Paraphernalia! Victorian Objects

Victorian Objects, edited by Helen Kingstone and Kate Lister, follows in the wake of a number of recent edited collections focused on Victorian material culture and its remediations in written and visual forms, including Illustrations, Optics and Objects in Nineteenth-Century Literary and Visual Cultures (2010), Bodies and Things in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture (2012), and Literary Bric-a-Brac and the Victorians: From Commodities to Oddities (2013). The theoretical framework of the introduction draws on John Plotz's Portable Property: Victorian Culture on the Move (2008) to make a series of useful points about the relationship between objects and the construction of identity, hierarchies of object value, and the problem of classification. In its nineteenth-century contexts, moreover, paraphernalia has important gendered connotations, denoting (prior to the Married Women's Property Act of 1870) a wife's personal items that were exempt from becoming the property of her husband: an important insight for any discussion of personal female items, especially dress and jewels.