Villainous Victorians

It's history with the nasty bits left in! Want to know: Why burglars were scared of bogies? Which poet said he ate an ape? How a snick fadger might kiddy-nap your spangle? Discover all the foul facts about the Villainous Victorians - all the gore and more!

Readers can discover all the foul facts about the Villainous Victorians, including why burglars were scared of bogies, which poet said he ate an ape and how a snick fadger might kiddy-nap your spangle. With a bold, accessible new look and a heap of extra-horrible bits, these bestselling titles are sure to be a huge hit with yet another generation of Terry Deary fans.

They may have looked all prim and proper, but the Victorians were a jolly naughty bunch who could be vicious and violent and villainous. Readers can discover the murderers who wouldn't hang, when the first public loo was flushed and all about stag hunting in Paddington Station. With a bold, accessible new look, these bestselling titles are sure to be a huge hit with yet another generation of Terry Deary fans. Revised by the author and illustrated throughout to make Horrible Histories more accessible to young readers.

'The Villainous Victorians' lets you in on the darkest secrets of Queen Victoria's Britain - from hard-living criminal kids to harder-hearted toffs who were criminally cruel.

Neo-Victorian Villains offers a varied and stimulating range of essays on the afterlives of Victorian villains in popular culture, exploring their representation and adaptation in neo-Victorian drama and fiction.

Broadway productions of musicals such as The King and I, Oliver!, Sweeney Todd, and Jekyll and Hyde became huge theatrical hits. Remarkably, all were based on one-hundred-year-old British novels or memoirs. What could possibly explain their enormous success? Victorians on Broadway is a wide-ranging interdisciplinary study of live stage musicals from the mid- to late twentieth century adapted from British literature written between 1837 and 1886. Investigating musical dramatizations of works by Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Christina Rossetti, Robert Louis Stevenson, and others, Sharon Aronofsky Weltman reveals what these musicals teach us about the Victorian books from which they derive and considers their enduring popularity and impact on our modern culture. Providing a front row seat to the hits (as well as the flops), Weltman situates these adaptations within the history of musical theater: the Golden Age of Broadway, the concept musicals of the 1970s and 1980s, and the era of pop mega-musicals, revealing Broadway's debt to melodrama. With an expertise in Victorian literature, Weltman draws on reviews, critical analyses, and interviews with such luminaries as Stephen Sondheim, Polly Pen, Frank Wildhorn, and Rowan Atkinson to understand this popular trend in American theater. Exploring themes of race, religion, gender, and class, Weltman focuses attention on how these theatrical adaptations fit into aesthetic and intellectual movements while demonstrating the complexity of their enduring legacy.