Perfume, London and the 'Orient': Re-reading John Frederick Lewis's Lilium Auratum (1871) and W. M. Thackeray's From Cornhill to Cairo (1845)
Abstract:
This session will examine the ways in which John Frederick Lewis's painting Lilium Auratum (1871) can be fruitfully placed in juxtaposition with Thackeray's accounts of Lewis in Egypt in From Cornhill to Cairo. Arguing that it is possible to read these two different genres alongside each other as different forms of 'travel-writing', the session examines how Thackeray and Lewis - both predominantly London-based - produce racialised, gendered and classed notions of scent and sensuality in their works. In examining the ways in which Thackeray and Lewis depict the racialization of smell, this session will also draw attention to the ways in which they depict imperial othering and colonial violence, and the ways in which they untether and delocalise London in their works.
About the Speaker:
Dr Fariha Shaikh is Associate Professor of Victorian Literature at the University of Birmingham. Her work focusses on nineteenth-century literature and the British empire, and she has written widely on settler colonial migration, women's writing, and periodical culture. She is the author of Nineteenth-Century Settler Emigration in British Literature and Art, published by Edinburgh University Press in 2018, and is co-editing the Routledge Companion to Global Victorian Literature and Culture. She is also the co-editor of the journal Victorian Literature and Culture.
Suggested reading:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3509495 (Chapter XV - To Cairo)
Unless stated otherwise, all our events are free of charge and anyone interested in the topic is welcome to attend. Registration is required for all events.
This page was last updated on 15 March 2025
