This text looks at the people, ideas and events between the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the Second Reform Act of 1867. From John Arthur Roebuck and the Crimean War, and Samuel Smiles and the Gospel of Work to Thomas Hughes and the Public Schools and Benjanmin Disraeli and the Leap in the Dark, Asa Briggs provides an assessment of Victorian achievements; and in doing so conjures up an enviable picture of the progress and independence of the last century. For expounding this theme, this interaction of event and personality, Mr. Briggs is abundantly and happily endowed. He is always readable, often amusing, never facetious. He is widely read and widely interested. He has a sound historic judgment, and an unfailing sense for what is significant in the historic sequence and what is merely topical. . . . Above all, he is in sympathy with the age of which he is writing.--Times Literary Supplement

Life in the Victorian period, focusing on the social, religious, scientific, and artistic movements that characterized the age.

The Way People Live series focuses on pockets of human culture. Using a wide variety of primary quotations, each book in the series attempts to show an honest and complete picture of a culture removed from our own by time or space. Typical of other books in the series, The Way People Live: Life in the Warsaw Chetto received a starred review from Booklist, the review journal of the American Library Association: The words of witnesses add compelling interest to this focused, indepth history of what happened to one Jewish community under the Nazis.... Candid about the vicious Jewish police and the profiteers ... [the author] tells astonishing stories of heroism and endurance.... The documentation is exemplary, with chapter notes and references to the best books on the subject and a long, annotated bibliography for all those who want to read further. A most promising start to a new The Way People Live series and a fine addition to the Holocaust history shelves. Book jacket.

"In this innovative look at nineteenth-century London, Lynda Nead offers a fresh account of modernity and metropolitan life. Taking a highly interdisciplinary approach, Nead charts the relationship between London's formation into a modern city in the 1860s and the emergence of new ways of producing and consuming visual culture."--BOOK JACKET.

How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain asks how our culture came to frown on using books for any purpose other than reading. When did the coffee-table book become an object of scorn? Why did law courts forbid witnesses to kiss the Bible? What made Victorian cartoonists mock commuters who hid behind the newspaper, ladies who matched their books' binding to their dress, and servants who reduced newspapers to fish 'n' chips wrap? Shedding new light on novels by Thackeray, Dickens, the Brontës, Trollope, and Collins, as well as the urban sociology of Henry Mayhew, Leah Price also uncovers the lives and afterlives of anonymous religious tracts and household manuals. From knickknacks to wastepaper, books mattered to the Victorians in ways that cannot be explained by their printed content alone. And whether displayed, defaced, exchanged, or discarded, printed matter participated, and still participates, in a range of transactions that stretches far beyond reading. Supplementing close readings with a sensitive reconstruction of how Victorians thought and felt about books, Price offers a new model for integrating literary theory with cultural history. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain reshapes our understanding of the interplay between words and objects in the nineteenth century and beyond.

This text looks at the people, ideas and events between the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the Second Reform Act of 1867. From "John Arthur Roebuck and the Crimean War", and "Samuel Smiles and the Gospel of Work" to "Thomas Hughes and the Public Schools" and "Benjanmin Disraeli and the Leap in the Dark", Asa Briggs provides an assessment of Victorian achievements; and in doing so conjures up an enviable picture of the progress and independence of the last century. "For expounding this theme, this interaction of event and personality, Mr. Briggs is abundantly and happily endowed. He is always readable, often amusing, never facetious. He is widely read and widely interested. He has a sound historic judgment, and an unfailing sense for what is significant in the historic sequence and what is merely topical. . . . Above all, he is in sympathy with the age of which he is writing."—Times Literary Supplement

Macabre tales of death and mourning in Victorian America.