Fashionable Acts


Book Description

A vibrant look at changes in British elite culture through the lens of opera-going







Elizabeth


Book Description

Elizabeth Chudleigh was one of the eighteenth century's most colourful characters. Born into impoverished gentility, her beauty, wit and vitality soon earned her a place at the centre of court life. When she married the Duke of Kingston in 1769 she had reached the highest rung of the social ladder. But Elizabeth was carrying a dark secret. In 1744 she had secretly married a naval lieutenant called Augustus Hervey, and after the Duke's death her first marriage was discovered. Bigamy fever swept London society and, in a very public trial, Elizabeth was found guilty. But her strength of character ensured that, even when her friends deserted her, her courage and zest for life did not. In an engaging history of this strong and wilful woman, Gervat shows there was far more to Elizabeth than the caricature villain her contemporaries made her out to be.




Perfection


Book Description

A colourful account of women's health, beauty, and cosmetic aids, from stays and corsets to today's viral trends Victorian women ate arsenic to achieve an ideal, pale complexion, while in the 1790s balloon corsets were all the rage, designed to make the wearer appear pregnant. Women of the eighteenth century applied blood from a black cat's tail to problem skin, while doctors in the 1880s promoted woollen underwear to keep colds at bay. Beautification and the pursuit of health may seem all-consuming today, but their history is long and fantastically varied. Ranging across the last four hundred years, Margarette Lincoln examines women's health and beauty in fascinating detail. Through first-hand accounts and reports of physicians, quacks, and advertising, Lincoln captures women's lived experience of consuming beauty products, and the excitement--and trauma--of adopting the latest fashion trends. Considering everything from body sculpture, diet, and exercise to skin, teeth, and hair, Perfection is a vibrant account of women's body-fashioning--and shows how intimately these practices are related to community and identity throughout history.




British Diaries


Book Description

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1950.




Lady M


Book Description

Lover of George, the Prince of Wales and mother of Queen Victoria's favourite prime minister, Viscountess Melbourne was the most important hostess of the Regency period. It was entirely in character that on her deathbed Elizabeth urged her daughter Emily to be faithful, not to her husband - but to her lover!




The Domestic Servant in Eighteenth-Century England


Book Description

Although the importance of domestic servants in eighteenth-century England has long been recognized, The Domestic Servant in Eighteenth-Century England (first published in 1956, reviving the 1980 edition here) is the first attempt to investigate comprehensively what was the largest occupational group at that time. A wide variety of source material has been used—the diaries, memoirs, letters, magazines, newspapers and literary works, as well as pamphlets and treatises on social and economic problems of the day. A wealth of data has also been drawn from contemporary works on service, servants, and household management. The study is thus able to reconstruct the principal lineaments of the servant ‘class’ and to demonstrate the significance of the group in relation to the society of which it formed a part. Such aspects of the group as its composition, size and structure, the means by which it was recruited, the hopes and ambitions of its members, the nature of their social status, and the conditions under which they lived and laboured are all fully treated. The result of this thorough examination is a cogent work of sociological history.




Index of English Literary Manuscripts


Book Description

Eleven authors are included in this final part of Volume III of the Index, beginning with Laurence Sterne and concluding with Edward Young. It also includes the final cumulative first-line index of all the verse which is described in the manuscript entries or mentioned in the Introductions in Parts 1-4 of Volume III.




The spoken word


Book Description

This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. Discusses the transition from a largely oral to a fundamentally literate society in the early modern period. During this period the spoken word remained of the utmost importance but development of printing and the spread of popular literacy combined to transform the nature of communication. Examines English, Scottish and Welsh Oral culture to provide the first pan-British study of the subject. Covers several aspects of oral culture ranging from tradition, to memories of the civil war, to changing mechanics for the settling of debts. The time-span concentrates on the period 1500-1800 but includes material from outside this time frame, covering a longer chronolgical span than most other studies to show the link between early modern and modern oral and literate cultures.