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How to Create the Perfect Wife by Wendy Moore 4 Aug 2013 | 06:51 pm
If anything is guaranteed to get my feminist dander up, it’s the idea of wifely perfection, and this enthralling book had me seething from start to finish. On a summer’s day in 1769, wealthy (but unpr...
Robert Elsmere by Mrs Humphry Ward 27 Jul 2013 | 08:54 pm
When Mrs Humphry Ward first had the idea for her bestselling novel Robert Elsmere (1888), she wrote to her publisher that it was all planned and that she would take “five quiet months in the country t...
More amusing Victorian short story titles 18 Jul 2013 | 10:50 pm
As my last post on amusing and bizarre Victorian short story titles proved so popular, here are some more of my favourites: Her Majesty the Flapper: Episodes in Her Career Cupid the Entomologist Mu...
Amusing Victorian story titles 9 Jun 2013 | 06:08 pm
One of my many current projects is digitising the Victorian Fiction Research Guides, a useful collection of bibliographies covering authors and journals. During the nineteenth century there was an in...
Fanny and Stella: The Young Men Who Shocked Victorian England by Neil McKenna 20 May 2013 | 08:34 pm
To be decadent in an age of utility was unforgivable, as Frederick Park and Ernest Boulton were to find out in a trial that scandalised London in 1870. Better known as Fanny and Stella, the two young ...
Inconvenient People: Lunacy, Liberty and the Mad-Doctors in Victorian England 9 May 2013 | 09:13 pm
The trouble with reading a lot of Victorian potboilers is that they start to seem like reality. The madwoman in the attic is a pervasive image throughout nineteenth-century culture, from Bertha Mason,...
Capturing the Light: The Birth of Photography by Roger Watson and Helen Rappaport 25 Apr 2013 | 12:16 pm
Anyone who has developed their own photographs will recall that miraculous moment as the image slowly materialises before your very eyes. The story behind the discovery of this alchemical technique is...
Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary 2 Apr 2013 | 11:32 pm
Having led an unexpectedly irreligious life for a Pope, my current thesis chapter on nineteenth-century Catholicism is involving a great deal of background reading. Thank you, therefore, to OUP for a ...
No Place for Ladies: The Untold Story of Women in the Crimean War by Helen Rappaport 8 Mar 2013 | 07:06 pm
As Russophobia gripped Britain, the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1854 provoked joy among many who wanted to give the “Rooshians” a jolly good beating. At the forefront of the warmongers was Queen Vi...
Thyrza by George Gissing 5 Mar 2013 | 01:13 pm
First published in 1887, Gissing intended Thyrza to “contain the very spirit of London working-class life”. He spent long hours researching the novel in south London, watching and listening to the inh...
