• Colour drawing of a staged theatrical scene framed by two symmetrical classical structures with niches containing gilded statues, flanked by trees. At the centre, a painted backdrop shows an island within an archipelago, with a visible settlement; in the foreground, a vessel approaches the shore. Four figures stand before the backdrop holding branches and other objects. The composition is enclosed within a thin rectangular gold border.

An unfinished masterpiece by Robert Louis Stevenson

By Gillian Hughes Many of Stevenson’s longer works of fiction might be characterised as historical novels: in Weir of Hermiston Stevenson excavates Edinburgh’s Golden Age, that of Sir Walter Scott and James Hogg, and also its surviving physical traces in the…

Neo-Victorian Masculinities

There is a shortage of men in neo-Victorianism. Or that, at least, is how it would appear to look at many critical works on neo-Victorianism at the present time. Eleanor Catton’s Man Booker Prize winning novel, The Luminaries (2013), with…