlap into other groups. The continued use of the term "gentle" to refer to characteristics that were associated with all elite ranks of society made it impossible for the gentry to achieve any positive distinctions as a social group. Unable to define themselves, the gentle ranks found it difficult to exclude newcomers, increasing the range and diversity of individuals who could claim to be part of the group. Texts on heraldry, conduct, hunting, hawking, and language indicate that multiple paths to gentility opened up during the fifteenth century in response to the gentry's failure at social closure. I argue that these texts demonstrate a contemporary recognition and acceptance of the v readings course enabled this project to span the boundary between medieval and early modern and to gain better perspective about why the gentry matters. Rudolph Bell's no-nonsense attitude inside and outside the classroom has grounded me at important moments. His comment at the end of my proposal defense, that I had packed into it a lifetime's worth of projects, stuck with me and helped me shape this thesis into a more manageable package. I am also indebted to my other teachers at Rutgers for treating me as an interesting and valuable academic colleague, and then shaping me into oneespecially Indrani Chatterjee,
The Victorian Archive and its Secret
Twelve years ago, in writing Fiction in the Age of Photography, I sought to show how the sheer repetition of certain shots extracted visual information from the camera's human subject matter and reassembled that information as a system of image-objects that acquired meaning and value strictly in relation to each other. The result was a world composed entirely of illuminated spaces in which virtually all members of the British public could place themselves, their animals, their objects, and their cultural practices. What is more, those who placed themselves within this cognitive map of British society could carry it far afield from its particular referents and use it to render non-European cultures legible in European terms. In this way, photography merged the project of positive knowledge-that assumed one could know by seeing-with the Romantic project of a comprehensive knowledge-that assumed one could see the world whole. This merger, as Thomas Richards argues, "made possible the fantasy of an imperial archive in which the control of Empire hinges on a British monopoly over knowledge" (7). 1 When I assumed that such knowledge took the form of taxonomy-a set of discrete positions designated by features of race, class, and gender-my understanding of the photographic archive was destined to stop there. Ignoring signs of difference, such as those that assert themselves as the ghostly blur in Francis Galton's composite portraits of the "Jewish" or "criminal" types, I fastened on the spatial architecture of a recognizably Victorian world-picture. 2
Biological Inheritance and the Social Order in Late-Victorian Fiction and Science
2011
This dissertation investigates the heightened interest in heredity as a kind of biological inheritance that arises after the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) and how this interest intersects with concerns about class mobility and the shifting social order. Within this framework, this project considers how heredity became a means of organizing and regulating bodies in keeping with what Michel Foucault terms biopower. It unearths the cultural work within literary and scientific writings as they respond to narratives of self-help and self-improvement by imagining heredity as a means of stabilizing the social order, and by extension the nation, at the very moment that it was undergoing significant change. In studying diverse texts, this project highlights the shared ideological concerns behind both literary and scientific narratives. This study begins by examining Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1861-2) for the way in which this sensation novel, published so soon after Origin reflects the tension between hereditary determination and the figure of the self-made man. The second chapter on George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1876) explores the limits and possibilities of biological inheritance as expressed within the confines of the realist novel. The third chapter turns to Francis Galton's work on heredity, exploring the way in which his scientific research and program of eugenics are underscored by a desire to develop a narrative for British progress. The final chapter focuses on two eugenic romance novels-Ménie Muriel Dowie's Gallia (1895) and Grant Allen's A Splendid Sin (1896)-that reflect the way in which biopolitical concerns enter the domestic space by transposing biological inheritance onto the framework of financial inheritance.