Lives And Anecdotes Of Misers Or The Passion Of Avarice Displayed In The

This book is a fascinating look at the lengths to which some people will go to hold onto their wealth. Merryweather tells the stories of the most notorious misers in history, and explores the psychology of avarice. The book also includes practical advice on how to manage your finances wisely. 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.

This volume uses the extreme case of misers to examine interlocking categories that undergirded the emergence of modern British society, including new perspectives on charity, morality, and marriage; new representations of passion and sympathy; and new modes of saving, spending, and investment. Misers surveys this class of people—as invented and interpreted in sermons, poems, novels, and plays; analyzed by economists and philosophers; and profiled in obituaries and biographies—to explore how British attitudes about saving money shifted between 1700 and 1860. As opposed to the century before, the nineteenth century witnessed a new appreciation for misers, as economists credited them with adding to the nation's stock of capital and novelists newly imagined their capacity to empathize with fellow human beings. These characters shared the spotlight with real people who posthumously donned that label, populating into a cottage industry of miser biographies by the 1850s. By the time A Christmas Carol appeared in 1843, many Victorians had come to embrace misers as links that connected one generation’s extreme saving with the next generation’s virtuous spending. With a broad chronological period, this volume is useful for students and scholars interested in representation of misers in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain.

This fascinating volume tackles the history of the terms 'normal' and 'abnormal'. Originally meaning 'as occurring in nature', normality has taken on significant cultural gravitas and this book recognizes and explores that fact. The essays engage with the concepts of the normal and the abnormal from the perspectives of a variety of academic disciplines – ranging from art history to social history of medicine, literature, and science studies to sociology and cultural anthropology. The contributors use as their conceptual anchors the works of moral and political philosophers such as Canguilhem, Foucault and Hacking, as well as the ideas put forward by sociologists including Durkheim and Illich. With contributions from a range of scholars across differing disciplines, this book will have a broad appeal to students in many areas of history.

Nineteenth-Century Energies explores the idea of ‘energy’, a concept central to new directions in interdisciplinary studies today. It examines the cultural perceptions and uses of energy in the nineteenth century – both in terms of pure and applied science, and as an idea with widespread diffusion in the popular imagination – in contributions by scholars drawing on a variety of fields, such as literature, philosophy, history, French studies, Latin American studies, cinema studies, and art history. These contributions explore the rise of insomnia as a recognized ailment, the role of guns and gun culture in the perception of human agency, the first uses of the barometer to predict massive cyclonic weather systems, and the hallucinatory, almost occult effects of radiant energy in early film. Exemplifying innovative research in twenty-first century academia, this volume also speaks to the wider cultural concerns of today’s global citizen about the preservation and renewal of natural resources around the world; the emergence of devices and technologies that have both improved and impaired human life; the aggrandizement of nation-states around large technological systems; and the centrality of the image in our perception and absorption of contemporary culture. This book was originally published as a special issue of Nineteenth-Century Contexts.

Our Mutual Friend (1864-5) Dickens’ last completed novel, has been critically praised as a profound and troubled masterpiece, and yet is has received far less scholarly attention than his other major works. This volume is the first book-length study of the novel. It explores every aspect of Dickens’ sustained imaginative involvement with his age. In particular its original research into hitherto neglected sources reveals not only Dickens’ reactions to the important developments during the 1860s in education, finance and the administration of poverty, but also his interest in phenomena as diverse as waste collection and the Shakespeare tercentenary. The Companion to Our Mutual Friend demonstrates the varied resources of artistry that inform the novel, and it provides the reader with a fundamental source of information about one of Dickens’ most complex works.