Download or read book Great Scandals of the Victorians written by Debbie Blake and published by Pen and Sword History. This book was released on 2024-07-30 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Great Scandals of the Victorians features a collection of true stories that shocked, outraged, angered or simply amused the Victorians in nineteenth-century Britain. Drawing on a wide variety of original material, seven disreputable stories that dominated the national newspapers for many weeks are explored, including the Great Warwickshire Scandal, a highly publicized divorce case where for the first time in history a Prince of Wales was called to give evidence in court; a ‘baby’ scandal that disrupted Queen Victoria’s court and threatened the monarchy; the sex scandals of the Abode of Love, a mysterious religious cult founded by a defrocked clergyman, Henry James Prince and the sensational trial of Fanny and Stella, two outrageous cross-dressers accused of sodomy. Some scandals, though traumatic for the people involved, produced a positive outcome, such as the scandalous custody battle between Caroline Norton and her husband, which led to the passing of the Custody of Infants Act, granting mothers custody of their children following a divorce, and the case of 13-year-old Eliza Armstrong, sold to a brothel keeper for £5, which caused a major scandal and public outrage, but also led to a change in the law, raising the age of consent from 13 to 16 years.
Download or read book Victorian Scandals written by Kristine Ottesen Garrigan and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the popular mind, the word "Victorian" still evokes associations of repression, hypocrisy, and prudery. We persist in thinking that the Victorians were perpetually shocked by everything from minor breaches of domestic decorum to ministry-toppling causes célèbres. In examining various Victorian scandals, some familiar, some more obscure, these essays provide lively discussion and diverse points of view on the context, nature, and function of "scandal" in Victorian society, particularly in terms of gender and class. Topics covered include: - women as both victims and beneficiaries of the Victorian legal establishment, demonstrated through divorce petitions, cases of wrongful confinement, and a highly publicized breach of promise suit - the actress in contemporary pornography - the effects on male hegemony of programs of higher education for women - ambivalent reactions to biographies of Thomas Carlyle and George Eliot and to Julia Margaret Cameron's "ennobled" photographic portraits - the surprising toleration of gambling and infanticide. The afterword examines the diverse responses to scandalous behavior from the perspectives of recent critical theory. Taken as a whole, Victorian Scandals illustrates the pervasive role of the contemporary press in rendering private conduct a subject of public fascination and suggests the need to expand the definitions, functions, and interpretations of "scandal" in Victorian society.
Download or read book Great Scandals of the Victorians written by Debbie Blake and published by Pen and Sword History. This book was released on 2024-07-30 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Great Scandals of the Victorians features a collection of true stories that shocked, outraged, angered or simply amused the Victorians in nineteenth-century Britain. Drawing on a wide variety of original material, seven disreputable stories that dominated the national newspapers for many weeks are explored, including the Great Warwickshire Scandal, a highly publicized divorce case where for the first time in history a Prince of Wales was called to give evidence in court; a ‘baby’ scandal that disrupted Queen Victoria’s court and threatened the monarchy; the sex scandals of the Abode of Love, a mysterious religious cult founded by a defrocked clergyman, Henry James Prince and the sensational trial of Fanny and Stella, two outrageous cross-dressers accused of sodomy. Some scandals, though traumatic for the people involved, produced a positive outcome, such as the scandalous custody battle between Caroline Norton and her husband, which led to the passing of the Custody of Infants Act, granting mothers custody of their children following a divorce, and the case of 13-year-old Eliza Armstrong, sold to a brothel keeper for £5, which caused a major scandal and public outrage, but also led to a change in the law, raising the age of consent from 13 to 16 years.
Download or read book Victorian Scandals written by Peter Wildeblood and published by . This book was released on 1976 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Sex Scandal written by William A. Cohen and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Never has the Victorian novel appeared so perverse as it does in these pages - and never has its perversity seemed so fundamental to its accomplishment. By viewing this fiction alongside the most alarming public scandals of the day, Cohen exposes both the scandalousness of this literature and its sexiness." "In narratives ranging from Great Expectations to the Boulton and Park sodomy scandal of 1870-71, from Eliot's and Trollope's novels about scandalous women to Oscar Wilde's writing and his trials for homosexuality. Cohen shows how, in each instance, sexuality appears couched in coded terms. He identifies an assortment of cunning narrative techniques used to insinuate sex into Victorian writing, demonstrating that even as such narratives air the scandalous subject, they emphasize its unspeakable nature. Written with an eye toward the sex scandals that still whet the appetites of consumers of news and novels, this work is suggestive about our own modes of imagining sexuality today and how we arrived at them."--BOOK JACKET.
Download or read book Enter Rumour written by Robert Bernard and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2012 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The common perception of Britain's Victorian era as one of strict and strait-laced conformity has long been subject to rebuttal, and Robert Bernard Martin's Enter Rumour (1962) was an early and distinguished endeavour in this line. Herein Martin weighs the evidence of four scandalous incidents that aroused great public interest during the first dozen years of Victoria's reign, each of them emanating from 'what the Victorians might have called the higher orders of society.' Martin recounts the sorry tale of Lady Flora Hastings, victim of Court gossip; Lord Eglinton, who tried and failed to revive the medieval tournament; the strange case of the St Cross Hospital Charity; and George Hudson, 'Railway King', whose rise and fall remains a story for our times. Martin examines sources expertly and further explores how three of these scandals were transformed into fiction - by none less than Dickens, Disraeli and Trollope.
Download or read book Wild Romance written by Chloë Schama and published by Walker. This book was released on 2010 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1852, on a steamer from France to England, nineteen-year-old Theresa Longworth met William Charles Yelverton, a soldier destined to become the Viscount of Avonmore. The flirtation that began on board soon blossomed into a clandestine, epistolary affair, and five years after their first meeting they married secretly in Edinburgh. Then, that same summer, at Theresa's urging, they married again in Dublin - or did they? Separated by circumstance soon after they were wed, Theresa and Charles would never live together as man and wife. And when Yelverton then married another woman, an abandoned Theresa found herself forced to prove the validity of her marriage. Multiple trials ensued - in Ireland, England and Scotland - and for months their scandal captivated society: every detail of the proceedings was reported in the press, songwriters dedicated ballads to Theresa, and novelists, Wilkie Collins among them, borrowed the courtroom melodrama for their plots. Over the course of a very public ordeal, Theresa lost all hope of the private married life she so prized. Thrust into the spotlight, she travelled the globe and made a name for herself as a writer, blazing a trail for independent women and their rights - and the changes in attitude the twentieth century would later bring. In this brilliant debut, Chloë Schama unearths both a forgotten tabloid spectacle full of steamy intrigue and the chronicle of how one woman made a life for herself as an unmarried woman in a society that made no allowance for her. Wild Romanceis the inspiring tale of a woman who never gave up, and who held on to her ideals of independence, self-reliance and - despite everything - love.
Download or read book The Case of the 5 Virgin written by Gavin Weightman and published by Backstory. This book was released on 2013-04 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1885 the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette published an account of a girl of thirteen being sold by her mother to a brothel, where her virginity would be highly prized. The editor was W T Stead, and his audacious scoop was telegraphed around the world. What became know as the story of the 5 virgin - the price that Stead claimed had been paid for the girl - was a sensation, one of the greatest scandals of the Victorian era. But was the story a 'put up job' as the playwright George Bernard Shaw judged it? With meticulous detective work Gavin Weightman has pieced together the true story of how the W T Stead, hero of the moral purity campaigners, fell victim to his own salacious imagination and wound up in the dock at the Old Bailey. At the heart of the story is an innocent cockney girl who later found immortality as the model for Eliza Doolittle in Shaw's most popular play, Pygmalion (My Fair Lady).
Download or read book The Beauty of Her Age written by Jenifer Roberts and published by Amberley Publishing Limited. This book was released on 2016-07-15 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of a French ballerina who became richer than the Queen.
Download or read book The Criminal Conversation of Mrs Norton written by Diane Atkinson and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-07-19 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Caroline Norton, born in 1808, was a society beauty, poet and pamphleteer. Her good looks and wit attracted many male admirers, first her husband, the Honourable George Norton, and then the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne. After years of simmering jealousy, George Norton accused Caroline and the Prime Minister of a ‘criminal conversation’ (adultery) resulting in a trial referred to as ‘the scandal of the century’. Cut off and bankrupted by George Norton, she went on to become one of the most important figures in changing the law for wives and mothers.
Download or read book Postal Pleasures written by Kate Thomas and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 2012 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With readings of novels by Thomas Hardy, Anthony Trollope, Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker, Henry James, and others, this work explores the relationship between illicit sex and the postal service in Victorian Britain.
Download or read book Inventing the Victorians written by Matthew Sweet and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2014-06-03 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "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.
Download or read book The Routledge Handbook of Victorian Scandals in Literature and Culture written by Brenda Ayres and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-12-01 with total page 491 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Routledge Handbook of Victorian Scandals in Literature and Culture exposes, explores, and examines what Victorians once considered flagrant breaches of decorum. Infringements that were fantasized through artforms or were actually committed exceeded entertaining parlor gossip; once in print they were condemned as socially contaminative but were also consumed as delightfully sensational. Written by scholars in diverse disciplines, this volume: Demonstrates that spreading scandals seemed to have been one of the most entertaining sources of activities but were also normative efforts made by the Victorians to ensure conformity of decorum. Provides a broad spectrum of infractions that were considered scandalous to the Victorians. Identifies Victorian transgressions that made the news and that may still shock modern readers. Covers a gamut of moral infractions and transgressions either practiced, rumored, or fantasized in art forms. This handbook is an invaluable resource about Victorian literature, art, and culture which challenges its readers to ponder perplexing questions about how and why some scandals were perpetrated and propagated in the nineteenth century while others were not, and what the controversies reveal about the human condition that persists beyond Victoria’s reign of propriety.
Download or read book Fruits of Philosophy written by Charles Knowlton and published by . This book was released on 1878 with total page 60 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Victorians Undone written by Kathryn Hughes and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 2018-02 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In lively, accessible prose, Victorians Undone fills the space where the body ought to be, proposing new ways of thinking and writing about flesh in the nineteenth century.
Download or read book City of Dreadful Delight written by Judith R. Walkowitz and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-06-14 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From tabloid exposes of child prostitution to the grisly tales of Jack the Ripper, narratives of sexual danger pulsated through Victorian London. Expertly blending social history and cultural criticism, Judith Walkowitz shows how these narratives reveal the complex dramas of power, politics, and sexuality that were being played out in late nineteenth-century Britain, and how they influenced the language of politics, journalism, and fiction. Victorian London was a world where long-standing traditions of class and gender were challenged by a range of public spectacles, mass media scandals, new commercial spaces, and a proliferation of new sexual categories and identities. In the midst of this changing culture, women of many classes challenged the traditional privileges of elite males and asserted their presence in the public domain. An important catalyst in this conflict, argues Walkowitz, was W. T. Stead's widely read 1885 article about child prostitution. Capitalizing on the uproar caused by the piece and the volatile political climate of the time, women spoke of sexual danger, articulating their own grievances against men, inserting themselves into the public discussion of sex to an unprecedented extent, and gaining new entree to public spaces and journalistic practices. The ultimate manifestation of class anxiety and gender antagonism came in 1888 with the tabloid tales of Jack the Ripper. In between, there were quotidien stories of sexual possibility and urban adventure, and Walkowitz examines them all, showing how women were not simply figures in the imaginary landscape of male spectators, but also central actors in the stories of metropolotin life that reverberated in courtrooms, learned journals, drawing rooms, street corners, and in the letters columns of the daily press. A model of cultural history, this ambitious book will stimulate and enlighten readers across a broad range of interests.
Download or read book Did She Kill Him written by Kate Colquhoun and published by ABRAMS. This book was released on 2014-10-15 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An intriguing story told in the style of Thomas Hardy or George Eliot, if they traded in true crime” (Kirkus Reviews). In the summer of 1889, young Southern belle Florence Maybrick stood trial for the alleged arsenic poisoning of her much older husband, Liverpool cotton merchant James Maybrick. The “Maybrick Mystery” had all the makings of a sensation: a pretty, flirtatious woman; resentful, gossiping servants; rumors of gambling and debt; and scandalous mutual infidelity. The case cracked the varnish of Victorian respectability, shocking and exciting the public in equal measure as they clamored to read the latest revelations of Florence’s past and glimpse her likeness in Madame Tussaud’s. Florence’s fate was fiercely debated in the courtroom, on the front pages of the newspapers, and in parlors and backyards across the country. Did she poison her husband? Was her previous infidelity proof of murderous intentions? Was James’s own habit of self-medicating to blame for his demise? In this book, historian and CWA Gold Dagger Award nominee Kate Colquhoun recounts an utterly absorbing tale of addiction, deception, and adultery that keeps you asking to the very last page: Did she kill him?
