Victorian History

In Behind the Throne, historian Adrian Tinniswood uncovers the reality of five centuries of life at the English court, taking the listener on a remarkable journey from one Queen Elizabeth to another and exploring life as it was lived by clerks and courtiers and clowns and crowned heads: the power struggles and petty rivalries, the tension between duty and desire, the practicalities of cooking dinner for thousands and of ensuring the king always won when he played a game of tennis.

When Queen Victoria stepped onto the throne of Great Britain and Ireland in 1837, gone were the days when the monarch had supreme authority over the kingdom. Victoria ruled at the head of a government with which she was meant to converse, debate, and ultimately guide, and it was a job she sometimes struggled to perform. Victoria described herself as an emotional creature and blamed her gender for what she believed were her shortcomings as a monarch.

In the spring of 1839, Britain invaded Afghanistan for the first time. Nearly 20,000 British and East India Company troops poured through the high mountain passes and re-established on the throne Shah Shuja ul-Mulk. On the way in, the British faced little resistance. But after two years of occupation, the Afghan people rose in answer to the call for jihad and the country exploded into violent rebellion. The First Anglo-Afghan War ended in Britain's greatest military humiliation of the 19th century.

This is a thrilling historical account of the worst cholera outbreak in Victorian London and a brilliant exploration of how Dr. John Snow's solution revolutionized the way we think about disease, cities, science, and the modern world.

In The Butchering Art, the historian Lindsey Fitzharris reveals the shocking world of 19th-century surgery on the eve of profound transformation. She conjures up early operating theaters - no place for the squeamish - and surgeons, working before anesthesia, who were lauded for their speed and brute strength. They were baffled by the persistent infections that kept mortality rates stubbornly high. A young, melancholy Quaker surgeon named Joseph Lister would solve the deadly riddle and change the course of history.

Celebrated storyteller and historian Edward Dolnick leads us through a compelling true adventure as the paleontologists of the first half of the 19th century puzzled their way through the fossil record to create the story of dinosaurs we know today. The tale begins with Mary Anning, a poor, uneducated woman who had a sixth sense for finding fossils buried deep inside cliffs; and moves to a brilliant, eccentric geologist named William Buckland.

No single invention epitomizes the Victorian era more than the black cast-iron range. Aware that the 21st-century has reduced it to a quaint relic, Ruth Goodman was determined to prove that the hot coal stove provided so much more than morning tea: It might even have kick-started the Industrial Revolution. Wielding the wit and passion seen in How to Be a Victorian, Goodman traces the tectonic shift from wood to coal in the mid-16th century - from sooty trials and errors during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I to the totally smog-clouded reign of Queen Victoria.

From a modern perspective, it may seem that the United States was a major powerhouse since its early days. However, the truth is far from it. This transformation from a weak and relatively poor dominion into a world-class international power was undoubtedly a long process, yet it achieved its peak in the late 19th century. At that time, the US managed to achieve change in many aspects, from economic and social to political and military. This period of growth has become known as the Gilded Age.

In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman examines the revolution of black intimate life that unfolded in Philadelphia and New York at the beginning of the 20th century. Free love, common-law and transient marriages, queer relations, and single motherhood were among the sweeping changes that altered the character of everyday life and challenged traditional Victorian beliefs about courtship, love, and marriage.

As the renowned granddaughter of Isabella Camherst, Audrey Camherst has always known she, too, would want to make her scholarly mark upon a chosen field of study. When Lord Gleinheigh recruits Audrey to decipher a series of ancient tablets holding the secrets of the ancient Draconean civilization, she has no idea that her research will plunge her into an intricate conspiracy, one meant to incite rebellion and invoke war.

The Virgin Cure begins in the tenements of lower Manhattan in the year 1871. A series of betrayals lead Moth, at only twelve years old, to the wild, murky world of the Bowery, where eventually she meets Miss Everett, the owner of a brothel simply known as "The Infant School." Miss Everett caters to gentlemen who pay dearly for companions who are "willing and clean," and the most desirable of them all are young virgins like Moth.

The encyclopedia once shaped our understanding of the world. Created by thousands of scholars and the most obsessive of editors, a good set conveyed a sense of absolute wisdom on its reader. Contributions from Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Orville Wright, Alfred Hitchcock, Marie Curie and Indira Gandhi helped millions of children with their homework. Adults cleared their shelves in the belief that everything that was explainable was now effortlessly accessible in their living rooms.

Full of larger than life characters and cinematically written, The Cure for Women documents the birth of a sexist science still haunting us today as the fight for control of women’s bodies and lives continues.

The secrets of Queen Victoria's sixth child, Princess Louise, may be destined to remain hidden forever. What was so dangerous about this artistic, tempestuous royal that her life has been documented more by rumor and gossip than hard facts? When Lucinda Hawksley started to investigate, often thwarted by inexplicable secrecy, she discovered a fascinating woman, modern before her time, whose story has been shielded for years from public view.

In June of 1860 three-year-old Saville Kent was found at the bottom of an outdoor privy with his throat slit. The crime horrified all England and led to a national obsession with detection. At the time, the detective was a relatively new invention; there were only eight detectives in all of England and rarely were they called out of London, but this crime was so shocking that Scotland Yard sent its best man to investigate, Inspector Jonathan Whicher.

“When a doctor does go wrong, he is the first of criminals,” Sherlock Holmes observed during one of his most puzzling murder investigations. Incredibly, at the time the words of the world’s most famous fictional detective appeared in print in the Strand Magazine, a real-life Canadian doctor, Dr. Thomas Neill Cream, was stalking and murdering women in London’s downtrodden Lambeth neighborhood. In this book, Dean Jobb reveals how bungled investigations, corrupt officials and failed prosecutions allowed Cream to evade detection or freed him to kill, again and again.

For more than a century, some of the world’s most important thinkers and leaders—men like Arthur Conan Doyle and William Butler Yeats—gathered once a month and discussed the supernatural at The Ghost Club in London. In the early 1900s the club's chairman was Harry Price, the world’s most well-known ghost hunter. He and other members, like Harry Houdini, sought to debunk the charlatans who preyed on vulnerable people with fake seances, tarot readings, and spiritual encounters.

Eminent Victorians, Lytton Strachey's wonderfully witty and Wildean quartet of biographies, stands out as one of the most radical and groundbreaking works of its genre. With relentless precision, Strachey explores the lives of four exemplars of the Victorian age: Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold and General Gordon, irreverently bringing to light the flaws, strengths, ambitions and hypocrisies of these treasured legends.

From award-winning author Tim Jeal comes a vivid examination of the six larger-than-life men and one extraordinary woman who set out to find the source of the White Nile in the 19th century.

Ladies of the Canyons is the true story of remarkable women who left the security and comforts of genteel Victorian society and journeyed to the American Southwest in search of a wider view of themselves and their world....