Helping you use psychology, mental health & neuroscience research to deepen your understanding of your ancestors and benefit present & future generations.

This is a study not of an elite of artists and thinkers but of broad cultural activities, such as local archaeology and tourism, historic preservation and restoration, and architectural historianism. Professor Dellheim argues that the Victorian's interest in the medieval past was far more than a revolt against modern civilization.

Anxiety. Addiction. Depression. We associate these words with the challenges of modern life. Rarely do we consider how these conditions shaped past generations. Using archival sources, testimonies, and her grandfather Walter Parker’s experiences, the author not only paints a vivid picture of life in an English Victorian village, but she also draws upon psychological theory to explore the lives of her working-class ancestors. What did your forebears inherit from their parents? Which psychological characteristics did your ancestors hand down? A Victorian’s Inheritance can help you find answers.

In 'Ralph the Heir', Anthony Trollope weaves a tale of a corrupt Parliamentary election based on his own experiences as a candidate. Ralph Newton is the spendthrift nephew of Squire Gregory Newton, who has an illegitimate son he loves dearly but cannot leave his estate to. In debt, Ralph must choose between raising money on his future interest in the estate or marrying a lower-class woman, both risky choices. Despite Trollope's negative assessment of his own work, readers have found 'Ralph the Heir' noteworthy for its portrayal of 19th-century society and politics.

The starting point for Richard Jenkyns's latest work is his contention that the Victorian age, which we think of as the great age of Gothic, was so shot through with the influence of the classical past that we should instead think of Victorian art and architecture as the continuing flow forward of two stylistic streams--the Gothic and the classical, side by side. In advancing his argument Jenkyns turns our accepted notions of the Victorians upside down, presenting Ruskin as an admirer of Greek statuary, the Houses of Parliament as a classical rather than a Gothic composition, and Thomas Woolner, the only sculptor among the original Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, as a neo-Hellenic carver and poet. Jenkyns moves effortlessly between the general and the particular and is refreshingly unafraid to make judgments. Here are some of the best descriptions of Victorian painting, sculpture, and architecture to have appeared in recent years. From the very gradual changes throughout the paintings of Leighton and Alma-Tadema, to the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan, the 'aesthetic scripture' of Pater, and even the advertisements for Beecham's pills, Jenkyns shows how what had been merely eclectic became a distinctive fin-de-siecle style and eventually began to point the way for Modernism. These are grand themes, presented by a masterly guide. Above all Jenkyns is entertaining: Dignity and Decadence is one of the most illuminating and enjoyable books about the Victorians yet to appear.

Inheritance and Speculation in Victorian Fiction: Finance, Family, and the Law investigates how Victorian fiction reconfigures the narrative and social conventions of inheritance. While recent criticism has concentrated on this fiction’s engagement with newer financial forms, this book contends that Victorian novels both attest to the persistence of inheritance and reveal its unsettling affinities with speculative forms. Focusing on Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847), Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1864-65), Wilkie Collins’s Armadale¬ (1866), and George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-72), each chapter explores a recurring pattern of contrast and conflation between inheritance and financial speculation. Taking an interdisciplinary historical and formal approach, Reich shows how this pattern gives narrative shape to concerns that were also emerging in contemporary political and legal debates around succession, bequest, landed estates, and conceptions of the family. Attending to the novels’ concrete and figurative allusions to these forms as well as their tentative alternatives, Reich also illustrates how the novels’ self-reflexive subversion of both characters and readers’ expectations based on inheritance conventions challenge our modes of reading. Inheritance and Speculation thus not only illuminates the integral role played by inheritance in Victorian fiction’s mediation of the credit economy, but also offers a new understanding of the complex role of convention in this fiction.