Women’s Lecture Series 2025

Incriminating suicide notes, grave robbing, adultery, and bigamy—these sensational acts may seem ripped from today’s social media, but, in fact, they are all things that everyday Victorians committed. We didn’t invent scandals nor just delight in them. We might like to imagine proper Victorians spending their days sipping tea from bone china teacups, but they lived in a world overflowing with scandal—disreputable events and circumstances bringing discredit and notoriety. In this talk, we will explore the lives of noted Victorians who committed scandalous acts out of despair, grief, love, and anger. Topics include, among others, the secret liaison between married artist George Cruikshank and a former servant turned mistress who bore him many illegitimate children; George Eliot’s move to the continent to live as a wedded couple with her already married lover; and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s exhumation of his dead wife’s grave to retrieve the only copy of his poems. Oh, those scandalous Victorians!

Catherine J. Golden is professor of English and the Tisch Chair in Arts and Letters at Skidmore College (2017-22), Saratoga Springs, NY. She is author of Serials to Graphic Novels: The Evolution of the Victorian Illustrated Book (2017), Posting It: The Victorian Revolution in Letter Writing (2009), and Images of the Woman Reader in Victorian British and American Fiction (2003).She contributes regularly to The Victorian Web and Illustration Magazine, a British arts journal. She has lectured widely.