Ashley Duraiswamy

Thesis Title: Victorian Manuscript Books: The Private Commonplaces Behind Published Literary Productions

Supervisors: Professor Helen Small and Professor Clare Broome-Saunders

Research Interests: My work examines the literary extracts copied into nineteenth-century commonplace books, scrapbooks, and albums. I am interested in fragmentary forms and private methods of literary circulation. As part of my research, I have examined literary exchange within the Rossetti family, George Eliot’s notebooks, and Charlotte Mary Yonge’s Barnacle manuscript magazine.

Other research interests include the aesthetics of Victorian literary productions (e.g. 1830s comic scrap culture) and nineteenth-century reception of medieval texts. My dissertation for the MSt in English (1830-1914) explored anonymous characters in Dickens.

I am supervising an undergraduate dissertation on penny dreadfuls in the long nineteenth century, as well as teaching a class and tutorial for Paper 3.

Conference Papers: 'An Uncommon Family: The Rossettis and the Commonplace.' Presented at 'The Rossettis: Siblings and Spouses,' hosted by the National Trust, Wightwick Manor, 10 November 2026. 

Anthologies: The Oxford Diary of Loss, co-editor. Forthcoming from the Oxford Writers' House.