Category: Romantic and Victorian

Anne DeWitt, Moral Authority, Men of Science and the Victorian Novel (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press 2013) 290 pp. £62.00 Hb., £19.99 Pb., $24.00 PDF. ISBN: 9781107036178 The introduction to Anne DeWitt’s Moral Authority, Men of Science and the Victorian Novel proclaims that it will focus on ‘characters who practice or study science, fictional conversations about…

Vicky Albritton and Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, Green Victorians: The Simple Life in John Ruskin’s Lake District (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2016) 209 pp.  £28.00 Hb.  ISBN: 978-0-226-339986 Vicky Albritton and Fredrik Albritton Jonsson open their account of The Simple Life in John Ruskin’s Lake District, as their book is subtitled, with the work of…

Tina Young Choi, Anonymous Connections: The Body and Narratives of the Social in Victorian Britain (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 2016) 192 pp. $65.00 Hb. ISBN: 978-0-472-11972-1 We live, Tina Young Choi reminds us, in an age of proliferating virtual networks, pervasive economic globalisation, and the transmission of diseases such as Ebola and influenza across…

David Spanagel, DeWitt Clinton and Amos Eaton: Geology and Power in Early New York (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press 2014) 288 pp. $54.95 Hb. ISBN: 9781421411040 In DeWitt Clinton and Amos Eaton, David Spanagel offers biographical treatments of the well-known New York politician DeWitt Clinton and the lesser-known geologist Amos Eaton and politician Stephen Van…

Rosa Mucignat, Realism and Space in the Novel, 1795-1869: Imagined Geographies (Oxford: Routledge 2013) 192 pp. £95.00 Hb. ISBN: 9781409450559 The title of Rosa Mucignat’s Realism and Space in the Novel 1795-1869: Imagined Geographies only palely suggests the nature of this careful, well documented, and very pertinent literary study. Mucignat’s book reflects the hybrid nature…

Will Abberley, English Fiction and the Evolution of Language, 1850-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2015) 247 pp. $80.00 PDF, £64.99 Hb. ISBN: 9781107101166 Will Abberley’s English Fiction and the Evolution of Language 1850-1914, as the title suggests, explores the development of the English language through fiction, arguing that the influence of fiction on the development…

Mark Frost, The Lost Companions and John Ruskin’s Guild of St George: A Revisionary History (London: Anthem Press 2014) 264pp. Hb £60.00. ISBN: 9781783082834 In 1871 John Ruskin launched a fund for the establishment of a new society. Ruskin envisaged a utopia based on medieval agrarianism, one which was community-minded and which opposed the advances…

William Hughes, That Devil’s Trick: Hypnotism and the Victorian Popular Imagination (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2015) 256 pp. Hb £70. ISBN 978-0-7190-7483-7 It is the sign of a good book when the reviewer’s main criticism is a quibble with the accuracy of its title. Despite the suggested focus on hypnotism, the main emphasis throughout is…

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.…