The Diaries of Hannah Cullwick, Victorian Maidservant
The Diaries of Hannah Cullwick, Victorian Maidservant

Author: Hannah Cullwick

Publisher:

Published: 1984

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Hannah Cullwick (1833-1909) worked all her life as a maidservant, scullion, and pot-girl. In 1854 she met Arthur Munby, 'man of two worlds, ' upper-class author and poet, with a lifelong obsession for lower-class women. And so began their strange and secret romance of eighteen years and marriage of thiry-six, lived largely apart. Hannah's diaries, written on Munby's suggestion, offer an obsorbing account of life 'below stairs' in Victorian England. But they reveal, too, a woman of extraordinary independence of will, whose chosen life of drudgery gave her the freedom not to 'play the Lady, ' as Munby demanded. Rescued from obscurity, these diaries are a remarkable historical and personal document.

Watching Hannah
Watching Hannah

Author: Barry Reay

Publisher: Reaktion Books

Published: 2002

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13:

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Arthur Munby (1828-1910) was a Victorian gentleman from a respected family of Yorkshire lawyers. He left behind diaries that record his life-long obsession with working-class Victorian women, whom he interviewed, photographed and wrote about. This obsession led to his relationship with, and eventual secret marriage to, his maidservant Hannah Cullwick. Working women fascinated Munby because they disrupted his Victorian ideal of femininity: their bodies were altered by physical exertion and dirt, and they were also often deformed by disease. Drawing not only on the diaries but also on a vast, untapped archive of documents, photographs, poems and sketches, Watching Hannah is far more than an account of a compulsive observer of working women and a fetishist of hard-working female hands, however. The author analyzes Munby's obsessions in relation to changing definitions of gender, sexual identity and class to reveal wider male preoccupations with femininity, the body, deformity, masculinity and - most of all - sexuality, at a pivotal point in European history.

Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy
Victorian Servants, Class, and the Politics of Literacy

Author: Jean Fernandez

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2009-09-10

Total Pages: 395

ISBN-13: 1135202109

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In this volume, Fernandez brings the under-examined figure of the Victorian servant out of obscurity in order to tell the story of his or her encounter with literacy, as imagined and represented in nineteenth-century fiction, autobiography, pamphlets and diaries. A vast body of writing is uncovered on the management of servant literacy in Victorian periodicals, advice manuals, cartoons, sermons, books on household management, and pornography, thereby revealing that the domestic sphere was a crucial war zone in the battle over mass literacy. By attending to how fictional and nonfictional texts of the age feature literate servant narrators, she demonstrates how the issue of servant literacy as a cultural phenomenon has profound implications for our understanding of the nexus between class, mass literacy, voice and narrative power in the nineteenth century. The study reads canonical fiction by Mary Wollstonecraft, Emily Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, Wilkie Collins, and R.L. Stevenson alongside popular detective fiction by Catherine Crowe, the Diaries of Hannah Cullwick, and best-selling pamphlets of the age, while introducing to Victorian scholarship hitherto little known or unknown servant autobiographies that address life history as an engagement with literacy.

Imperial Leather
Imperial Leather

Author: Anne Mcclintock

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-10-01

Total Pages: 544

ISBN-13: 1135209103

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Imperial Leather chronicles the dangerous liaisons between gender, race and class that shaped British imperialism and its bloody dismantling. Spanning the century between Victorian Britain and the current struggle for power in South Africa, the book takes up the complex relationships between race and sexuality, fetishism and money, gender and violence, domesticity and the imperial market, and the gendering of nationalism within the zones of imperial and anti-imperial power.

Class Fictions
Class Fictions

Author: Pamela Fox

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 1994-11-21

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 9780822315421

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Many recent discussions of working-class culture in literary and cultural studies have tended to present an oversimplified view of resistance. In this groundbreaking work, Pamela Fox offers a far more complex theory of working-class identity, particularly as reflected in British novels of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through the concept of class shame, she produces a model of working-class subjectivity that understands resistance in a more accurate and useful way—as a complicated kind of refusal, directed at both dominated and dominant culture. With a focus on certain classics in the working-class literary "canon," such as The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and Love on the Dole, as well as lesser-known texts by working-class women, Fox uncovers the anxieties that underlie representations of class and consciousness. Shame repeatedly emerges as a powerful counterforce in these works, continually unsettling the surface narrative of protest to reveal an ambivalent relation toward the working-class identities the novels apparently champion. Class Fictions offers an equally rigorous analysis of cultural studies itself, which has historically sought to defend and value the radical difference of working-class culture. Fox also brings to her analysis a strong feminist perspective that devotes considerable attention to the often overlooked role of gender in working-class fiction. She demonstrates that working-class novels not only expose master narratives of middle-class culture that must be resisted, but that they also reveal to us a need to create counter narratives or formulas of working-class life. In doing so, this book provides a more subtle sense of the role of resistance in working class culture. While of interest to scholars of Victorian and working-class fiction, Pamela Fox’s argument has far-reaching implications for the way literary and cultural studies will be defined and practiced.

Love and Dirt
Love and Dirt

Author: Diane Atkinson

Publisher: Pan Macmillan

Published: 2004-09-18

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 9780333780718

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

On May 26, 1854, Arthur Munby met Hannah Cullwick. He was a solicitor for the Ecclesiastical Commission, and he loathed his job. She was a servant, a maid of all work. This first encounter marked the beginning of a relationship which was to endure for more than fifty years. Drawing on their diaries, letters, and Munby's photographs of Hannah, Diane Atkinson paints a picture of the wilder shores of Victorian sexuality. Love and Dirt is the story of a deep and lasting love between two extraordinary individuals who breached the barriers of class and endangered their vastly different stations in Victorian society.

Victorian Diaries
Victorian Diaries

Author: Heather Creaton

Publisher: Miller/Mitchell Beazley

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 144

ISBN-13: 9781840003598

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A collection of ordinary diary entries from a cross section of classes and lifestyles showing the essentials of the Victorians' daily reality: their family concerns, medical conditions and education. Included in the book are entries from an actor, a schoolboy, a Countess and an engraver.

Inside the Victorian Home
Inside the Victorian Home

Author: Judith Flanders

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 560

ISBN-13: 9780393052091

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A rich selection from diaries, letters, advice books, magazines, and paintings creates a rooms-by-room portrait of Victorian life--from childbirth in the master bedroom to separate gender domains in the drawing room and parlor.

What's Left?
What's Left?

Author: Julia Swindells

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-12-07

Total Pages: 222

ISBN-13: 0429817932

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

First published in 1990. What had been left out of Left thought? What had allowed the Left to substitute nostalgia for programme and action, and to continue to address itself exclusively to labouring men, despite insistent demands for inclusion from others – notably women – who recognised themselves as belonging to the Left? What’s Left?, a feminist challenge to the male-dominated ideology of the Labour Party, took shape under the pressure of two crucial events: the third successive election defeat of Labour by the Conservative Party, and the death of Raymond Williams. Swindells and Jardine analyse the difficulties the Left had including women in its account of class, to clarify general problems in British Left thought. They conclude that there was a serious and widely-perceived discrepancy between the Labour Party’s model of working-class consciousness and the experiences of the contemporary workforce as a whole. An important exploration of the intellectual history of the Labour Movement, What’s Left? looks critically at the Left from within the Left. It will be fascinating reading for students of cultural studies, history, politics and women’s studies.

The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature
The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature

Author: Dennis Denisoff

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-11-11

Total Pages: 753

ISBN-13: 0429018177

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature offers 45 chapters by leading international scholars working with the most dynamic and influential political, cultural, and theoretical issues addressing Victorian literature today. Scholars and students will find this collection both useful and inspiring. Rigorously engaged with current scholarship that is both historically sensitive and theoretically informed, the Routledge Companion places the genres of the novel, poetry, and drama and issues of gender, social class, and race in conversation with subjects like ecology, colonialism, the Gothic, digital humanities, sexualities, disability, material culture, and animal studies. This guide is aimed at scholars who want to know the most significant critical approaches in Victorian studies, often written by the very scholars who helped found those fields. It addresses major theoretical movements such as narrative theory, formalism, historicism, and economic theory, as well as Victorian models of subjects such as anthropology, cognitive science, and religion. With its lists of key works, rich cross-referencing, extensive bibliographies, and explications of scholarly trajectories, the book is a crucial resource for graduate students and advanced undergraduates, while offering invaluable support to more seasoned scholars.