Search results for ""author victoria"

A fascinating account of what it was like to live in a Victorian body from best-selling historian and critic Kathryn Hughes.In Victorians Undone, renowned British historian Kathryn Hughes follows five iconic figures of the nineteenth century as they encounter the world not through their imaginations or intellects but through their bodies. Or rather, through their body parts. Using the vivid language of admiring glances, cruel sniggers, and implacably turned backs, Hughes crafts a narrative of cinematic quality by combining a series of truly eye-opening and deeply intelligent accounts of life in Victorian England.Lady Flora Hastings is an unmarried lady-in-waiting at young Queen Victoria's court whose swollen stomach ignites a scandal that almost brings the new reign crashing down. Darwin's iconic beard provides important new clues to the roles that men and women play in the great dance of natural selection. George Eliot brags that her right hand is larger than her left, but her descendants are strangely desperate to keep the information secret. The poet-painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti, meanwhile, takes his art and his personal life in a new direction thanks to the bee-stung lips of his secret mistress, Fanny Cornforth. Finally, we meet Fanny Adams, an eight-year-old working-class girl whose tragic evisceration tells us much about the currents of desire and violence at large in the mid-Victorian countryside. While 'bio-graphy' parses as 'the writing of a life,' the genre itself has often seemed willfully indifferent to the vital signs of that life—to breath, movement, touch, and taste. Nowhere is this truer than when writing about the Victorians, who often figure in their own life stories as curiously disembodied. In lively, accessible prose, Victorians Undone fills the space where the body ought to be, proposing new ways of thinking and writing about flesh in the nineteenth century.

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Behind the innocent face of Victorian fairy tales such as Through the Looking Glass or Mopsa the Fairy lurks the specter of an intense gender debate about the very nature of childhood. Offering brilliant rereadings of classics from the "Golden Age of Children's Literature" as well as literature commonly considered "grown-up," U. C. Knoepflmacher illuminates this debate, probing deeply into the relations between adults and children, adults and their own childhood selves, and the lives of beloved Victorian authors and their "children's tales." Ventures into Childland will delight and instruct all readers of children's classics, and will be essential reading for students of Victorian culture and gender studies."Ventures into Childland is acute, well written and stimulating. It also has a political purpose, to insist on the importance of protecting and nurturing children, imaginatively and physically."—Jan Marsh, Times Literary Supplement"A provocative and interesting book about Victorian culture."—Library Journal

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Eminent Victorians marked an epoch in the art of biography; it also helped to crack the old myths of high Victorianism and to usher in a new spirit by which chauvinism, hypocrisy and the stiff upper lip were debunked. In it Strachey cleverly exposes the self-seeking ambitions of Cardinal Manning and the manipulative, neurotic Florence Nightingale; and in his essays on Dr Arnold and General Gordon his quarries are not only his subjects but also the public-school system and the whole structure of nineteenth-century liberal values.

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Discover all the foul facts about the Vile Victorians with history's most horrible headlines. All the foul facts about the Vile Victorians are ready to uncover, including: the murderers who wouldn't hang when the first public loo was flushed and how stag hunting took place in Paddington Station Fully illustrated throughout and packed with horrible stories – with all the horribly hilarious bits included with a fresh take on the classic Horrible Histories style, perfect for fans old and new the perfect series for anyone looking for a fun and informative read Horrible Histories has been entertaining children and families for generations with books, TV, stage show, magazines, games and 2019's brilliantly funny Horrible Histories: the Movie – Rotten Romans. Get your history right here and collect the whole horrible lot. Read all about it!

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Perhaps no period better clarifies our current crisis of digital information than the nineteenth century. Self-aware about its own epochal telecommunications changes and awash in a flood of print, the nineteenth century confronted the consequences of its media shifts in ways that still define contemporary responses. In this authoritative new work, Paul Fyfe argues that writing about Victorian new media continues to shape reactions to digital change. Among its unexpected legacies are what we call digital humanities, characterized by the self-reflexiveness, disciplinary reconfigurations, and debates that have made us digital Victorians, so to speak, struggling again to resituate humanities practices amid another technological revolution. Engaging with writers such as Thomas De Quincey, George Eliot, George du Maurier, Henry James, and Robert Louis Stevenson who confronted the new media of their day, Fyfe shows how we have inherited Victorian anxieties about quantitative and mac

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This provocative study traces Alfred Hitchcock's long directorial career from Victorianism to postmodernism. Paula Cohen considers a sampling of Hitchcock's best films - Shadow of a Doubt, Rear Window, Vertigo, Psycho - as well as some of his more uneven ones - Rope, The Wrong Man, Topaz - and makes connections between his evolution as a filmmaker and trends in the larger society.Drawing on a number of methodologies including feminism, psychoanalysis, and family systems, the author provides an insightful look at the paradox of a Victorian-style gentleman who evolved into one of the leading masters of the modern medium of film. Cohen sees Hitchcock's films as developing, in part, as a masculine response to the domestic, psychological novels that had appealed primarily to women during the Victorian era. His career, she argues, can be seen as an attempt to balance "the two faces of Victorianism": the masculine legacy of law and hierarchy and the feminine legacy of feeling and imagination.Also central to her thesis is the Victorian model of the nuclear family and its permutations, especially the father-daughter dyad. She postulates a fundamental dynamic in Hitchcock's films, what she calls a "daughter's effect," and relates it to the social role of the family as an institution and to Hitchcock's own relationship with his daughter, Patricia, who appeared in three of his films.Cohen argues that Hitchcock's films reflect his Victorian legacy and serve as a map for ideological trends. She charts his development from his British period through his classic Hollywood years into his later phase, tracing a conceptual evolution that corresponds to an evolution in cultural identity - one that builds on a Victorian inheritance and ultimately discards it.

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Perhaps no period better clarifies our current crisis of digital information than the nineteenth century. Self-aware about its own epochal telecommunications changes and awash in a flood of print, the nineteenth century confronted the consequences of its media shifts in ways that still define contemporary responses. In this authoritative new work, Paul Fyfe argues that writing about Victorian new media continues to shape reactions to digital change. Among its unexpected legacies are what we call digital humanities, characterized by the self-reflexiveness, disciplinary reconfigurations, and debates that have made us digital Victorians, so to speak, struggling again to resituate humanities practices amid another technological revolution. Engaging with writers such as Thomas De Quincey, George Eliot, George du Maurier, Henry James, and Robert Louis Stevenson who confronted the new media of their day, Fyfe shows how we have inherited Victorian anxieties about quantitative and mac

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Discover all the foul facts with history's most horrible headlines: Victorian edition. The master of making history fun, Terry Deary, turns his attention to the Victorian era. From ridiculous stories of why burglars were scared of bogies to how a snick fadger might kiddy-nap your spangle, it's all in Horrible Histories: Villainous Victorians: fully illustrated throughout and packed with hair-raising stories - with all the horribly hilarious bits included with a fresh take on the classic Horrible Histories style, perfect for fans old and new the perfect series for anyone looking for a fun and informative read Horrible Histories has been entertaining children and families for generations with books, TV, stage show, magazines, games and 2019's brilliantly funny Horrible Histories: the Movie - Rotten Romans. Get your history right here and collect the whole horrible lot. Read all about it!

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Primary History: Victorians encourages the study of written sources, images and key figures to understand the influence of Victorian society on today’s world. Stimulating activities cover the growth of railways, industrial and social reform, levels of society within towns and the countryside, and the life of children at home, school and in work. Choose from a range of activities to suit your class. Differentiate using a variety of writing-based tasks. Explore history topics through creative role-plays and art and design work. Ideal as accessible research resources for topic work.

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Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring The Victorian period may have come to an end over 120 years ago, but the Victorians continue to be a vital presence in the modern world. Contemporary Britain is still in large part Victorian in its transport networks, sewage systems, streets, and houses. Victorian cultural legacies, especially in art, science, and literature, are still celebrated. The first to have to grapple with many of the challenges of modern urban society, we continue to look to the Victorians for inspiration and solace. And we are increasingly aware of the ways their global actions shaped, often for ill, the world around us. Much mythologised, inexhaustibly controversial, the Victorians are an inescapable reference point for understanding the modern histories not just of Britain and its empire, but of the world. In The Victorians: A Very Short Introduction Martin Hewitt offers a guide through the thickets of judgement and debate which have grown around the period and its people, to offer a historical overview of the Victorians and their legacies. He seeks to answer five crucial questions. Why have the Victorians continued occupy such a prominent place in the cultures of not just the anglophone world? How far does it make sense to think of a 64-year period arbitrarily given an identity by the longevity of the Queen as an identifiable historical period in a general sense? How justified are the value-laden versions of the Victorians which argue for the existence of a particular world view called 'Victorianism'? Beyond ideology, what was Victorian Britain actually like – and in particular, what was distinctive about it? Who were the Victorians – not just the eminent few, but the population as a whole? And finally, how far and with what results did the Victorians and their culture spread across the globe? In answering these questions, Hewitt cautions against some long-held orthodoxies, throws a light on some less well-known aspects of the period, and urges the importance of understanding the Victorians on their own terms if we are to effectively engage with their legacies. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

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The innovative Creative History Activity Packs series is designed to help teachers bring history topics to life through imaginative creative arts activities. Each pack includes ten laminated, double-sided cards, printed in full color. Each card describes in detail activities that recreate aspects of life in a particular historical period, using art, drama and dance. Each activity is based on historically researched authentic practices of the time. Ideal for whole class or small group sessions, the packs are an inspiration for busy teachers looking for new ways to approach project work at Key Stage 2 - and are easily applicable for Key Stage 1 classes. Victorian activities in this pack include making decorative objects - penwipers, fans, cornucopias - based on original Victorian patterns; sewing samplers; making miniature gardens; original Victorian parlor games based on both wordplay and physical activity; and an upstairs/downstairs drama.

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This insightful and elegantly written book examines how the popular media of the Victorian era sustained and transformed the reputations of Romantic writers. Tom Mole provides a new reception history of Lord Byron, Felicia Hemans, Sir Walter Scott, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Wordsworth—one that moves beyond the punctual historicism of much recent criticism and the narrow horizons of previous reception histories. He attends instead to the material artifacts and cultural practices that remediated Romantic writers and their works amid shifting understandings of history, memory, and media.Mole scrutinizes Victorian efforts to canonize and commodify Romantic writers in a changed media ecology. He shows how illustrated books renovated Romantic writing, how preachers incorporated irreligious Romantics into their sermons, how new statues and memorials integrated Romantic writers into an emerging national pantheon, and how anthologies mediated their works to new generations. This ambitious study investigates a wide range of material objects Victorians made in response to Romantic writing—such as photographs, postcards, books, and collectibles—that in turn remade the public’s understanding of Romantic writers.Shedding new light on how Romantic authors were posthumously recruited to address later cultural concerns, What the Victorians Made of Romanticism reveals new histories of appropriation, remediation, and renewal that resonate in our own moment of media change, when once again the cultural products of the past seem in danger of being forgotten if they are not reimagined for new audiences.

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Victorian Britain, with its maritime economy and strong links between government and scientific enterprises, founded an office to collect meteorological statistics in 1854 in an effort to foster a modern science of the weather. But as the office turned to prediction rather than data collection, the fragile science became a public spectacle, with its forecasts open to daily scrutiny in the newspapers. And meteorology came to assume a pivotal role in debates about the responsibility of scientists and the authority of science.Studying meteorology as a means to examine the historical identity of prediction, Katharine Anderson offers here an engrossing account of forecasting that analyzes scientific practice and ideas about evidence, the organization of science in public life, and the articulation of scientific values in Victorian culture. In Predicting the Weather, Anderson grapples with fundamental questions about the function, intelligibility, and boundaries of scientific work while exposing the public expectations that shaped the practice of science during this period.A cogent analysis of the remarkable history of weather forecasting in Victorian Britain, Predicting the Weather will be essential reading for scholars interested in the public dimensions of science.

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Jeremy Paxman's unique portrait of the Victorian age takes readers on an exciting journey through the birth of modern Britain. Using the paintings of the era as a starting point, he tells us stories of urban life, family, faith, industry and empire that helped define the Victorian spirit and imagination.To Paxman, these paintings were the television of their day, and his exploration of Victorian art and society shows how these artists were chronicling a world changing before their eyes. This enthralling history is Paxman at his best - opinionated, informed, witty, surprising - and a glorious reminder of how the Victorians made us who we are today.

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People, not abstract ideas, make history, and nowhere is this more revealed than in A. N. Wilson's superb portrait of the Victorians, in which hundreds of different lives have been pieced together to tell a story - one which is still unfinished in our own day. The 'global village' is a Victorian village and many of the ideas we take for granted, for good or ill, originated with these extraordinary, self-confident people. What really animated their spirit, and how did they remake the world in their view? In an entertaining and often dramatic narrative, A. N. Wilson shows us remarkable people in the very act of creating the Victorian age.

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Modernity and the Victorians diagnoses a disorder in the scholarship on Victorian Britain, and proposes an interpretative remedy. It argues that the 'modernization theory' beloved of twentieth-century social scientists cannot be made to fit the facts of nineteenth-century British history. In its place, the book lays out in sweeping terms an alternative conception of the political and social dynamics of the period, centred on the past, morality, and community. Intended in part as a companion volume to Angus Hawkins' previous synthetic study Victorian Political Culture: "Habits of Heart and Mind" (2015), the book offers a deliberately bracing challenge to a swathe of received wisdoms which, it asserts, have misled students of modern Britain. Modernity and the Victorians is at once a piece of twentieth-century intellectual history, a contribution to the history of scholarship, a commentary on more recent historiography, and an attempt to intervene in current debates about the practice and future of political history. It is a mature and humane essay by a historian who devoted the whole of his career to making sense of the Victorians. A preface by Alex Middleton sets the book in context with Hawkins' earlier scholarship, and reflects on his wider contribution to the historiography of modern Britain. The volume will be of interest not only to students of nineteenth-century Britain, but also to intellectual historians, historiographers, historically-minded social scientists, and anyone interested in how present preoccupations can distort readings of the past.

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This unique study traces the history of Norwich and Norfolk from the time of earliest life to the outbreak of the First World War. It is designed to appeal to the travellers, both single and in family groups, who wish to explore the host of fascinating places on offer in what the Norfolk-born authors believe to be the most unspoilt and mysterious county in England. Norwich has its own section along with three possible walks taking in many of the recommended sites. The vast coast is presented next and finally the book travels to central Norfolk: at all times, places of interest are grouped as much as possible so that travellers can make the most of the time available. Everywhere, legends and stories relating to an area are woven into the narrative. A final chapter considers Norwich and Norfolk through time using rare archive and archaeological material to give a taste of life in days gone by. Top Norfolk photographer Daniel Tink has taken 100 photographs especially for the book and presents these where appropriate alongside some wonderful contrasting old prints and etchings. The book concludes with a comprehensive index and bibliography designed to facilitate further study.Throughout, telephone numbers and websites of attractions are given, providing readers with a toolkit' to unlock the secrets, history, sites and stories of this vast county.

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Beyond the patrician vision of Victorian Britain traditionally advanced in our textbooks, there always existed another, more diverse Britain, populated by people of colour marking achievements both ordinary and extraordinary. In this deeply researched and dynamic history, Woolf and Abraham reach into the archives to recentre our attention on marginalised Black Victorians, from leading medic George Rice to political agitator William Cuffay to abolitionists Henry ‘Box’ Brown and Sarah Parker Remond; from pre-Raphaelite muse Fanny Eaton to renowned composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. While acknowledging the paradoxes of Victorian views of race, Black Victorians demonstrates, with storytelling verve and a liberatory impulse, how Black people were visible and influential, firmly rooted in British life.

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This compact easy-reference book takes an alternative look at 19th-century British history, shining a light on the often-forgotten sacrifices that were required to bring about the Industrial Revolution & the realisation of the Victorian dream. For while the Victorian era is often viewed as one of uninterrupted success - of unrelenting industrial progress powered scientific advance like no other in history - a question remains: was this revolution good for everyone? The stories in this book offer a sobering counterbalance to the associated tales of glorious Victorian success. One chapter looks at the Tay Bridge disaster. In 1879 the Tay Bridge was the longest in the world and a wonder of its age. But on a stormy night in December, disaster struck when the central section of the bridge collapsed and the 7:13pm train from Edinburgh plunged into the icy waters of the Tay, taking the lives of 75 passengers and crew. How and why did this supposed feat of Victorian invention fail so spectacularly? One of the worst man-made catastrophes in Victorian Britain was caused when the wall of the Dale Dyke dam at Bradfield in South Yorkshire was breached in March 1864. This released 650 million gallons of water that poured down towards Sheffield at a mile a minute in a 9ft wall of liquid that demolished houses, factories and bridges, and claimed the lives of 240 people. For all the railways built, bridges constructed, rivers tamed and electricity harnessed, an impatience for achievement too often resulted in catastrophe and disaster. The accounts in this book detail how the Victorians could and did stumble into appalling errors of judgement.

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Melanie se recupera de una larga convalecencia que la ha mantenido postrada durante meses. Por primera vez se le permitirá abandonar su cuarto y tal vez ver a su hijo, con quien no ha tenido contacto desde el parto. El primer paso es levantarse de la cama y reposar unas horas sobre la chaise-longue situada en la sala contigua. Pero, tras adormecerse en el viejo sillón, Melanie despierta en un lugar extraño. Ante ella se inicia un desfile de siniestros personajes, oscuras intenciones, secretos y censuras, con los que comenzará una desesperada carrera por encontrar un sentido y salvar la propia vida.

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Gruesome Truth About looks at all the gruesome, gory and grisly bits of history that no one ever tells you about.

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Disability and the Victorians brings together in one collection a range of topics, perspectives and experiences from the Victorian era that present a unique overview of the development and impact of attitudes and interventions towards those with impairments during this time. The collection also considers how the legacies of these actions can be seen to have continued throughout the twentieth century right up to the present day. Subjects addressed include deafness, blindness, language delay, substance dependency, imperialism and the representation of disabled characters in popular fiction. These varied topics illustrate how common themes can be found in how Victorian philanthropists and administrators responded to those under their care. Often character, morality and the chance to be restored to productivity and usefulness overrode medical need and this both influenced and reflected wider societal views of impairment and inability.

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"Each century," wrote Charles Dickens "[is] more amazed by the century following it than by all the centuries before." Victorians in theory explores the startling conceit that nineteenth-century poetry is amazed by twentieth-century literary theory. In a daring and exciting departure from critical convention, Schad re-reads postructuralist theory through Victorian poetry. Each chapter pairs a poet with a theorist: Robert Browning meets Jacques Derrida; Christina Rossetti encounters Luce Irigaray; Matthew Arnold is after Michel Foucault; Gerald Manley Hopkins dreams with Jacques Lacan; and Elizabeth Barrett Browning haunts Hélène Cixous. Reading both across and between these writers, Schad opens up a radically intertextual space; he wanders, in Matthew Arnold's words, "between two worlds." Across this no-man's land appear a host of unlikely specters, among them T. S. Eliot, Martin Luther, Friedrich Nietzsche, Lewis Carroll's Alice, Walter Benjamin's "angel of history," and the woman taken in adultery.This book will fascinate anyone interested in the Victorians or theory; at once rigorous and readable, it will appeal to both the scholar and the student.

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Northumberland to the Romans it was Ad Fines, the limit of the Empire, the end of the Roman World. It was here in 122 AD that the Emperor Hadrian decided to build a wall stretching from coast-to-coast to provide protection, to show the might of the Empire, and as a statement of his grandeur. Visitors to Northumberland can walk the Wall visiting milecastles, Roman frontier forts and settlements such as Housesteads (where you can see the oldest toilets you ll ever see) or Vindolanda (where you can take part in an archaeological dig) where wooden tablets detailing life on this frontier (the oldest example of written language in Britain) were discovered, or the remains of Roman temples and shrines (such as the Mithraeum at Carrawburgh). After the Romans left, Northumberland became the heart of one of the greatest kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon Britain, Northumbria. The home of Saints, scholars and warrior kings. Visitors can see the ancient seat of this kingdom at the medieval Bamburgh Castle, visit Hexham Abbey (built in 674 AD), or tour the magnificent remains of the 7th century Priory at Tynemouth (where three kings are buried Oswin (d. 651), Osred (d. 790), and the Scottish King Malcolm III (d. 1093). No other county in Britain has as many medieval remains as Northumberland. From the most grand such as Alnwick Castle (known as the Windsor of the North, the home of the Dukes of Northumberland, the capital of Northumberland, and, to many, Hogwarts!) to humble remains such as the Chantry at Morpeth. At Warkworth visitors can tour the medieval church (scene of a 12th century Scottish massacre), Warkworth Castle (another Percy possession and the setting for a scene in Shakespeare s Henry IV), a medieval hermitage, and the fortified bridge gatehouse (one of the only surviving examples in Britain). Northumberland was ravaged during the Anglo-Scottish Wars and this led to the development of family clans of Border Reivers who were active during the 16th and early 17th centuries. Raiders, looters, blackmailers and courageous cavalrymen the Reivers have left many surviving remnants of their harsh time. Peel Towers dot the landscape alongside Bastle Houses. The active can even walk in the footsteps of the Reivers by following the Reivers Way long distance path. Victorian Northumberland was dominated by both farming and, increasingly, by the industrial genius of some of its entrepreneurs. The greatest of these, Lord Armstrong (known as the Magician of the North), has left behind one of the most magnificent tourist sites in Britain; his home at Cragside. Carved from a bare hillside and transplanted with millions of trees and shrubs and crowned with the beautiful Cragside House visitors can walk the grounds taking advantage of various trails and spotting wildlife such as red squirrels before visiting the first house in the world to be lit by electricity!

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Divorce has become one of the most widely discussed issues in America. In this innovative exploration of the phenomenon of divorce in American society, Norma Basch uses a variety of analytic perspectives to enrich our understanding of the meaning of divorce during the formative years of both the nation and its law, roughly 1770 to 1870. She provides a fascinating, thoughtful look at divorce as a legal action, as an individual experience, and as a cultural symbol in its era of institutionalization and traces the powerful legacy of the first American divorce experiences for us today. Using a unique methodology, Basch fragments her story into three discrete but chronologically overlapping perspectives. In Part I, 'Rules,' she analyzes the changing legal and legislative aspects of divorce and the public response to them. Part II, 'Mediations,' focuses on individual cases and presents a close-up analysis of the way ordinary women and men tested the law in the courts. And Part III, 'Representations,' charts the spiraling imagery of divorce through various fiction and non-fiction narratives that made their way into American popular culture during the nineteenth century. The composite picture that emerges in "Framing American Divorce" is a vividly untidy one that exposes the gulf between legal and moral abstractions and everyday practices. Divorce, Basch argues, was always a focal point of conflict between the autonomy of women and the authority of men. Tracing the legal, social, and cultural experience of divorce allows Basch to provide a searching exploration of the limits of nineteenth-century ideals of domesticity, romantic love, and marriage, and their legacy for us today. She brings her findings up-to-date with a provocative discussion of the current debate over fault or no-fault divorce.

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Beyond the patrician vision of Victorian Britain traditionally advanced in our textbooks, there always existed another, more diverse Britain, populated by people of colour marking achievements both ordinary and extraordinary. In this deeply researched and dynamic history, Woolf and Abraham reach into the archives to recentre our attention on marginalised Black Victorians, from leading medic George Rice to political agitator William Cuffay to abolitionists Henry ‘Box’ Brown and Sarah Parker Remond; from pre-Raphaelite muse Fanny Eaton to renowned composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. While acknowledging the paradoxes of Victorian views of race, Black Victorians demonstrates, with storytelling verve and a liberatory impulse, how Black people were visible and influential, firmly rooted in British life.

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THE VICTORIANS & ANCIENT ROME Norman Vance has written the first full-length study of the impact on Victorian Britain of the history and literature of ancient Rome. His comprehensive account shows how not only scholars and poets but also engineers, soldiers, scientists and politicians gained inspiration from the writing, theory and practice of their Roman predecessors. The Roman theme is traced in nineteenth-century painting and music as well as literature and political discussion. There are chapters on the imaginative influence throughout the nineteenth century of five major Roman poets, framed by other chapters on Rome and European revolutions, nineteenth-century versions of Roman history, fictions of Rome, imperialism and decadence. Attention is also paid to the influence of developments in archaeology both at Rome and Pompeii and at Romano-British sites. Professor Vance provides a fascinating account of the sense of connection Victorian Britain felt with the Roman experience, a connection made the more complex because Britain had once been a Roman colony and because Christianity took hold and spread under the Roman Empire.

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In this provocative and historically detailed reading of the relations between Victorian liberalism and aestheticism, David Wayne Thomas challenges current critical assumptions concerning modern liberal agency and aesthetic experience more generally. Through meticulous examinations of literature, visual arts, popular culture, and politics, Cultivating Victorians shows how a mid-Victorian liberal discourse of individual "many-sidedness"—understood as a cultivated disposition toward self-criticism and open-mindedness—was taken up by artists and writers as they claimed for art a self-reflecting agency at the core of the liberal ideal. Thomas makes plain, as well, the ongoing but often repressed stake of latter-day critics in the aesthetics of many-sidedness. As Thomas shows, an increasingly dominant mid-Victorian liberal culture employed its rhetoric of cultivation in projects as varied as aesthetic appreciation, self-improvement, and social amelioration. By looking to topics across both elite and popular culture, Thomas demonstrates how this liberal culture had to take shape in competition with other dimensions of Victorian public life. Thus several uncommon but illuminating contexts come under inspection here: the bizarre sensation of the Tichborne Claimant, a low-born imposter claiming a noble inheritance; the reportage on life-scale historical city replicas fashioned for temporary public exhibitions in the 1880s; and Dante Gabriel Rossetti's practice of producing and reproducing his artwork for a newly constituted consumer market. Thomas also reads extensively in notable Victorian intellectuals such as George Eliot, John Stuart Mill, John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, and Oscar Wilde. Theoretically inventive, engagingly written, and vividly illustrated, Cultivating Victorians is a timely invitation to rethink liberal values—like autonomy and reflective judgment—that have been routinely condemned as atomistic individualism and false universalism in recent decades.

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This insightful and elegantly written book examines how the popular media of the Victorian era sustained and transformed the reputations of Romantic writers. Tom Mole provides a new reception history of Lord Byron, Felicia Hemans, Sir Walter Scott, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Wordsworth--one that moves beyond the punctual historicism of much recent criticism and the narrow horizons of previous reception histories. He attends instead to the material artifacts and cultural practices that remediated Romantic writers and their works amid shifting understandings of history, memory, and media. Mole scrutinizes Victorian efforts to canonize and commodify Romantic writers in a changed media ecology. He shows how illustrated books renovated Romantic writing, how preachers incorporated irreligious Romantics into their sermons, how new statues and memorials integrated Romantic writers into an emerging national pantheon, and how anthologies mediated their works to new generations. This ambitious study investigates a wide range of material objects Victorians made in response to Romantic writing--such as photographs, postcards, books, and collectibles--that in turn remade the public's understanding of Romantic writers. Shedding new light on how Romantic authors were posthumously recruited to address later cultural concerns, What the Victorians Made of Romanticism reveals new histories of appropriation, remediation, and renewal that resonate in our own moment of media change, when once again the cultural products of the past seem in danger of being forgotten if they are not reimagined for new audiences.

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Indulge in the sweetness and beauty of Victoriana, with a year paper collages that celebrate the era's delight in flowers, dogs and cats, fine China, beautiful costumes, greeting cards, and more.

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Publicado en 1913 dentro de la serie de la Home University Library of Modern Knowledge, en La Época Victoriana en la literatura G. K. Chesterton realiza un mordaz repaso del espíritu de las letras de este período. Pero el suyo no es un relato al uso; no podía serlo en su caso. Como él mismo dice en la obra: lo más cerca que cualquier hombre honesto puede estar de eso que llamamos ?imparcialidad?, es confesar que está siendo parcial. Principio que aplica a rajatabla, demostrando que fue un pensador comprometido con los grandes problemas del hombre de su tiempo.Desde la primera página, ya nos anuncia que rechaza la perspectiva cronológica, para analizar y comentar la obra de autores como Jane Austen, Robert Louis Stevenson, las hermanas Brontë o Charles Dickens, entre muchos otros. Aunque su mirada va más allá de la mera observación y lo aparente, esbozando un convincente retrato de qué fueron los victorianos: hombres y mujeres que, en su opinión, se alejaron de un sentido espiritual

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Someone got into the sewing basket! Actually, the whole gang did! But who can blame them? A spool of thread is an almost irresistible toy-a bright, colourful, perfect plaything for a curious kitten. Created by artist Cynthia Hart, who layers antique paper ephemera, fresh flowers, ribbons, and vintage objects into lush collages filled with life, colour, and energy, Sewing with Kittens 1,000-Piece Puzzle celebrates the joy of a little harmless mischief.* 1,000 interlocking pieces* Mini-poster (8 3/8 × 6 5/8) for reference or framing* Completed puzzle size: 23 4/5 × 19

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From spooky stories and real-life ghost hunting, to shows about murder and serial killers, we are fascinated by death - and we owe these modern obsessions to the Victorian age. Death and the Victorians explores a period in history when the search for the truth about what lies beyond our mortal realm was matched only by the imagination and invention used to find it. Walk among London’s festering graveyards, where the dead were literally rising from the grave. Visit the Paris Morgue, where thousands flocked to view the spectacle of death every single day. Lift the veil on how spirits were invited into the home, secret societies taught ways to survive death, and the latest science and technology was applied to provide proof of the afterlife. Find out why the Victorian era is considered the golden age of the ghost story, exemplified by tales from the likes of Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Oscar Wilde and Henry James. Discover how the birth of the popular press nurtured our taste for murder and that Jack the Ripper was actually a work of pure Gothic horror fiction crafted by cynical Victorian newspapermen. Death and the Victorians exposes the darker side of the nineteenth century, a time when the living were inventing incredible ways to connect with the dead that endure to this day.

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Simon Heffer's new book forms an ambitious exploration of the making of the Victorian age and the Victorian mind.Britain in the 1840s was a country wracked by poverty, unrest and uncertainty, where there were attempts to assassinate the Queen and her prime minister, and the ruling class lived in fear of riot and revolution. By the 1880s it was a confident nation of progress and prosperity, transformed not just by industrialisation but by new attitudes to politics, education, women and the working class. That it should have changed so radically was very largely the work of an astonishingly dynamic and high-minded group of people – politicians and philanthropists, writers and thinkers – who in a matter of decades fundamentally remade the country, its institutions and its mindset, and laid the foundations for modern society. It traces the evolution of British democracy and shows how early laissez-faire attitudes to the lot of the less fortunate turned into campaigns to improve their lives and prospects. It analyses the birth of new attitudes to education, religion and science. And it shows how even such aesthetic issues as taste in architecture were swept in to broader debates about the direction that the country should take. In the process, Simon Heffer looks at the lives and deeds of major politicians, from the devout and principled Gladstone to the unscrupulous Disraeli; at the intellectual arguments that raged among writers and thinkers such as Matthew Arnold, Thomas Carlyle, and Samuel Butler; and at the 'great projects' of the age, from the Great Exhibition to the Albert Memorial. Drawing heavily on previously unpublished documents, he offers a superbly nuanced insight into life in an extraordinary era, populated by extraordinary people – and how our forebears’ pursuit of perfection gave birth to modern Britain.

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Part of bestselling designer Cynthia Hart's Victoriana Dogs stationery line, here is a curated collection of 340 stickers that allow adults and children to add a touch of beauty to any surface with these beautiful images of cute pups and playful dogs. How the Victorians loved their dogs! In fact, it was during the Victorian era that dogs became so popular, as they embodied important values of the time: steadfastness, loyalty, and pluck. A collection of 340 stickers, Cynthia Hart's Victoriana Dogs: The Sticker Book features terriers and spaniels, setters and hounds, in all manner of poses and dress, from the sentimental to the whimsical, and always exemplifying those lovable canine virtues—all with a twinkle in their eye.

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From Henry David Thoreau to Bill McKibben, critics and philosophers have long sought to demonstrate how a sufficient life—one without constant, environmentally damaging growth—might still be rich and satisfying. Yet one crucial episode in the history of sufficiency has been largely forgotten. Green Victorians tells the story of a circle of men and women in the English Lake District who attempted to create a new kind of economy, turning their backs on Victorian consumer society in order to live a life dependent not on material abundance and social prestige but on artful simplicity and the bonds of community. At the center of their social experiment was the charismatic art critic and political economist John Ruskin. Albritton and Albritton Jonsson show how Ruskin’s followers turned his theory into practice in a series of ambitious local projects ranging from hand spinning and woodworking to gardening, archaeology, and pedagogy. This is a lively yet unsettling story, for there was a dark side to Ruskin’s community as well—racist thinking, paternalism, and technophobia. Richly illustrated, Green Victorians breaks new ground, connecting the ideas and practices of Ruskin’s utopian community with the problems of ethical consumption then and now.

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The century-long struggle over the boundaries of sexual propriety and morality is the subject of Kevin White's rich account of American attitudes toward sex. Mr. White explores this great and continuing cultural conflict in the full context of Americans' ambiguous dialogue with their Victorian legacy. Incisive and authoritative....A remarkably nuanced analysis of Americans' obsession with sex. —John C. Burnham, Ohio State University. A bold and engaging survey...highly readable. —William L. O'Neill. American Ways Series.

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Nineteenth-century England witnessed an unprecedented increase in the number of publications and institutions devoted to the creation and the dissemination of knowledge: encyclopedias, scientific periodicals, instruction manuals, scientific societies, children’s literature, mechanics’ institutes, museums of natural history, and lending libraries. In Useful Knowledge Alan Rauch presents a social, cultural, and literary history of this new knowledge industry and traces its relationships within nineteenth-century literature, ending with its eventual confrontation with Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species.Rauch discusses both the influence and the ideology of knowledge in terms of how it affected nineteenth-century anxieties about moral responsibility and religious beliefs. Drawing on a wide array of literary, scientific, and popular works of the period, the book focusses on the growing importance of scientific knowledge and its impact on Victorian culture. From discussions of Jane Webb Loudon’s The Mummy! and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, to Charlotte Brontë’s The Professor, Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke, and George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss, Rauch paints a fascinating picture of nineteenth-century culture and addresses issues related to the proliferation of knowledge and the moral issues of this time period. Useful Knowledge touches on social and cultural anxieties that offer both historical and contemporary insights on our ongoing preoccupation with knowledge.Useful Knowledge will appeal to readers interested in nineteenth century history, literature, culture, the mediation of knowledge, and the history of science.

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