Holiday faces! Aye, they are bright, shining, and beautiful as dewdrops glistening in the morning’s splendour—stars sparkling in a clear midnight sky—flowers lit up by the summer’s sun. It makes the heart of poor old PETER PARLEY glad when he sees them—whether they belong to young or old, to rich or to poor, it is one of my chief delights. I do assure you, my young friends, that a good deal of my parleying has to do with HOLIDAY FACES. I see them again and again, year after year, and they make me feel young again; and, like the old rustic of the Suffolk poet, Bloomfield, I am often ready[viii] to jump with joy when I see the cabs and coaches, post-chaises and omnibuses, crowded, inside and outside, with school children, going home for the Holidays. Old as I am growing, I still feel that I belong to the order of light hearts and merry looks—to the heraldry of smiling faces—and my escutcheon is charged with “nods and becks, and wreathed smiles.”Hurrah, then, for the Holidays, say I! Be cheerful, my young friends—not more for the sake of being merry, than for the sake of being serious again at the proper time. Unbend the bow and loosen the string, that both string and bow may have more force when again brought into action! Make the air ring then, I say, with the Holiday Cheer of Merry Christmas time! Sing, and skip, and dance, and play, like “lambkins by the hill side,” and let love reign in all your hearts, a perpetual sunshine, from year to year, and from youth to age, until you are as old as your ever sincere

The relationship between lifelike machines and mechanistic human behaviour provoked both fascination and anxiety in Victorian culture. This collection is the first to examine the widespread cultural interest in automata - both human and mechanical - in the nineteenth century. It was in the Victorian period that industrialization first met information technology, and that theories of physical and mental human automatism became essential to both scientific and popular understandings of thought and action. Bringing together essays by a multidisciplinary group of leading scholars, this volume explores what it means to be human in a scientific and industrial age. It also considers how Victorian inquiry and practices continue to shape current thought on race, creativity, mind, and agency. This title is part of the Flip it Open programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

The last thirty years have witnessed one of the most fertile periods in the history of children's books. A fascinating reference guide to the world of children's literature, this volume covers every genre from fairy tales to chapbooks; school stories to science fiction; comics to children's hymns