In the belief that museums devoted to the late Victorians play an important part in our understanding of them, we published a first list of 69 shrines in September 2008, with the help of a number of correspondents on VICTORIA and others of THE OSCHOLARS editorial team. For the second edition, we added a further 55, with 46 more in the third, another 10 for the fourth, six more for the fifth, a further eight for the sixth edition, at the end of 2014 another eleven, and five more in July 2015 totalling 210.
The emphasis is on people who lived a substantial part of their lives between c.1880 and 1910, the exceptions being Poe, included because of his long influence on the fin-de-siècle, Bulwer Lytton, who died in 1873, and Comte, who is under studied to-day but whose thought was also influential. Occasionally we stray from the Shrine to the Collection (e.g. Conan Doyle, Gide), and, somewhat whimsically, we have also included Sherlock Holmes, twice. The list will be expanded from time to time, and we will add further information. New additions and visit-based accounts are sought.
Subsequently we included links to a number of literary associations and at the end of July 2020 we broadened our remit to include discussion of the place in our culture of such museums and the questions raised regarding ownership, interpretation, mediation and revision, stimulated by the correspondence on VICTORIA: thread ‘Undisciplining Victorian Studies’.
Page created September 2008. Updated 3rd November 2008; 18th April 2010; 25th April 2011; 10th February 2012; 16th February 2014; 26th December 2014; 13th July 2015; 7th February 2016, 3rd August 2020.
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