A major study of changing attitudes to the Victorians, from Lytton Strachey to the present day. >

First published in 1988, this encyclopedia serves as an overview and point of entry to the complex interdisciplinary field of Victorian studies. The signed articles, which cover persons, events, institutions, topics, groups and artefacts in Great Britain between 1837 and 1901, have been written by authorities in the field and contain bibliographies to provide guidelines for further research. The work is intended for undergraduates and the general reader, and also as a starting point for graduates who wish to explore new fields.

"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, existence was stultifying, dank, and over-furnished, and when behavior conformed so rigorously to proprieties that the repressed results put Freud into business. We think we have the Victorians pegged--as self-righteous, imperialist, racist, materialist, hypocritical and, worst of all, earnest. Oh how wrong we are, argues Matthew Sweet in this highly entertaining, provocative, and illuminating look at our great, and great-great, grandparents. One hundred years after Queen Victoria's death, Sweet forces us to think again about her century, entombed in our minds by Dickens, the Elephant Man, Sweeney Todd, and by images of unfettered capitalism and grinding poverty. Sweet believes not only that we're wrong about the Victorians but profoundly indebted to them. In ways we have been slow to acknowledge, their age and our own remain closely intertwined. The Victorians invented the theme park, the shopping mall, the movies, the penny arcade, the roller coaster, the crime novel, and the sensational newspaper story. Sweet also argues that our twenty-first century smugness about how far we have evolved is misplaced. The Victorians were less racist than we are, less religious, less violent, and less intolerant. Far from being an outcast, Oscar Wilde was a fairly typical Victorian man; the love that dared not speak its name was declared itself fairly openly. In 1868 the first international cricket match was played between an English team and an Australian team composed entirely of aborigines. The Victorians loved sensation, novelty, scandal, weekend getaways, and the latest conveniences (by 1869, there were image-capable telegraphs; in 1873 a store had a machine that dispensed milk to after-hours' shoppers). Does all this sound familiar? As Sweet proves in this fascinating, eye-opening book, the reflection we find in the mirror of the nineteenth century is our own. We inhabit buildings built by the Victorians; some of us use their sewer system and ride on the railways they built. We dismiss them because they are the age against whom we have defined our own. In brilliant style, Inventing the Victorians shows how much we have been missing.

A study of intellectuals in crisis and of ideologies in transition, elegant in style and thought. "Few works that I know convey the excitement of the intellectual life of 19th-century England as immediately....The essays are remarkable no less for the cogency of their wit than for the range and precision of their scholarship." --Lionel Trilling.

First published in 1988, this encyclopedia serves as an overview and point of entry to the complex interdisciplinary field of Victorian studies. The signed articles, which cover persons, events, institutions, topics, groups and artefacts in Great Britain between 1837 and 1901, have been written by authorities in the field and contain bibliographies to provide guidelines for further research. The work is intended for undergraduates and the general reader, and also as a starting point for graduates who wish to explore new fields.

As one of Victorian Britain’s pre-eminent social reformers, Lord Shaftesbury (1801–85) exerted a lasting impact surpassing all of his parliamentary contemporaries. Despite being born into one of England’s aristocratic families, a combination of early childhood deprivation, an earnest Evangelical faith, and an abiding sense of noblesse oblige made him a champion of the poor. His seminal contribution to the Victorian factory reform movement represented just one of his manifold legacies. This contextual study of the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury probes the mind behind the man to evaluate the religious and philosophical ideas, and their leading figures, that ignited his lifelong activism in the public sphere. This book reveals that far from representing a relic of the Victorian age, the Earl of Shaftesbury, whilst a conservative by predilection, was essentially a forward-looking and farsighted reformer. The principles that Shaftesbury espoused of industrial justice, class harmony, subsidiarity, volunteerism, selfless individualism, religious observance, strong families and private enterprise tempered by moderate state intervention are essentially those prized by liberal democracies today as the foundation for social cohesion, prosperity, and human flourishing.