A01=Karen Chase
A01=Michael Levenson
Anecdote
Another Woman
Aurora Floyd
Author_Karen Chase
Author_Michael Levenson
Bigamy
Captivating
Caroline Norton
Category=DSBF
Category=JHBK
Category=NHD
Category=NHTB
Cleanliness
Consummation
Courtesy
Decadence
Divine Truth
Domestic drama
Enthusiasm
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Eroticism
Favourite
Filial piety
For the Glory
Generosity
Healthy city
Honour
Household
I Wish (manhwa)
In Society
Independent woman
Indulgence
Infatuation
Lady Audley's Secret
Martin Chuzzlewit
Melodrama
Modernity
Mr.
Mrs.
Narrative
New Thought
Of Education
Originality
Our Mutual Friend
Parody
Personhood
Poetry
Popularity
Presence of Mind
Pretty Face
Romanticism
Sarah Stickney Ellis
Satire
Seduction
Self-sufficiency
Sensation novel
Sensationalism
Sensibility
Sentimental novel
Sentimentality
Seriousness
Sexual attraction
Sexual desire
The Erotic
The Great Exhibition
The Honourable
The Intimates
The Other Hand
The Power of Sympathy
The Society of the Spectacle
The Telling
Triumphalism
True Heart
Utopia
V.
Virginity
Wealth
Product details
- ISBN 9780691006680
- Weight: 510g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 25 Jun 2000
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Love of home life, the intimate moments a family peacefully enjoyed in seclusion, had long been considered a hallmark of English character even before the Victorian era. But the Victorians attached unprecedented importance to domesticity, romanticizing the family in every medium from novels to government reports, to the point where actual families felt anxious and the public developed a fierce appetite for scandal. Here Karen Chase and Michael Levenson explore how intimacy became a spectacle and how this paradox energized Victorian culture between 1835 and 1865. They tell a story of a society continually perfecting the forms of private pleasure and yet forever finding its secrets exposed to view. The friction between the two conditions sparks insightful discussions of authority and sentiment, empire and middle-class politics. The book recovers neglected episodes of this mid-century drama: the adultery trial of Caroline Norton and the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne; the Bedchamber Crisis of the young Queen Victoria; the Bloomer craze of the 1850s; and Robert Kerr's influential treatise, celebrating the ideal of the English Gentleman's House.
The literary representation of household life--in Dickens, Tennyson, Ellis, and Oliphant, among others--is placed in relation to such public spectacles as the Deceased Wife's Sister Bill of 1848, the controversy over divorce in the years 1854-1857, and the triumphant return of Florence Nightingale from the Crimea. These colorful incidents create a telling new portrait of Victorian family life, one that demands a fundamental rethinking of the relation between public and private spheres.
Karen Chase, Professor of English at the University of Virginia, is the author of Eros and Psyche: The Representation of Personality in Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot. She has also written a book-length critical study of Middlemarch.
Michael Levenson is also Professor of English at the University of Virginia. He is the author of A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine 1908-1922 and Modernism and the Fate of Individuality: Character and Form in the Modern English Novel, and is the editor of the Cambridge Companion to Modernism.
