Personal diaries provide rare glimpses into those aspects of the past that are usually hidden from view. Elizabeth Lee grew up on Merseyside in the late nineteenth century. She began her diary at the age of 16 in 1884 and it provides an unbroken record of her life up to the age of 25 in 1892. Elizabeth’s father was a draper and outfitter with shops in Birkenhead, and throughout the period of the diary Elizabeth lived at home with her family in Prenton. However, she travelled widely on both sides of the Mersey and her diary provides an unusually revealing picture of middle-class life that begins to challenge conventional views of the position of young women in Victorian society. The book includes a detailed introduction to and analysis of the diary, together with a glossary relating to key people in the diary and maps of the localities in which Elizabeth lived her everyday life. There have been a number of diaries published relating to ‘ordinary’ people, but most accounts were written retrospectively as life histories by people who eventually gained some degree of fame or prominence in society. This very rare first-hand account provides a unique insight into adolescent life in Victorian Britain.

Personal diaries provide rare glimpses into those aspects of the past that are usually hidden from view, and the diary of Elizabeth Lee (1868–?) is no exception to this rule. Elizabeth’s father was a draper and outfitter in Birkenhead and during the twenty-five year span of Lee’s diary which began in 1884, she lived at home with her family while simultaneously traveling to both sides of the Mersey without supervision, making the diary an unusually revealing portrait of middle-class female life in Victorian society. Accompanied by a detailed introduction and an analysis of the diary itself, as well as a glossary relating to key people mentioned in its pages, The Diary of Elizabeth Lee is a rare firsthand account of adolescent life in Victorian Britain.

Elizabeth Lee grew up on Merseyside in the late nineteenth century. She began her diary at the age of 16 in 1884 and her diary provides an unbroken record of her life up to the age of 25 in 1892. Elizabeth's father was a draper and outfitter with shops in Birkenhead, and throughout the period of the diary Elizabeth lived at home with her family in Prenton. However, she travelled widely on both sides of the Mersey and her diary provides an unusually revealing picture of middle-class life that begins to challenge conventional views of the position of young women in Victorian society.

"International exhibitions were among the most significant cultural phenomena of the late nineteenth century. These vast events aimed to illustrate, through displays of physical objects, the full spectrum of the world's achievements, from industry and manufacturing, to art and design. But exhibitions were not just visual spaces. Music was ever present, as a fundamental part of these events' sonic landscape, and integral to the visitor experience. This book explores music at international exhibitions held in Australia, India, and the United Kingdom during the 1880s. At these exhibitions, music was codified, ordered, and all-round 'exhibited' in manifold ways. Displays of physical instruments from the past and present were accompanied by performances intended to educate or to entertain, while music was heard at exhibitors' stands, in concert halls, and in the pleasure gardens that surrounded the exhibition buildings. Music was depicted as a symbol of human artistic achievement, or employed for commercial ends. At times it was presented in nationalist terms, at others as a marker of universalism. This book argues, by interrogating the multiple ways that music was used, experienced, and represented, that exhibitions can demonstrate in microcosm many of the broader musical traditions, purposes, arguments, and anxieties of the day. Its nine chapters focus on sociocultural themes, covering issues of race, class, public education, economics, and entertainment in the context of music, trading these through the networks of communication that existed within the British Empire at the time. Combining approaches from reception studies and historical musicology, this book demonstrates how the representation of music at exhibitions drew the press and public into broader debates about music's role in society"--Page 4 of cover.

V. 1. The women who traveled west in covered wagons during the 1840s speak through these letters and diaries. Here are the voices of Tamsen Donner and young Virginia Reed, members of the ill-fated Donner party; Patty Sessions, the Mormon midwife who delivered five babies on the trail between Omaha and Salt Lake City; Rachel Fisher, who buried both her husband and her little girl before reaching Oregon. Still others make themselves heard, starting out from different places and recording details along the way, from the mundane to the soul-shattering and spirit-lifting.

This book uses diaries written by ordinary British people over the past two centuries to examine and explain the nature and extent of everyday mobilities, such as travel to school, to work, to shop or to visit friends, and to explore the meanings attached to these mobilities. After a critical evaluation of diary writing, the ways in which mobility changed over time, interacted with new forms of transport technology, and varied from place to place are examined. Further chapters focus on the roles of family and life course, gender, income and class, and journey purpose in shaping mobilities, including immobility. It is argued that easy and frequent everyday mobilities were experienced by most of the diarists studied, that travellers could exercise their own agency to adapt easily to new forms of transport technology, but that factors such as gender, class, and location also created significant mobility inequalities.