Author: Ann Kennedy Smith

Anne Green, Changing France: Literature and Material Culture in the Second Empire (London: Anthem Press 2011) 208 pp. £70 Hb, £25 Pb. ISBN: 9780857287779 The French Second Empire (1852-1870) always had a problem with its public image. Now associated with froth, superficiality and excess, its beginnings were dark and disturbing. Louis-Napoleon, the nephew of the…

Valerie Purton (ed), Darwin, Tennyson and Their Readers: Explorations in Victorian Literature and Science (New York and London: Anthem Press 2013) 192 pp. £70.00 Hb, £25.00 Pb. ISBN 9780857280763 The real author of Tennyson’s poems was in fact Charles Darwin; or so asserted Algernon Charles Swinburne in a spoof published in the Nineteenth Century in 1888.…