Victorian Values is an absorbing portrait of Victorian society and culture, presenting different aspects of the age through profiles of representative or pioneering figures - among them Dickens, Pugin, Mary Kingsley, Lord Leighton, Gladstone and Joseph Chamberlain. It illuminates Victorian attitudes to a range of issues from education, health and self-help to civic ideals and sexual identity. Widely used and enjoyed by students, teachers and general readers alike, it has now been extended with four new essays and the Introduction, comparing the Victorian age with our own, has been updated and rewritten.

Ben Wilson's The Making of Victorian Values is the history of an era rather like our own-a time when dissenters and rebels were hemmed in by conformists and hardheaded authoritarians, a time when a nation on the eve of global domination fretted about its future. It was, however, a period when those who argued that a British empire would be a disaster for liberty were eventually squashed by imperialists, just as those who railed against mindless materialism were in the end rolled over by industrialists and the promoters of luxury goods. The Making of Victorian Values reveals an era when people were obsessed with the need to appear authentic, and yet forever had doubts about who was and who wasn't-concerns familiar to the "me" age we know so well. Wilson begins with the libertine spirit inspired by Byron, Shelley, and the Romantics; he ends with the rise and eventual victory of stolid middle-class values. The result is a radical tour de force, a brilliant reworking of the pre-Victorian age. Once portrayed by Paul Johnson in his bestselling The Birth of the Modern as the years when virtue finally trumped corruption, Wilson reveals a far more compelling story-and a more engrossing and scandalous one, too. It is a story about hypochondriacs and cranks, killjoys and dandies, rakes and priests, advocates of free-speech and those against it-people who were made awe struck by Britain's emerging role as the economic and political powerhouse of the world, but who were also deeply anxious about the responsibilities a vast empire might require. Wilson is heir to the great radical historians of the twentieth century, E. J. Hobsbawm and E. P. Thompson, among them. He brushes aside scholarly politesse and refuses to join in unnecessary academic point-settling, and his invigorating literary abilities will win many admirers who would otherwise know this history only through the works of nineteenth-century fiction.

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.

In recent years there has been a great deal of discussion about Victorian values. This collection, the outcome of the first joint symposium between the British Academy and the Royal Society of Edinburgh, attempts to sift through the myths to illustrate how the reality of the Victorian age differs from modern perceptions. Of particular relevance is Raphael Samuel's important examination of Mrs. Thatcher's use of the concept, while the following chapters explore the Victorian world itself. The papers shed light on a wide variety of Victorian issues, from the Scotland of Samuel Smiles to the position of women.

The middle decades of the nineteenth century saw an unprecedented growth in the picture industry, with technological advances ensuring that images adorned the pages of books and the walls of Victorian homes.