Edwardian London Through Japanese Eyes

Edwardian London Through Japanese Eyes

Author: Yoshio Markino

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2011-12-23

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 9004220399

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The Japanese artist Yoshio Markino enjoyed a successful career in early twentieth century London as an artist and author. This book examines his uniquely Asian perspective on British society and culture at a time when Japan eagerly sought engagement with the West.


Motherhood, Respectability and Baby-Farming in Victorian and Edwardian London

Motherhood, Respectability and Baby-Farming in Victorian and Edwardian London

Author: Joshua G. Stuart-Bennett

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-11-10

Total Pages: 167

ISBN-13: 1000642445

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Motherhood, Respectability and Baby-Farming in Victorian and Edwardian London explores a largely obscured marketplace of motherhood that provided ways for women to manage the stigma of illegitimacy and their respectable identities within Victorian and Edwardian society. It focuses on the extent of women’s ‘dirty work’, when maternal problem management was fundamental to the general maintenance of respectability and, by extension, to Empire and Civilisation. Despite its intrigue, history has struggled to understand and represent an uncomfortable but significant artefact of Western modernising society: ‘baby-farming’. During a period when ideologies of respectability and civilisation arguably mattered most, the ‘right’ kind of parenthood – especially motherhood – became paramount. As the ‘wrong’ offspring could jeopardise a woman’s chances of being respectable, a wholesale, informal, and somewhat clandestine marketplace emerged that catered to various maternal difficulties. Within this marketplace, a pregnancy or newborn child who may have compromised a woman’s respectability could be ‘disposed’ of through different means, for a fee. From the Victorian period to the present, the commercialised maternal practices associated with baby-farming have become firmly established within collective consciousness as being synonymous with child murder, female pathology, and ‘infanticide for hire’. This book provides a revised, far more complex, and nuanced narrative history which reveals all that was associated with baby-farming – including all possible outcomes – to be entirely natural, rational, and even necessary products of their time; an understandable outcome of the period’s ‘civilising offensive’. Motherhood, Respectability and Baby-Farming in Victorian and Edwardian London will be of great interest to students and scholars of criminology, sociology, history, and gender studies.


Music in Edwardian London

Music in Edwardian London

Author: Simon McVeigh

Publisher: Boydell & Brewer

Published: 2024-05-21

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 1837651345

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Traversing London's musical culture, this book boldly illuminates the emergence of Edwardian London as a beacon of musical innovation. The dawning of a new century saw London emerge as a hub in a fast-developing global music industry, mirroring Britain's pivotal position between the continent, the Americas and the British Empire. It was a period of expansion, experiment and entrepreneurial energy. Rather than conservative and inward-looking, London was invigorated by new ideas, from pioneering musical comedy and revue to the modernist departures of Debussy and Stravinsky. Meanwhile, Elgar, Holst, Vaughan Williams, and a host of ambitious younger composers sought to reposition British music in a rapidly evolving soundscape. Music was central to society at every level. Just as opulent theatres proliferated in the West End, concert life was revitalised by new symphony orchestras, by the Queen's Hall promenade concerts, and by Sunday concerts at the vast Albert Hall. Through innumerable band and gramophone concerts in the parks, music from Wagner to Irving Berlin became available as never before. The book envisions a burgeoning urban culture through a series of snapshots - daily musical life in all its messy diversity. While tackling themes of cosmopolitanism and nationalism, high and low brows, centres and peripheries, it evokes contemporary voices and characterful individuals to illuminate the period. Challenging issues include the barriers faced by women and people of colour, and attitudes inhibiting the new generation of British composers - not to mention embedded imperialist ideologies reflecting London's precarious position at the centre of Empire. Engagingly written, Simon McVeigh's groundbreaking book reveals the exhilarating transformation of music in Edwardian London, which laid the foundations for the century to come.


London 1870-1914

London 1870-1914

Author: Andrew Saint

Publisher: Lund Humphries Publishers Limited

Published: 2022-02

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 9781848224650

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This book conveys the excitement, diversity and richness of London at a time when the city was arguably at the height of its power, uniqueness and attraction. Balancing the social, the topographical and the visible aspects of the great city, author Andrew Saint uses buildings, architecture, literature and art as a way into understanding social and historical phenomena. While many volumes on Victorian London focus on poverty (an issue which is included in this book), the author here provides a broader picture of life in the city. It is enlivened with a rich line-up of colourful characters, including Baron Albert Grant; Henry Mayers Hyndman and his connections with Karl Marx, William Morris and George Bernard Shaw; John Burns; Octavia Hill; Aubrey Beardsley and the artistic bohemians; Alfred Harmsworth and the Garrett sisters, and includes insightful quotes on London by esteemed authors such as Trollope, Henry James and Rudyard Kipling. Topics covered include: the creation of new neighbourhoods and roads; how the Victorians dealt with their housing crisis; why certain architectural styles were preferred; and the fashion for focusing on certain types of building.


Edwardian Requiem

Edwardian Requiem

Author: Michael Waterhouse

Publisher: Biteback Publishing

Published: 2013-04-23

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 1849545804

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Best remembered for his portentous remark at the outbreak of the Great War, 'The lamps are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime', Sir Edward Grey was a consummate Edwardian politician and one of the most notable statesmen of an era abounding with them. In the first biography of Grey in forty years, Michael Waterhouse vividly depicts a man full of contradictions. Deep in his heart he was a country-loving fisherman, a sensitive naturalist and ornithologist who preferred reading Wordsworth to giving speeches in his constituency and answering questions on foreign policy in the House. Yet it fell to this peace-loving gentleman who rarely left his shores to ask his country to go to war with Germany. Grey spent nearly thirty years in Parliament and only reluctantly became Foreign Secretary of a country that presided over the greatest empire the world had seen since Roman times. Yet it was a position he filled for more than a decade, the longest anyone has ever served continuously in his or any age, firstly under Campbell-Bannerman and then Asquith. During this time he battled relentlessly to protect and advance the interests of his country against the volatile backdrop of a Europe in which the balance of power was tilting wildly. Edwardian Requiem is the remarkable portrait of a complex and enigmatic politician who presided over the twilight of old Europe.


Moral Mapping of Victorian and Edwardian London

Moral Mapping of Victorian and Edwardian London

Author: Thomas R.C. Gibson-Brydon

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 2016-03-01

Total Pages: 164

ISBN-13: 0773598618

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Charles Booth’s seventeen-volume series, The Life and Labour of the People in London (1886–1903), is a staple of late Victorian social history and a monumental work of scholarship. Despite these facts, historians have paid little attention to its section on religious influences. Thomas Gibson-Brydon’s The Moral Mapping of Victorian and Edwardian London seeks to remedy this neglect. Combing through the interviews Booth and his researchers conducted with 1,800 churchmen and women, Gibson-Brydon not only brings to life a cast of characters – from “Jesusist” vicars to Peckham Rye preachers to women drinkers – but also uncovers a city-wide audit of charitable giving and philanthropic practices. Discussing the philosophy of Booth, the genesis of his Religious Influences Series, and the agents and recipients of London charity, this study is a frank testimony on British moral segregation at the turn of the century. In critiquing the idea of working-class solidarity and community-building traditionally portrayed by many leading social and labour historians, Gibson-Brydon displays a meaner, bleaker reality in London’s teeming neighbourhoods. Demonstrating the wealth of untapped information that can be gleaned from Booth’s archives, The Moral Mapping of Victorian and Edwardian London raises new questions about working-class communities, cultures, urbanization, and religion at the height of the British Empire.


The Edwardian House

The Edwardian House

Author: Helen C. Long

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 9780719037290

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Illustrates how Edwardian houses were built, how they were used, and what they meant at the time.


Guilty Money

Guilty Money

Author: Ranald C Michie

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-09-30

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 131731512X

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This is an engaging study of the place occupied by the City of London within British cultural life during the Victorian and Edwardian periods. Michie uses both literary and popular novels to examine socio-economic representations during this period.


The Age of Decadence

The Age of Decadence

Author: Simon Heffer

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2021-04-06

Total Pages: 912

ISBN-13: 1643136712

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A richly detailed history of Britain at its imperial zenith, revealing the simmering tensions and explosive rivalries beneath the opulent surface of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. The popular memory of Britain in the years before the Great War is of a powerful, contented, orderly, and thriving country. Britain commanded a vast empire: she bestrode international commerce. Her citizens were living longer, profiting from civil liberties their grandparents only dreamed of and enjoying an expanding range of comforts and pastimes. The mood of pride and self-confidence can be seen in Edward Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance marches, newsreels of George V’s coronation, and London’s great Edwardian palaces. Yet beneath the surface things were very different In The Age of Decadence, Simon Heffer exposes the contradictions of late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain. He explains how, despite the nation’s massive power, a mismanaged war against the Boers in South Africa created profound doubts about her imperial destiny. He shows how attempts to secure vital social reforms prompted the twentieth century’s gravest constitutional crisis—and coincided with the worst industrial unrest in British history. He describes how politicians who conceded the vote to millions more men disregarded women so utterly that female suffragists’ public protest bordered on terrorism. He depicts a ruling class that fell prey to degeneracy and scandal. He analyses a national psyche that embraced the motor-car, the sensationalist press, and the science fiction of H. G. Wells, but also the nostalgia of A. E. Housman.