Homes Of The London Poor Essays

Social reformer Octavia Hill was a passionate advocate for improving the living conditions of the urban poor in Victorian London. In this collection of essays, she offers a detailed examination of the housing crisis in the city and provides concrete proposals for how to address it. She also explores the broader social and economic issues that contribute to poverty and inequality. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Originally published together in 1970, this study collects two essays on the housing situation of London in the nineteenth century. Homes of the London Poor was first published in 1875 and written by Octavia Hill, the granddaughter of the pioneer of sanitary reformation, Dr. T. Southwood Smith. Influenced by his work and by Christian socialism, she aims to outline the housing problems in London present in her lifetime and how reformation could help those in need of affordable and sanitary housing. The second text comes from a pamphlet written by Andrew Mearns in 1883 which highlights the overcrowded and unsanitary housing conditions that were still a major issue eight years after Hill’s work was published. Both works together present a clear picture of the appalling conditions the poor and homeless were forced into in Victorian London. This title will be of interest to students of history and social work.

This study examines literary celebrity in Britain from 1850 to 1914 with chapters focused on a variety of Victorian authors, including Charles Dickens, Harriet Martineau, and Octavia Hill. Through lively analysis of rare cultural materials, Easley demonstrates the crucial role of the celebrity author in the formation of British national identity. As Victorians toured the homes and haunts of famous writers, they developed a sense of shared national heritage. At the same time, by reading sensational accounts of writers' lives, they were able to reconsider conventional gender roles and domestic arrangements. Women writers capitalized on celebrity media as a way of furthering their own careers and retelling British history on their own terms. Easley demonstrates how the trope of the literary celebrity was utilized for other purposes as well, including the professionalization of medicine, the development of the open space movement, and the formation of the literary canon.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1875.

Take three things: the home, nature, and the feminine ideal—a notional and perfected femininity. Constitute them as inexorably and universally connected. Enrol them in diverse strategies and tactics that create varied anatomo-politics of the body and biopolitics of the population. Enlist those three things as the “handmaidens” of the government of individuals and groups, places and spaces, and comings and goings. Focus some effort on the periodical press, and on producing and disseminating narratives, discourses, and practices that relate specifically to health and well-being. Deploy those texts and shape those contexts in ways that affect flesh and bone, psychology and social conduct, and the spatial organization and relational dynamics of dwellings and streets, settlements and regions, and states and empires. Stretch these activities over the Anglophone world—from the epicentres of the United Kingdom and the United States to Australia or Canada, New Zealand or India—and extend their reach over the whole of the long nineteenth century. Such are the subjects of this work, in which Elaine Stratford draws from governmentality, the geohumanities, and geocriticism to converse with an extensive archive that profoundly shaped our engagements with home, nature, and the feminine ideal, deeply influenced our collective capacity to flourish, and powerfully constituted diverse geographies of the interior and of empire that still affect us.

Since the late twentieth century, there has been a strategic campaign to recover the impact of Victorian women writers in the field of English literature. However, with the increased understanding of the importance of interdisciplinarity in the twenty-first century, there is a need to extend this campaign beyond literary studies in order to recognise the role of women writers across the nineteenth century, a time that was intrinsically interdisciplinary in approach to scholarly writing and public intellectual engagement.

This book is an essay that focuses on the importance of Dante's "Divine Comedy". The essay discusses how the "Divine Comedy" is a landmark in history, as it is not just a magnificent poem but also the beginning of a language and the opening of national literature. The essay also discusses the mystery of the creative process and how Dante's work has become a permanent feature of the world's literature. The essay is followed by a translation of Dante's "De Monarchia" by F.J. Church. The "De Monarchia" is a work of political speculation that discusses the medieval idea of the Empire and should be compared with the "De Regimine Principum" by Thomas Aquinas.