Vice and the Victorians

Vice and the Victorians
Author: Mike Huggins
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2015-12-17
Genre: History
ISBN: 1472525566

Vice and the Victorians explores the ways the Victorian world gave meanings to the word 'vice', and the role this complex notion played in shaping society. Mike Huggins provides a richer and more nuanced understanding of a term that, despite its vital importance to the Victorians, has thus far lacked a clear definition. Each chapter explores a different facet of vice. Firstly, the book seeks to define exactly what vice meant to the Victorians, exploring how the language of vice was used as a tool to beat down opposition and dissent. It considers the cultural geography and spatial dimensions of vice in the public and private spheres, before moving on to look at specific vices: the unholy trinity of drink, sex and gambling. Finally, it shifts from vice to virtue and the efforts of moral reformers, and reassesses the relationship between vice and respectability in Victorian life. In his lively and engaging discussion, Mike Huggins draws on a range of theory and exploits a wide variety of texts and representations from the periodical press, parliamentary reports and Acts, novels, obscene publications, paintings and posters, newspapers, sermons, pamphlets and investigative works. This will be an illuminating text for undergraduates studying Victorian Britain as well as anyone wishing to gain a more nuanced understanding of Victorian society.

How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain

How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain
Author: Leah Price
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 360
Release: 2013-10-27
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0691159548

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.

Bugs and the Victorians

Bugs and the Victorians
Author: John F. M. Clark
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2009-01-01
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0300150911

This text explores how science became increasingly important in 19th century British culture and how the systematic study of insects permitted entomologists to engage with the most pressing questions of Victorian times: the nature of God, mind, and governance, and the origins of life.

Vice and the Victorians

Vice and the Victorians
Author: Mike Huggins
Publisher:
Total Pages: 258
Release: 2016
Genre: Alcoholism
ISBN: 9781474219679

"Vice and the Victorians explores the ways the Victorian world gave meanings to the word 'vice', and the role this complex notion played in shaping society. Mike Huggins provides a richer and more nuanced understanding of a term that, despite its vital importance to the Victorians, has thus far lacked a clear definition. Each chapter explores a different facet of vice. Firstly, the book seeks to define exactly what vice meant to the Victorians, exploring how the language of vice was used as a tool to beat down opposition and dissent. It considers the cultural geography and spatial dimensions of vice in the public and private spheres, before moving on to look at specific vices: the unholy trinity of drink, sex and gambling. Finally, it shifts from vice to virtue and the efforts of moral reformers, and reassesses the relationship between vice and respectability in Victorian life. In his lively and engaging discussion, Mike Huggins draws on a range of theory and exploits a wide variety of texts and representations from the periodical press, parliamentary reports and Acts, novels, obscene publications, paintings and posters, newspapers, sermons, pamphlets and investigative works. This will be an illuminating text for undergraduates studying Victorian Britain as well as anyone wishing to gain a more nuanced understanding of Victorian society."--Bloomsbury Publishing.

Love in the Time of Victoria

Love in the Time of Victoria
Author: Francoise Barret-Ducrocq
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 241
Release: 1992-12-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0140173269

Using firsthand documents uncovered in the archives of a London foundling hospital, Barret-Ducrocq offers a marvelously acute census of Victorian sexual and moral attitudes.

Oceania and the Victorian Imagination

Oceania and the Victorian Imagination
Author: Professor Peter H Hoffenberg
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
Total Pages: 399
Release: 2013-04-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 147240470X

Oceania, or the South Pacific, loomed large in the Victorian popular imagination. It was a world that interested the Victorians for many reasons, all of which suggested to them that everything was possible there. This collection of essays focuses on Oceania’s impact on Victorian culture, most notably travel writing, photography, international exhibitions, literature, and the world of children. Each of these had significant impact. The literature discussed affected mainly the middle and upper classes, while exhibitions and photography reached down into the working classes, as did missionary presentations. The experience of children was central to the Pacific’s effects, as youthful encounters at exhibitions, chapel, home, or school formed lifelong impressions and experience. It would be difficult to fully understand the Victorians as they understood themselves without considering their engagement with Oceania. While the contributions of India and Africa to the nineteenth-century imagination have been well-documented, examinations of the contributions of Oceania have remained on the periphery of Victorian studies. Oceania and the Victorian Imagination contributes significantly to our discussion of the non-peripheral place of Oceania in Victorian culture.

The English Vice

The English Vice
Author: Ian Gibson
Publisher: Duckworth Publishing
Total Pages: 408
Release: 1978
Genre: History
ISBN:

After the Victorians

After the Victorians
Author: A. N. Wilson
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 660
Release: 2006-09-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780312425159

Blending military, political, social, and cultural history of the most dramatic kind, distinguished historian Wilson offers an absorbing portrait of the decline of one of the world's great powers. The result is a fresh account of the birth pangs of the modern world, as well as a timely analysis of imperialism and its discontents.

Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves

Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves
Author: Jacqueline Yallop
Publisher: Atlantic Books
Total Pages: 550
Release: 2012-04-01
Genre: Antiques & Collectibles
ISBN: 0857895613

During the Victorian age, British collectors were among the most active, passionate, and eccentric in the world. This book tells the stories of some of the 19th century's most intriguing collectors, following their perilous journeys across the globe in the hunt for rare and beautiful objects. From art connoisseur John Charles Robinson, to the aristocratic scholar Charlotte Schreiber, who ransacked Europe for treasure, and from London's fashionable Pre-Raphaelite circle, to pioneering Orientalists in Beijing, Jacqueline Yallop plunges us into the cut-throat world of the Victorian mania for collecting.

Victorian Secrets

Victorian Secrets
Author: Sarah A. Chrisman
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 361
Release: 2015-04-07
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1634500407

On Sarah A. Chrisman’s twenty-ninth birthday, her husband, Gabriel, presented her with a corset. The material and the design were breathtakingly beautiful, but her mind immediately filled with unwelcome views. Although she had been in love with the Victorian era all her life, she had specifically asked her husband not to buy her a corset—ever. She’d heard how corsets affected the female body and what they represented, and she wanted none of it. However, Chrisman agreed to try on the garment . . . and found it surprisingly enjoyable. The corset, she realized, was a tool of empowerment—not oppression. After a year of wearing a corset on a daily basis, her waist had gone from thirty-two inches to twenty-two inches, she was experiencing fewer migraines, and her posture improved. She had successfully transformed her body, her dress, and her lifestyle into that of a Victorian woman—and everyone was asking about it. In Victorian Secrets, Chrisman explains how a garment from the past led to a change in not only the way she viewed herself, but also the ways she understood the major differences between the cultures of twenty-first-century and nineteenth-century America. The desire to delve further into the Victorian lifestyle provided Chrisman with new insight into issues of body image and how women, past and present, have seen and continue to see themselves.