Victorian London's Middle-Class Housewife

Victorian London's Middle-Class Housewife PDF Author: Yaffa C. Draznin
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313002576
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
Through a detailed description of the life and activities of the middle-class married woman of London between 1875 and 1900, this study reveals how housewives unwittingly became engines for change as the new century neared. In marked contrast to the stereotypical depictions of Victorian women in literature and on television, Draznin reveals a woman seldom seen: the stay-at-home housewife whose activities were not much different than those of her counterparts today. By exploring her daily activities, how she cleaned her home, disciplined her children, managed her servants, stretched a limited budget, and began to indulge herself, one discovers the human dimension of women who lived more than a century ago. While most studies of this period consider values, aspirations, and attitudes, this book concentrates on actions, what these women did all day, to provide readers with a new perspective on Victorian life. Late-Victorian London was a surprisingly modern city with a public face of well-lit streets, an excellent underground railway system, and extended municipal services. In the home, gas stoves were replacing coal ranges and household appliances were becoming more common. Having both money to spend and a strong incentive to buy the new laborsaving devices, ready-to-wear clothing, and other manufactured products, the middle-class matron's resistance to change gave way to a rising consumer culture. Despite her nearly exclusive preoccupation with home and family, these urban women became agents for the modernization of Britain.

Victorian London's Middle-Class Housewife

Victorian London's Middle-Class Housewife PDF Author: Yaffa C. Draznin
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313002576
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Get Book Here

Book Description
Through a detailed description of the life and activities of the middle-class married woman of London between 1875 and 1900, this study reveals how housewives unwittingly became engines for change as the new century neared. In marked contrast to the stereotypical depictions of Victorian women in literature and on television, Draznin reveals a woman seldom seen: the stay-at-home housewife whose activities were not much different than those of her counterparts today. By exploring her daily activities, how she cleaned her home, disciplined her children, managed her servants, stretched a limited budget, and began to indulge herself, one discovers the human dimension of women who lived more than a century ago. While most studies of this period consider values, aspirations, and attitudes, this book concentrates on actions, what these women did all day, to provide readers with a new perspective on Victorian life. Late-Victorian London was a surprisingly modern city with a public face of well-lit streets, an excellent underground railway system, and extended municipal services. In the home, gas stoves were replacing coal ranges and household appliances were becoming more common. Having both money to spend and a strong incentive to buy the new laborsaving devices, ready-to-wear clothing, and other manufactured products, the middle-class matron's resistance to change gave way to a rising consumer culture. Despite her nearly exclusive preoccupation with home and family, these urban women became agents for the modernization of Britain.

Middle-class Life in Victorian Belfast

Middle-class Life in Victorian Belfast PDF Author: Alice Johnson
Publisher:
ISBN: 1789620317
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
Middle-Class Life in Victorian Belfast vividly reconstructs the social world of upper middle-class Belfast from c.1830 to 1890. Using extensive primary material, the book draws a rich portrait of Belfast's middle-class society, covering themes of civic activism, working lives, philanthropy, associational culture, evangelicalism, recreation, marriage and family life.

Inside the Victorian Home

Inside the Victorian Home PDF Author: Judith Flanders
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393052091
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 560

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Book Description
A rich selection from diaries, letters, advice books, magazines, and paintings creates a rooms-by-room portrait of Victorian life--from childbirth in the master bedroom to separate gender domains in the drawing room and parlor.

Victorian Material Culture

Victorian Material Culture PDF Author: Tatiana Kontou
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315399962
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
From chatelaines to whale blubber, ice making machines to stained glass, this six-volume collection will be of interest to the scholar, student or general reader alike - anyone who has an urge to learn more about Victorian things. The set brings together a range of primary sources on Victorian material culture and discusses the most significant developments in material history from across the nineteenth century. The collection will demonstrate the significance of objects in the everyday lives of the Victorians and addresses important questions about how we classify and categorise nineteenth-century things. This collection brings together a range of primary sources on Victorian material and culture. This volume, ‘Fashionable Things’, will focus on Victorian fads and fashions ranging from chatelains to insect jewellery.

The Diary of Elizabeth Lee

The Diary of Elizabeth Lee PDF Author: Colin Pooley
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 1789625025
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 504

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Book Description
Personal diaries provide rare glimpses into those aspects of the past that are usually hidden from view. Elizabeth Lee grew up on Merseyside in the late nineteenth century. She began her diary at the age of 16 in 1884 and it provides an unbroken record of her life up to the age of 25 in 1892. Elizabeth’s father was a draper and outfitter with shops in Birkenhead, and throughout the period of the diary Elizabeth lived at home with her family in Prenton. However, she travelled widely on both sides of the Mersey and her diary provides an unusually revealing picture of middle-class life that begins to challenge conventional views of the position of young women in Victorian society. The book includes a detailed introduction to and analysis of the diary, together with a glossary relating to key people in the diary and maps of the localities in which Elizabeth lived her everyday life. There have been a number of diaries published relating to ‘ordinary’ people, but most accounts were written retrospectively as life histories by people who eventually gained some degree of fame or prominence in society. This very rare first-hand account provides a unique insight into adolescent life in Victorian Britain.

Victorian London

Victorian London PDF Author: Liza Picard
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1466863471
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 420

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Book Description
To Londoners, the years 1840 to 1870 were years of dramatic change and achievement. As suburbs expanded and roads multiplied, London was ripped apart to build railway lines and stations and life-saving sewers. The Thames was contained by embankments, and traffic congestion was eased by the first underground railway in the world. A start was made on providing housing for the "deserving poor." There were significant advances in medicine, and the Ragged Schools are perhaps the least known of Victorian achievements, in those last decades before universal state education. In 1851 the Great Exhibition managed to astonish almost everyone, attracting exhibitors and visitors from all over the world. But there was also appalling poverty and exploitation, exposed by Henry Mayhew and others. For the laboring classes, pay was pitifully low, the hours long, and job security nonexistent. Liza Picard shows us the physical reality of daily life in Victorian London. She takes us into schools and prisons, churches and cemeteries. Many practical innovations of the time—flushing lavatories, underground railways, umbrellas, letter boxes, driving on the left—point the way forward. But this was also, at least until the 1850s, a city of cholera outbreaks, transportation to Australia, public executions, and the workhouse, where children could be sold by their parents for as little as £12 and streetpeddlers sold sparrows for a penny, tied by the leg for children to play with. Cruelty and hypocrisy flourished alongside invention, industry, and philanthropy.

Historia and Fabula

Historia and Fabula PDF Author: Peter G. Bietenholz
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9789004100633
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 472

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Book Description
Examining a variety of texts ranging from the Ancient Near East to the nineteenth century, this book deals with the inevitable presence of both fact and fiction in historical thought and investigates when, where and to what degree they were distinguished.

Summary of Liza Picard's Victorian London

Summary of Liza Picard's Victorian London PDF Author: Everest Media,
Publisher: Everest Media LLC
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 69

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Book Description
Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 The Thames stank. The main ingredient was human waste. In previous centuries, the Thames run sweetly, and salmon and swans thrived in it. But by 1841, the census counted 1,945,000 people in London, and probably more if you include the shadowy ones who always evade officialdom. #2 The bouquet of London’s streets was made up of animal dung, human excrement, and decaying brickwork. The sewers were old, and could not be enlarged to cope with the increased flow. #3 The Victorians were proud that they had made a breakthrough in cleaning up London, when water closets became a normal part of a house in 1857. But the Great Stink of 1858 proved that their efforts were futile. #4 Thinking Londoners began to realize that government through medieval parochial boards was not viable in the nineteenth century, and in 1845 London’s first Metropolitan Board of Works was set up.

A History of Solitude

A History of Solitude PDF Author: David Vincent
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509536604
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
Solitude has always had an ambivalent status: the capacity to enjoy being alone can make sociability bearable, but those predisposed to solitude are often viewed with suspicion or pity. Drawing on a wide array of literary and historical sources, David Vincent explores how people have conducted themselves in the absence of company over the last three centuries. He argues that the ambivalent nature of solitude became a prominent concern in the modern era. For intellectuals in the romantic age, solitude gave respite to citizens living in ever more complex modern societies. But while the search for solitude was seen as a symptom of modern life, it was also viewed as a dangerous pathology: a perceived renunciation of the world, which could lead to psychological disorder and anti-social behaviour. Vincent explores the successive attempts of religious authorities and political institutions to manage solitude, taking readers from the monastery to the prisoner’s cell, and explains how western society’s increasing secularism, urbanization and prosperity led to the development of new solitary pastimes at the same time as it made traditional forms of solitary communion, with God and with a pristine nature, impossible. At the dawn of the digital age, solitude has taken on new meanings, as physical isolation and intense sociability have become possible as never before. With the advent of a so-called loneliness epidemic, a proper historical understanding of the natural human desire to disengage from the world is more important than ever. The first full-length account of its subject, A History of Solitude will appeal to a wide general readership.

Culinary Culture in Colonial India

Culinary Culture in Colonial India PDF Author: Utsa Ray
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316222675
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
This book utilizes cuisine to understand the construction of the colonial middle class in Bengal who indigenized new culinary experiences as a result of colonial modernity. This process of indigenization developed certain social practices, including imagination of the act of cooking as a classic feminine act and the domestic kitchen as a sacred space. The process of indigenization was an aesthetic choice that was imbricated in the upper caste and patriarchal agenda of the middle-class social reform. However, in these acts of imagination, there were important elements of continuity from the pre-colonial times. The book establishes the fact that Bengali cuisine cannot be labeled as indigenist although it never became widely commercialized. The point was to cosmopolitanize the domestic and yet keep its tag of 'Bengaliness'. The resultant cuisine was hybrid, in many senses like its makers.