Download or read book The Victorians and Sport written by Mike Huggins and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2004-12-17 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many of the sports that have spread across the world, from athletics and boxing to golf and tennis, had their origins in nineteenth-century Britain. They were exported around the world by the British Empire, and Britain's influence in the world led to many of its sports being adopted in other countries. (Americans, however, liked to show their independence by rejecting cricket for baseball.) The Victorians and Sport is a highly readable account of the role sport played in both Victorian Britain and its empire. Major sports attracted mass followings and were widely reported in the press. Great sporting celebrities, such as the cricketer Dr W.G. Grace, were the best-known people in the country, and sporting rivalries provoked strong loyalties and passionate emotions. Mike Huggins provides fascinating details of individual sports and sportsmen. He also shows how sport was an important part of society and of many people's lives.
Download or read book The Sporting Life written by Nancy Fix Anderson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2010-02-26 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This lively and intriguing study looks at the way sports both reflected and shaped Victorian society. Just as our own games have a lot to say about modern American culture, so sports are a prism through which we can gain valuable insights into Victorian society. The Sporting Life: Victorian Sports and Games is an engaging and perceptive account of how sport developed during Britain's heyday, who played (and who wasn't allowed to play), and what it all conveys about gender, race, imperialism, and national pride. Drawing extensively on 19th-century writings, The Sporting Life begins with a survey of sports in pre-Victorian England and the impact of industrialism in the early 19th century. We read of the effects of evangelicalism and utilitarianism, both of which first opposed sport, then used it for their own purposes. We learn of the association of sports with masculinity, an identification women challenged late in the century. Finally we learn how English sports became part of the imperial game, used to promote—and resist—the spread of Victoria's vast empire.
Download or read book A Sport loving Society written by J. A. Mangan and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2006 with total page 340 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A selection of essays exploring the role of social institutions and political, economic and technological change in shaping the sport of middle class Victorians and Edwardians.
Download or read book Palaces of Pleasure written by Lee Jackson and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-25 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An energetic and exhilarating account of the Victorian entertainment industry, its extraordinary success and enduring impact The Victorians invented mass entertainment. As the nineteenth century’s growing industrialized class acquired the funds and the free time to pursue leisure activities, their every whim was satisfied by entrepreneurs building new venues for popular amusement. Contrary to their reputation as dour, buttoned-up prudes, the Victorians reveled in these newly created ‘palaces of pleasure’. In this vivid, captivating book, Lee Jackson charts the rise of well-known institutions such as gin palaces, music halls, seaside resorts and football clubs, as well as the more peculiar attractions of the pleasure garden and international exposition, ranging from parachuting monkeys and human zoos to theme park thrill rides. He explores how vibrant mass entertainment came to dominate leisure time and how the attempts of religious groups and secular improvers to curb ‘immorality’ in the pub, variety theater and dance hall faltered in the face of commercial success. The Victorians’ unbounded love of leisure created a nationally significant and influential economic force: the modern entertainment industry.
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 Sport and the British written by Richard Holt and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This lively and deeply researched history - the first of its kind - goes beyond the great names and moments to explain how British sport has changed since 1800, and what it has meant to ordinary people. It shows how the way we play reflects not just our lives as citizens of a predominantlyurban and industrial world, but what is especially distinctive about British sport. Innovators in abandoning traditional, often brutal sports, and in establishing a code of `fair play', the British were also pioneers in popular sports and in the promotion of organized spectator events.Modern media coverage of sport, gambling, violence and attitudes towards it, nationalism, and the role of sport in sustaining male identity are also explored, and the book is rich in illuminating and entertaining anecdotes, which it combines with a serious historical understanding of a fascinatingsubject.
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 How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain written by Leah Price and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2012-04-09 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain asks how our culture came to frown on using books for any purpose other than reading. When did the coffee-table book become an object of scorn? Why did law courts forbid witnesses to kiss the Bible? What made Victorian cartoonists mock commuters who hid behind the newspaper, ladies who matched their books' binding to their dress, and servants who reduced newspapers to fish 'n' chips wrap? Shedding new light on novels by Thackeray, Dickens, the Brontës, Trollope, and Collins, as well as the urban sociology of Henry Mayhew, Leah Price also uncovers the lives and afterlives of anonymous religious tracts and household manuals. From knickknacks to wastepaper, books mattered to the Victorians in ways that cannot be explained by their printed content alone. And whether displayed, defaced, exchanged, or discarded, printed matter participated, and still participates, in a range of transactions that stretches far beyond reading. Supplementing close readings with a sensitive reconstruction of how Victorians thought and felt about books, Price offers a new model for integrating literary theory with cultural history. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain reshapes our understanding of the interplay between words and objects in the nineteenth century and beyond.
Download or read book Bugs and the Victorians written by John F. M. Clark and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2009-01-01 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text explores how science became increasingly important in 19th century British culture and how the systematic study of insects permitted entomologists to engage with the most pressing questions of Victorian times: the nature of God, mind, and governance, and the origins of life.
Download or read book The Victorians and Ancient Greece written by Richard Jenkyns and published by Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1980 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Sport and Society in Victorian Ireland written by Tom Hunt and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the development of sports in Victorian Ireland using the example of Westmeath as a case study. It explores the development of hunting, racing, commercial sports (golf, cycling and tennis), cricket, hurling and football, soccer, and rugby. It also examines the importance of spectator sports and a variety of ancillary attractions. It examines the importance of the club as a vehicle for facilitating sporting involvement, the financing of sports and recreation, the commercialization of sports and the importance of codification. It also constructs a social profile of individuals active in the various sports. The role of sports in providing recreational opportunities for women is examined as is the importance of the military to sports promotion and the importance of sports to the military. The book illustrates the importance of sport in creating a social life for participants at all levels of society. The crucial importance of post-1900 developments in cultural nationalism and their impact on recreational activities and in particular the re-emergence of the GAA are also investigated. The information is placed in a comparative context and links Westmeath to the Irish sporting world and places the developments in Westmeath within the sporting revolution of the wider Victorian world. The book demolishes various established ideas of the Victorian sporting world in rural Ireland and enhances our understanding of what games people were playing and why they played them. The range of sports examined contributes to the production of an inclusive and comprehensive study that enhances our understanding of the social history of several groups in society.
Download or read book How Football Began written by Tony Collins and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-08-06 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This ambitious and fascinating history considers why, in the space of sixty years between 1850 and 1910, football grew from a marginal and unorganised activity to become the dominant winter entertainment for millions of people around the world. The book explores how the world’s football codes - soccer, rugby league, rugby union, American, Australian, Canadian and Gaelic - developed as part of the commercialised leisure industry in the nineteenth century. Football, however and wherever it was played, was a product of the second industrial revolution, the rise of the mass media, and the spirit of the age of the masses. Important reading for students of sports studies, history, sociology, development and management, this book is also a valuable resource for scholars and academics involved in the study of football in all its forms, as well as an engrossing read for anyone interested in the early history of football.
Download or read book Upper and middle class sport in Victorian Britain and the concept of amateurism written by Mathias Wick and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2008-02-18 with total page 30 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Culture and Applied Geography, grade: 1,3, University of Potsdam (Institut für Anglistik / Amerikanistik), course: Sport in the Making of Britain, language: English, abstract: The significance of sport as a means to explain dynamic processes in society has increasingly been acknowledged by scholars in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Vice versa it would be difficult, if not impossible, to understand the development of sport if contemplating it isolated and not on the broader background of society in general. This text concentrates rather on sport as a product of other areas such as the working world or politics, but also attempts to outline its initiating role for some changes in British culture. The time to be examined will be the Victorian era, which lasted from 1837 until 1901 and in which Britain underwent remarkable processes of modernization in all areas. It was also the period when sport became subject to remarkable transformations, largely acquiring the features of its modern twentieth century appearance. However, the attempt to describe contexts as multi- facetted as possible will make it necessary to also take a look into the time after and especially before those sixty-four Victorian years. Accordingly, the first chapter deals with sport in Early Modern Britain, emphasising especially the eighteenth century. It is concerned to present an overview, from which more or less universal features of the sports exercised in that time can be derived and which in the later course of the text shall be contrasted with the characteristics of Victorian sport. Those characteristics and its origins will be worked out in the second chapter, when sport is predominantly described as a product of technological modernization and shifting social attitudes. Here also the role of the rising middle classes as the new “Trägerschicht” (Eisenberg, 1999, p. 47) of sport will receive attention. The third chapter more technically deals with the most common and most popular sports exercised in Victorian Britain, whereat a distinction between upper- and middle class disciplines will be employed in order to present a more differentiated picture. The fourth and last chapter finally recapitulates the way of the middle classes, who managed to become the dominating influence in sport, while contrasting them to the higher and lower orders. With regard to the lower, focus lies on the amateur rule, which emerged in all sports, and which in Guttman’s (1979) words “war eine Waffe in der Auseinandersetzung zwischen sozialen Schichten” (p. 40).
Download or read book The Victorian and Edwardian Sportsman written by Richard Tames and published by Shire Publications. This book was released on 2008-03-04 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Victorian Britain made sport 'sporting' respectable, rule-bound and a nationwide obsession. Ancient sports, such as archery and fencing, were revived. New sports, such as tennis and cycling, were invented. Foreign sports, including polo, judo and lacrosse, were imported.
Download or read book The Victorians written by Jacob Rees-Mogg and published by W H Allen. This book was released on 2020-09-17 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: They built a nation. Now it's our turn. Many associate the Victorian era with austere social attitudes and filthy factories. But in this bold and provocative book, Jacob Rees-Mogg -- leading Tory MP and prominent Brexit advocate -- takes up the story of twelve landmark figures to paint a very different picture of the age- one of bright ambition, bold self-belief and determined industriousness. Whether through Peel's commitment to building free trade, Palmerston's deft diplomacy in international affairs, or Pugin's uplifting architectural feats, the Victorians transformed the nation and established Britain as a preeminent global force. Now 200 years since the birth of Queen Victoria, it is essential that we remember the spirit, drive and values of the Victorians who forged modern Britain, as we consider our future as a nation.
Download or read book High Minds written by Simon Heffer and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-04-05 with total page 780 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An ambitious exploration of the making of the Victorian Age—and the Victorian mind—by a master historian. Britain in the 1840s was a country wracked by poverty, unrest, and uncertainty; there were attempts to assassinate the queen and her prime minister; and the ruling class lived in fear of riot and revolution. By the 1880s it was a confident nation of progress and prosperity, transformed not just by industrialization but by new attitudes to politics, education, women, and the working class. That it should have changed so radically was very largely the work of an astonishingly dynamic and high-minded group of people—politicians and philanthropists, writers and thinkers—who in a matter of decades fundamentally remade the country, its institutions and its mindset, and laid the foundations for modern society. High Minds explores this process of transformation as it traces the evolution of British democracy and shows how early laissez-faire attitudes to the fate of the less fortunate turned into campaigns to improve their lives and prospects. The narrative analyzes the birth of new attitudes in education, religion, and science. And High Minds shows how even such aesthetic issues as taste in architecture collided with broader debates about the direction that the country should take. In the process, Simon Heffer looks at the lives and deeds of major politicians; at the intellectual arguments that raged among writers and thinkers such as Matthew Arnold, Thomas Carlyle, and Samuel Butler; and at the "great projects” of the age, from the Great Exhibition to the Albert Memorial. Drawing heavily on previously unpublished documents, he offers a superbly nuanced portrait into life in an extraordinary era, populated by extraordinary people—and show how the Victorians’ pursuit of perfection gave birth to the modern Britain we know today.
Download or read book Understanding the Victorians written by Susie Steinbach and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Understanding the Victorians paints a vivid portrait of the era, combining broad surveys with close analysis, and introduces students to the critical debates taking place among historians today. Focusing not just on England but on the whole of Great Britain and Ireland it emphasises class, gender, and racial and imperial positioning as constitutive of human relations. This book encompasses the whole of the Victorian period giving equal prominence to social and cultural topics alongside the politics and economics. Starting with the Queen Caroline Affair in 1820 and coming right up to the start of World War I in 1914, Susie L. Steinbach uses thematic chapters to discuss and evaluate, the economy, gender, religion, the history of science and ideas, material culture and sexuality. Steinbach also provides much-needed chapters on consumption, which links consumption with production, on law, which explains the legal culture and trials of criminal and scandalous cases and on space which draws to together the most current research in Victorian studies"--Provided by publisher.
