For much of the century, London's greatest contemporary observer, Charles Dickens, obsessively walked its streets, recording its pleasures and vices, curiosities and cruelties. In his company, the author leads us through the markets, sewers, rivers, slums, cemeteries, gin palaces and chop-houses of the Victorian capital, revealing the city in all its variety, vibrancy, and squalor. From the cacophonous cries of street-sellers to the uncomfortable reality of travel by omnibus, from the many uses of a dead horse to the unimaginably grueling working lives of hawker children, no detail is too small, or too strange. No one who reads this book will view London in the same light again.
The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-line Pioneers
A new edition of the first book by the bestselling author of A History of the World in 6 Glasses--the fascinating story of the telegraph, the world's first "Internet," which revolutionized the nineteenth century even more than the Internet has the twentieth and twenty first.
Is an utterly compulsive gothic adventure story set in a fictitious Victorian city, and featuring a host of wicked and outlandish characters, including Miss Celestial Temple – a heiress, Cardinal Chang, a deadly assassin and Dr Svenson.. Three months after 25-year-old Celeste Temple travels from "her island" (a Bermuda-like place) plantation home to Victorian London, fiancé Roger Bascombe breaks their engagement. Driven more by curiosity than desire, she follows him from his job at the foreign ministry to Harschmort House, where, with little prodding, she quickly finds herself in silk undergarments at a ritual involving masked guests and two-way mirrors.
Bleak Houses - Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction
“Professor Surridge exhibits a clear and persuasive historical sense as well as sensitivity to the novels and stories. I believe this study will have lasting value because of its careful historical research and corresponding interpretation of the texts,” says Naomi Wood, Kansas State University The Offenses Against the Person Act of 1828 was a piece of legislation that opened magistrates' courts to abused working-class wives. Newspapers in turn reported on these proceedings and in this way the Victorian scrutiny of domestic conduct began. But how did popular fiction treat the phenomenon of “private” family violence?
