Description
Book SynopsisIn Walking the Victorian Streets, Deborah Epstein Nord explores the way in which the female figure is used as a marker for social suffering, poverty, and contagion in texts by De Quincey, Lamb, Pierce Egan, and Dickens.
Trade Review"A historically informed account of the sexual politics of urban spectatorship in nineteenth-century England. Nord's shrewd analysis and sensitive readings, coupled with the similarity between late-Victorian middle-class women's anxieties about family and vocation and those of contemporary Western women, will earn the book an especially enthusiastic response. The subject is intriguing and attractively handled; Walking the Victorian Streets is pleasurable and informative reading." -- Linda Dowling, author of
Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian OxfordTable of ContentsIntroduction: Rambling in the Nineteenth CenturyPART ONE. STROLLER INTO NOVELIST1. The City as Theater: London in the 1820s2. Sketches by Boz: The Middle-Class City and the Quarantine of Urban Suffering3. "Vitiated Air": The Polluted City and Female Sexuality in Dombey and Son and Bleak HousePART TWO. FALLEN WOMEN4. The Female Pariah: Flora Tristan's London Promenades5. Elbowed in the Streets: Exposure and Authority in Elizabeth Gaskell's Urban FictionsPART THREE: NEW WOMEN6. "Neither Pairs Nor Odd": Women, Urban Community, and Writing in the 1880s
7. The Female Social Investigator: Maternalism, Feminism, and Women's WorkConclusion: Esther Summerson's Veil
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