text by Dorota Osińska When Alfred Tennyson published ‘The Kraken’ in 1830, he gave Victorian poetry one of its most ambiguous images of hidden power, unaffected by history, culture, and human consciousness. Almost two centuries later, Florence + the Machine released ‘Kraken’ (Everybody Scream, 2025), a song that (consciously or not) reanimates this mythic beast […]
text by Magdalena Pypeć Old Harmon in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend amassed an enormous fortune as a dust contractor, as one of the characters explains: “On his own small estate the growling old vagabond threw up his own mountain range, like an old volcano, and its geological formation was Dust. Coal-dust, vegetable-dust, bone-dust, crockery-dust, rough […]
text by Emma Woodhouse My current project is a non-fiction book, Witches and Witchcraft in Victorian Britain, which will be published by Pen and Sword Books in April 2027. My overarching research interest is Victorian working-class women’s lives, particularly those who have been overlooked. My initial interest in witchcraft belief in Victorian Britain was ignited […]
