Late-nineteenth-century Britain saw the privileged classes forsake society balls and gatherings to turn their considerable resources to investigating and relieving poverty. By the 1890s at least half ...a million women were involved in philanthropy, particularly in London.Slum Travelers,edited, annotated, and with a superb introduction by Ellen Ross, collects a fascinating array of the writings of these "lady explorers," who were active in the east, south, and central London slums from around 1870 until the end of World War I. Contributors range from the well known, including Annie Besant, Sylvia Pankhurst, and Beatrice Webb (then Potter), to the obscure. The collection reclaims an important group of writers whose representations of urban poverty have been eclipsed by better-known male authors such as Charles Dickens and Jack London.
From Jewish clothing merchants to Bangladeshi curry houses, ancient docks to the 2012 Olympics, the area east of the City has always played a crucial role in London's history. The East End, as it has ...been known, was the home to Shakespeare's first theater and to the early stirrings of a mass labor movement; it has also traditionally been seen as a place of darkness and despair, where Jack the Ripper committed his gruesome murders, and cholera and poverty stalked the Victorian streets.
In this beautifully illustrated history of this iconic district, John Marriott draws on twenty-five years of research into the subject to present an authoritative and endlessly fascinating account. With the aid of copious maps, archive prints and photographs, and the words of East Londoners from seventeenth-century silk weavers to Cockneys during the Blitz, he explores the relationship between the East End and the rest of London, and challenges many of the myths that surround the area.
Presents important early essays that laid the foundation for queer studies of the Bloomsbury Group together with new essays that build upon this foundation to provide ground-breaking work on ...Bloomsbury figures and cultural achievements.
All roads lead to London - and to the West End theatre. This book presents a new history of the beginnings of the modern world of London entertainment. Putting female-centred, gender-challenging ...managements and styles at the centre, it redraws the map of performance history in the Victorian capital of the world. Bratton argues for the importance in Victorian culture of venues like the little Strand Theatre and the Gallery of Illustration in Regent Street in the experience of mid-century London, and of plays drawn from the work of Charles Dickens as well as burlesques by the early writers of Punch. Discovering a much more dynamic and often woman-led entertainment industry at the heart of the British Empire, this book seeks a new understanding of the work of women including Eliza Vestris, Mary Ann Keeley and Marie Wilton in creating the template for a magical new theatre of music, feeling and spectacle.
In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries the Inns of Court and fashionable London taverns developed a culture of clubbing, urban sociability and wit. The convivial societies that emerged ...created rituals to define social identities and to engage in literary play and political discussion. Michelle O'Callaghan argues that the lawyer-wits, including John Hoskyns, in company with authors such as John Donne, Ben Jonson and Thomas Coryate, consciously reinvigorated humanist traditions of learned play. Their experiments with burlesque, banquet literature, parody and satire resulted in a volatile yet creative dialogue between civility and licence, and between pleasure and the violence of scurrilous words. The wits inaugurated a mode of literary fellowship that shaped the history and literature of sociability in the seventeenth century. This study will provide many insights for historians and literary scholars of the period.
London Fog Corton, Christine L
2015, 2015-01-01, 2015-11-03
eBook
The classic London fogs--thick yellow "pea-soupers"--were born in the industrial age and remained a feature of cold, windless winter days until clean air legislation in the 1960s. Christine L. Corton ...tells the story of these epic London fogs, their dangers and beauty, and the lasting effects on our culture and imagination of these urban spectacles.
The "forgotten majority" of German merchants in London between the end of the Hanseatic League and the end of the Napoleonic Wars became the largest mercantile Christian immigrant group in the ...eighteenth century. Using previously neglected and little used evidence, this book assesses the causes of their migration, the establishment of their businesses in the capital, and the global reach of the enterprises. As the acquisition of British nationality was the admission ticket to Britain's commercial empire, it investigates the commercial function of British naturalization policy in the early modern period, while also considering the risks of failure and chance for a new beginning in a foreign environment. As more German merchants integrated into British commercial society, they contributed to London becoming the leading place of exchange between the European continent, Russia, and the New World.
The Japanese artist Yoshio Markino enjoyed a successful career in early twentieth century London as an artist and author. This book examines his uniquely Asian perspective on British society and ...culture at a time when Japan eagerly sought engagement with the West.
Traditionally the scene of some of London’s poorest, most crime-ridden neighborhoods, the East End of London has long been misunderstood as abject and deviant. As a landing place for migrants and ...newcomers, however, it has also been memorably and colorfully represented in the literature of Victorian authors such as Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde. In Strangers in the Archive, Heidi Kaufman applies the resources of archives both material and digital to move beyond icon and stereotype to reveal a deeper understanding of East End literature and culture in the Victorian age.
Kaufman uncovers this engaging new perspective on the East End through Maria Polack’s Fiction without Romance (1830), the first novel to be published by an English Jew, and through records of Polack’s vibrant community. Although scholars of nineteenth-century London and readers of East End fictions persist in privileging sensational narratives of Jack the Ripper and the infamous Fagin the Jew as signs of universal depravity among East End minority ethnic and racial groups, Strangers in the Archive considers how archival materials are uniquely capable of redressing cultural silences and marginalized perspectives as well as reshaping conceptions of the global significance of literary and print culture in nineteenth-century London.
Many of this book’s subjects—including digital editions of rare books and manuscript diaries, multimedia maps, and other related East End print records—can be viewed online at the Lyon Archive and the Polack Archive.
