How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain

How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain PDF Author: Leah Price
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400842182
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 361

Get Book

Book Description
How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain asks how our culture came to frown on using books for any purpose other than reading. When did the coffee-table book become an object of scorn? Why did law courts forbid witnesses to kiss the Bible? What made Victorian cartoonists mock commuters who hid behind the newspaper, ladies who matched their books' binding to their dress, and servants who reduced newspapers to fish 'n' chips wrap? Shedding new light on novels by Thackeray, Dickens, the Brontës, Trollope, and Collins, as well as the urban sociology of Henry Mayhew, Leah Price also uncovers the lives and afterlives of anonymous religious tracts and household manuals. From knickknacks to wastepaper, books mattered to the Victorians in ways that cannot be explained by their printed content alone. And whether displayed, defaced, exchanged, or discarded, printed matter participated, and still participates, in a range of transactions that stretches far beyond reading. Supplementing close readings with a sensitive reconstruction of how Victorians thought and felt about books, Price offers a new model for integrating literary theory with cultural history. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain reshapes our understanding of the interplay between words and objects in the nineteenth century and beyond.

How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain

How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain PDF Author: Leah Price
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400842182
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 361

Get Book

Book Description
How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain asks how our culture came to frown on using books for any purpose other than reading. When did the coffee-table book become an object of scorn? Why did law courts forbid witnesses to kiss the Bible? What made Victorian cartoonists mock commuters who hid behind the newspaper, ladies who matched their books' binding to their dress, and servants who reduced newspapers to fish 'n' chips wrap? Shedding new light on novels by Thackeray, Dickens, the Brontës, Trollope, and Collins, as well as the urban sociology of Henry Mayhew, Leah Price also uncovers the lives and afterlives of anonymous religious tracts and household manuals. From knickknacks to wastepaper, books mattered to the Victorians in ways that cannot be explained by their printed content alone. And whether displayed, defaced, exchanged, or discarded, printed matter participated, and still participates, in a range of transactions that stretches far beyond reading. Supplementing close readings with a sensitive reconstruction of how Victorians thought and felt about books, Price offers a new model for integrating literary theory with cultural history. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain reshapes our understanding of the interplay between words and objects in the nineteenth century and beyond.

Victorian Britain

Victorian Britain PDF Author: Sally Mitchell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415668514
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 1014

Get Book

Book Description
First published in 1988, this encyclopedia serves as an overview and point of entry to the complex interdisciplinary field of Victorian studies. The signed articles, which cover persons, events, institutions, topics, groups and artefacts in Great Britain between 1837 and 1901, have been written by authorities in the field and contain bibliographies to provide guidelines for further research. The work is intended for undergraduates and the general reader, and also as a starting point for graduates who wish to explore new fields.

The Rise of Respectable Society

The Rise of Respectable Society PDF Author: Francis Michael Longstreth Thompson
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674772854
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 396

Get Book

Book Description
'The Rise of Respectable Society' offers a new map of this territory as revealed by close empirical studies of marriage, the family, domestic life, work, leisure and entertainment in 19th century Britain.

Mesmerized

Mesmerized PDF Author: Alison Winter
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226902197
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 488

Get Book

Book Description
List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: An Invitation to the Seance1: Discovery of the Island of Mesmeria 2: Animal Magnetism Comes to London 3: Experimental Subjects as Scientific Instruments 4: Carnival, Chapel, and Pantomime 5: The Peripatetic Power of the "New Science" 6: Consultations, Conversaziones, and Institutions 7: The Invention of Anesthesia and the Redefinition of Pain 8: Colonizing Sensations in Victorian India9: Emanations from the Sickroom 10: The Mesmeric Cure of Souls 11: Expertise, Common Sense, and the Territories of Science 12: The Social Body and the Invention of Consensus Conclusion: The Day after the Feast Notes Bibliography Index Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

Victorian Britain

Victorian Britain PDF Author: John Sampson
Publisher: Ginn
ISBN: 9780602251499
Category : Great Britain
Languages : en
Pages : 52

Get Book

Book Description


Men at Work

Men at Work PDF Author: T. J. Barringer
Publisher: Paul Mellon Ctr for Studies
ISBN: 9780300103809
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 379

Get Book

Book Description
For artists of the increasingly mechanized Victorian age, questions about the meaning and value of labour presented a series of urgent problems: Is work a moral obligation or a religious duty? Must labour be the preserve of men alone? Does the amount of work bestowed on a painting affect its value? Should art celebrate wholesome rural work or reveal the degradations of the industrial workplace? In this highly original book, Tim Barringer considers how artists and theorists addressed these questions and what their solutions reveal about Victorian society and culture. Based on extensive new research, Men at Work offers a compelling study of the image as a means of exploring the relationship between labour and art in Victorian Britain. Barringer arrives at a major reinterpretation of the art and culture of nineteenth-century Britain and its empire as well as new readings of such key figures as Ford Madox Brown and John Ruskin.

The Arsenic Century

The Arsenic Century PDF Author: James C. Whorton
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191623431
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 448

Get Book

Book Description
Arsenic is rightly infamous as the poison of choice for Victorian murderers. Yet the great majority of fatalities from arsenic in the nineteenth century came not from intentional poisoning, but from accident. Kept in many homes for the purpose of poisoning rats, the white powder was easily mistaken for sugar or flour and often incorporated into the family dinner. It was also widely present in green dyes, used to tint everything from candles and candies to curtains, wallpaper, and clothing (it was arsenic in old lace that was the danger). Whether at home amidst arsenical curtains and wallpapers, at work manufacturing these products, or at play swirling about the papered, curtained ballroom in arsenical gowns and gloves, no one was beyond the poison's reach. Drawing on the medical, legal, and popular literature of the time, The Arsenic Century paints a vivid picture of its wide-ranging and insidious presence in Victorian daily life, weaving together the history of its emergence as a nearly inescapable household hazard with the sordid story of its frequent employment as a tool of murder and suicide. And ultimately, as the final chapter suggests, arsenic in Victorian Britain was very much the pilot episode for a series of environmental poisoning dramas that grew ever more common during the twentieth century and still has no end in sight.

Politics and Empire in Victorian Britain

Politics and Empire in Victorian Britain PDF Author: Antoinette Burton
Publisher: Red Globe Press
ISBN: 9780312229979
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 343

Get Book

Book Description
The first source book to track the role the British empire played in domestic politics, social attitudes and intellectual and cultural life at home, this volume is undergirded by a recognizable political chronology, emphasizing moments of major constitutional reform (1832, 1867) and imperial crisis (1857, 1865, 1882, 1886, 1899). The primary purpose of the reader is to introduce students to the intersections of 'home' and 'empire', so that the effects of imperialism on Victorian politics and society can be fully appreciated.

Post-Victorian Britain 1902-1951

Post-Victorian Britain 1902-1951 PDF Author: L.C.B. Seaman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134954913
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 544

Get Book

Book Description
This comprehensive survey of English history during the first half of the twentieth century has three main themes: the political and social consequences of the replacement of the Liberal Party by the Labour Party; the continuous development of the welfare state; and the changes in England’s imperial and international position caused by the ambitions of Germany and Japan and by the emergence of the U.S.A and the U.S.S.R as world powers. The leading personalities of the period are brilliantly portrayed and the issues challengingly presently.

The Organisation of Knowledge in Victorian Britain

The Organisation of Knowledge in Victorian Britain PDF Author: Martin Daunton
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780197263266
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 444

Get Book

Book Description
This collection of essays explores the questions of what counted as knowledge in Victorian Britain, who defined knowledge and the knowledgeable, by what means and by what criteria. During the Victorian period, the structure of knowledge took on a new and recognizably modern form, and the disciplines we now take for granted took shape. The ways in which knowledge was tested also took on a new form, with the rise of written examinations. New institutions of knowledge were created: museums were important at the start of the period, universities had become prominent by the end. Victorians needed to make sense of the sheer scale of new information, to popularize it, and at the same time to exclude ignorance and error - a role carried out by encyclopaedias and popular publications. By studying the Victorian organization of knowledge in its institutional, social, and intellectual settings, these essays contribute to our wider consideration of the complex and much debated concept of knowledge.