Participant Info

First Name
Victoria
Last Name
Clarke
Country
(Country)
State
Affiliation
University of Leeds
Website URL
www.drvicclarke.co.uk
Keywords
labour history, chartism, print history, print culture, victorian, non-fiction, fashion, literary history
Availability
Media Contact
Additional Contact Information
PhD
PhD

Personal Info

Photo
About Me

I am a literary historian of working class culture and politics in Modern Britain. My doctorate, ‘Reading and Writing the Northern Star, 1837-1847′ was completed at the University of Leeds in 2020, and explores how a political newspaper was instrumental in building activist communities during the first national suffrage campaign in Britain. I am currently working towards my first book on the same topic.

My research expertise spans Britain in the late eighteenth century to the early twentieth. I am particularly interested in the culture of print and periodicals in Victorian Britain, politics and protest, and fashion and material culture of the long nineteenth century. I have taught at the Universities of Leeds, York, Durham, and Warwick, covering modules including Political Prisoners and Convict Colonialism in Australia, the life and works of John Stuart Mill, Crime and Punishment in 19th century Britain, and Victorian celebrity cultures. I have also published extensively on working-class literatures in Victorian Britain for both academic and general audiences.

Recent Publications

Forthcoming/In Press

  • Clarke, Victoria, ‘Working-Class Victorian Fiction’, Oxford Companion to Popular Fiction, due 2026.
  • Clarke, Victoria, ‘The Chartist Press, c. 1835-1855’, Edinburgh Handbook to Radical Periodicals, due 2025.
  • Clarke, Victoria, and McAllister, Annemarie, ‘Special Issue Introduction: Currents in the Victorian Periodical Press’, Victorian Periodicals Review, Winter 2024.
  • Editor, Special Issue, Victorian Periodicals Review, Winter 2024.

Published

  • Clarke, Victoria, ‘Working-Class Writing in Victorian Britain, 1837-1901’, Routledge Companion to Working-Class Literature (2025).
  • ‘The Chartist Movement in Britain, 1830-1855’, in Mouvements protestataires, contestations politiques et luttes sociales en Grande-Bretagne (Editions Ellipses, 2024)
  • Clarke, Victoria, ‘“Fustian Jackets, Unshorn Chins, and Blistered Hands”: Fabric and Political Feeling in the Chartist Movement, 1837-1848’, Everyday Fashion, ed. by Jade Halbert, Liz Tregenza, and Bethan Bide (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2024).
  • Clarke, Vic, ‘What if… the Chartists had succeeded?’, All About History Magazine (April 2023).
  • Clarke, Victoria, ‘Time, Space, and Gender in the Digitised Periodical’, Victorian Periodicals Review (Autumn 2020).
  • ‘Identifying the Readers & Correspondents of the Northern Star, 1847-1848′ Print, Politics, and the Provincial Press in Modern Britain, eds. Ian Cawood and Lisa Peters (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2019).
Media Coverage
I have been an expert contributor for the series Northern Powerhouse (Dan Snow's History Hit, 2022), Killing Victorian (BBC Sounds, 2023), and Uncanny (BBC2, 2023). I am delighted to
Country Focus
UK
Expertise by Geography
Australia, British Isles, England, United Kingdom
Expertise by Chronology
18th century, 19th century, Modern, 20th century, 21st century
Expertise by Topic
Book History, Capitalism, Economic History, Gender, Labor, Libraries & Archives, Literary History, Material Culture, Museums, Politics, Public History, Rebellion & Revolution, Sexuality, Sexual Violence, Urban History, Women