Excavating Victorians

Excavating Victorians examines nineteenth-century Britain's reaction to the revelations about time and natural history provided by the new sciences of geology and archaeology. The Victorians faced one of the greatest paradigm shifts in history: the bottom dropped out of time, and they had to reinvent their relationship to the earth and to time and history. These new sciences took the Victorians by storm, inundating them with fossils, skeletal remains, and potsherds-artifacts, or traces, that served at once as relics from the past, objects in the present, and markers of time's passage.

The Wake of Wellington - Englishness in 1852

Soldier, hero, and politician, the Duke of Wellington is one of the best-known figures of nineteenth-century England. From his victory at Waterloo over Napoleon in 1815, he rose to become prime minister of his country. But Peter Sinnema finds equal fascination in Victorian England’s response to the Duke’s death. The Wake of Wellington considers Wellington’s spectacular funeral pageant in the fall of 1852—an unprecedented event that attracted one and a half million spectators to London—as a threshold event against which the life of the soldier-hero and High-Tory statesman could be re-viewed and represented.

James Watt, Chemist - Understanding the Origins of the Steam Age

In the Victorian era, James Watt became an iconic engineer, but in his own time he was also an influential chemist. Miller examines Watt’s illustrious engineering career in light of his parallel interest in chemistry, arguing that Watt’s conception of steam engineering relied upon chemical understandings.

The Victorians at War 1815 - 1914 - An Encyclopedia of British Military History

This encyclopaedia surveys the major wars, campaigns, battles and expeditions of the British Army as well as its weaponry, tactics, and all other aspects of its operations from the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the dawn of World War I. The volume explains why the numerous military operations took place and what the results were. Biographies reveal facts about British and Indian army officers and other ranks, while other entries deal with recruitment, training, education and literacy, uniforms, equipment, pay and conditions, social conditions, social backgrounds of soldiers and diseases and wounds they fell victim to.

The House of Blackwood - Author - Publisher Relations in the Victorian Era

The Scottish publishing firm of William Blackwood & Sons, founded in 1804, was a major force in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British literary history, publishing a diverse group of important authors -- including George Eliot, John Galt, Thomas de Quincey, Margaret Oliphant, Anthony Trollope, Joseph Conrad, and John Buchan, among many others -- in book form and in its monthly Blackwood's Magazine. In The House of Blackwood, David Finkelstein exposes for the first time the successes and failures of this onetime publishing powerhouse.