British Victorian Women S Periodicals

Ledbetter explores themes and patterns of poetry publication in a variety of women's periodicals published throughout the Victorian era using taste, style and the significance of poetry to advance our understanding of women's lives in the nineteenth century.

Focusing on the historical development of the British women's magazine, this book begins with descriptions of different kinds of magazines. This is followed by an exploration of elements that made up the mix of ingredients and a comprehensive listing.

Presents 35 thematically organised, research-led essays on women, periodicals and print culture in Victorian Britain.

Table of contents

Covering a wide range of magazine work, including editing, illustration, poetry, needlework instruction and typesetting, this book provides fresh insights into the participation of women in the nineteenth-century magazine industry.

The circulation of periodicals and newspapers is thought to have been larger and more influential than that of books in Victorian society. J. Don Vann and Rosemary T. VanArsdel have brought together commissioned bibliographical essays on Victorian periodical literature by some of the world's greatest experts in the field, whose contributions support this view. The essayists guide the reader into avenues for exploring Victorian society and the professions (law, medicine, architecture, the military, science); the arts (music, illustration, theatre, authorship and the book trade); occupations and commerce (transport, finance, trade, advertising, agriculture); popular culture (temperance, sport, comic periodicals); and both lower- and upper-class journals (workers' and university students'). They seek to identify the ways that periodicals informed, instructed, and amused virtually all of the people in the many segments of Victorian life. The periodicals demonstrate the emergence of professionalism in the various areas of human endeavour. Professional societies were formed to regulate each discipline and each had its own journal or journals. The growth of professionalism also dictated a rapid pace of change in Victorian society, and change, in turn, demanded closer and more accurate communication of new ideas through periodical literature.

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.

Presents 35 thematically organised, research-led essays on women, periodicals and print culture in Victorian Britain.