Bodies And Lives In Victorian England

Author : Pamela K. Stone,Lise Shapiro Sanders
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 105 pages
File Size : 52,9 Mb
Release : 2020-10-11
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780429676994

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Bodies and Lives in Victorian England by Pamela K. Stone,Lise Shapiro Sanders Pdf

This volume offers an overview of what it was like to be female and to live and die in Victorian England (c. 1837-1901), by situating this experience within the scientific and social contexts of the times. With a temporal focus on women’s life experience, the book moves from childhood and youth, through puberty and adolescence, to pregnancy, birth, and motherhood, into senescence. Drawing on osteological sources, medical discourses, and examples from the literature and cultural history of the period, alongside social and environmental data derived from ethnographic and archival investigations, the authors explore the experience of being female in the Victorian era for women across classes. In synthesizing current research on demographic statistics, maternal morbidity and mortality, and bioarchaeological evidence on patterns of aging and death, they analyze how changing social ideals, cultural and environmental variability, shifting economies, and evolving medical and scientific understanding about the body combined to shape female health and identity in the nineteenth century. Victorian women faced a variety of challenges, including changing attitudes regarding appropriate behavior, social roles, and beauty standards, while grappling with new understandings of the role played by gender and sexuality in shaping women’s lives from youth to old age. The book concludes by considering the relevance of how Victorian narratives of womanhood and the experience of being female have influenced perceptions of female health and cultural constructions of identity today.

Author : Pamela K. Stone,Lise Shapiro Sanders
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 146 pages
File Size : 51,6 Mb
Release : 2020-09
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0429398735

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Bodies and Lives in Victorian England by Pamela K. Stone,Lise Shapiro Sanders Pdf

"This volume offers an overview of what it was like to be female and to live and die in Victorian England (c. 1837-1901), by situating this experience within the scientific and social contexts of the times. With a temporal focus on women's life experience, the book moves from childhood and youth, through puberty and adolescence, to pregnancy, birth, and motherhood, into senescence. Drawing on osteological sources, medical discourses, and examples from the literature and cultural history of the period, alongside social and environmental data derived from ethnographic and archival investigations, the authors explore the experience of being female in the Victorian era for women across classes. In synthesizing current research on demographic statistics, maternal morbidity and mortality, and bioarchaeological evidence on patterns of aging and death, they analyze how changing social ideals, cultural and environmental variability, shifting economies, and evolving medical and scientific understanding about the body combined to shape female health and identity in the nineteenth century. Victorian women faced a variety of challenges, including changing attitudes regarding appropriate behavior, social roles, and beauty standards, while grappling with new understandings of the role played by gender and sexuality in shaping women's lives from youth to old age. The book concludes by considering the relevance of how Victorian narratives of womanhood and the experience of being female have influenced perceptions of female health and cultural constructions of identity today"--

Author : Marjorie Levine-Clark
Publisher : Ohio State University Press
Page : 268 pages
File Size : 54,7 Mb
Release : 2004
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 9780814209561

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Beyond the Reproductive Body by Marjorie Levine-Clark Pdf

Investigates the politics of women's health and work in early Victorian England, where government officials and reformers surveying the laboring population became convinced that the female body would be ruined by employment.

Author : Nina Attwood
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 224 pages
File Size : 40,6 Mb
Release : 2015-10-06
Category : History
ISBN : 9781317324256

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The Prostitute's Body by Nina Attwood Pdf

Attwood examines Victorian attitudes to prostitution across a number of sources: medical, literary, pornographic.

Author : Judith Flanders
Publisher : Atlantic Books
Page : 692 pages
File Size : 44,6 Mb
Release : 2015-08-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9780857898814

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The Victorian City by Judith Flanders Pdf

From an acclaimed popular historian comes a masterly recreation of Victorian London, whose raucous streets and teeming denizens inspired and permeated the works of one of the world's greatest novelists: Charles Dickens The 19th century was a time of unprecedented transformation, and nowhere was this more apparent than on the streets of London. In only a few decades, London grew from a Regency town to the biggest city the world had ever seen, with more than 6.5 million people and railways, street-lighting, and new buildings at every turn. Charles Dickens obsessively walked London's streets, recording its pleasures, curiosities and cruelties. Now, Judith Flanders follows in his footsteps, leading us through the markets, transport systems, sewers, slums, cemeteries, gin palaces, and entertainment emporia of Dickens' London. The Victorian City is a revelatory portrait of everyday life on the streets, bringing to life the Victorian capital in all its variety, vibrancy, and squalor. No one who reads it will view London in the same light again.

Author : Lillian Craton
Publisher : Cambria Press
Page : 260 pages
File Size : 41,6 Mb
Release : 2009
Category : Literary Criticism & Collections
ISBN : 9781604976533

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The Victorian Freak Show by Lillian Craton Pdf

"The Victorian freak show was at once mainstream and subversive. Spectacles of strange, exotic, and titillating bodies drew large middle-class audiences in England throughout much of the nineteenth century, and souvenir portraits of performing freaks even found their way into Victorian family albums. At the same time, the imagery and practices of the freak show shocked Victorian sensibilities and sparked controversy about both the boundaries of physical normalcy and morality in entertainment. Marketing tactics for the freak show often made use of common ideological assumptions - compulsory female domesticity and British imperial authority, for instance - but reflected these ideas with the surreal distortion of a fun-house mirror. Not surprisingly, the popular fiction written for middle-class Victorian readers also calls upon imagery of extreme physical difference, and the odd-bodied characters that people nineteenth-century fiction raise meaningful questions about the relationships between physical difference and the social expectations that shaped Victorian life." "This book is primarily an aesthetic analysis of freak show imagery as it appears in Victorian popular fiction, including the works of Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Guy de Maupassant, Florence Marryat, and Lewis Carroll. It argues that, in spite of a strong nineteenth-century impulse to define and defend normalcy, images of radical physical difference are often framed in surprisingly positive ways in Victorian fiction. The dwarves, fat people, and bearded ladies who intrude on the more conventional imagery of Victorian novels serve to shift the meaning of those works' main plots and characters, sometimes sharpening satires of the nineteenth-century treatment of the poor or disabled, sometimes offering new traits and behaviors as supplements for restrictive social norms." --Book Jacket.

Author : Iwan Rhys Morus
Publisher : The History Press
Page : 216 pages
File Size : 43,6 Mb
Release : 2011-04-11
Category : History
ISBN : 9780752463810

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Shocking Bodies by Iwan Rhys Morus Pdf

For the Victorians, electricity was the science of spectacle and of wonder. It provided them with new ways of probing the nature of reality and understanding themselves. Luigi Galvani's discovery of 'animal electricity' at the end of the eighteenth century opened up a whole new world of possibilities, in which electricity could cure sickness, restore sexual potency and even raise the dead. In Shocking Bodies, Iwan Rhys Morus explores how the Victorians thought about electricity, and how they tried to use its intimate and corporeal force to answer fundamental questions about life and death. Some even believed that electricity was life, which brought into question the existence of the soul, and of God, and provided arguments in favour of political radicalism. This is the story of how electricity emerged as a powerful new tool for making sense of our bodies and the world around us.

Author : Lee Jackson
Publisher : Yale University Press
Page : 300 pages
File Size : 47,6 Mb
Release : 2014-01-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9780300192056

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Dirty Old London by Lee Jackson Pdf

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 : Pamela K. Gilbert
Publisher : SUNY Press
Page : 272 pages
File Size : 46,7 Mb
Release : 2004-02-12
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0791460266

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Mapping the Victorian Social Body by Pamela K. Gilbert Pdf

Tracing the development of cholera mapping from the early sanitary period to the later "medical" period of which John Snow's work was a key example, the book explores how maps of cholera outbreaks, residents' responses to those maps, and the novels of Charles Dickens, who drew heavily on this material, contributed to an emerging vision of London as a metropolis. The book then turns to India, the metropole's colonial other and the perceived source of the disease. In India, the book argues, imperial politics took cholera mapping in a wholly different direction and contributed to Britons' perceptions of Indian space as quite different from that of home.

Author : Pamela K. Gilbert
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 194 pages
File Size : 49,7 Mb
Release : 2007
Category : Electronic books
ISBN : 0814272061

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The Citizen's Body by Pamela K. Gilbert Pdf

Author : Mary Elizabeth Hotz
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 217 pages
File Size : 50,5 Mb
Release : 2009
Category : Burial laws
ISBN : 1441604901

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Literary Remains by Mary Elizabeth Hotz Pdf

Literary Remains explores the unexpectedly central role of death and burial in Victorian England. As Alan Ball, creator of HBO s Six Feet Under, quipped, Once you put a dead body in the room, you can talk about anything. So, too, with the Victorians: dead bodies, especially their burial and cremation, engaged the passionate attention of leading Victorians, from sanitary reformers like Edwin Chadwick to bestselling novelists like Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, and Bram Stoker. Locating corpses at the center of an extensive range of concerns, including money and law, medicine and urban architecture, social planning and folklore, religion and national identity, Mary Elizabeth Hotz draws on a range of legal, administrative, journalistic, and literary writing to offer a thoughtful meditation on Victorian attitudes toward death and burial, as well as how those attitudes influenced present-day deathway practices. Literary Remains gives new meaning to the phrase that serves as its significant theme: Taught by death what life should be.

Author : Ruth Goodman
Publisher : Penguin UK
Page : 470 pages
File Size : 49,6 Mb
Release : 2013-06-27
Category : History
ISBN : 9780241958346

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How to be a Victorian by Ruth Goodman Pdf

TRAVEL BACK IN TIME WITH THE BBC'S RUTH GOODMAN We know what life was like for Victoria and Albert. But what was it like for a commoner - like you or me? How did it feel to cook with coal and wash with tea leaves? Drink beer for breakfast and clean your teeth with cuttlefish? Catch the omnibus to work and do the laundry in your corset? How to be a Victorian is a radical new approach to history; a journey back in time more personal than anything before, illuminating the overlapping worlds of health, sex, fashion, food, school, work and play. Surviving everyday life came down to the gritty details, the small necessities and tricks of living and this book will show you how. ______________________ 'Goodman skilfully creates a portrait of daily Victorian life with accessible, compelling, and deeply sensory prose' Erin Entrada Kelly 'We're lucky to have such a knowledgeable cicerone as Ruth Goodman . . . Revelatory' Alexandra Kimball 'Goodman's research is impeccable . . . taking the reader through an average day and presenting the oddities of life without condescension' Patricia Hagen

Author : Thomas E. Jordan
Publisher : State University of New York Press
Page : 412 pages
File Size : 46,7 Mb
Release : 1987-09-30
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9781438408057

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Victorian Childhood by Thomas E. Jordan Pdf

This book presents a broad range of original data on childhood in Victorian Britain. It combines a social science approach to data with historical context, resulting in a highly readable account based on sound historiography. Against a backdrop of the industrial revolution, an expanding economy, and a rising standard of living, Victorian Childhood explores life and death, child development, the family, work, education, social life, cities, crime, and advocacy and reform. Presenting data on the deteriorating health of children during the nineteenth century and on their increasing displacement of adults in the workplace, the author demonstrates that they did not share proportionately in the increased standard of living. Jordan's book is a unique piece of scholarship in its range, focus, and presentation. Original sources such as diaries and memoirs not previously cited elsewhere, literature from the period, and anecdotes from the children themselves animate the statistical background and provide vivid pictures of their lives.

Author : Alan Gallop
Publisher : The History Press
Page : 160 pages
File Size : 44,8 Mb
Release : 2012-05-30
Category : History
ISBN : 9780752486970

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Life in a Victorian Workhouse by Alan Gallop Pdf

What was it like in a Victorian Workhouse? Was the food really as bad as we imagine? Take a step back in time with Alan Gallop and ask yourself if you could have survived in such harsh conditions.

Author : Lydia Murdoch
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 368 pages
File Size : 48,6 Mb
Release : 2013-10-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9798216071501

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Daily Life of Victorian Women by Lydia Murdoch Pdf

Explores the complexities of the lived experiences of Victorian women in the home, the workplace, and the empire as well as the ideals of womanhood and femininity that developed during the 19th century. Contrary to popular misconception, many Victorian women performed manual labor for wages directly alongside men, had political voice before women's suffrage, and otherwise contributed significantly to society outside of the domestic sphere. Daily Life of Victorian Women documents the varied realities of the lives of Victorian women; provides in-depth comparative analysis of the experiences of women from all classes, especially the working class; and addresses changes in their lives and society over time. The book covers key social, intellectual, and geographical aspects of women's lives, with main chapters on gender and ideals of womanhood, the state, religion, home and family, the body, childhood and youth, paid labor and professional work, urban life, and imperialism.