The Last Victorians

In lively, accessible prose, Victorians Undone fills the space where the body ought to be, proposing new ways of thinking and writing about flesh in the nineteenth century.

This intensely engaging biography examines the extraordinary life of George Eliot from her childhood, through her scandalous liaison and social exile, to her hard-won status as one of Victorian England's literary elite.

Ever since the publication of Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians in 1918 it has been fashionable to ridicule the great figures of the nineteenth century. From the longreigning monarch herself to the celebrated writers, philanthropists and politicians of the day, the Victorians have been dismissed as hypocrites and frauds - or worse. Yet not everyone in the twentieth century agreed with Strachey and his followers. To a handful of eccentrics born during Victoria's reign, the nineteenth century remained the greatest era in human history: a time of high culture for the wealthy, 'improvement' for the poor, and enlightened imperial rule for the 400 million inhabitants of the British Empire. They were, to friend and foe alike, 'the last Victorians' - relics of a bygone civilisation. In this daring group biography, W. Sydney Robinson explores the extraordinary lives of four of these Victorian survivors: the 'Puritan Home Secretary', William Joynson-Hicks (1865-1932); the 'Gloomy Dean' of St Paul's Cathedral, W. R. Inge (1860-1954); the belligerent founder of the BBC, John Reith (1889-1971), and the ultra-patriotic popular historian and journalist Arthur Bryant (1899- 1985). While revealing their manifold foibles and eccentricities, Robinson argues that these figures were truly great - even in error.

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.

This, the third volume to appear in the New Oxford History of England, covers the period from the repeal of the Corn Laws to the dramatic failure of Gladstone's first Home Rule Bill. In his magisterial study of the mid-Victorian generation, Theodore Hoppen identifies three defining themes. The first he calls `established industrialism' - the growing acceptance that factory life and manufacturing had come to stay. It was during these four decades that the balance of employment shifted irrevocably. For the first time in history, more people were employed in industry than worked on the land. The second concerns the `multiple national identities' of the constituent parts of the United Kingdom. Dr Hoppen's study of the histories of Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and the Empire reveals the existence of a variety of particular and overlapping national traditions flourishing alongside the increasingly influential structure of the unitary state. The third defining theme is that of `interlocking spheres' which the author uses to illuminate the formation of public culture in the period. This, he argues, was generated not by a series of influences operating independently from each other, but by a variety of intermeshed political, economic, scientific, literary and artistic developments. This original and authoritative book will define these pivotal forty years in British history for the next generation.

We can hardly imagine a Britain without Elizabeth II on the throne. It seems to be the job she was born for. And yet for much of her early life the young princess did not know the role that her future would hold. She was our accidental Queen.Elizabeth's determination to share in the struggles of her people marked her out from a young age. Her father initially refused to let her volunteer as a nurse during the Blitz, but relented when she was 18 and allowed her to work as a mechanic and truck driver for the Women's Auxiliary Territorial Service. It was her forward-thinking approach that ensured that her coronation was televised, against the advice of politicians at the time.Kate Williams reveals how the 25-year-old young queen carved out a lasting role for herself amid the changes of the 20th century. Her monarchy would be a very different one to that of her parents and grandparents, and its continuing popularity in the 21st century owes much to the intelligence and elusive personality of this remarkable woman.

A riveting biography that vividly captures the life and times of the last Victorian king. To his mother, Queen Victoria, he was "poor Bertie," to his wife he was "my dear little man," while the President of France called him "a great English king," and the German Kaiser condemned him as "an old peacock." King Edward VII was all these things and more, as Hibbert reveals in this captivating biography. Shedding new light on the scandals that peppered his life, Hibbert reveals Edward's dismal early years under Victoria's iron rule, his terror of boredom that led to a lively social life at home and abroad, and his eventual ascent to the throne at age 59. Edward is best remembered as the last Victorian king, the monarch who installed the office of Prime Minister.