Victorian Scandals
Victorian Scandals

Author: Kristine Ottesen Garrigan

Publisher:

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 364

ISBN-13:

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In the popular mind, the word "Victorian" still evokes associations of repression, hypocrisy, and prudery. We persist in thinking that the Victorians were perpetually shocked by everything from minor breaches of domestic decorum to ministry-toppling causes célèbres. In examining various Victorian scandals, some familiar, some more obscure, these essays provide lively discussion and diverse points of view on the context, nature, and function of "scandal" in Victorian society, particularly in terms of gender and class. Topics covered include: - women as both victims and beneficiaries of the Victorian legal establishment, demonstrated through divorce petitions, cases of wrongful confinement, and a highly publicized breach of promise suit - the actress in contemporary pornography - the effects on male hegemony of programs of higher education for women - ambivalent reactions to biographies of Thomas Carlyle and George Eliot and to Julia Margaret Cameron's "ennobled" photographic portraits - the surprising toleration of gambling and infanticide. The afterword examines the diverse responses to scandalous behavior from the perspectives of recent critical theory. Taken as a whole, Victorian Scandals illustrates the pervasive role of the contemporary press in rendering private conduct a subject of public fascination and suggests the need to expand the definitions, functions, and interpretations of "scandal" in Victorian society.

The Battered Body Beneath the Flagstones, and Other Victorian Scandals
The Battered Body Beneath the Flagstones, and Other Victorian Scandals

Author: Michelle Morgan

Publisher: Robinson

Published: 2018-04-12

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 1472139488

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'Ghoulishly entertaining' Jacqueline Banerjee, Times Literary Supplement 'This is a great book for dipping into . . . the cases themselves are written engagingly and with appealing dramatisation of key events.' Kim Fleet, Crime Review A grisly book dedicated to the crimes, perversions and outrages of Victorian England, covering high-profile offences - such as the murder of actor William Terriss, whose stabbing at the stage door of the Adelphi Theatre in 1897 filled the front pages for many weeks - as well as lesser-known transgressions that scandalised the Victorian era. The tales include murders and violent crimes, but also feature scandals that merely amused the Victorians. These include the story of a teenage man who married an actress, only to be shipped off to Australia by his disgusted parents; and the Italian ice-cream man who only meant to buy his sweetheart a hat but ended up proposing marriage instead. When he broke it off, his fiancée's father sued him and the story was dubbed the 'Amusing Aberdeen Breach of Promise Case'. Also present is the gruesome story of the murder of Patrick O Connor who was shot in the head and buried under the kitchen flagstones by his lover Maria Manning and her husband, Frederick. The couple's subsequent trial caused a sensation and even author Charles Dickens attended the grisly public hanging. Drawing on a range of sources from university records and Old Bailey transcripts to national and regional newspaper archives, Michelle Morgan's research sheds new light on well-known stories as well as unearthing previously unknown incidents.

The Routledge Handbook of Victorian Scandals in Literature and Culture
The Routledge Handbook of Victorian Scandals in Literature and Culture

Author: Brenda Ayres

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-12-01

Total Pages: 491

ISBN-13: 1000782638

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The Routledge Handbook of Victorian Scandals in Literature and Culture exposes, explores, and examines what Victorians once considered flagrant breaches of decorum. Infringements that were fantasized through artforms or were actually committed exceeded entertaining parlor gossip; once in print they were condemned as socially contaminative but were also consumed as delightfully sensational. Written by scholars in diverse disciplines, this volume: Demonstrates that spreading scandals seemed to have been one of the most entertaining sources of activities but were also normative efforts made by the Victorians to ensure conformity of decorum. Provides a broad spectrum of infractions that were considered scandalous to the Victorians. Identifies Victorian transgressions that made the news and that may still shock modern readers. Covers a gamut of moral infractions and transgressions either practiced, rumored, or fantasized in art forms. This handbook is an invaluable resource about Victorian literature, art, and culture which challenges its readers to ponder perplexing questions about how and why some scandals were perpetrated and propagated in the nineteenth century while others were not, and what the controversies reveal about the human condition that persists beyond Victoria’s reign of propriety.

Tangled Souls
Tangled Souls

Author: Jane Dismore

Publisher: The History Press

Published: 2022-02-17

Total Pages: 358

ISBN-13: 0750999861

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Outrageously handsome, witty and clever, Harry Cust was reputed to be one of the great womanisers of the late Victorian era. In 1893, while a Member of Parliament, he caused public scandal by his affair with artist and poet Nina Welby Gregory. When she revealed she was pregnant, horror swept through their circle known as 'the Souls', a cultured, mostly aristocratic group of writers, artists and politicians who also rubbed shoulders with luminaries such as Oscar Wilde and H. G. Wells. For the rest of their lives, Harry and Nina would fight to rebuild their reputations and maintain the marriage they were pressurised to enter. In Tangled Souls, acclaimed biographer Jane Dismore tells the tumultuous story of the romance which threatened to tear apart this distinguished group of friends, revealing pre-war society at its most colourful and most conflicted.

Enter Rumour
Enter Rumour

Author: Robert Bernard

Publisher: Faber & Faber

Published: 2012-01-19

Total Pages: 182

ISBN-13: 0571287859

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The common perception of Britain's Victorian era as one of strict and strait-laced conformity has long been subject to rebuttal, and Robert Bernard Martin's Enter Rumour (1962) was an early and distinguished endeavour in this line. Herein Martin weighs the evidence of four scandalous incidents that aroused great public interest during the first dozen years of Victoria's reign, each of them emanating from 'what the Victorians might have called the higher orders of society.' Martin recounts the sorry tale of Lady Flora Hastings, victim of Court gossip; Lord Eglinton, who tried and failed to revive the medieval tournament; the strange case of the St Cross Hospital Charity; and George Hudson, 'Railway King', whose rise and fall remains a story for our times. Martin examines sources expertly and further explores how three of these scandals were transformed into fiction - by none less than Dickens, Disraeli and Trollope.

Wild Romance
Wild Romance

Author: Chloë Schama

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2011-04-04

Total Pages: 267

ISBN-13: 1408809540

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In 1852, on a steamer from France to England, nineteen-year-old Theresa Longworth met William Charles Yelverton, a soldier destined to become the Viscount of Avonmore. Their flirtation soon blossomed into a clandestine, epistolary affair, and five years later they married secretly in Edinburgh. Then, that same summer, they married again in Dublin - or did they? Separated by circumstance soon after they were wed, Theresa and Charles would never live together as husband and wife. And when Yelverton married another woman, an abandoned Theresa found herself forced to prove the validity of her marriage. Multiple trials ensued, and the press and the public seized upon the scandal and reported its every detail with relish. Wild Romance is the inspiring tale of a woman who never gave up, and who held on to her ideals of independence, dignity and - despite everything - love.

Great Scandals of the Victorians
Great Scandals of the Victorians

Author: Debbie Blake

Publisher: Pen and Sword History

Published: 2024-07-30

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 1399091611

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Great Scandals of the Victorians features a collection of true stories that shocked, outraged, angered or simply amused the Victorians in nineteenth-century Britain. Drawing on a wide variety of original material, seven disreputable stories that dominated the national newspapers for many weeks are explored, including the Great Warwickshire Scandal, a highly publicized divorce case where for the first time in history a Prince of Wales was called to give evidence in court; a ‘baby’ scandal that disrupted Queen Victoria’s court and threatened the monarchy; the sex scandals of the Abode of Love, a mysterious religious cult founded by a defrocked clergyman, Henry James Prince and the sensational trial of Fanny and Stella, two outrageous cross-dressers accused of sodomy. Some scandals, though traumatic for the people involved, produced a positive outcome, such as the scandalous custody battle between Caroline Norton and her husband, which led to the passing of the Custody of Infants Act, granting mothers custody of their children following a divorce, and the case of 13-year-old Eliza Armstrong, sold to a brothel keeper for £5, which caused a major scandal and public outrage, but also led to a change in the law, raising the age of consent from 13 to 16 years.

Sex Scandal
Sex Scandal

Author: William A. Cohen

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 9780822318484

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"Never has the Victorian novel appeared so perverse as it does in these pages - and never has its perversity seemed so fundamental to its accomplishment. By viewing this fiction alongside the most alarming public scandals of the day, Cohen exposes both the scandalousness of this literature and its sexiness." "In narratives ranging from Great Expectations to the Boulton and Park sodomy scandal of 1870-71, from Eliot's and Trollope's novels about scandalous women to Oscar Wilde's writing and his trials for homosexuality. Cohen shows how, in each instance, sexuality appears couched in coded terms. He identifies an assortment of cunning narrative techniques used to insinuate sex into Victorian writing, demonstrating that even as such narratives air the scandalous subject, they emphasize its unspeakable nature. Written with an eye toward the sex scandals that still whet the appetites of consumers of news and novels, this work is suggestive about our own modes of imagining sexuality today and how we arrived at them."--BOOK JACKET.

Victorian Secrets and Scandals
Victorian Secrets and Scandals

Author: Brian Williams

Publisher: Pitkin

Published: 2017-01-09

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781841656861

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What constituted a secret or a scandal in times gone by? This entertaining title in this new series gives an overview of the times and attitudes to ‘secrets’, and what was meant by a ‘scandal’. The series uncovers revelations of infidelity, murder, poisonings and corruption. In the context of Victorian propriety the tales in this book are even more startling. Detailing scandalous celebrities and poor ‘unfortunates’. From those upstairs and down, to those dwelling in the slums, they all sampled the same pleasures and sometimes met the same ghastly fate, and the new defamatory popular press gleefully printed the most lurid tales.