Explore the vast range of titles available.

Why did British industrial cities build art museums? By exploring the histories of the municipal art museums in Birmingham, Liverpool, and Manchester,Transformative Beauty examines the underlying logic of the Victorian art museum movement. These museums attempted to create a space free from the moral and physical ugliness of industrial capitalism. Deeply engaged with the social criticism of John Ruskin, reformers created a new, prominent urban institution, a domesticated public space that not only aimed to provide refuge from the corrosive effects of industrial society but also provided a remarkably unified secular alternative to traditional religion. Woodson-Boulton raises provocative questions about the meaning and use of art in relation to artistic practice, urban development, social justice, education, and class. In today's context of global austerity and shrinking government support of public cultural institutions, this book is a timely consideration of arts policy and purposes in modern society.

The late-Victorian discovery of the music hall by English intellectuals marks a crucial moment in the history of popular culture.Music Hall and Modernitydemonstrates how such pioneering cultural critics as Arthur Symons and Elizabeth Robins Pennell used the music hall to secure and promote their professional identity as guardians of taste and national welfare. These social arbiters were, at the same time, devotees of the spontaneous culture of \"the people.\"In examining fiction from Walter Besant, Hall Caine, and Henry Nevinson, performance criticism from William Archer and Max Beerbohm, and late-Victorian controversies over philanthropy and moral reform, scholar Barry Faulk argues that discourse on music-hall entertainment helped consolidate the identity and tastes of an emergent professional class. Critics and writers legitimized and cleaned up the music hall, at the same time allowing issues of class, respect, and empowerment to be negotiated.Music Hall and Modernityoffers a complex view of the new middle-class, middlebrow mass culture of late-Victorian London and contributes to a body of scholarship on nineteenth-century urbanism. The book will also interest scholars concerned with the emergence of a professional managerial class and the genealogy of cultural studies.

Much scholarship on nineteenth-century English workers has been devoted to the radical reform politics that powerfully unsettled the social order in the century's first decades. Comparatively neglected have been the impetuous patriotism, royalism, and xenophobic anti-Catholicism that countless men and women demonstrated in the early Victorian period. This much-needed study of the era's \"conservatism from below\" explores the role of religion in everyday culture and the Tories' successful mobilization across class boundaries. Long before they were able to vote, large swathes of the lower classes embraced Britain's monarchical, religious, and legal institutions in the defense of traditional English culture.

This book explores the development of modern transatlantic prosthetic industries in nineteenth and twentieth centuries and reveals how the co-alignment of medicine, industrial capitalism, and social norms shaped diverse lived experiences of prosthetic technologies and in turn, disability identities. Through case studies that focus on hearing aids, artificial tympanums, amplified telephones, artificial limbs, wigs and dentures, this book provides a new account of the historic relationship between prostheses, disability and industry. Essays draw on neglected source material, including patent records, trade literature and artefacts, to uncover the historic processes of commodification surrounding different prostheses and the involvement of neglected companies, philanthropists, medical practitioners, veterans, businessmen, wives, mothers and others in these processes.

While scholars have long associated the group of nineteenth-century French and English writers and artists known as the decadents with alienation, escapism, and withdrawal from the social and political world, Matthew Potolsky offers an alternative reading of the movement. InThe Decadent Republic of Letters, he treats the decadents as fundamentally international, defined by a radically cosmopolitan ideal of literary sociability rather than an inward turn toward private aesthetics and exotic sensation.The Decadent Republic of Letterslooks at the way Charles Baudelaire, Théophile Gautier, and Algernon Charles Swinburne used the language of classical republican political theory to define beauty as a form of civic virtue. The libertines, an international underground united by subversive erudition, gave decadents a model of countercultural affiliation and a vocabulary for criticizing national canon formation and the increasing state control of education. Decadent figures such as Joris-Karl Huysmans, Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, Aubrey Beardsley, and Oscar Wilde envisioned communities formed through the circulation of art. Decadents lavishly praised their counterparts from other traditions, translated and imitated their works, and imagined the possibility of new associations forged through shared tastes and texts. Defined by artistic values rather than language, geography, or ethnic identity, these groups anticipated forms of attachment that are now familiar in youth countercultures and on social networking sites. Bold and sophisticated,The Decadent Republic of Lettersunearths a pervasive decadent critique of nineteenth-century notions of political community and reveals the collective effort by the major figures of the movement to find alternatives to liberalism and nationalism.

We are often told that the Victorians were far less violent than their forebears: over the course of the nineteenth century, violent sports were mostly outlawed, violent crime, including homicide, notably declined, and punishments were hidden from public view within prison walls. They were also much more respectable, and actively sought orderly, uplifting, domestic and refined pastimes. Yet these were the very same people who celebrated the exceptionally violent careers of anti-heroes such as the brutal puppet Punch and the murderous barber Sweeney Todd. By drawing attention to the wide range of gruesome, bloody and confronting amusements patronised by ordinary Londoners this book challenges our understanding of Victorian society and culture. From the turn of the nineteenth century, graphic, yet orderly, 're-enactments' of high level violence flourished in travelling entertainments, penny broadsides, popular theatres, cheap instalment fiction and Sunday newspapers.

Moving nimbly between literary and historical texts, Monica Flegel provides a much-needed interpretive framework for understanding the specific formulation of child cruelty popularized by the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) in the late nineteenth century. Flegel considers a wide range of well-known and more obscure texts from the mid-eighteenth century to the early twentieth, including philosophical writings by Locke and Rousseau, poetry by Coleridge, Blake, and Caroline Norton, works by journalists and reformers like Henry Mayhew and Mary Carpenter, and novels by Frances Trollope, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Arthur Morrison. Taking up crucial topics such as the linking of children with animals, the figure of the child performer, the relationship between commerce and child endangerment, and the problem of juvenile delinquency, Flegel examines the emergence of child abuse as a subject of legal and social concern in England, and its connection to earlier, primarily literary representations of endangered children. With the emergence of the NSPCC and the new crime of cruelty to children, new professions and genres, such as child protection and social casework, supplanted literary works as the authoritative voices in the definition of social ills and their cure. Flegel argues that this development had material effects on the lives of children, as well as profound implications for the role of class in representations of suffering and abused children. Combining nuanced close readings of individual texts with persuasive interpretations of their influences and limitations, Flegel's book makes a significant contribution to the history of childhood, social welfare, the family, and Victorian philanthropy.

In the context of this rapidly changing world, Rachel Worth explores the ways in which the clothing of the rural working classes was represented visually in paintings and photographs and by the literary sources of documentary, autobiography and fiction, as well as by the particular pattern of survival and collection by museums of garments of rural provenance. Rachel Worth explores ways in which clothing and how it is represented throws light on wider social and cultural aspects of society, as well as how 'traditional' styles of dress, like men's smock-frocks or women's sun-bonnets, came to be replaced by 'fashion'. Her compelling study, with black & white and colour illustrations, both adds a broader dimension to the history of dress by considering it within the social and cultural context of its time and discusses how clothing enriches our understanding of the social history of the Victorian period.

Focusing on the middle decades of the nineteenth century, Albert D. Pionke's book historicizes the relationship of ritual, class, and public status in Victorian England. His analysis of various discourses related to professionalization suggests that public ritual flourished during the period, especially among the burgeoning ranks of Victorian professions. As Pionke shows, magazines, court cases, law books, manuals, and works by authors that include William Makepeace Thackeray, Thomas Hughes, Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning demonstrate the importance of ritual in numerous professional settings. Individual chapters reconstruct the ritual cultures of pre-professionalism provided to Oxbridge undergraduates; of oath-taking in a wide range of professional creation and promotion ceremonies; of the education, promotion, and public practice of Victorian barristers; and of Victorian Parliamentary elections. A final chapter considers the consequences of rituals that fail through the lens of the Eglinton tournament. The uneasy place of Victorian writers, who were both promoters of and competitors with more established professionals, is considered throughout. Pionke's book excavates Victorian professionals' vital ritual culture, at the same time that its engagement with literary representations of the professions reconstructs writers' unique place in the zero-sum contest for professional status.

This innovative work begins to fill a large gap in theatre studies: the lack of any comprehensive study of nineteenth-century British theatre audiences. In an attempt to bring some order to the enormous amount of available primary material, Jim Davis and Victor Emeljanow focus on London from 1840, immediately prior to the deregulation of that city's theatres, to 1880, when the Metropolitan Board of Works assumed responsibility for their licensing. In a further attempt to manage their material, they concentrate chapter by chapter on seven representative theatres from four areas: the Surrey Theatre and the Royal Victoria to the south, the Whitechapel Pavilion and the Britannia Theatre to the east, Sadler's Wells and the Queen's (later the Prince of Wales's) to the north, and Drury Lane to the west. Davis and Emeljanow thoroughly examine the composition of these theatres' audiences, their behavior, and their attendance patterns by looking at topography, social demography, police reports, playbills, autobiographies and diaries, newspaper accounts, economic and social factors as seen in census returns, maps and transportation data, and the managerial policies of each theatre.