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Reading recommendations for fiction, nonfiction, and audiobooks across all reading levels.
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Featuring prominent figures in education, religion, science, and war, Eminent Victorians is a fascinating collection of Victorian biographies. Beginning with a discussion of the achievements of Cardinal Manning, Strachey provides insight on the Cardinal's rise to power and follows the creation of the Oxford Movement, which began the development of the Anglo-Catholic church. Sparing no detail, Manning's feud with the influential theologian John Henry...
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Novels and tales of Henry James volume 1
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A gifted American artist finds fame, fortune, and tragedy in Europe in this classic tale. Working in obscurity, sculptor Roderick Hudson finds a generous patron in Rowland Mallet, an art aficionado so captivated by the young man's work, he offers to take Hudson with him to Europe. Mallet soon falls in love with Miss Mary Garland, a distant cousin of Hudson's who lives with the family and tends to his aging mother. Unfortunately, Hudson has already...
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Damn bad place Sheffield,' said King George Ill, reflecting on the town's reputation as a hotbed of radicalism with revolutionary tendencies, a reputation it maintained for much of the 19th century, augmented by the numerous times that the Riot Act was read to the Sheffield mob. Yet few Sheffield riots were in the name of revolution. They were more to do with social inequalities, injustice and deprivation, only the Chartists' rising and connections...
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"Suppose that everything we think we know about the Victorians is wrong." So begins Inventing the Victorians by Matthew Sweet, a compact and mind-bending whirlwind tour through the soul of the nineteenth century, and a round debunking of our assumptions about it. The Victorians have been victims of the "the enormous condescension of posterity," in the historian E. P. Thompson's phrase. Locked in the drawing room, theirs was an age when, supposedly,...
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Step back to London, 1895.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's stories are full of references to everyday activities and events from Victorian times that make the twenty-first century reader run to the reference shelf. Few, for example, are intimately acquainted with the responsibilities of a country squire, the importance of gentlemen's clubs, or the intricacies of the Victorian monetary system.
These twenty-four short essays explore various aspects of life...
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What springs to mind when you think of British Victorian men and women?—manners, manners and more manners. Behavior that was as rigid and constricted as the corsets women wore. From iron-knicker sexual prudery to men so uptight they furtively released their pent up emotions in opium dens and prostitute hot spots. All, of course, exaggerated clichés worthy of a Victorian melodrama. Each generation loves to think it is better than the last and loves...
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Many of London's Victorian buildings are built of coarse-textured yellow bricks. These are 'London stocks', produced in very large quantities all through the nineteenth century and notable for their ability to withstand the airborne pollutants of the Victorian city. Whether visible or, as is sometimes the case, hidden behind stonework or underground, they form a major part of the fabric of the capital. Until now, little has been written about how...
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Victorian Scientific Naturalism examines the secular creeds of the generation of intellectuals who, in the wake of The Origin of Species, wrested cultural authority from the old Anglican establishment while installing themselves as a new professional scientific elite. These scientific naturalists-led by biologists, physicists, and mathematicians such as William Kingdon Clifford, Joseph Dalton Hooker, Thomas Henry Huxley, and John Tyndall-sought to...
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For the better part of the nineteenth century, Queen Victoria was in power over Great Britain and Ireland, among the other areas under the control of the British Empire. This period of rule became known as the Victorian era, during which Britain flourished economically, socially, and politically, and great advancements were made in both the military and science.
Focal point of the forthcoming 2017 film Victoria and Abdul, Queen Victoria has long...
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An ambitious exploration of the making of the Victorian Age-and the Victorian mind-by a master historian.
Britain in the 1840s was a country wracked by poverty, unrest, and uncertainty, there were attempts to assassinate the queen and her prime minister, and the ruling class lived in fear of riot and revolution. By the 1880s, it was a confident nation of progress and prosperity, transformed not just by industrialization but by new attitudes to politics,...
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Studies of child lab our have examined the experiences of child workers in agriculture, mining and textile mills, yet surprisingly little research has focused on child labor in manufacturing towns. This book investigates the extent and nature of child labor in Birmingham and the West Midlands, from the mid-eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century. It considers the economic contributions of child workers under the age of 14 and the impact...
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A popular abridgement of the much larger original that loses none of its punch. Shows that life is short and Hell is real. Discusses the certainty of death, the uncertainty of the time, the death of the sinner, of the negligent Christian and of the just and how different they are. Also the habit of sin, delusions of the Devil, Particular and General Judgments, the pains of Hell and its eternity, the remorse of the damned, etc. Powerful incentives...
14) The Last Galley
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A collection of fantastic short stories by the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. In these stories, Doyle explores many different genres, from historical adventure, to pirate romance, to mystery. From the author's preface: I have written "Impressions and Tales" upon the title-page of this volume, because I have included within the same cover two styles of work which present an essential difference. The second half of the collection...
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Few events in the history of humanity rival the Industrial Revolution. Following its onset in eighteenth-century Britain, sweeping changes in agriculture, manufacturing, transportation, and technology began to gain unstoppable momentum throughout Europe, North America, and eventually much of the world-with profound effects on socioeconomic and cultural conditions.In The Institutional Revolution, Douglas W. Allen offers a thought-provoking account...
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With England's Great Transformation, Marc W. Steinberg throws a wrench into our understanding of the English Industrial Revolution, largely revising the thesis at heart of Karl Polanyi's landmark The Great Transformation. The conventional wisdom has been that in the nineteenth century, England quickly moved toward a modern labor market where workers were free to shift from employer to employer in response to market signals. Expanding on recent historical...
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The early years of film were dominated by competition between inventors in America and France, especially Thomas Edison and the Lumière brothers . But while these have generally been considered the foremost pioneers of film, they were not the only crucial figures in its inception. Telling the story of the white-hot years of filmmaking in the 1890s, Robert Paul and the Origins of British Cinema seeks to restore Robert Paul, Britain's most important...
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Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817–1911) was an internationally renowned botanist, a close friend and early supporter of Charles Darwin, and one of the first-and most successful-British men of science to become a full-time professional. He was also, Jim Endersby argues, the perfect embodiment of Victorian science. A vivid picture of the complex interrelationships of scientific work and scientific ideas, Imperial Nature gracefully uses one individual's career...
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Is Britain ashamed of its past, and if not shouldit be? A dilapidated war memorial in Oxford city-centre seems a strange place to begin a search to the answer to these questions but this intriguing book does just that. It takes us from the mountains of Afghanistan to the tropics of Uganda to tell a tale of one city's often surprising links with the British Empire.
Uncomfortable questions are raised with the focus as much on those commemorated...
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"The Life of William Morris" by John William Mackail, published in 1899, delves into the captivating journey of one of the most influential figures of the Victorian era. William Morris was not just a visionary designer and craftsman; he was a prolific poet, a fervent socialist, and a key figure in the British Arts and Crafts Movement. Mackail's meticulous biography offers a comprehensive exploration of Morris's multifaceted life, from his early artistic...