Victorian History

Edward, Prince of Wales, better known as "Bertie", was the eldest son of Queen Victoria. Charming and dissolute, he was a larger-than-life personality with king-size appetites. A lifelong womanizer, Bertie conducted his countless liaisons against the glittering backdrop of London society, Europe, and the stately homes of England in the second half of the 19th century. Bertie's lovers were beautiful, spirited society women who embraced a wide field of occupations.

July 1839, without the permission of the English Government, the New Zealand Company ship, Tory, quietly departed England, anxious to reach New Zealand with the utmost speed. Expedition leader, Colonel William Wakefield's objective is clear - acquire millions of acres of valuable land from the natives at the lowest possible price. On board the Tory, Andrew and Eleanor Stewart, young Scottish emigrants indentured to the New Zealand Company, are excited at the prospect of beginning a new life in a perfect town called Britannia. It's the Utopia the company promised.

Oscar Wilde visited America in the year 1882. Interest in the Aesthetic School, of which Wilde was the most prominent representative, had spread to the United States, and Wilde decided to undertake an American lecture tour to explain the Aesthetic movement. Towards the end of September 1883 Wilde returned to England and immediately commenced a lecturing tour. His first visit was to Wandsworth Town Hall where he presented his "Impressions of America", the text of which was published in 1906.

Were things really better in the good old days? Gilda O'Neill's powerful exploration of the teeming underbelly that was to be found in the fog-bound streets, rat-infested slums, common lodging houses, boozers, penny gaffs, and brothels in the heart of the greatest empire that the world has ever seen brings to life the real working-class London of Victoria's reign.

This is the story of the celebrated Pickwick Club. The members are to report to the club on their journeys, adventures, and observations of characters and manners. Dickens creates a vivid picture of England in taking his characters along the nostalgic highways and byways of this majestic isle. This remarkable first novel made Dickens famous and has remained one of the world's best-known works.

Tourists have sought out the landmarks, streets, and alleys of Charles Dickens's London ever since the death of the world-renowned author. Late Victorians and Edwardians were obsessed with tracking down the locations—dubbed "Dickensland"—that famously featured in his novels. But his fans were faced with a city that was undergoing rapid redevelopment, where literary shrines were far from sacred. Over the following century, sites connected with Dickens were demolished, relocated, and reimagined.

Honor and conviction clash with loyalty and love in this epic Civil War novel that pits brother against brother. Winner of the coveted John Esten Cooke Award for Southern Fiction, Noble Cause chronicles the clash of a Confederate cavalry officer with a Union spy as they defend their beliefs, their country, and their honor.

When a brutal attack leaves Agatha DeLacey blind, she and the Artful Dodger find themselves at the mercy of an experimental biomech surgery. Though the procedure restores Aggie’s sight, her new eyes come at an unnerving cost, and the changes in Dodger are even more alarming - instead of seeing Aggie as the girl he fancies, he now views her as a potential threat.

Staid, responsible Elodie Buchanan is the eldest of 10 sisters growing up in a small English market town in 1861. The girls barely know their father, a plant hunter usually off adventuring through China, more myth than man. Then disaster strikes: Mr. Buchanan reneges on his contract to collect an extremely rare and valuable orchid. He will be thrown into debtors' prison while his daughters are sent to the orphanage and the workhouse.

Savory Suppers and Fashionable Feasts offers a delightfully flavorful tour of dining in America during the second half of the 19th century. Susan Williams investigates the manners and morals of that era by looking at its eating customs and cooking methods. As she reveals, genteel dining became an increasingly important means of achieving social stability during a period when Americans were facing significant changes on a variety of fronts - social, cultural, intellectual, technological, and demographic.

Si quiere descubrir la fascinante historia de la era victoriana, siga leyendo.... Cuando la reina Victoria subió al trono de Gran Bretaña e Irlanda en 1837, ya no existían los días en que el monarca tenía la autoridad suprema sobre el reino. Victoria gobernó al frente de un gobierno con el que debía conversar, debatir y, en última instancia, guiar, y era un trabajo que a veces le costaba realizar. Victoria se describiría a sí misma como una criatura emocional y culparía a su género por lo que creía que eran sus defectos como monarca.

Through the enduring eye of Sherlock Holmes, noted historian Jeremy Black traces how Holmes and his milieu evolved in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's books and how Holmes continues to resonate today. Black explores the context of Doyle's ideas and stories and why they struck such a chord with readers in London, and ultimately the world. Drawing on a masterful knowledge both of Doyle's era and his writings, this entertaining and wide-ranging book uses the Holmes stories to bring Victorian England to vibrant life, a world where crimes large and small abound.

After joining the Order of the Crystal Daggers, led by her dauntless grandmother, Lady Penelope, Eleanora Svobodová set out to save her kingdom from oncoming devastation. And she failed. Following the attack on Prague Castle, Eleanora is determined to redeem herself. She sets out to win Karl’s trust while distancing herself from Ferdy, whose secrets and lies have done nothing to stop her from falling in love with him.

The Cancer Problem offers the first medical, cultural, and social history of cancer in 19th-century Britain. It argues that it was in the 19th century that cancer acquired the unique emotional, symbolic, and politicized status it maintains today. Through an interrogation of the construction, deployment, and emotional consequences of the disease's incurability, this book reframes our conceptualization of the relationship between medicine and modern life and reshapes our understanding of chronic and incurable maladies, both past and present.

Tea-drinking in Victorian England was a pervasive activity that, when seen through the lens of a century’s perspective, presents a unique overview of Victorian culture. Tea was a necessity and a luxury; it was seen as masculine as well as feminine; it symbolized the exotic and the domestic; and it represented both moderation and excess. Tea was flexible enough to accommodate and to mark subtle differences in social status, to mediate these differences between individuals, and to serve as a shared cultural symbol within England.

As the train rattled westward on the outskirts of Dublin, James Berry didn’t stand out amongst his fellow passengers, but they couldn’t see the long, Italian silk rope coiled in the black leather bag by his side, nor the white cap and pinion straps, nor the revolver in his coat pocket. Galway, the winter of 1885. The violent murders of John Moylan, killed on a dark country lane, and Alice Burns, shot dead in the dining room of the Royal Hotel, have shaken the county. Now, following painstaking investigations and charged courtroom drama, justice beckons for the guilty parties.

In 1910, Mary Acworth Evershed (1867-1949) sat on a hill in southern India staring at the moon as she grappled with apparent mistakes in Dante's Divine Comedy. Was Dante's astronomy unintelligible? Or was he, for a man of his time and place, as insightful as one could be about the sky? As the 20th century began, women who wished to become professional astronomers faced difficult cultural barriers, but Evershed joined the British Astronomical Association and, from an Indian observatory, became an experienced observer of sunspots, solar eclipses, and variable stars.

Modern society tends to portray men of history to be great saints or great sinners. In fact, biographers are often inclined, depending on their personal predilections, to portray their subjects as one of these two extremes, especially when someone is seen by a certain group as an example of religious ideals or values. Writers are often afraid that if any of the person's mistakes come to light, it will somehow disqualify them from being admired.

A Room of His Own sheds light on the mysterious ways of male associational culture as it examines such topics as fraternity, sophistication, nostalgia, social capital, celebrity, gossip, and male professionalism. The story of clubland (and the literature it generated) begins with Britain's military heroes home from the Napoleonic campaign and quickly turns to Dickens's and Thackeray's acrimonious Garrick Club Affair.

On April 26, 1871, a police constable walking one of London's remotest beats stumbled upon a brutalized young woman kneeling on a muddy road - gashes were cloven into her skull, her left cheek was slashed open and smashed in, her right eye was destroyed, and above it a chunk of the temporal bone had been bashed out. The policeman gaped in horror as the woman held out her hand before collapsing into the mud, muttering, "Let me die", and slipping into a coma. Five days later she died, her identity still unknown.