British Literature (19th century): Manuscripts Collections

The nineteenth century was a time of unprecedented change, and nowhere was this more apparent than London, which, in only a few decades, grew from a compact Regency town into the largest city the world had ever seen. Technology-railways, street-lighting, and sewers-transformed both the city and the experience of city-living. From the moment Charles Dickens, the century's best-loved novelist and London's greatest observer, arrived in the city in 1822, he obsessively walked its streets, recording its pleasures, curiosities and cruelties. Now, with him, Judith Flanders leads us through the markets, transport systems, rivers, slums, alleys, cemeteries, gin palaces, chop-houses and entertainment emporia of Dickens' London, to reveal the Victorian capital in all its variety, vibrancy, and squalor. From the colorful cries of street-sellers to the uncomfortable reality of travel by omnibus, to the many uses for the body parts of dead horses and the unimaginably grueling working days of hawker children, no detail is too small, or too strange. No one who reads Judith Flanders's meticulously researched, captivatingly written The Victorian City will ever view London in the same light again.

Judith Flanders examines some of the most gripping cases that captivated the Victorians and gave rise to the first detective fiction. Murder in Britain in the nineteenth century was rare. But murder as sensation and entertainment became ubiquitous, transformed into novels, into broadsides and ballads, into theatre and melodrama and opera--even into puppet shows and performing dog-acts. Detective fiction and England's new police force developed in parallel, each imitating the other--the pioneers of Scotland Yard gave rise to Dickens's Inspector Bucket, the first fictional police detective, who in turn influenced Sherlock Holmes and, ultimately, even P.D. James and Patricia Cornwell.

When it was published in 1979, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination was hailed as a pathbreaking work of criticism, changing the way future scholars would read Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, the Brontës, George Eliot, and Emily Dickinson. This thirtieth-anniversary collection adds both valuable reassessments and new readings and analyses inspired by Gilbert and Gubar's approach. It includes work by established and up-and-coming scholars, as well as retrospective accounts of the ways in which The Madwoman in the Attic has influenced teaching, feminist activism, and the lives of women in academia. These essays constitute substantive interventions into established debates and ongoing questions among scholars concerned with defining third-wave feminism, showing that, as a feminist symbol, the raging madwoman still has the power to disrupt conventional ideas about gender, myth, sexuality, and the literary imagination.

A luminous meditation on the art of biography that fuses the author's own experiences with a history of the genre and explores the fascinating and surprising relationship between fact and fiction. In a book that ranges widely over art, science, and poetry, Richard Holmes confesses to a lifetime's obsession with his Romantic subjects. It has become for him a pursuit, or pilgrimage of the heart, that has taken him across three centuries, through much of Europe, and into the lively company of many earlier biographers. Central to this quest is a powerful and tender evocation of the lives of women both scientific and literary,. some well-known and some almost lost to history: Margaret Cavendish, Mary Somerville, Mary Wollstonecraft, Germaine de Stael, and the Dutch intellectual Zelide. Holmes also investigates the myths that have overshadowed the lives of some favorite Romantic figures including John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Blake.   

With this collection of short and fascinating biographical pieces, the award-winning biographer of Coleridge and Shelley offers a fascinating glimpse into the mysterious art of biography. This book is a rare literary feast and an exploration of the creative processes of one of our most preeminent biographers.

The Age of Wonder is a colorful and utterly absorbing history of the men and women whose discoveries and inventions at the end of the eighteenth century gave birth to the Romantic Age of Science. Holmes brings to life the era in which we first realized both the awe-inspiring and the frightening possibilities of science--an era whose consequences are with us still.

The story of the Bront's is told through the things they wore, stitched, wrote on and inscribed at the parsonage in Haworth. From Charlotte's writing desk and the manuscripts it contained to the brass collar worn by Emily's dog, Keeper, each object opens a window onto the sisters' world, their fiction and the Victorian era. By unfolding the histories of the things they used, the chapters form a chronological biography of the family. A walking stick evokes Emily's solitary hikes on the moors and the stormy heath--itself a character in Wuthering Heights. Charlotte's bracelet containing Anne and Emily's intertwined hair gives voice to her grief over their deaths. These possessions pull us into their daily lives: the imaginary kingdoms of their childhood writing, their time as governesses and their stubborn efforts to make a mark on the world.

Nineteenth-century Britons treasured objects of daily life that had once belonged to their dead. The love of these keepsakes, which included hair, teeth, and other remains, speaks of an intimacy with the body and death, a way of understanding absence through its materials, which is less widely felt today. Deborah Lutz analyzes relic culture as an affirmation that objects held memories and told stories. These practices show a belief in keeping death vitally intertwined with life - not as memento mori but rather as respecting the singularity of unique beings. In a consumer culture in full swing by the 1850s, keepsakes of loved ones stood out as non-reproducible, authentic things whose value was purely personal. Through close reading of the works of Charles Dickens, Emily Brontë, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Thomas Hardy, and others, this study illuminates the treasuring of objects that had belonged to or touched the dead.

"A book worthy of Keats-full of feeling and drama and those fleeting moments we call genius." -- Ted Genoways, Washington Post Book World. Stanley Plumly meditates on the chances for poetic immortality, an idea that finds its purest expression in Keats.

On 28 December 1817, Benjamin Robert Haydon hosted what he refers to in his diaries and autobiography as the "immortal dinner". He wanted to introduce his young friend John Keats to the great William Wordsworth and to celebrate his progress on his most important historical painting so far, Christ's Entry into Jerusalem, in which Keats, Wordsworth and Charles Lamb, also a guest at the party, appear. After thoughtful and entertaining discussions of poetry and art and their relation to Enlightenment science, the party evolves into a lively, raucous evening. This event will prove to be a highlight in the lives of these immortals. A beautiful and profound work of extraordinary brilliance, The Immortal Evening takes this dinner as a lens through which to understand the lives and work of these men and to contemplate the immortality of genius.