19th Century Reading List

Pasts at play showcases a range of approaches to children's literature and culture, from disciplines including Classics, English Literature, and History. The ten essays integrate visual and material culture into historical practice to analyse how nineteenth-century children interacted playfully with the past to generate moral lessons.

Extends counterfactual thought experiments from history and the social sciences to literary historiography, criticism and theory

Through innovative readings of seven novels, Creating character demonstrates how the Victorian sensation authors Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Wilkie Collins employed, challenged and explored diverse, and sometimes contradictory, theories of character formation in their fiction

How do pictures tell stories? This ground-breaking book analyses visual narrative in nineteenth-century history and genre paintings across Europe. It reveals how artists constructed plots via objects, managing the tension between narrative and style and prompting viewers to weave their own tales.

This is the first book to focus on women illustrators in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It features critical essays by an international group of scholars on fourteen women illustrators from Britain, Canada and the United States.

Tells the remarkable story of Charles Dickens' relationship with his sister-in-law, his 'best and truest friend' Georgina Hogarth, who came to live with the Dickenses aged fifteen, and continued to live with Charles after they divorced.

The authoritative sequel to Female Fortune, continuing the diaries of Anne Lister up to 1838, when she was at her most powerful.

This book reveals the varied and often eccentric lives of the Victorians who helped define dogs as we know them today.

The rise of devils chronicles the emergence of terrorism in the late nineteenth century. This era simmered with political rage and social inequalities, which drove nationalists, nihilists, anarchists and republicans to extreme measures, while an outrage-hungry press peddled hysteria, conspiracy theories and, sometimes, fake news in response.

This book starts with the premise that clothing is political and that analysing clothing can enhance understanding of political style. It offers an examination of how dress formed political identities and communicated social and political messages during the period when imperial and colonial empires assumed their modern form.

Reveals how British writers and artists engaged with archaeological discourse as a crucial mode of conceptualising modernity at the turn of the twentieth century. Examining multiple literary genres and visual media from 1880-1930, the book traces archaeological discourse in discussions about sexuality, aesthetics, authenticity, and historiography.