Honeymoons and Nostalgia

A couple of scholar books with Brontë references that appear this month:

Victorian Honeymoons. Journeys to the Conjugal
Helena Michie (Rice University, Houston)
Cambridge University Press
Series: Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture (No. 53)

While Victorian tourism and Victorian sexuality have been the subject of much recent critical interest, there has been little research on a characteristically nineteenth-century phenomenon relating to both sex and travel: the honeymoon, or wedding journey. Although the term ‘honeymoon’ was coined in the eighteenth century, the ritual increased in popularity throughout the Victorian period, until by the end of the century it became a familiar accompaniment to the wedding for all but the poorest classes. Using letters and diaries of 61 real-life honeymooning couples, as well as novels from Frankenstein to Middlemarch that feature honeymoon scenarios, Michie explores the cultural meanings of the honeymoon, arguing that, with its emphasis on privacy and displacement, the honeymoon was central to emerging ideals of conjugality and to ideas of the couple as a primary social unit.

• An original study of an often overlooked but important experience of Victorian married life

• Sheds new light on Victorian attitudes to sexuality

• Reconstructs the experiences of real-life couples through their own accounts

Chapter 1, Reading honeymoons, contains several references to Charlotte Brontë and Arthur Bell Nicholls honeymoon in Ireland.

Nostalgia in Transition, 1780-1917
Linda M. Austin
University of Virginia Press
Victorian Literature and Culture Series

Referred to long ago as a "disease" of Swiss soldiers and Highland regiments far from home, nostalgia became known in the 1920s as more of a fleeting rather than debilitating condition. Yet, what caused this shift in our collective understanding of the term? In "Nostalgia in Transition, 1780-1917", Linda M. Austin traces the development of nostalgia from a memory disorder in the eighteenth century to its modern formulation as a pleasant recreational distraction. Offering a paradigm for and analysis of nostalgic memory as it operates in various attempts to reenact the past, Austin explains both the early and the modern understanding of this phenomenon. Beginning with an account of nostalgia's transformation from an acute form of melancholia and homesickness into elegiac expression and idyllic representation, Austin goes on to examine an array of texts, from poetic meditations on nostalgia in the first half of the nineteenth century to the popular adult souvenirs of childhood in the second half. She shows how, in novels by Hardy; in elegies and lyrics by Arnold, Tennyson, and Emily Bronte; in illustrations by Kate Greenaway and Helen Allingham; and in late Victorian cultural histories of the cottage, nostalgia acts as a collective, rather than an individual reenactment of an invented, rather than a remembered, past or place. For students and scholars interested in the Victorian era, as well as in Romanticism and modernism, "Nostalgia in Transition" provides a well-rounded perspective on how and why our understanding of nostalgia has changed over time.

Chapter 1 - Emily Brontë’s homesickness

Categories: Books, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Scholar