This is a fascinating account of the influence of evangelicalism upon eminent Victorians. Recording family life was an important ritual in Victorian households, and out of this habit grew a new literary genre, the domestic biography, extolling individual piety and domestic virtue. Using documents from the archives of the Macaulay, Stephen, Wilberforce, and Thornton families, Dr Tolley analyzes the biographical tradition and its lasting effects upon "family values."

Through an examination of numerous biographies, from the lives of working-class scientists to minor women writers, Victorian Biography Reconsidered examines how and why nineteenth-century biographers challenged the contemporary obsession with 'Great Men' and brought to public attention the lives of neglected or unknown men and women.

This book addresses the multifaceted history of the domestic sphere in Europe from the Age of Reformation to the emergence of modern society. By focusing on daily practice, interaction and social relations, it shows continuities and social change in European history from an interior perspective. The Routledge History of the Domestic Sphere in Europe contains a variety of approaches from different regions that each pose a challenge to commonplace views such as the emergence of confessional cultures, of private life, and of separate spheres of men and women. By analyzing a plethora of manifold sources including diaries, court records, paintings and domestic advice literature, this volume provides an overview of the domestic sphere as a location of work and consumption, conflict and cooperation, emotions and intimacy, and devotion and education. The book sheds light on changing relations between spouses, parents and children, masters and servants or apprentices, and humans and animals or plants, thereby exceeding the notion of the modern nuclear family. This volume will be of great use to upper-level graduates, postgraduates and experienced scholars interested in the history of family, household, social space, gender, emotions, material culture, work and private life in early modern and nineteenth-century Europe.

Medical texts provide a powerful means of accessing contemporary perceptions of illness and through them assumptions about the nature of the body and identity. By mapping these perceptions, from their nineteenth-century focus on illness located in a biological body through to their 'discovery' of the psycho-social patient of the late twentieth century, a history of identity, both physical and psychological, is revealed.