Free Victorian Electronic Books
Ohio University Press is pleased to make available electronic versions of these four books in Victorian studies at no cost to the reader. While it is our hope that as a result of reading the books in a downloadable format, readers will be inspired to buy the paper editions of the books, our real goal in providing these e-books to you is to increase your access to our books.
Please let us know if you appreciate this effort. Ohio University Press, like all university presses, exists as a function of the scholarly publishing process. It is our mission to disseminate the fruits of research and creative activity. If this experiment in new platforms is successful and is used as a way to promote the ideas and arguments of our authors and to stimulate more debate and research on the topics they have investigated, we will strive to continue our commitment to this new reach into the scholarly dialogue.
Music Hall and Modernity
The Late-Victorian Discovery of Popular Culture
The late-Victorian discovery of the music hall by English intellectuals marks a crucial moment in the history of popular culture. Music Hall and Modernity demonstrates how such pioneering cultural critics as Arthur Symons and Elizabeth Robins Pennell used the music hall to secure and promote their professional identity as guardians of taste and national welfare.…
“Faulk has incorporated an impressive amount of theoretical writing from a variety of schools, and steers his way through its various pitfalls admirably and instructively. In its ecumenical and measured treatment of the demands of contemporary theory, the book ranks with the best of recent treatments of Victorian London.”
—David Pike
The Wake of Wellington
Englishness in 1852
Soldier, hero, and politician, the Duke of Wellington is one of the best-known figures of nineteenth-century England. From his victory at Waterloo over Napoleon in 1815, he rose to become prime minister of his country.…
“Sinnema provides fascinating insight into the process by which an Anglo-Irishman assumed Englishness and was appropriated (with some whitewashing of his personal life, and despite his political reputation) as a quintessential Englishman, the embodiment of the English traits of ‘simplicity of character, common sense, and the veneration of duty,’ whose ‘death celebrations staged Englishness, London, and the [English] nation.’”
—University of Toronto Quarterly
Bleak Houses – On Sale
Marital Violence in Victorian Fiction
The Offenses Against the Person Act of 1828 opened magistrates' courts to abused working-class wives. Newspapers in turn reported on these proceedings, and in this way the Victorian scrutiny of domestic conduct began.…
“From a historian’s perspective, Surridge’s interpretations of individual texts are persuasive, yet it is her contextualization of these works of fiction within ongoing reform movements and newspaper reporting that makes this a truly remarkable book.”
—CLIO
The Cut of His Coat – On Sale
Men, Dress, and Consumer Culture in Britain, 1860-1914
The English middle class in the late nineteenth century enjoyed an increase in the availability and variety of material goods. With that, the visual markers of class membership and manly behavior underwent a radical change.…
“Shannon’s most noteworthy achievement is his examination of the sometimes contradictory, usually tangled, process of constructing gender as it evolved during the late Victorian age, a crucial period in the history of the consumer society.”
—Business History Review
