Kategoria BISAC: History >> Europe - Great Britain - Victorian Era (1837-1901)

An allotment is a small area of land, let out at a nominal yearly rent by local government or independent allotment associations, for individuals to grow their own food. However, the humble allotment has a surprisingly turbulent history. Initially the right to an allotment was proposed as a charitable means by which the poor could grow their own food and stave off starvation, but it quickly entered political and social debate. During the World Wars the allotment became the focal point on the home front, as families took part in the 'Dig for Victory' campaigns.

The post-war years saw...

First published in 1981, this is Ronald Clark's engagingly readable account of Queen Victoria's relationship with "Our dear Balmoral" and the life that went on there.

The biography of Balmoral begins with the first visit to Scotland of the young Queen Victoria and her husband Prince Albert in 1842. Five years later, while bad weather envelops the Royal party in western Scotland, the son of the Queen's physician, convalescing in Old Balmoral, reports blazing sunshine from Upper Deeside. The death of his host shortly afterwards opens the way for the Royal acquisition of the Balmoral...

Based on the letters and diaries of six members of Queen Victoria's household, Serving Victoria offers unique insight into the queen and her court. Seen through the eyes of her servants--including the governess to the royal children, her maid of honor, her chaplain, and her personal physician--Victoria emerges as more vulnerable, more emotional, more selfish, more comical than the austere figure depicted in her portraits.

We see a woman prone to fits of giggles, who wept easily and often, who shrank from confrontation yet insisted on controlling the lives of those around...

Queen Victoria is Britain's queen of contradictions. In her combination of deep sentimentality and bombast; cultural imperialism and imperial compassion; fear of intellectualism and excitement at technology; romanticism and prudishness, she became a spirit of the age to which she gave her name.

Victoria embraced photography, railway travel and modern art; she resisted compulsory education for the working classes, recommended for a leading women's rights campaigner 'a good whipping' and detested smoking. She may or may not have been amused.

Meanwhile she reinvented the monarchy...

When Mary Anne Lewis met Benjamin Disraeli, she was married to Wyndham Lewis, a rich, mildly successful politician at the center of nineteenth-century British high society. The three became friends and with his deep pockets Wyndham helped Disraeli--young, ambitious, and swimming in debt--get his start in the political arena. Mary Anne even referred to him as her "Parliamentary protege." But when Wyndham suddenly died of a heart attack, Mary Anne's friendship with Disraeli (fifteen years her junior) soon evolved into a peculiarly romantic and undoubtedly advantageous marriage: Mary Anne...

In Supernatural Entertainments, Simone Natale vividly depicts spiritualism's rise as a religious and cultural phenomenon and explores its strong connection to the growth of the media entertainment industry in the nineteenth century. He frames the spiritualist movement as part of a new commodity culture that changed how public entertainments were produced and consumed.

Starting with the story of the Fox sisters, considered the first spiritualist mediums in history, Natale follows the trajectory of spiritualism in Great Britain and the United States from its foundation in 1848...