It was with great sadness that the School of English learned that Dr Sheila Smith had died in 2014. Although it was over two decades since Sheila worked at the University in what was, at the time, the Department of English, she is still, in a sense, with us, mainly through her pioneering study The Other Nation: The Poor in English Novels of the 1840s and 1850s, a work which is still required reading for students studying mid-Victorian fiction, especially the works of Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell.
One reason why Sheila's monograph has retained its relevance for today's generation of student, is due to the lucidity of its prose and the extremely detailed research that underpinned her argument. Long before 'new historicism' was fashionable, Sheila was diligently surveying a whole array of contemporary evidence, from periodicals, contemporary photographs, drawings and paintings, to government reports and commissions and broadside ballad-sheets, all in the service of painting a richly detailed portrait of the lives of the Victorian poor, one that gives her readers a sense of immediacy and authenticity - as if momentarily, they can inhabit the same social world as her nineteenth-century subjects.
Staff and colleagues in the School remembered Sheila at a ceremony of celebration of her life with members of her family and close friends.
Posted on Friday 28th November 2014