James Malcolm Rymer, Penny Fiction, and the Family
James Malcolm Rymer, Penny Fiction, and the Family

Author: Rebecca Nesvet

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-07-30

Total Pages: 207

ISBN-13: 104009371X

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James Malcolm Rymer, Penny Fiction, and the Family is the first monograph focusing on Sweeney Todd and Varney the Vampyre’s creator James Malcolm Rymer (1814–1884). It argues that Rymer wrote his so-called ‘penny bloods’ and ‘dreadfuls’ for and about British urban working families. In the 1840s, the notion of the family acquired unprecedented prominence and radical potential. Raised in an artisanal artistic-literary family, Rymer wrote for and edited family magazines early in that genre’s history, deployed Chartist domesticity to liberal ends, and collaborated with cheap publisher Edward Lloyd to define and popularise the domestic romance genre. In 1850s–1860s penny serials published by George W.M. Reynolds, John Dicks, and Lloyd, Rymer showed how families might sustain Empire and advocated for patriarchal family dynamics in response to literary and political change. During the fin-de-siècle, Rymer’s penny fiction was demonised as hyper-masculine ‘bloods’ and ‘dreadfuls’, a reputation it retains today. Reading Victorian penny fiction’s most indicative author’s works as a corpus and with attention to their original textual, cultural, and political contexts reveals it as the family-oriented phenomenon it in fact was.

The World Of Hannah More
The World Of Hannah More

Author: Patricia Demers

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2021-11-21

Total Pages: 238

ISBN-13: 0813187338

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History has not been kind to Hannah More. This once lionized writer and activist—the most influential female philanthropist of her day—is now considered by many to be the embodiment of pious morality and reactionary anti-feminism. Largely because of her belief in separate spheres for men and women, More has been vilified by modern-day feminists. The first biography to examine the complete range of her life and work, The World of Hannah More depicts the author as a forceful voice in her own day and one who, from the point of view of plain justice, today deserves a more nuanced treatment. Without denying the problems More presents for modern readers, Patricia Demers has produced a balanced revisionist study of a woman enormously influential in late-eighteenth-and early-nineteenth-century England. By examining the career of this cultural warrior, situating her major texts in relation to contemporaries, and addressing her published writing, philanthropic activities, and voluminous correspondence, Demers anchors The World of Hannah More in the work itself—an appropriate and just response to a woman who took pride in living to some purpose. Trying to deal justly with More and her female moral imperialism requires admitting both the expansiveness and the limitations of her charity, methodology and vision. Without venerating or trivializing, Demers pursues the doubleness and contradictions of More's largely neglected or superficially mined works, from the determined experiments of the earliest plays to the poignantly revealing essays on practical piety, Christian morals, and Saint Paul.

Women's Worlds
Women's Worlds

Author: Ros Ballaster

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 1991-07-12

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 1349213918

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This book integrates new material, using sources from the eighteenth and nineteenth century periodical press, research with contemporary readers, the authors' critical reading of past and present magazines, and a clear discussion of theoretical approaches from literary criticism. The development of the genre, and its part in the historical process of forging modern definitions of gender, class and race are analysed through critical readings and a discussion of readers' negotiations with the contradictory pleasures of the magazine, and its constricting ideal of femininity.

The Gothic World
The Gothic World

Author: Glennis Byron

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-10-08

Total Pages: 752

ISBN-13: 1135053057

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The Gothic World offers an overview of this popular field whilst also extending critical debate in exciting new directions such as film, politics, fashion, architecture, fine art and cyberculture. Structured around the principles of time, space and practice, and including a detailed general introduction, the five sections look at: Gothic Histories Gothic Spaces Gothic Readers and Writers Gothic Spectacle Contemporary Impulses. The Gothic World seeks to account for the Gothic as a multi-faceted, multi-dimensional force, as a style, an aesthetic experience and a mode of cultural expression that traverses genres, forms, media, disciplines and national boundaries and creates, indeed, its own ‘World’.

Animal Companions
Animal Companions

Author: Ingrid H. Tague

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2015-06-17

Total Pages: 317

ISBN-13: 0271067446

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Animal Companions explores how eighteenth-century British society perceived pets and the ways in which conversation about them reflected and shaped broader cultural debates. While Europeans kept pets long before the eighteenth century, many believed that doing so was at best frivolous and at worst downright dangerous. Ingrid Tague argues that for Britons of the eighteenth century, pets offered a unique way to articulate what it meant to be human and what society ought to look like. With the dawn of the Enlightenment and the end of the Malthusian cycle of dearth and famine that marked previous eras, England became the wealthiest nation in Europe, with a new understanding of religion, science, and non-European cultures and unprecedented access to consumer goods of all kinds. These transformations generated excitement and anxiety that were reflected in debates over the rights and wrongs of human-animal relationships. Drawing on a broad array of sources, including natural histories, periodicals, visual and material culture, and the testimony of pet owners themselves, Animal Companions shows how pets became both increasingly visible indicators of spreading prosperity and catalysts for debates about the morality of the radically different society emerging in eighteenth-century Britain.

Cloak of Charity
Cloak of Charity

Author: Betsy Rodgers

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-08-18

Total Pages: 164

ISBN-13: 1000995089

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First published in 1949, Cloak of Charity provides a short history of philanthropy in the eighteenth-century. The author asserts that the history of charity is the history of the changes which have occurred in the attitude of the rich towards the poor. The character of philanthropy changed considerably during the course of the eighteenth-century and it is this change that the book traces. This book will be of interest to students of history, sociology and religion.

Pity My Simplicity
Pity My Simplicity

Author: Paul Sangster

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

Published: 2021-07-25

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 1666730777

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How did the early Evangelicals pass on their beliefs to their children? This book is a study of a strangely neglected part of Evangelical history. But it is not merely, nor even especially, a historian's book - it is of general interest, absorbingly so. The reader is plunged into the child's world of the late eighteenth century, a world both surprisingly familiar and terrifyingly unknown. Their home life is examined, their schools and Sunday Schools, the sermons preached for them, the books and tracts and magazines they read, the diaries they wrote. Much of the atmosphere is death-haunted and repellent, entirely foreign to educational thought today. And yet ... the final proof of the efficacy of any system must be its fruits. Actual case-histories are considered, and conclusions attempted. The power of Evangelicalism must have vanished from the earth in a generation, had the fathers not nurtured the children, believing devoutly in their own educational abilities. Yet their many detractors have called them bigots, fanatics, fools and madmen. How fair is this judgment? And for today, how much of those first beliefs do we retain? What is our debt to those Evangelical fathers? A fascinating piece of social history is unfolded - often grim, even macabre, sometimes pathetic, occasionally gay but never, never dull.