Search results for ""author victoria"

In 1859, Dubliners strolling along country roads witnessed something new emerging from the green fields. The Victorian house had arrived: wide red brick structures stood back behind manicured front lawns. Over the next forty years, an estimated 35,000 of these homes were constructed in the fields surrounding the city. The most elaborate were built for Dublin’s upper middle classes, distinguished by their granite staircases and decorative entrances. Today, they are some of the Irish capital’s most highly valued structures, and are protected under strict conservation laws.Dublin’s Bourgeois Homes is the first in-depth analysis of the city’s upper middle-class houses. Focusing on the work of three entrepreneurial developers, Susan Galavan follows in their footsteps as they speculated in house building: signing leases, acquiring plots and sourcing bricks and mortar. She analyses a select range of homes in three different districts: Ballsbridge, Rathgar and Kingstown (now Dun Laoghaire), exploring their architectural characteristics: from external form to plan type, and detailing of materials. Using measured surveys, photographs, and contemporary drawings and maps, she shows how house design evolved over time, as bay windows pushed through façades and new lines of coloured brick were introduced. Taking the reader behind the façades into the interiors, she shows how domestic space reflected the lifestyle and aspirations of the Victorian middle classes. This analysis of the planning, design and execution of Dublin’s bourgeois homes is an original contribution to the history of an important city in the British Empire.

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Liverpool gained a unique and notorious reputation during the 19th century for being an abnormally violent and criminal place. ‘The Monster Evil’ intends to explore the historical foundations of this stigmatization: were the fears real or an invention of the Victorian newspapers? In answering such questions the book examines Liverpool’s violent crime and how effectively it was policed by the newly established constabulary through the use of local and national press reports, contemporary accounts and police records. In doing so issues relating to public acceptance and tolerance of violence and the police will be explored. All forms of criminal interpersonal violence are described and analysed in the context of the city; including notorious murders such as the Tithebarn-street kicking of 1874, the ‘wholesale poisonings’ by two sisters in 1883 and the killing of young children by other young children in 1855 and 1891. Everyday acts of violence in the home between family members, or in the street, whether as acts of robbery or as drunken unprovoked attacks on strangers or against the police, are also given prominence. An extract on police night shift duty by Liverpool’s foremost 19th-century journalist, Hugh Shimmin, is included. The book, which covers much of the Victorian period, is based on original and extensive research. Through an examination of a wide range of ‘typical’ case studies and news stories, which exemplify the various kinds of violent crime found in Liverpool, readers will find the book accessible, authoritative and surprising in its resonance with present day crime and its news coverage by the media.

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A VENGEFUL PHANTOM LURKS IN A COUNTRY GRAVEYARD. A WHALING CREW BECOMES TRAPPED ON A HAUNTED SHIP. A HUMAN SKULL IS KEPT LOCKED IN A CUPBOARD, BUTSOMETIMES AT NIGHT, IT SCREAMS. . . .This collection of tales transports the reader to a time when staircases creaked in old manor houses, and a candle could be blown out by a gust of wind, or by a passing ghost. Penned by some of the greatest Victorian novelists and masters of the ghost story genre, each story is illustrated with exquisitely eerie artwork in this special gift edition featuring an embossed textured case and a ribbon marker.

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In Supernatural Entertainments, Simone Natale vividly depicts spiritualism’s rise as a religious and cultural phenomenon and explores its strong connection to the growth of the media entertainment industry in the nineteenth century. He frames the spiritualist movement as part of a new commodity culture that changed how public entertainments were produced and consumed.Starting with the story of the Fox sisters, considered the first spiritualist mediums in history, Natale follows the trajectory of spiritualism in Great Britain and the United States from its foundation in 1848 to the beginning of the twentieth century. He demonstrates that spiritualist mediums and leaders adopted many of the promotional strategies and spectacular techniques that were being developed for the broader entertainment industry. Spiritualist mediums were indistinguishable from other professional performers, as they had managers and agents, advertised in the press, and used spectacularism to draw audiences.Addressing the overlap between spiritualism’s explosion and nineteenth-century show business, Natale provides an archaeology of how the supernatural became a powerful force in the media and popular culture of today.

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This fascinating book explores the history of makeup and beauty from lipstick to leg shaving. Madeleine Marsh chronicles the development of cosmetics from a secret shame in the 19th century, to a handbag essential in the 20th. She tells the stories behind famous brands; explores the role of makeup in peace and war - showing how our daily beauty rituals reflect the changing roles of women across the decades. This lavishly illustrated history also provides a guide to collecting vintage compacts and cosmetics - revealing the old makeup that you shouldn't throw away.

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The latest volume for Oxfordshire is devoted to eight parishes between the market towns of Burford and Witney in the west of the county. The area is predominantly rural, the only urban centre being Carterton. Founded in 1900 as acolony of smallholders, it became one of the county's fastest growing towns after World War II due to its proximity to Brize Norton's military airbase. Oxfordshire: Volume XV is a richly detailed history of these parishes, covering everything from Anglo-Saxon settlement to 20th-century urbanisation, agriculture to rural industry, religious influences to famous residents.

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One night, one rash act, one crime changed James Daunton’s life for ever. Robbed of everything he once had, and trapped in a merciless vendetta, James must now take on Nathaniel Caine and his gang to survive. Alone, he cannot hope to win, but to find allies he needs to learn to trust in a world of betrayal. Each of those who promise help has their own secrets, hidden in silences, half-truths and lies. And asked if it is fate, destiny, or simply chance that brings them together, each of them would have a different answer. Avon Street is an historical adventure story that takes the reader on a journey behind the Georgian façades of the city to expose the darker side of Victorian Bath. It is a book about the potential that lies, often unlocked or unrecognised, in all of us.

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This volume covers the town of Burton-upon-Trent on the county's eastern boundary, along with its suburbs and satellite villages on either side of the river, including Stapenhill which was formerly in a separate parish in Derbyshire. Best known as a major centre for brewing beer from the earlier nineteenth century, Burton first came to prominence in the early eleventh century as the site of a Benedictine monastery which later promoted the cult of its own saint, the legendary St Modwen. Part of the monastic infirmary survives in the present Abbey inn, and a house called Sinai Park on the high ground to the west of the town was used by the monks as a rest home and hunting lodge. Alabaster carving developed as a specialist industry in the middle ages, and clothworking was important until the nineteenth century, with fulling and then cotton mills on the river Trent. The breweries were concentrated in the historic town centre near the river, and in the later nineteenth century a more respectable centre was created to the west around the imposing St Paul's church and the present town hall, both paid for by members of the Bass family. Other Anglican churches built by leading brewers in the town and its suburbs remain a major feature in the landscape. NIGEL TRINGHAM is VCH county editor for Staffordshire, and lecturer in history at the University of Keele.

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After Britain abolished slavery throughout most of its empire in 1834, Victorians adopted a creed of "anti-slavery" as a vital part of their national identity and sense of moral superiority over other civilizations. The British government used diplomacy, pressure, and violence to suppress the slave trade, while the Royal Navy enforced abolition worldwide and an anxious public debated the true responsibilities of an anti-slavery nation. This crusade was far from altruistic or compassionate, but Richard Huzzey argues that it forged national debates and political culture long after the famous abolitionist campaigns of William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson had faded into memory. These anti-slavery passions shaped racist and imperialist prejudices, new forms of coerced labor, and the expansion of colonial possessions. In a sweeping narrative that spans the globe, Freedom Burning explores the intersection of philanthropic, imperial, and economic interests that underlay Britain’s anti-slavery zeal— from London to Liberia, the Sudan to South Africa, Canada to the Caribbean, and the British East India Company to the Confederate States of America. Through careful attention to popular culture, official records, and private papers, Huzzey rewrites the history of the British Empire and a century-long effort to end the global trade in human lives.

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Examines legal and literary narratives of personhood in the 19th century Traces the concept of character through related areas of law, cultural discourses of character and the formal structures of the novel Offers new readings of works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, George Eliot, Anne Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde and Arthur Conan Doyle Analyses literary constructions of character in relation to specific legal cases and doctrines, including the right to silence, libel and privacy Includes new work on Anthony Trollope's topical and editorial interest in libel Covers the relationship between libel, the development of privacy rights and emerging modernist aesthetics Presents a transatlantic approach to select works and issues, including the right to silence and privacy Why would Hawthorne and Eliot grant their fallen women an anachronistic right to silence that could only worsen their punishment? Why did Bronte and Gaskell find gossip such a useful source of information when lawyers excluded it as hearsay? How did Trollope's work as an editor influence his preoccupation throughout his novels with libel? Drawing on a range of primary sources including novels, Victorian periodical literature, legislative debate, case law, and legal treatise, Cathrine O. Frank traces the ways conventions of literary characterisation mingled with character-centred legal developments to produce a jurisprudential theory of character that extends beyond the legal profession. She explores how key categories and representational strategies for imagining individual personhood also defined communities and mediated relations within them, in life and in fiction.

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York, 1865. A passenger train stands ready to depart amid the bustle at the station. The flurry of passengers and porters, the swooping pigeons and barking dogs are thrown into a state of turmoil when an explosion rips through the brake van of the train, killing guard Jack Follis. In response to a summons from the North Eastern Railway, Inspector Robert Colbeck and Sergeant Leeming are sent to investigate. Was it an accident, deliberate vandalism or targeted murder? The longer the investigation goes on, the more complex it becomes. With a dizzying array of suspects and motives, will the combined skills of the detectives be enough to identify and catch the culprit?

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Over 1400 historical ceramic figures encompass the wide range of themes depicted by Staffordshire potters between 1835 and 1875. 1090 bright color photos include portraits, naval and military figures, theatrical and literary characters, religious and temperance figures, hunters, shepherds, gardeners, harvesters, pastoral scenes, occupations, pursuits and pastimes, children, sporting figures, dogs and other animals, cottages, houses, and castles. The text provides updated information and listings for every known variation within each figural type. Cross-references to figures in the other 3 volumes in this series are provided in each category and value ranges are included. This will be a valued addition to the libraries of Staffordshire collectors worldwide.

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“A tour de force of storytelling.” —Louise Penny, #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Chief Inspector Gamache series“Jobb’s excellent storytelling makes the book a pleasure to read.” —The New York Times Book Review “When a doctor does go wrong, he is the first of criminals,” Sherlock Holmes observed during one of his most baffling investigations. “He has nerve and he has knowledge.” In the span of fifteen years, Dr. Thomas Neill Cream murdered as many as ten people in the United States, Britain, and Canada, a death toll with almost no precedent. Poison was his weapon of choice. Largely forgotten today, this villain was as brazen as the notorious Jack the Ripper. Structured around the doctor’s London murder trial in 1892, when he was finally brought to justice, The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream exposes the blind trust given to medical practitioners, as well as the flawed detection methods, bungled investigations, corrupt officials, and stifling morality of Victorian society that allowed Dr. Cream to prey on vulnerable and desperate women, many of whom had turned to him for medical help. Dean Jobb transports readers to the late nineteenth century as Scotland Yard traces Dr. Cream’s life through Canada and Chicago and finally to London, where new investigative tools called forensics were just coming into use, even as most police departments still scoffed at using science to solve crimes. But then, most investigators could hardly imagine that serial killers existed—the term was unknown. As the Chicago Tribune wrote, Dr. Cream’s crimes marked the emergence of a new breed of killer: one who operated without motive or remorse, who “murdered simply for the sake of murder.” For fans of Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City, all things Sherlock Holmes, or the podcast My Favorite Murder, The Case of the Murderous Dr. Cream is an unforgettable true crime story from a master of the genre.

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The Victorian Art of Fiction presents important Victorian statements on the form and function of fiction. The essays in this anthology address questions of genre, such as realism and sensationalism; questions of gender and authorship; questions of form, such as characterization, plot construction, and narration; and questions about the morality of fiction. The editor discusses where Victorian writing on the novel has been placed in accounts of the history of criticism and then suggests some reasons for reconsidering this conventional evaluation. Among the featured essayists and critics are John Ruskin, Walter Bagehot, George Henry Lewes, Leslie Stephen, Anthony Trollope, and Robert Louis Stevenson; the classic essays include George Eliot’s “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” and Henry James’s “The Art of Fiction.”

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Sabine Baring-Gould was one of the most remarkable Englishmen of the Victorian Age. Born as the heir to an estate in Devon, he received an erratic education travelling on the continent. Eventually he became a clergyman, and when thirty he married an eighteen year old mill girl, and act which attracted national interest and comment.Over the next sixty years he became famous as a pioneer archaeologist, the first collector of West Country folk music, composer of hymns, a writer on theology-he was extremely critical of his Church-and one of the most popular novelists of the day. As well as this staggering output, he ran his large estate with compassion, and as if to cement his Victorian credentials he and Grace had fifteen children. He died in 1924 aged eighty nine. This biography analyses in detail his extraordinary life and work, especially his literary output, and draws a picture of a great character. It is high time we were reminded of a major figure in Victorian England.

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The Marriage of Minds examines the implications of the common Victorian claim that novel reading can achieve the psychic, ethical, and affective benefits also commonly associated with sympathy in married life. Through close readings of canonical texts in relation to the histories of sympathy, marriage, and reading, The Marriage of Minds begins to fill a long-standing gap between eighteenth-century philosophical notions of sympathy and twentieth-century psychoanalytic concepts of identification. It examines the wide variety of ways in which novels were understood to educate or reform readers in the mid-nineteenth century. Finally, it demonstrates how both the form of the Victorian novel and the experience supposed to result from that form were implicated in ongoing debates about the nature, purpose, and law of marriage.

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The Off-Comers of Windermere, Birth of a Vibrant Victorian Township fills a gap in the literature of the Lake District. It presents a comprehensive social history of the many off-comers who built their villas and mansions in a sylvan landscape, amongst the lakes and fells of Lakeland, creating the vibrant village we know today as Windermere. Who were these folk, wealthy and not, artisan and not, mostly strangers who came from off to shape a Northern Arcadia? All too often the memory of them and their contribution to the architecture, institutions and heritage of the place has faded, and been lost in the mists of time. This book seeks to revive their memory and assemble a definitive record, before the facts are lost forever. It also describes the many working people who provided labour and skill to fashion the fabric, services and infrastructure of a vibrant township for the enjoyment of residents and tourists alike, who increasingly visit today. Windermere was born in 1847, a product of the railway age, when a branch line opened from Kendal to carry tourists into central Lakeland. It was vigorously opposed by Wordsworth, who feared invasion of his homeland by uneducated masses from the industrial hinterland. So what was the plan, if any; who conceived it; and how was it accomplished? What linked a private church, a college for the sons of clergymen, a school for the poorer classes, and the elegant villas of gentlefolk? The narrative is rooted in records, building as far as possible on contemporaneous accounts of events, to weave a broad and colourful tapestry which stretches from a sylvan quietude in 1800, through the thrust of an iron way, to completion of a thriving township in 1900. A fascinating story emerges, supported by many colourful anecdotes, and original photographs taken in Victorian times by one of the founders.

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This book explores the life of Henry Dresser (1838–1915), one of the most productive British ornithologists of the mid-late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and is largely based on previously unpublished archival material. Dresser travelled widely and spent time in Texas during the American Civil War. He built enormous collections of skins and eggs of birds from Europe, North America and Asia, which formed the basis of over 100 publications, including some of the finest bird books of the late nineteenth century. Dresser was a leading figure in scientific society and in the early bird conservation movement; his correspondence and diaries reveal the inner workings, motivations, personal relationships and rivalries that existed among the leading ornithologists.

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Growing up in Victorian Bolton was definitely not easy for Allen and Midge. Life was harsh, what with dangerous mill work,ever-present hunger, and their shoeless feet always cold. But these two young milltown boys were determined to have as much fun as they could, getting into plenty of mischief on the way. Their often hilarious escapades make for tremendously entertaining reading, but while we can laugh at some of their daring adventures, we have to remember that this is not fiction - these boys were real and all that is described here is true.

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The Science of Character makes a bold new claim for the power of the literary by showing how Victorian novelists used fiction to theorize how character forms. In 1843, the Victorian philosopher John Stuart Mill called for the establishment of a new science, “the science of the formation of character.” Although Mill’s proposal failed as scientific practice, S. Pearl Brilmyer maintains that it found its true home in realist fiction of the period, which employed the literary figure of character to investigate the nature of embodied experience. Bringing to life Mill’s unrealized dream of a science of character, novelists such as George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, and Olive Schreiner turned to narrative to explore how traits and behaviors in organisms emerge and develop, and how aesthetic features—shapes, colors, and gestures—come to take on cultural meaning through certain categories, such as race and sex. Engaged with materialist science and philosophy, these authors transformed character from the liberal notion of the inner truth of an individual into a materially determined figuration produced through shifts in the boundaries between the body’s inside and outside. In their hands, Brilmyer argues, literature became a science, not in the sense that its claims were falsifiable or even systematically articulated, but in its commitment to uncovering, through a fictional staging of realistic events, the laws governing physical and affective life. The Science of Character redraws late Victorian literary history to show how women and feminist novelists pushed realism to its aesthetic and philosophical limits in the crucial span between 1870 and 1920.

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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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This is the true story of respected businessman, Henry Wainwright, who had everything he needed in 1871: a loving wife and five children, a delightful London townhouse and successful family business, but just one year later, Henry's life would be turned upside down. He embarked on a risky affair, setting his mistress, Harriet Lane, up in lodgings with an allowance to look after herself and the couple's two children as they pretended to be husband and wife. It was at this time that Henry's finances tumbled out of control; with gambling debts and a failing business, bankruptcy loomed. His world started to crumble and what happened next as he tried to regain control involved a scandalous conspiracy which ended in murder and ruined the lives of three families. This fast-moving story will transport the reader to the East End of Victorian London, revealing information on the lives of those involved and detailing the police investigation and the subsequent Old Bailey trial. Fourteen years before the infamous Jack the Ripper Murders, it was the original 'Whitechapel Mystery' and probably the most sensational criminal case of the 1870s. It's a story of love, weakness and devious, desperate liars.

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Uncovering strange plots by early British anthropologists to use scientific status to manipulate the stock market, Anthropologists in the Stock Exchange tells a provocative story that marries the birth of the social sciences with the exploits of global finance. Marc Flandreau tracks a group of Victorian gentleman-swindlers as they shuffled between the corridors of the London Stock Exchange and the meeting rooms of learned society, showing that anthropological studies were integral to investment and speculation in foreign government debt, and, inversely, that finance played a crucial role in shaping the contours of human knowledge. Flandreau argues that finance and science were at the heart of a new brand of imperialism born during Benjamin Disraeli’s first term as Britain’s prime minister in the 1860s. As anthropologists advocated the study of Miskito Indians or stated their views on a Jamaican rebellion, they were in fact catering to the impulses of the stock exchange—for their own benefit. In this way the very development of the field of anthropology was deeply tied to issues relevant to the financial market—from trust to corruption. Moreover, this book shows how the interplay between anthropology and finance formed the foundational structures of late nineteenth-century British imperialism and helped produce essential technologies of globalization as we know it today.

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Uncovering strange plots by early British anthropologists to use scientific status to manipulate the stock market, Anthropologists in the Stock Exchange tells a provocative story that marries the birth of the social sciences with the exploits of global finance. Marc Flandreau tracks a group of Victorian gentleman-swindlers as they shuffled between the corridors of the London Stock Exchange and the meeting rooms of learned society, showing that anthropological studies were integral to investment and speculation in foreign government debt, and, inversely, that finance played a crucial role in shaping the contours of human knowledge. Flandreau argues that finance and science were at the heart of a new brand of imperialism born during Benjamin Disraeli’s first term as Britain’s prime minister in the 1860s. As anthropologists advocated the study of Miskito Indians or stated their views on a Jamaican rebellion, they were in fact catering to the impulses of the stock exchange—for their own benefit. In this way the very development of the field of anthropology was deeply tied to issues relevant to the financial market—from trust to corruption. Moreover, this book shows how the interplay between anthropology and finance formed the foundational structures of late nineteenth-century British imperialism and helped produce essential technologies of globalization as we know it today.

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Of the many literary phenomena that sprang up in eighteenth-century England and later became a staple of Victorian culture, one that has received little attention until now is the “Family Bible with Notes.” Published in serial parts to make it affordable, the Family Bible was designed to enhance the family’s status and sense of national and imperial identity. Imperial Bibles, Domestic Bodies reveals in its study of the production and consumption of British commercial Family Bibles startling changes in “family values.” Advertised in the eighteenth century as providing the family with access to “universal knowledge,” these Bibles suddenly shifted in the early nineteenth century to Bibles with bracketed sections marked “to be omitted from family reading” and reserved for reading “in the closet” by the “Master of the family.” These disciplinary Bibles were paralleled by Family Bibles designed to appeal to the newly important female consumer. Illustrations featured saintly women and charming children, and “family registers” with vignettes of family life emphasized the prominent role of the “angel in the house.” As Mary Wilson Carpenter documents in Imperial Bibles, Domestic Bodies, the elaborate notes and “elegant engravings” in these Bibles bring to light a wealth of detail about the English commonsense view of such taboo subjects as same-sex relations, masturbation, menstruation, and circumcision. Her reading of literary texts by Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning in the context of these commercial representations of the “Authorized Version” or King James translation of the Bible indicates that when the Victorians spoke about religion, they were also frequently speaking about sex.

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From humble beginnings as the daughter of a Clerkenwell milliner, Emily Soldene rose to become a leading lady of the London stage and a formidable impresario with her own opera company. The darling of London's theatreland, she later reinvented herself as a journalist and writer who scandalised the capital with her backstage revelations. Weaving through the spurious glamour of Victorian music halls and theatres, taking encounters with the Pre-Raphaelites and legal disputes involving Charles Dickens in her stride, Emily became the toast of New York and ventured far off the beaten track to tour in Australia and New Zealand. In The Improbable Adventures of Miss Emily Soldene, a life filled with performance, travel and incident returns to centre stage.

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This book offers the first comprehensive treatment of the historian and public moralist E. A. Freeman since the publication of W. R. W. Stephens’ Life and Letters of Edward A. Freeman (1895). While Freeman is often viewed by modern scholars as a panegyrist to English progress and a proponent of Aryan racial theory, this study suggests that his world-view was more complicated than it appears. Revisiting Freeman’s most important historical works, this book positions Thomas Arnold as a significant influence on Freeman’s view of world-historical development. Conceptualising the past as cyclical rather than unilinear, and defining race in terms of culture, rather than biology, Freeman’s narratives were pervaded by anxieties about recapitulation. Ultimately, this study shows that Freeman’s scheme of universal history was based on the idea of conflict between Euro-Christendom and the Judeo-Islamic Orient, and this shaped his engagement with contemporary issues.

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London, 1900. Hester Stanmore watches in disbelief as the jury declares her attacker 'not guilty', and the courtroom erupts into chaos. The man in the dock is being congratulated as if he were a hero, but she has seen the madness in his eyes when he had attacked her and left her for dead. It was only Hester's strength that allowed her to survive. Hester was determined to bring him to justice, but what would happen now? As she endeavours to pick up the pieces of her life, Hester meets the mysterious Daniel Hansen, and perhaps she will find the happy ending she justly deserves .

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The first comprehensive study of the role of gender in British Protestant missionary expansion into China and India during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This is the first comprehensive study of the role of gender in British Protestant missionary expansion into China and India during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Focusing on the experiences of wives and daughters, female missionaries, educators and medical staff associated with the London Missionary Society, the China Inland Mission and the various Scottish Presbyterian Mission Societies, it compares and contrasts gender relations within different British Protestant missions in cross-cultural settings. Drawing on extensive published and archival materials, this study examines how gender, race, class, nationality and theology shaped the polity of Protestant missions and Christian interaction with native peoples. Rather than providing a romantic portrayal of fulfilled professional freedom, this work argues that women's labor in Christian missions, as in the secular British Empire and domestic society, remained under-valued both in terms of remuneration and administrative advancement, until well into the twentieth century. Rich in details and full of insights, this work not only presents the first comparative treatment of gender relations in British Christian missionary movements, but also contributes to an understanding of the importance of gender more broadly in the high imperial age. RHONDA A. SEMPLE is Assistant Professor ofHistory at the University of Northern British Columbia, Canada.

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Badass Victorian Women“Wild Women is a delightful collection of riveting stories about our independent, iconoclastic, and utterly outrageous foremothers.” – Vicki Leon, author of Uppity Women of Ancient Times.#1 New Release in Politics & Social Sciences, ReferenceEnjoy a fascinating and sometimes humorous glimpse into the lives of over one hundred, 19th-century Victorian era American women who refused to whittle themselves down to the Victorian model of proper womanhood. Included in Wild Women are 50-black-and-white photos from the era.During the Victorian era a woman’s pedestal was her prison.“Women should not be expected to write, or fight, or build, or compose scores. She does all by inspiring man to do all.” ─ Ralph Waldo Emerson“There is nothing more dangerous for a young woman than to rely chiefly upon her intellectual powers, her wit, her imagination, her fancy.” ─ Godey’s Lady’s Book magazineBut, scores of nineteenth-century American women chose to live life on their terms. In this book you will meet women who refused to remain on a Victorian pedestal. In San Francisco a courtesan appeared as a plaintiff in court, suing her clients for fraud. In Montana a laundress in her seventies decked a gentleman who refused to pay his bill. A forty-three-year-old schoolteacher plunged down Niagara Falls in a wooden barrel. A frail lighthouse keeper pulled twenty-two sinking sailors out of the ocean off Rhode Island. A pair of Colorado madams fought a public pistol duel over their mutual beau. Two lady lovebirds were legally wed in Michigan. An ad hoc abolitionist spirited away scores of slaves on the Underground Railroad. A Secessionist spy swallowed a secret message as she was arrested, claiming that no one could capture her soul.Readers of books for women such as Women Who Run with the Wolves or Badass Affirmations will love this book about Victorian women who refused to accept the gender roles of their day.

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Paris, 1899. Abigail Wilson has received an invitation from Professor Alphonse Flamand, a prominent French Professor of Archaeology, to join him on a dig in Egypt. Overjoyed to be presented with such an opportunity, Abigail and her husband, Daniel, travel to Paris to meet the Professor at his office in the Louvre to discuss plans. However, when Abigail goes to the appointment, she finds Flamand dead with a knife in his chest. In a whirl of confusion and despite her pleas of innocence, Abigail is arrested. Determined to prove that she has been framed for Flamand's brutal murder, Daniel and Abigail, the Museum Detectives, will delve far into the shadowy corners of the City of Light for the truth.

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How Franz Schubert and his compositions were viewed in nineteenth-century European criticism, literature, and the visual arts, from Schumann to George Eliot to Whistler. In Schubert in the European Imagination, Volume 1: The Romantic and Victorian Eras, Scott Messing examines the historical reception of Franz Schubert as conveyed through the gendered imagery and language of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European culture. The concept of Schubert as a feminine type vaulted into prominence in 1838 when Robert Schumann described the composer's Mädchencharakter ("girlish" character), by contrast to the purportedly more masculine, more heroic Beethoven. What attracted Schumann to Schubert's music and marked it as feminine is evident in some of Schumann's own works that echo those of Schubert's in intriguing ways. Schubert's supposedly feminine quality acted upon the popular consciousness also through the writers and artists -- in German-speaking Europe but also in France and England -- whose fictional characters perform and hear Schubert'smusic. The figures discussed include Musset, Sand, Nerval, Maupassant, George Eliot, Henry James, Beardsley, Whistler, Storm, Fontane, and Heinrich and Thomas Mann. Over time, Schubert's stature became inextricably entwinedwith concepts of the distinct social roles of men and women, especially in domestic settings. For a composer whose reputation was principally founded upon musical genres that both the public and professionals construed as most suitable for private performance, the lure to locate Schubert within domestic spaces and to attach to him the attributes of its female occupants must have been irresistible. The story told is not without its complications, as this book reveals in an analysis of the response to Schubert in England, where the composer's eminence was questioned by critics whose arguments sometimes hinged on the more problematic aspects of gender in Victorian culture. Scott Messing is Charles A. Dana Professor of Music at Alma College, and author of Neoclassicism in Music (University of Rochester Press, 1996).

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This work reexamines the Victorian spiritual crisis from the perspective of the period's women writers, exploring the spiritual dimension in their writings. Case studies of the lives and writings of Florence Nightingale, Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot provide an in-depth analysis of the relationship between these crises and narrative strategies that reappropriate the conservative power associated with religious symbolism.

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In the early 1800s, books were largely unillustrated. By the 1830s and 1840s, however, innovations in wood- and steel-engraving techniques changed how Victorian readers consumed and conceptualized fiction. A new type of novel was born, often published in serial form, one that melded text and image as partners in meaning-making. These illustrated serial novels offered Victorians a reading experience that was both verbal and visual, based on complex effects of flash-forward and flashback as the placement of illustrations revealed or recalled significant story elements. Victorians’ experience of what are now canonical novels thus differed markedly from that of modern readers, who are accustomed to reading single volumes with minimal illustration. Even if modern editions do reproduce illustrations, these do not appear as originally laid out. Modern readers therefore lose a crucial aspect of how Victorians understood plot—as a story delivered in both words and images, over time, and with illustrations playing a key role. In The Plot Thickens, Mary Elizabeth Leighton and Lisa Surridge uncover this overlooked narrative role of illustrations within Victorian serial fiction. They reveal the intricacy and richness of the form and push us to reconsider our notions of illustration, visual culture, narration, and reading practices in nineteenth-century Britain.

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Presents 35 thematically organised, research-led essays on women, periodicals and print culture in Victorian Britain.

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In The Victorian Novel of Adulthood, Rebecca Rainof confronts the conventional deference accorded the bildungsroman as the ultimate plot model and quintessential expression of Victorian nation building. The novel of maturity, she contends, is no less important to our understanding of narrative, Victorian culture, and the possibilities of fiction. Reading works by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Henry James, John Henry Newman, and Virginia Woolf, Rainof exposes the little-discussed theological underpinnings of plot and situates the novel of maturity in intellectual and religious history, notably the Oxford Movement. Purgatory, a subject hotly debated in the period, becomes a guiding metaphor for midlife adventure in secular fiction. Rainof discusses theological models of gradual maturation, thus directing readers’ attention away from evolutionary theory and geology, and offers a new historical framework for understanding Victorian interest in slow and deliberate change.

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An intriguing study of a unique and unsettling cultural phenomenon in Victorian England. WINNER of the 2013 Katharine Briggs Award NEW LOWER PRICE This book uses the nineteenth-century legend of Spring-Heeled Jack to analyse and challenge current notions of Victorian popular cultures. Starting as oral rumours, this supposedly supernatural entity moved from rural folklore to metropolitan press sensation, co-existing in literary and theatrical forms before finally degenerating into a nursery lore bogeyman to frighten children. A mercurial and unfixed cultural phenomenon, Spring-Heeled Jack found purchase in both older folkloric traditions and emerging forms of entertainment. Through this intriguing study of a unique and unsettling figure, Karl Bell complicates our appreciation of the differences, interactions and similarities between various types of popular culture between 1837 and 1904. The book draws upon a rich variety of primary source material including folklorist accounts, street ballads, several series of "penny dreadful" stories (and illustrations), journals, magazines, newspapers, comics, court accounts, autobiographies and published reminiscences. The Legend of Spring-Heeled Jack is impressively researched social history and provides a fascinating insight into Victorian cultures. It will appeal to anyone with an interest in nineteenth-century English social and cultural history, folklore or literature. Karl Bell is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Portsmouth.

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