Understanding the Victorians Politics, Culture and Society in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Understanding the Victorians paints a vivid portrait of an era of dramatic change, combining broad survey with close analysis and introducing students to the critical debates on the nineteenth century taking place among historians today. The volume encompasses all of Great Britain and Ireland over the whole of the Victorian period and gives prominence to social and cultural topics alongside politics and economics and emphasizes class, gender, and racial and imperial positioning as constitutive of human relations. This third edition is fully updated with new chapters on emotion and on Britain’s relationship with Europe as well as added discussions of architecture, technology, and the visual arts. Attention to the current concerns and priorities of professional historians also enables readers to engage with today’s historical debates. Starting with the Queen Caroline Affair in 1820 and coming up to the start of World War I in 1914, thematic chapters explore the topics of space, politics, Europe, the empire, the economy, consumption, class, leisure, gender, the monarchy, the law, arts and entertainment, sexuality, religion, and science. With a clear introduction outlining the key themes of the period, a detailed timeline, and suggestions for further reading and relevant internet resources, this is the ideal companion for all students of the nineteenth century. Discover more from Susie by exploring our forthcoming Routledge Historical resource on British Society, edited by Susie L. Steinbach and Martin Hewitt. Find out more about our Routledge Historical resources by visiting https://www.routledgehistoricalresources.com.

List of figures Timeline Preface to thethird edition Acknowledgments Introduction: ‘Playing on the Piano-forte’ 1. A ‘green and pleasant land’ of cities and slums: Space 2. ‘Discussions on the subject of reform’: Politics 3. 'Fog in channel—Continent isolated’: Britain and Europe 4. Ruling the world: Imperialism 5. Wealth, poverty,growth, and slumps: The economy 6. ‘Bristling with shops’: Consumption 7. ‘Born into the lower-upper-middle’: Class 8. ‘Oh, I do like to be beside the seaside’: Leisure 9. ‘A common cause with all the females in this kingdom’: Gender 10. A ‘dignified part’: Monarchy 11. ‘The court was crowded all day’: The law and the police 12. ‘Good, murderous melodramas’: Arts, entertainment, and print culture13. Marriage, free love, and ‘unnatural crimes’: Sexuality 14. 'For all its gathered tears': Emotion 15. ‘Begin and end with the Church whatever you do between-whiles’: Religion 16. Vestiges and origins: Science, technology, and medicine

Susie L. Steinbach is a Professor of History at Hamline University who has written extensively on nineteenth-century Britain, with particular emphasis on gender and the law. She is the author of Understanding the Victorians, 2nd edition (Routledge, 2016), Women in England 1760–1914: A Social History (2004), and the editor of Millicent Garret Fawcett by Her Contemporaries (2008).