The Victorians were passionate about family. While Queen Victoria's supporters argued that her intense commitment to her private life made her the more fit to mother her people, her critics charged that it distracted her from her public responsibilities. Here, Nelson focuses particularly on the conflicting and powerful images of family life that Victorians produced in their fiction and nonfiction--that is, on how the Victorians themselves conceived of family, which continues both to influence and to help explain visions of family today.

Drawing upon a wide variety of...

Nine recipes serve as entry points for detailing the history of food production, cooking, and diet throughout Queen Victoria's reign in England. More than that, however, Broomfield offers an introduction to the world of everyday dining, food preparation, and nutrition during one of the most interesting periods of English history. Food procurement, kitchen duties, and dining conventions were almost always dictated by one's socioeconomic status and one's gender, but questions still remain. Who was most likely to dine out? Who was most likely to be in charge of the family flatware and fine...

Religion permeated almost every aspect of Victorian life and culture, from Parliamentary politics to issues of marriage and sexuality, from class relations to literature and the life of the imagination. In order to understand Victorian culture and writings, modern readers need to understand Victorian religion in its public and its private aspects. But much in Victorian religious life can be baffling for modern readers. The sheer diversity of Victorian religious experience is one source of confusion. Also, doctrinal disputes and discoveries in science or textual criticism that loomed so...

When Adam Smith wrote in 1776 that England was a nation of shopkeepers, he meant that commerce was a major factor in political decisions. Smith's observation was even more on-target for Victorian England: shopkeepers, shops, and shopping were a vital part of life. Those Victorians with resources could shop often and had many choices. Industrialization and their imperial connections gave them an almost unprecedented array of goods. Even the poor and working classes had more to eat and more to spend as the century progressed. Here, Graham explores the world of Victorian shops and shopping in...

The experiences of children growing up in Britain during Victorian times are often misunderstood to be either idyllic or wretched. Yet, the reality was more wide-ranging than most imagine. Here, in colorful detail and with firsthand accounts, Frost paints a complete picture of Victorian childhood that illustrates both the difficulties and pleasures of growing up during this period. Differences of class, gender, region, and time varied the lives of children tremendously. Boys had more freedom than girls, while poor children had less schooling and longer working lives than their better-off...

"Victorian Technology: Invention, Innovation, and the Rise of the Machine" captures the extraordinary surge of energy and invention that catapulted 19th-century England into the position of the world's first industrialized nation. It was an astonishing transformation, one that shaped and was shaped by the values of the Victorian era, and that laid the groundwork for the consumer-based society in which we currently live.

Filled with vivid details and fascinating insights into the impact of the Industrial Revolution on peoples' lives, "Victorian Technology" locates the forerunners of the...

In contemporary culture, the near obsessive pursuit of love and monogamous bliss is considered "normal," as evidenced by a wide range of online dating sites, television shows such as Sex in the City and The Bachelorette, and an endless stream of Hollywood romantic comedies. Ironically, when it comes to love and marriage, we still wrestle with many of the same emotional and social challenges as our 19th-century predecessors did over 100 years ago.

Courtship and Marriage in Victorian England draws on little-known conduct books, letter-writing manuals,...

Victorian Needlework explores these ubiquitous pastimes--their practice and their meaning in women's lives. Covering the period from 1837-1901, the book looks specifically at the crafts themselves examining quilting, embroidery, crochet, knitting, and more. It discusses required skills and the techniques women used as well as the technological innovations that influenced needlework during this period of rapid industrialization.

This book is unique in its comprehensive treatment of the topic ranging across class, time, and technique. Readers will learn what needlework...