Throughout the nineteenth century, but most intensely in the reign of Queen Victoria, England and Scotland produced an unprecedented range of extraordinary illustrated books. Images in books became a central feature of Victorian culture. They were at once prestigious and popular--a kind of entertainment--but equally a place for pondering fundamental questions about history, geography, language, time, commerce, design, and vision itself. Concentrating on the use of illustration in literature--especially novels, poems, and children's books--the essays collected in The Victorian Illustrated...

As London became the first major city of the nineteenth century, new models of representation emerged in the journalism, poetry, fiction, and social commentary of the period. Simon Joyce argues that such writing reflected a persistent worry about the problem of crime but was never able to contain it. Such commentators as Wordsworth, Dickens, Mayhew, Stevenson, Conan Doyle, Booth, and Wilde all struggled with the same questions about how to represent London and the relations among its varied populations, yet their accounts often undermined one another.

Whereas Victorian...

Scholars have long recognized that narrative suspense dominates the formal dynamics of nineteenth-century British fiction, both high and low. But few have asked why suspense played such a crucial role in the Victorian novel--and in Victorian culture more broadly. The Serious Pleasures of Suspense argues that a startling array of nineteenth-century thinkers--from John Ruskin and Michael Faraday to Charlotte Bronte and Wilkie Collins --saw suspense as the perfect vehicle for a radically new approach to knowledge that they called "realism." Although by convention suspense has belonged...

Sarah Emily Davies (1830-1921) lived and crusaded during a time of profound change for education and women's rights in England. At the time of her birth, women's suffrage was scarcely open to discussion, and not one of England's universities (there were four) admitted women. By the time of her death, not only had the number of universities grown to twelve, all of which were open to women; women had also begun to get the vote. Davies's own activism in the women's movement and in the social and educational reform movements of the time culminated in her founding of Girton College, Cambridge...

From Robert Southey to William Morris, British social critics in the Romantic tradition consistently stigmatized industry as a threat to aesthetic or humanistic -culture.- Joseph Bizup argues that early Victorian advocates of industry sought to resist the power inherent in this opposition by portraying automatic manufacture itself as a cultural force or agent. He traces the contours of this new proindustrial rhetoric as it coalesced in two mutually reinforcing discourses: the contentious debate over the factory system and its social consequences that raged throughout the 1830s and 1840s,...

Frances Power Cobbe (1822-1904) is the most important nineteenth-century British writer and activist not heretofore treated in a full-length biography. An independent professional woman, she worked to improve conditions for delinquent girls and for the sick poor, promoted university degrees for women, roused support for the Union during the American Civil War, advocated for victims of marital violence, campaigned for women's suffrage, and engaged in a long-running battle with leading physicians decrying the use of animals in medical experiments. She was centrally located among the circle...

Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) has come to be considered one of the major poets--not just one of the major women poets--of the Victorian era, eclipsing her famous brother. Leading critics have demonstrated how studies of Rossetti's work, her daily life, her relationships with the Pre-Raphaelites, and her interactions with other women authors of the period can help us understand the unique cultural situation of Victorian women writers. The Letters of Christina Rossetti, four volumes, makes available all of Rossetti's extant letters, almost two-thirds of which have never before been...

Although the cultural and literary influence of Christina Rossetti has recently been widely acknowledged, the belatedness of this critical attention has left wide gaps in our understanding of her poetic contribution. Often focusing solely on her early work and neglecting her later volumes, many critics minimized her relevance by measuring her stature through either her early poems or her relationships with well-known Victorian literary figures. In Christina Rossetti: The Patience of Style, Constance W. Hassett argues against this diminishment by reopening Rossetti's canon,...

It was during the Victorian era that the circus, whose origins lay in the fairground world, emerged as a commercialized entertainment that we would recognize today. This development was intricately tied to a widespread demand for circus acts by a broad range of classes. In The Circus and Victorian Society, Brenda Assael examines this interest in the circus as an artistic form within the context of a vibrant, and sometimes not so respectable, consumer market. In doing so, she provides not only the first scholarly history of the Victorian circus but also a new view of nineteenth-century...

Best known today as the illustrator for Lewis Carroll's Alice books, John Tenniel was the Victorian era's chief political cartoonist. This extensively illustrated book is the first to draw almost exclusively on primary sources in family collections, public archives, and other depositories. Frankie Morris examines Tenniel's life and work, producing a book that is not only a definitive resource for scholars and collectors but one that can be easily enjoyed by everyone interested in Victorian life and art, social history, journalism and political cartoons, and illustrated books.

In the...