Overview

Victorian society and culture was a contradiction – an era of bold vision and technological wonders entwined with deep social fears and cultural anxieties.

Why do we associate the Victorians with darkness, sin, hypocrisy and monstrosity? Why does the Gothic seem to best encapsulate how we think about and remember the Victorians? These are some of the questions you'll explore on this course.

This MA explores not just 19th-century Gothic cultures but, more generally, the fears, wonders, and dark imagination of the Victorian era. Through a rich and fascinating range of historical, literary and folkloric texts, themes and approaches, you'll probe the darker side of the Victorian age.

The course gives you access to a wealth of online resources and digitised archival material relating to Victorian culture and draws on local literary and cultural resources, such as the Conan Doyle Collection (Lancelyn Green Bequest) in Portsmouth’s Central Library. You'll have the freedom and scope to pursue your own areas of interest and research via an individual research project and 15,000-word dissertation.

What you'll experience

On this course you'll:

• Be taught by experts from both the History and English departments at the University of Portsmouth
• Develop your research skills, critical thinking and literary analysis
• Work through two core content modules, focused on the cultural tensions between Victorian anxieties (crime, poverty, slums, and degeneration) and Victorian enchantment (supernatural folklore and magic, ghosts, spiritualism and the occult, and the development of Victorian celebrity culture)
• Use our Library’s wealth of online archival material including London Low Life, Victorian Popular Culture, The Old Bailey Online, The Charles Booth Archive, and the British Library Newspaper Archive
• Have opportunities to undertake research in the Charles Dickens Collection and Arthur Conan Doyle Collection (Lancelyn Green Bequest), both housed in the Portsmouth Central Library
• Get to study any topic of interest within the broad scope of the Victorian Gothic and the history of Victorian culture
• Be able to base your studies around more recent Neo-Victorian re-imaginings of the nineteenth century in their research projects, exploring areas such as crime or supernatural fictions, or steampunk culture
• Have the chance to listen to extracurricular talks by guest scholars and writers
• Be fully supported by a personal tutor (one of the teaching team) throughout your course

Careers and opportunities

As well as giving you greater expertise in the fields of nineteenth-century history and Victorian Gothic literature, this course also enhances your knowledge and skills in other areas. During this course, you'll:

develop the skillset required to work in the heritage industry, the arts and media
develop a strong grounding for pursuing more advanced levels of academic study, including PhDs and careers in academia
improve your broader academic skills, such as the ability to analyse, assess, synthesise and evaluate
develop your archival and research skills, as well as data analysis and interpretation abilities
improve your oral and written communication, time and workload management, and other transferable skills