Great Scandals of the Victorians features a collection of true stories that shocked, outraged, angered or simply amused the Victorians in nineteenth-century Britain. Drawing on a wide variety of original material, seven disreputable stories that dominated the national newspapers for many weeks are explored, including the Great Warwickshire Scandal, a highly publicized divorce case where for the first time in history a Prince of Wales was called to give evidence in court; a ‘baby’ scandal that disrupted Queen Victoria’s court and threatened the monarchy; the sex scandals of the Abode of Love, a mysterious religious cult founded by a defrocked clergyman, Henry James Prince and the sensational trial of Fanny and Stella, two outrageous cross-dressers accused of sodomy. Some scandals, though traumatic for the people involved, produced a positive outcome, such as the scandalous custody battle between Caroline Norton and her husband, which led to the passing of the Custody of Infants Act, granting mothers custody of their children following a divorce, and the case of 13-year-old Eliza Armstrong, sold to a brothel keeper for £5, which caused a major scandal and public outrage, but also led to a change in the law, raising the age of consent from 13 to 16 years.

"Never has the Victorian novel appeared so perverse as it does in these pages - and never has its perversity seemed so fundamental to its accomplishment. By viewing this fiction alongside the most alarming public scandals of the day, Cohen exposes both the scandalousness of this literature and its sexiness." "In narratives ranging from Great Expectations to the Boulton and Park sodomy scandal of 1870-71, from Eliot's and Trollope's novels about scandalous women to Oscar Wilde's writing and his trials for homosexuality. Cohen shows how, in each instance, sexuality appears couched in coded terms. He identifies an assortment of cunning narrative techniques used to insinuate sex into Victorian writing, demonstrating that even as such narratives air the scandalous subject, they emphasize its unspeakable nature. Written with an eye toward the sex scandals that still whet the appetites of consumers of news and novels, this work is suggestive about our own modes of imagining sexuality today and how we arrived at them."--BOOK JACKET.

The Routledge Handbook of Victorian Scandals in Literature and Culture exposes, explores, and examines what Victorians once considered flagrant breaches of decorum. Infringements that were fantasized through artforms or were actually committed exceeded entertaining parlor gossip; once in print they were condemned as socially contaminative but were also consumed as delightfully sensational. Written by scholars in diverse disciplines, this volume: Demonstrates that spreading scandals seemed to have been one of the most entertaining sources of activities but were also normative efforts made by the Victorians to ensure conformity of decorum. Provides a broad spectrum of infractions that were considered scandalous to the Victorians. Identifies Victorian transgressions that made the news and that may still shock modern readers. Covers a gamut of moral infractions and transgressions either practiced, rumored, or fantasized in art forms. This handbook is an invaluable resource about Victorian literature, art, and culture which challenges its readers to ponder perplexing questions about how and why some scandals were perpetrated and propagated in the nineteenth century while others were not, and what the controversies reveal about the human condition that persists beyond Victoria’s reign of propriety.

In 1852, on a steamer from France to England, nineteen-year-old Theresa Longworth met William Charles Yelverton, a soldier destined to become the Viscount of Avonmore. Their flirtation soon blossomed into a clandestine, epistolary affair, and five years later they married secretly in Edinburgh. Then, that same summer, they married again in Dublin - or did they? Separated by circumstance soon after they were wed, Theresa and Charles would never live together as husband and wife. And when Yelverton married another woman, an abandoned Theresa found herself forced to prove the validity of her marriage. Multiple trials ensued, and the press and the public seized upon the scandal and reported its every detail with relish. Wild Romance is the inspiring tale of a woman who never gave up, and who held on to her ideals of independence, dignity and - despite everything - love.

"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.

Caroline Norton, born in 1808, was a society beauty, poet and pamphleteer. Her good looks and wit attracted many male admirers, first her husband, the Honourable George Norton, and then the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne. After years of simmering jealousy, George Norton accused Caroline and the Prime Minister of a ‘criminal conversation’ (adultery) resulting in a trial referred to as ‘the scandal of the century’. Cut off and bankrupted by George Norton, she went on to become one of the most important figures in changing the law for wives and mothers.

With readings of novels by Thomas Hardy, Anthony Trollope, Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, Henry James, and others, this work explores the relationship between illicit sex and the postal service in Victorian Britain.