A wonderful A–Z of the fascinating world of Victorian London, full of amazing facts and curious humour.

This book has been considered by academicians and scholars of great significance and value to literature. This forms a part of the knowledge base for future generations. So that the book is never forgotten we have represented this book in a print format as the same form as it was originally first published. Hence any marks or annotations seen are left intentionally to preserve its true nature.

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.

During the 19th century, London was a complex, vibrant, and multi-faceted city, the first true metropolis. As such, it contained within it a widely disparate array of worlds and cultures. Representations of London in literature varied just as widely. In the late 1830s, London began appearing as a site of literary terror, and by the end of the century a large proportion of the important Victorian "Gothic revival" novels were set in the city: The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Three Impostors, The Beetle, Dracula, and many others. In Darkest London is a full-length study of the Victorian Urban Gothic, a pervasive mode that appears not only in straightforward novels of terror like those mentioned above but also in the works of mainstream authors such as Charles Dickens and in the journalism and travel literature of the time. In this volume, author Jamieson Ridenhour looks beyond broad considerations of the Gothic as a historical mode to explore the development of London and the concurrent rise of the Urban Gothic. He also considers very specific aspects of London's representation in these works and draws upon recent and then-contemporary theories, close readings of relevant texts, and cartography to support and expand these ideas. This book examines the work of both canonical and non-canonical authors, including Dickens, Bram Stoker, Robert Louis Stevenson, G.W.M. Reynolds, Richard Marsh, Arthur Machen, Marie Belloc Lowndes, and Oscar Wilde. Placing the conventions of the Gothic form in their proper historical context, In Darkest London will appeal to scholars and students interested in an in-depth survey of the Urban Gothic.

Provides period information on home furnishings, fashion, medicine, the courts, entertainment, shopping, travel, and etiquette.