Search results for ""author victoria"

In the Victorian era, sensational ghost stories were headline news. Spine-chilling reports of two-headed phantoms, murdered knights and spectral locomotives filled the pages of the press. Spirits communicated with the living at dark séances, forced terrified families to flee their homes and caused superstitious workers to down their tools at the haunted mines. This book contains more than fifty hair-raising – and in some cases, comical – real life accounts from Wales, dating from 1837 to 1901. Unearthed from newspaper archives, they include chilling prophecies from beyond the grave, poltergeists terrorising the industrial communities, and more than a few ingenious hoaxes along the way.

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This book reveals the cultural meanings and literary representations of disability in Victorian Britain. Tiny Tim, Clym Yeobright, Long John Silver - what underlies nineteenth-century British literature's fixation with disability? Melodramatic representations of disability pervaded not only novels, but also doctors' treatises on blindness, educators' arguments for 'special' education, and even the writing of disabled people themselves. Drawing on extensive primary research, Martha Stoddard Holmes introduces readers to popular literary and dramatic works that explored culturally risky questions like 'can disabled men work?' and 'should disabled women have babies?' and makes connections between literary plots and medical, social, and educational debates of the day.

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This book examines the British Admiralty’s engagement with science and technological innovation in the nineteenth century. It is a book about people, and gross misunderstanding, about the dreams and disappointments of scientific workers and inventors in relation to the administrators who adjudicated their requests for support, and about the power of paper to escalate arguments, reduce opinions, and frustrate hopes. From instructions for naval surveying to debates about rewards to civilians for inventions, Paper Navigators puts a wide range of primary sources in the context of public debates and explores the British Admiralty’s engagement with, decision-making around, and management of questions of value, support, and funding with citizen inventors, the broader public, and their own employees. Concentrating on the Admiralty’s private, internal correspondence to explore these themes, it offers a fresh perspective on the Victorian Navy's history of innovation and exploration and is a novel addition to literature on the history of science in the nineteenth century.

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In Race, Nation, History, Oded Y. Steinberg examines the way a series of nineteenth-century scholars in England and Germany first constructed and then questioned the periodization of history into ancient, medieval, and modern eras, shaping the way we continue to think about the past and present of Western civilization at a fundamental level. Steinberg explores this topic by tracing the deep connections between the idea of epochal periodization and concepts of race and nation that were prevalent at the time—especially the role that Germanic or Teutonic tribes were assumed to play in the unfolding of Western history. Steinberg shows how English scholars such as Thomas Arnold, Williams Stubbs, and John Richard Green; and German scholars such as Christian Karl Josias von Bunsen, Max Müller, and Reinhold Pauli built on the notion of a shared Teutonic kinship to establish a correlation between the division of time and the ascent or descent of races or nations. For example, although they viewed the Germanic tribes' conquest of the Roman Empire in A.D. 476 as a formative event that symbolized the transformation from antiquity to the Middle Ages, they did so by highlighting the injection of a new and dominant ethnoracial character into the decaying empire. But they also rejected the idea that the fifth century A.D. was the most decisive era in historical periodization, advocating instead for a historical continuity that emphasized the significance of the Germanic tribes' influence on the making of the nations of modern Europe. Concluding with character studies of E. A. Freeman, James Bryce, and J. B. Bury, Steinberg demonstrates the ways in which the innovative schemes devised by this community of Victorian historians for the division of historical time relied on the cornerstone of race.

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The Level 8 Biff, Chip and Kipper Stories, written by Roderick Hunt and illustrated by Alex Brychta, provide a rich story context to help develop language comprehension and decoding skills. Stories and More Stories continue to provide a mix of fantasy settings and familiar situations. More complex sentences develop stamina, ensuring that readers will be able to progress to more demanding texts with confidence. Books contain inside cover notes to support children in their reading. Help with childrens reading development is also available at www.oxfordowl.co.uk.

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The marriage between the Duke of Marlborough and 17-year-old Consuelo Vanderbilt, the American railroad heiress, was the talk of two nations when it occurred in 1895. By 1903, the Duchess had produced the requisite heir-and-a-spare, and the Duke had taken a lover, the exotic, erotic Gladys Deacon. Kate and Charles are introduced to this uncomfortable menage-a-trois when they come to Blenheim Palace: Kate to work on a book about King Henry II and Fair Rosamund, said to have been poisoned there by Eleanor of Aquitaine, and Charles to follow the trail of a team of jewelry thieves. But the visit takes a disturbing turn when the hosts unwittingly begin to relive the legend...

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In this innovative study of early film exhibition, Joe Kember demonstrates that prior to the emergence of a specific discipline of screen acting and the arrival of picture personalities, the early cinema inherited its human dimensions from diverse earlier traditions of performance, from the magic lantern lecture to the fairground and variety theatre. Uncovering new sources, including previously neglected films, industrial documentation, memoirs, trade and popular periodicals, the book reveals a rich landscape of popular entertainments during the mid to late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and charts the development of film institutions in relation to this complex industrial context. Marketing Modernity re-evaluates the relationship between early film and the broader cultural conditions of industrial modernity. Investigating such diverse topics as performance practices in music hall and magic theatre, the celebrity of adventurer-cameramen, and the exhibition of everyday life on screen, Kember argues that early film shows offered new opportunities to recover a sense of intimacy – a quality that was popularly considered to be under threat in the rapidly modernising world of the 1890s and 1900s.

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Newlyweds Charles and Kate Sheridan have moved into Kate's ancestral Georgian home Bishop's Keep, where Kate plans to devote herself to her writing and Charles to the responsibilities of the landed gentry. He agrees to host an automobile exhibition and balloon race at Bishop's Keep attended by Europe's foremost investors and inventors, among them the young Mr. Charles Rolls and Henry Royce. But speed, competition, and money prove to be more explosive than gasoline - and for one automobile builder, more deadly....

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1857. Joel Heygate is the popular stationmaster at Exeter St David's railway station. So when the charred remains of a body are discovered in the embers of the town's annual Bonfire Night celebration, everyone is horrified to discover that they belong to Mr Heygate. Inspector Robert Colbeck and his assistant Victor Leeming are dispatched to Exeter with all due haste, and quickly unearth a number of suspects. But as Colbeck closes in on the killer, he finds himself in mortal danger. Can justice prevail, or will his beloved Madeleine be robbed of a husband on the very eve of their marriage?

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With the growth of English cities during the Industrial Revolution came a booming population too vast for churchyards. Beckett Street Cemetery in Leeds was to become the first municipal cemetery in the country. This study relates how the cemetery was started and run, and describes the developing feuds between denominations. The author draws upon newspaper articles, archive material and municipal records to tell the stories of many of the people who lie there, from tiny infants, soldiers and victims of crime to those who perished in the great epidemics of Victorian England. The study throws new light on the occupations and pastimes of the inhabitants of Victorian cities, their problems with law and order, their attitudes to children, education and religious provision.

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In a dusty corner at the Institute of Forensic Medicine in Norway lie the remains of Julia Pastrana, half hidden in a black plastic sack, all but forgotten. Yet in the middle of the nineteenth century, this 'ape woman' was renowned, visited by scientists of international repute, and drawing the populace of three continents to the freakshows in which she starred. Just 4ft 6in tall, she was covered in hair, with a protruding jaw; but she also spoke several languages, married, had a child, made money. This is the compelling and strange story of how a woman born in the backwoods of Mexico came to be one of the most infamous women in Europe and America and how, nearly 150 years after she first set foot upon the stage, Julia is still being shown to others. The exhibition goes on.

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Beginning in 1870, the hunger for scientific discovery in Great Britain drove prominent scientists, philosophers, and others to promote the legitimacy of telepathy. At the same time, mind-reading as a form of entertainment gained increasing popularity as persuasive performers like John Randall Brown, W. I. Bishop, and Stuart C. Cumberland convinced reporters that they truly could read the thoughts of others. The widely publicized, sometimes bizarre, interactions between scientists and these charlatans ushered in the Thought Reader Craze, a period that lasted through 1910 and saw entertainers make and lose fortunes and scientists make and lost reputations. This volume explores this unusual cultural phenomenon, showing how it endured through the years due to public scientific pronouncements, astonishing performances by the thought readers, and the rapidly changing industrial society.

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Charles and Kate are summoned to Scotland on a mysterious errand for the Crown. Upon their arrival, they discover they will be staying at Glamis Castle, the most historic castle in Scotland, a place haunted by shadows and dark secrets. They learn that Prince Eddy, who had been heir to the throne until his supposed death in 1892, is still alive, ten years later. Only now the prince has gone missing - on the very morning that the body of one of his servants was found, her throat slashed. Now, Charles and his clever Kate must find Eddy and clear him from suspicion of murder, while keeping his true identity a secret.

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In Death at Bishop's Keep, Kathryn Ardleigh captured the interest of amateur detective Sir Charles Sheridan as they solved their first case together. Now the death of a local constable and the disappearance of a child have Kate and Charles once again on the trail of deadly greed and criminal mischief. They team up with the shy, uncertain (but tactful and deeply perceptive) Miss Beatrix Potter to discover who killed the constable in Mr McGregor's garden and kidnapped the constable's daughter. Helping with this urgent task or blundering clumsily into the way are Miss Potter's animal companions, Mrs Tiggywinkle and Jemima Puddleduck, as well as the beastly Mr Tod and Mr Brock.

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Located a short distance from Edinburgh’s Princes Street, the castellated design of Calton Prison was often mistaken by nineteenth-century visitors to the city for Edinburgh Castle. Occupying a prominent site on the rocky slope of Calton Hill, the then largest jail in Scotland was constructed to replace the ageing tolbooth and soon became the region’s main correction facility, housing prisoners awaiting trial and those facing execution, including murderers, political agitators, fraudsters, terrorists and even the notorious bodysnatchers Burke and Hare. For the inmates– the first of whom arrived in 1817– life inside the prison was initially wretched: conditions were squalid and discipline harsh, food was basic and the cells cold, but by the latter part of the nineteenth century it was well run compared with some other prisons. In this, the first long-overdue history of the prison, Malcolm Fife tells the story of Calton Jail, the staff and prisoners, the escapes and executions, and the crimes and punishments. Richly illustrated, it offers an absorbing insight into the Scottish criminal justice system of yesteryear.

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London, 1852. On the shocking discovery of a passenger's body on the Great Western Railway excursion train, Detective Inspector Robert Colbeck and his assistant, Sergeant Victor Leeming, are dispatched to the scene. Faced with what initially appears to be a motiveless murder, Colbeck is intrigued by the murder weapon - a noose. When it emerges that the victim had worked as a public executioner, Colbeck realizes that this must be intrinsically linked to the killer's choice of weapon. However, the further he delves into the case, the more mysterious it becomes. When a second man is strangled by a noose on a train, Colbeck knows that he must act quickly; can he catch the murderer before more lives are lost? The memorable characters, first featured in The Railway Detective, again lead you down unexpected paths in their quest to solve the mystery of the noose murders.

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Especially evident in Victorian-era writings is a rhetorical tendency to liken adults to children and children to adults. Claudia Nelson examines this literary phenomenon and explores the ways in which writers discussed the child-adult relationship during this period. Though far from ubiquitous, the terms "child-woman", "child-man", and "old-fashioned child" appears often enough in Victorian writings to prompt critical questions about the motivations and meanings of such generational border crossings. Nelson carefully considers the use of these terms and connects invocations of age inversion to developments in post - Darwinian scientific thinking and attitudes about gender roles, social class, sexuality, power, and economic mobility. She brilliantly analyzes canonical works of Charles Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, William Makepeace Thackeray, Bram Stoker, and Robert Louis Stevenson alongside lesser - known writings to demonstrate the diversity of literary age inversion and its profound influence on Victorian culture. By considering the full context of Victorian age inversion, "Precocious Children and Childish Adults" illuminates the complicated pattern of anxiety and desire that creates such ambiguity in the writings of the time. Scholars of Victorian literature and culture, as well as readers interested in children's literature, childhood studies, and gender studies, will welcome this excellent work from a major figure in the field.

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A short, provocative book that challenges basic assumptions about Victorian fictionNow praised for its realism and formal coherence, the Victorian novel was not always great, or even good, in the eyes of its critics. As Elaine Freedgood reveals in Worlds Enough, it was only in the late 1970s that literary critics constructed a prestigious version of British realism, erasing more than a century of controversy about the value of Victorian fiction.Examining criticism of Victorian novels since the 1850s, Freedgood demonstrates that while they were praised for their ability to bring certain social truths to fictional life, these novels were also criticized for their formal failures and compared unfavorably to their French and German counterparts. She analyzes the characteristics of realism—denotation, omniscience, paratext, reference, and ontology—and the politics inherent in them, arguing that if critics displaced the nineteenth-century realist novel as the standard by which others are judged, literary history might be richer. It would allow peripheral literatures and the neglected wisdom of their critics to come fully into view. She concludes by questioning the aesthetic racism built into prevailing ideas about the centrality of realism in the novel, and how those ideas have affected debates about world literature.By re-examining the critical reception of the Victorian novel, Worlds Enough suggests how we can rethink our practices and perceptions about books we think we know.

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Have you ever wished you could live in an earlier, more romantic era? Ladies, welcome to the 19th century, where there's arsenic in your face cream, a pot of cold pee sits under your bed, and all of your underwear is crotchless. (Why? Shush, dear. A lady doesn't question.) UNMENTIONABLE is your hilarious, illustrated, scandalously honest (yet never crass) guide to the secrets of Victorian womanhood, giving you detailed advice on: ~ What to wear ~ Where to relieve yourself ~ How to conceal your loathsome addiction to menstruating ~ What to expect on your wedding night ~ How to be the perfect Victorian wife ~ Why masturbating will kill you ~ And moreIrresistibly charming, laugh-out-loud funny, and featuring nearly 200 images from Victorian publications, UNMENTIONABLE will inspire a whole new level of respect for Elizabeth Bennett, Scarlet O'Hara, Jane Eyre, and all of our great, great grandmothers. (And it just might leave you feeling ecstaticallygrateful to live in an age of pants, super absorbency tampons, epidurals, anti-depressants, and not-dying-of-the-syphilis-your-husband-brought-home.)

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Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817-1911) was an internationally renowned botanist, a close friend and early supporter of Charles Darwin, and one of the first - and most successful - British men of science to become a full-time professional. He was also, Jim Endersby argues, the perfect embodiment of Victorian science. A vivid picture of the complex interrelationships of scientific work and scientific ideas, "Imperial Nature" gracefully uses one individual's career to illustrate the changing world of science in the Victorian era. By focusing on science's material practices and one of its foremost practitioners, Endersby ably links concerns about empire, professionalism, and philosophical practices to the forging of a nineteenth-century scientific identity.

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"The Ideas in Things" explores apparently inconsequential objects in popular Victorian texts to make contact with their fugitive meanings. Developing an innovative approach to analyzing nineteenth-century fiction, Elaine Freedgood reconnects the things readers unwittingly ignore to the stories they tell. Building her case around objects from three well-known Victorian novels - Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton, and Charles Dickens' Great Expectations - Freedgood argues that these things are connected to histories that the novels barely acknowledge, generating darker meanings outside the novels' symbolic systems. A valuable contribution to the field of object studies, "The Ideas in Things" pushes readers' thinking about things beyond established concepts of commodity and fetish.

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In late Victorian England, even as the sword was being rendered useless on the battlefield, swordsmanship was experiencing a unique revival. Captain Alfred Hutton and Egerton Castle, both devoted fencers and amateur historians, led a systematic study and reconstruction of combat with all the weapons of the Elizabethan arsenal - the elegant rapier, deadly sword and buckler, and the massive two-handed sword. Their work found practical expression in classes, exhibitions, academic lectures and theatrical combat, for audiences as diverse as school children, soldiers and the Prince of Wales. Yet for all of their efforts, Hutton and Castle did not establish a tradition of historical swordsmanship that survived their own generation. Instead, their books and essays were largely forgotten until the second revival of ancient swordplay in the late 20th century, and today's researchers often view these early efforts with a cavalier or dismissive eye. In Ancient Swordplay: the Revival of Elizabethan Swordplay in Victorian England, 19th-century martial arts scholar, theatrical fight director and martial artist Tony Wolf reexamines Hutton and Castle's work, both through their own words and those of their enthusiasts, students and critics. Rather than earnest but misguided amateur scholars, they are revealed to be the inventors of a systematic study and practice of lost fighting arts that has only been exceeded in recent years, worthy of being celebrated as the true pioneers in the field.

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Argues against the repeated emphasis on literary form and for the artistic importance of literary contentIt is natural to assume that if works of literature are artistically valuable, it's not because of anything they say but because of what they are: beautiful. Works of art try to say nothing, to use their content only as matter for realizing the beauty of complex form. But what if appreciating the things a work of literature has to say is a way of appreciating it as a work of art? Often dismissed as too lengthy, messy, and preachy to qualify as genuine art, in fact Victorian narrative challenges our conceptions about what makes art worth engaging.

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This text looks at the people, ideas and events between the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the Second Reform Act of 1867. From "John Arthur Roebuck and the Crimean War", and "Samuel Smiles and the Gospel of Work" to "Thomas Hughes and the Public Schools" and "Benjanmin Disraeli and the Leap in the Dark", Asa Briggs provides an assessment of Victorian achievements; and in doing so conjures up an enviable picture of the progress and independence of the last century. "For expounding this theme, this interaction of event and personality, Mr. Briggs is abundantly and happily endowed. He is always readable, often amusing, never facetious. He is widely read and widely interested. He has a sound historic judgment, and an unfailing sense for what is significant in the historic sequence and what is merely topical. . . . Above all, he is in sympathy with the age of which he is writing."—Times Literary Supplement

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A charming, gorgeously illustrated botanical encyclopedia for your favorite romantic, local witch, bride-to-be, or green-thumbed friend.Floriography is a full-color guide to the historical uses and secret meanings behind an impressive array of flowers and herbs. The book explores the coded significances associated with various blooms, from flowers for a lover to flowers for an enemy.The language of flowers was historically used as a means of secret communication. It soared in popularity during the 19th century, especially in Victorian England and the U.S., when proper etiquette discouraged open displays of emotion. Mysterious and playful, the language of flowers has roots in everything from the characteristics of the plant to its presence in folklore and history. Researched and illustrated by popular artist Jessica Roux, this book makes a stunning display piece, conversation-starter, or thoughtful gift.

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Who were the men who commanded the British Army in the numerous small wars of the Victorian Empire? Today, many are all but forgotten, save the likes of Cardigan, Kitchener, Baden-Powell and Gordon of Khartoum. Yet they were a disparate and fascinating assemblage, made up of men of true military genius, as well as egoists, fools and despots. In Warriors of the Queen, William Wright surveys over 170 of these men, examining their careers and personalities. He reveals not only the lives of the great military names of the period but also of those whom history has overlooked, from James ‘Buster’ Browne, who once fought a battle in his nightshirt, to Jack Bisset, who had fought in three South African wars by his twenty-third birthday. Based on original research and complemented by over sixty photographs, Warriors of the Queen provides new insight into the men who built (and sometimes endangered) the British Empire on the battlefield.

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Lavishly illustrated with images and stunning photographs from private collections and spanning three generations, delve into the history of Thomas Clark and his family… Rising from obscure beginnings to become a gentleman in the Victorian age dominated by the class system, as a merchant, Thomas was importing exotic produce from around the globe into the City of London. The diaries of his daughter Matilda throw open a window onto the stresses and strains of family life, showing a stereotypical Victorian father (including the bad temper). Follow his eldest son through his artistic endeavours as a lecturer, writer, poet and artist. There is a shift of perspective on his authoritarian father; here is a devoted family man who adored his wife and spent time with his family. A man dedicated to both science and religion in a world in which he found some new teachings objectionable as an evangelical non-conformist Protestant. Finally, the life stories of his children unfold, including the author’s grandfather; they were born into privilege but transcended the modern world which saw social change. Moving recollections of lives lived up to the 1950s from children, grandchildren and local residents are revealed. Read these fascinating tales, including that of the great-uncle who appears to have made an important invention, which played a significant role in winning the Great War – but perhaps someone else ended up claiming the credit? A fascinating and readable saga of the highest order. John Titford MA FSA

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Lundin explores the contemporary response to the picture books of three pioneer Victorian illustrators of children's books: Walter Crane, Randolph Caldecott, and Kate Greenaway. Over a century after their first printing, the picture books are striking—breathtaking in their line, color, and design. The author frames "the horizons of expectation"—the context of assumptions and values—that shaped the way picture books were read and reviewed by their audience and examines their critical reception with a summary of their reputation over the last century. Finally, Lundin positions the three artists in relationship to each other and examines the historiography of the trio's canonization. The role of librarians, booksellers, and publishers was critical in making these names prominent through the twentieth century. The book illustrates that reputations are made, not born, and many cultural mediators are at work in the marketplace of children's literature.

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An unabridged republication of Selected Designs from Shoppell’s Modern Houses, originally published by The Co-Operative Building Plan Association, Architects, 63 Broadway, New York, 1890. This rare catalog of residential designs is an invaluable guide for architectural historians, preservationists, and anyone attempting to restore a Victorian-era home. Besides acting as a guide to over 250 house plans, the book offers builders and homeowners essays in interior decoration and landscaping. It includes dozens of examples of architecture popular at the turn of the century including bungalow, stick-style, Gothic revival, chateau style, Queen Anne, and Eastlake influenced designs. More than 800 photos and line drawings illustrate front and side views, and floor plans complete with dimensions. Written descriptions include general dimensions, suggestions for interior finishes, color schemes, and cost estimates. The book begins with humble cottages estimated to cost less than $1,000 to build and expands to homes that would run over $10,000. There are also several row houses, a hotel, bank, church or meeting hall, a boathouse, and a seven-room school plan, plus plans for a carriage house and nine stables. Essays provide tips for an ice house, greenhouse, a cistern, heating and ventilation, removal of household waste, plumbing and drainage, and landscape gardening. There’s even a charming children’s playhouse.

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The late-Victorian discovery of the music hall by English intellectuals marks a crucial moment in the history of popular culture. Music Hall and Modernity demonstrates how such pioneering cultural critics as Arthur Symons and Elizabeth Robins Pennell used the music hall to secure and promote their professional identity as guardians of taste and national welfare. These social arbiters were, at the same time, devotees of the spontaneous culture of “the people.” In examining fiction from Walter Besant, Hall Caine, and Henry Nevinson, performance criticism from William Archer and Max Beerbohm, and late-Victorian controversies over philanthropy and moral reform, scholar Barry Faulk argues that discourse on music-hall entertainment helped consolidate the identity and tastes of an emergent professional class. Critics and writers legitimized and cleaned up the music hall, at the same time allowing issues of class, respect, and empowerment to be negotiated. Music Hall and Modernity offers a complex view of the new middle-class, middlebrow mass culture of late-Victorian London and contributes to a body of scholarship on nineteenth-century urbanism. The book will also interest scholars concerned with the emergence of a professional managerial class and the genealogy of cultural studies.

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This highly original book brilliantly exposes the phenomenon of false allegations of lunacy and the dark motives behind them in the Victorian period.Gaslight tales of rooftop escapes, men and women snatched in broad daylight, patients shut in coffins, a fanatical cult known as the Abode of Love… The nineteenth century saw repeated panics about sane individuals being locked away in lunatic asylums. With the rise of the ‘mad-doctor’ profession, English liberty seemed to be threatened by a new generation of medical men willing to incarcerate difficult family members in return for the high fees paid by an unscrupulous spouse or friend. Sarah Wise uncovers twelve shocking stories, untold for over a century and reveals the darker side of the Victorian upper and middle classes – their sexuality, fears of inherited madness, financial greed and fraudulence – and chillingly evoke the black motives at the heart of the phenomenon of the ‘inconvenient person.' ‘A fine social history of the people who contested their confinement to madhouses in the 19th century, Wise offers striking arguments, suggesting that the public and juries were more intent on liberty than doctors and families’ Sunday Telegraph

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Alcohol consumption is frequently described as a contemporary, worsening and peculiarly British social problem that requires radical remedial regulation. Informed by historical research and sociological analysis, this book takes an innovative and refreshing look at how public attitudes and the regulation of alcohol have developed through time. It argues that, rather than a response to trends in consumption or harm, ongoing anxieties about alcohol are best understood as ‘hangovers’ derived, in particular, from the Victorian period. The product of several years of research, this book aims to help readers re-evaluate their understandings of drinking. As such, it is essential reading for students, academics and anyone with a serious interest in Britain’s ‘drink problem’.

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Stories are the backbone of ethnographic research. During fieldwork, subjects describe their lives through stories. Afterward ethnographers come home from their journeys with stories of their own about their experiences in the field. Storytime in India is an exploration of the stories that come out of ethnographic fieldwork. Helen Priscilla Myers and Umesh Chandra Pandey examine the ways in which their research collecting Bhojpuri wedding songs became interwoven with the stories of their lives, their work together, and their shared experience reading The Eustace Diamonds by Anthony Trollope. Moving through these intertwined stories, the reader learns about the complete Bhojpuri wedding tradition through songs sung by Gangajali and access to the original song recordings and their translations. In the interludes, Pandey reads and interprets The Eustace Diamonds, confronting the reader with the ever-present influence of colonialism, both in India and in ethnographic fieldwork. Interwoven throughout are stories of the everyday, highlighting the ups and downs of the ethnographic experience.Storytime in India combines the style of the Victorian novel with the structure of traditional Indian village tales, in which stories are told within stories. This book questions how we can and should present ethnography as well as what we really learn in the field. As Myers and Pandey ultimately conclude, writers of scholarly books are storytellers themselves and scholarly books are a form of art, just like the traditions they study.

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In nineteenth-century Toronto, people took to the streets to express their jubilation on special occasions, such as the 1860 visit of the Prince of Wales and the return in 1885 of the local Volunteers who helped to suppress the Riel resistance in the North-West. In a contrasting mood, people also took to the streets in anger to object to government measures, such as the Rebellion Losses bill, to heckle rival candidates in provincial election campaigns, to assert their ethno-religious differences, and to support striking workers. Expressive Acts examines instances of both celebration and protest when Torontonians publicly displayed their allegiances, politics, and values. The book illustrates not just the Victorian city’s vibrant public life but also the intense social tensions and cultural differences within the city. Drawing from journalists’ accounts in newspapers, Expressive Acts illuminates what drove Torontonians to claim public space, where their passions lay, and how they gave expression to them.

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Mary Poovey's The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer has become a standard text in feminist literary discourse. In Uneven Developments Poovey turns to broader historical concerns in an analysis of how notions of gender shape ideology. Asserting that the organization of sexual difference is a social, not natural, phenomenon, Poovey shows how representations of gender took the form of a binary opposition in mid-Victorian culture. She then reveals the role of this opposition in various discourses and institutions—medical, legal, moral, and literary. The resulting oppositions, partly because they depended on the subordination of one term to another, were always unstable. Poovey contends that this instability helps explain why various institutional versions of binary logic developed unevenly. This unevenness, in turn, helped to account for the emergence in the 1850s of a genuine oppositional voice: the voice of an organized, politicized feminist movement. Drawing on a wide range of sources—parliamentary debates, novels, medical lectures, feminist analyses of work, middle-class periodicals on demesticity—Poovey examines various controversies that provide glimpses of the ways in which representations of gender were simultaneously constructed, deployed, and contested. These include debates about the use of chloroform in childbirth, the first divorce law, the professional status of writers, the plight of governesses, and the nature of the nursing corps. Uneven Developments is a contribution to the feminist analysis of culture and ideology that challenges the isolation of literary texts from other kinds of writing and the isolation of women's issues from economic and political histories.

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'An excellent and intelligent investigation of the realities of urban living that respond to no design or directive... This is a book about the nature of London itself' Peter Ackroyd, The TimesA powerful exploration of the seedy side of Victorian London by one of our most promising young historians.In 1887 government inspectors were sent to investigate the Old Nichol, a notorious slum on the boundary of Bethnal Green parish, where almost 6,000 inhabitants were crammed into thirty or so streets of rotting dwellings and where the mortality rate ran at nearly twice that of the rest of Bethnal Green. Among much else they discovered that the decaying 100-year-old houses were some of the most lucrative properties in the capital for their absent slumlords, who included peers of the realm, local politicians and churchmen. The Blackest Streets is set in a turbulent period of London's history when revolution was in the air. Award-winning historian Sarah Wise skilfully evokes the texture of life at that time, not just for the tenants but for those campaigning for change and others seeking to protect their financial interests. She recovers Old Nichol from the ruins of history and lays bare the social and political conditions that created and sustained this black hole which lay at the very heart of the Empire.A revelatory and prescient read about cities, class and inequality, the message at the heart of The Blackest Streets still resonates today.

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Medicine, in the early 1800s, was a brutal business. Operations were performed without anaesthesia while conventional treatment relied on leeches, cupping and toxic potions. The most surgeons could offer by way of pain relief was a large swig of brandy. Onto this scene came John Elliotson, the dazzling new hope of the medical world. Charismatic and ambitious, Elliotson was determined to transform medicine from a hodge-podge of archaic remedies into a practice informed by the latest science. In this aim he was backed by Thomas Wakley, founder of the new magazine, theLancet, and a campaigner against corruption and malpractice.Then, in the summer of 1837, a French visitor - the self-styled Baron Jules Denis Dupotet - arrived in London to promote an exotic new idea: mesmerism. The mesmerism mania would take the nation by storm but would ultimately split the two friends, and the medical world, asunder - throwing into focus fundamental questions about the fine line between medicine and quackery, between science and superstition.

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Disaster strikes at the Sapperton Tunnel in Gloucestershire when a goods train collides with an unusual blockage on the line: seven sheep penned onto the tracks. Specially requested to investigate the carnage, Inspector Colbeck and Sergeant Leeming are confronted with a bizarre case unlike anything they've encountered before. Stephen Rydall, board member of the Great Western Railway that manages the route, is convinced this tragedy is a personal attack on him and fears for the safety of his shepherd, missing since the incident. Rydall has many enemies but, as Colbeck will soon discover, the man also has a closely guarded secret of his own...

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