Infamous Victorians PDF Download
Are you looking for read ebook online? Search for your book and save it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Download Infamous Victorians PDF full book. Access full book title Infamous Victorians by Giles St Aubyn. Download full books in PDF and EPUB format.
Author: Giles St Aubyn
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571299369
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 180
Get Book
Book Description
'Even the lives of scoundrels play some part in portraying an age...' Our interest in all things Victorian - in the seamy side of the era especially - is ageless and undimmed. Giles St. Aubyn's Infamous Victorians, first published in 1971, stands as a brilliant illumination of two dark stories of the time, replete with sinister elements of iniquity and hypocrisy. In the first fifty years of Victoria's reign two doctors were hanged after being found guilty of murder at the Central Criminal Court. Both men were 32 years old, both poisoners, both murdered for money. Dr William Palmer was a notorious figure, tried for a single murder though he almost certainly killed others. Dr George Lamson was a morphia addict convicted of killing his crippled young brother-in-law at Blenheim House school. Giles St. Aubyn restores them to life on the page, examines their careers and assesses their guilt.
Author: Giles St Aubyn
Publisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571299369
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 180
Get Book
Book Description
'Even the lives of scoundrels play some part in portraying an age...' Our interest in all things Victorian - in the seamy side of the era especially - is ageless and undimmed. Giles St. Aubyn's Infamous Victorians, first published in 1971, stands as a brilliant illumination of two dark stories of the time, replete with sinister elements of iniquity and hypocrisy. In the first fifty years of Victoria's reign two doctors were hanged after being found guilty of murder at the Central Criminal Court. Both men were 32 years old, both poisoners, both murdered for money. Dr William Palmer was a notorious figure, tried for a single murder though he almost certainly killed others. Dr George Lamson was a morphia addict convicted of killing his crippled young brother-in-law at Blenheim House school. Giles St. Aubyn restores them to life on the page, examines their careers and assesses their guilt.
Author: Lee Jackson
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300192053
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 300
Get Book
Book Description
In Victorian London, filth was everywhere: horse traffic filled the streets with dung, household rubbish went uncollected, cesspools brimmed with "night soil," graveyards teemed with rotting corpses, the air itself was choked with smoke. In this intimately visceral book, Lee Jackson guides us through the underbelly of the Victorian metropolis, introducing us to the men and women who struggled to stem a rising tide of pollution and dirt, and the forces that opposed them. Through thematic chapters, Jackson describes how Victorian reformers met with both triumph and disaster. Full of individual stories and overlooked details--from the dustmen who grew rich from recycling, to the peculiar history of the public toilet--this riveting book gives us a fresh insight into the minutiae of daily life and the wider challenges posed by the unprecedented growth of the Victorian capital.
Author: Giles St Aubyn
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780829009576
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 242
Get Book
Book Description
Author: Matthew Sweet
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1466872713
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288
Get Book
Book Description
"Suppose that everything we think we know about the Victorians is wrong." So begins Inventing the Victorians by Matthew Sweet, a compact and mind-bending whirlwind tour through the soul of the nineteenth century, and a round debunking of our assumptions about it. The Victorians have been victims of the "the enormous condescension of posterity," in the historian E. P. Thompson's phrase. Locked in the drawing room, theirs was an age when, supposedly, existence was stultifying, dank, and over-furnished, and when behavior conformed so rigorously to proprieties that the repressed results put Freud into business. We think we have the Victorians pegged--as self-righteous, imperialist, racist, materialist, hypocritical and, worst of all, earnest. Oh how wrong we are, argues Matthew Sweet in this highly entertaining, provocative, and illuminating look at our great, and great-great, grandparents. One hundred years after Queen Victoria's death, Sweet forces us to think again about her century, entombed in our minds by Dickens, the Elephant Man, Sweeney Todd, and by images of unfettered capitalism and grinding poverty. Sweet believes not only that we're wrong about the Victorians but profoundly indebted to them. In ways we have been slow to acknowledge, their age and our own remain closely intertwined. The Victorians invented the theme park, the shopping mall, the movies, the penny arcade, the roller coaster, the crime novel, and the sensational newspaper story. Sweet also argues that our twenty-first century smugness about how far we have evolved is misplaced. The Victorians were less racist than we are, less religious, less violent, and less intolerant. Far from being an outcast, Oscar Wilde was a fairly typical Victorian man; the love that dared not speak its name was declared itself fairly openly. In 1868 the first international cricket match was played between an English team and an Australian team composed entirely of aborigines. The Victorians loved sensation, novelty, scandal, weekend getaways, and the latest conveniences (by 1869, there were image-capable telegraphs; in 1873 a store had a machine that dispensed milk to after-hours' shoppers). Does all this sound familiar? As Sweet proves in this fascinating, eye-opening book, the reflection we find in the mirror of the nineteenth century is our own. We inhabit buildings built by the Victorians; some of us use their sewer system and ride on the railways they built. We dismiss them because they are the age against whom we have defined our own. In brilliant style, Inventing the Victorians shows how much we have been missing.
Author: Kate Summerscale
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143110462
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 402
Get Book
Book Description
Winner of the 2017 Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime Book! From the internationally bestselling author, a deeply researched and atmospheric murder mystery of late Victorian-era London In the summer of 1895, Robert Coombes (age 13) and his brother Nattie (age 12) were seen spending lavishly around the docklands of East London -- for ten days in July, they ate out at coffee houses and took trips to the seaside and the theater. The boys told neighbors they had been left home alone while their mother visited family in Liverpool, but their aunt was suspicious. When she eventually forced the brothers to open the house to her, she found the badly decomposed body of their mother in a bedroom upstairs. Robert and Nattie were arrested for matricide and sent for trial at the Old Bailey. Robert confessed to having stabbed his mother, but his lawyers argued that he was insane. Nattie struck a plea and gave evidence against his brother. The court heard testimony about Robert's severe headaches, his fascination with violent criminals and his passion for 'penny dreadfuls', the pulp fiction of the day. He seemed to feel no remorse for what he had done, and neither the prosecution nor the defense could find a motive for the murder. The judge sentenced the thirteen-year-old to detention in Broadmoor, the most infamous criminal lunatic asylum in the land. Yet Broadmoor turned out to be the beginning of a new life for Robert--one that would have profoundly shocked anyone who thought they understood the Wicked Boy. At a time of great tumult and uncertainty, Robert Coombes's case crystallized contemporary anxieties about the education of the working classes, the dangers of pulp fiction, and evolving theories of criminality, childhood, and insanity. With riveting detail and rich atmosphere, Kate Summerscale recreates this terrible crime and its aftermath, uncovering an extraordinary story of man's capacity to overcome the past.
Author: John H. Trestrail, III
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9781588299215
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 204
Get Book
Book Description
In this revised and expanded edition, leading forensic scientist John Trestrail offers a pioneering survey of all that is known about the use of poison as a weapon in murder. Topics range from the use of poisons in history and literature to convicting the poisoner in court, and include a review of the different types of poisons, techniques for crime scene investigation, and the critical essentials of the forensic autopsy. The author updates what is currently known about poisoners in general and their victims. The Appendix has been updated to include the more commonly used poisons, as well as the use of antifreeze as a poison.
Author: Judith Rowbotham
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
ISBN: 0814209734
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352
Get Book
Book Description
"The essays in this book set out to explore the ways in which Victorians used newspapers to identify the causes of bad behavior and its impacts, and the ways in which they tried to "distance" criminals and those guilty of "bad" behavior from the ordinary members of society, including identification of them as different according to race of sexual orientation. It also explores how threats from within "normal" society were depicted and the panic that issues like "baby-farming" caused." "Victorian alarm was about crimes and bad behavior which they saw as new or unique to their period - but which were not new then and which, in slightly different dress, are still causing panic today. What is striking about the essays in this collection are the ways in which they echo contemporary concerns about crime and bad behavior, including panics about "new" types of crime. This has implications for modern understandings of how society needs to understand crime, demonstrating that while there are changes over time, there are also important continuities."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Author: Katherine D. Watson
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 9781852855031
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 300
Get Book
Book Description
Here is a valuable, and fascinating, piece of social history. Watson sheds new light on a macabre yet frequently misunderstood subject.
Author: Lucy McDiarmid
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191035351
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240
Get Book
Book Description
On January 18, 1914, seven male poets gathered to eat a peacock. W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound, the celebrities of the group, led four lesser-known poets to the Sussex manor house of the man they were honouring, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt: the poet, horse-breeder, Arabist, and anti-imperialist married to Byron's only granddaughter. In this story of the curious occasion that came to be known as the 'peacock dinner,' immortalized in the famous photograph of the poets standing in a row, Lucy McDiarmid creates a new kind of literary history derived from intimacies rather than 'isms.' The dinner evolved from three close literary friendships, those between Pound and Yeats, Yeats and Lady Gregory, and Lady Gregory and Blunt, whose romantic affair thirty years earlier was unknown to the others. Through close readings of unpublished letters, diaries, memoirs, and poems, in an argument at all times theoretically informed, McDiarmid reveals the way marriage and adultery, as well as friendship, offer ways of transmitting the professional culture of poetry. Like the women who are absent from the photograph, the poets at its edges (F.S. Flint, Richard Aldington, Sturge Moore, and Victor Plarr) are also brought into the discussion, adding interest by their very marginality. This is literary history told with considerable style and brio, often comically aware of the extraordinary alliances and rivalries of the 'seven male poets' but attuned to significant issues in coterie formation, literary homosociality, and the development of modernist poetics from late-Victorian and Georgian beginnings. Poets and the Peacock Dinner is written with critical sophistication and a wit and lightness that never compromise on the rich texture of event and personality.
Author: Cheryl A. Wilson
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319629654
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 214
Get Book
Book Description
This book uses the figure of the Victorian heroine as a lens through which to examine Jane Austen’s presence in Victorian critical and popular writings. Aimed at Victorianist readers and scholars, the book focuses on the ways in which Austen was constructed in fiction, criticism, and biography over the course of the nineteenth century. For the Victorians, Austen became a kind of cultural shorthand, representing a distant, yet not too-distant, historical past that the Victorians both drew on and defined themselves against with regard to such topics as gender, literature, and national identity. Austen influenced the development of the Victorian literary heroine, and when cast as a heroine herself, was deployed in debates about the responsibilities of the novelist and the ability of fiction to shape social and cultural norms. Thus, the study is as much, if not more, about the Victorians than it is about Jane Austen.
