Description
Book SynopsisUnderstanding the Victorians paints a vivid portrait of an era of dramatic change, combining broad survey with close analysis and introducing students to the critical debates on the nineteenth century taking place among historians today.
The volume encompasses all of Great Britain and Ireland over the whole of the Victorian period and gives prominence to social and cultural topics alongside politics and economics and emphasizes class, gender, and racial and imperial positioning as constitutive of human relations. This third edition is fully updated with new chapters on emotion and on Britain's relationship with Europe as well as added discussions of architecture, technology, and the visual arts. Attention to the current concerns and priorities of professional historians also enables readers to engage with today's historical debates. Starting with the Queen Caroline Affair in 1820 and coming up to the start of World War I in 1914, thematic chapters explore the topics
Table of Contents
List of figures Timeline Preface to the third edition Acknowledgments Introduction: ‘Playing on the Piano-forte’ 1. A ‘green and pleasant land’ of cities and slums: Space 2. ‘Discussions on the subject of reform’: Politics 3. 'Fog in channel—Continent isolated’: Britain and Europe 4. Ruling the world: Imperialism 5. Wealth, poverty, growth, and slumps: The economy 6. ‘Bristling with shops’: Consumption 7. ‘Born into the lower-upper-middle’: Class 8. ‘Oh, I do like to be beside the seaside’: Leisure 9. ‘A common cause with all the females in this kingdom’: Gender 10. A ‘dignified part’: Monarchy 11. ‘The court was crowded all day’: The law and the police 12. ‘Good, murderous melodramas’: Arts, entertainment, and print culture 13. Marriage, free love, and ‘unnatural crimes’: Sexuality 14. 'For all its gathered tears': Emotion 15. ‘Begin and end with the Church whatever you do between-whiles’: Religion 16. Vestiges and origins: Science, technology, and medicine
