The Victorians and Germany


Book Description

Of all the parts of the world to interest the Victorians, Germany was among the most important. Though less well known today, partly in consequence of the events of the twentieth century, German influences in Britain were strong, and their legacy substantial. This book charts the emergence, development and course of the Victorian interest in Germany. Its multidisciplinary approach, which binds together for the first time the latest research conducted in a variety of areas, shows how a discourse developed in Britain regarding Germany and the Germans which spilled over from one area of life to another, and included some of the most prominent figures in Victorian life. It provides a framework for understanding the causes of the Victorian fascination with Germany, and argues forcefully that the roots of this lay in the processes of modernisation taking place in each place respectively. It also points to the deep impact this had upon the course of British history and reveals how it prepared the ground for the future direction of Anglo-German relations.




Inventing the Victorians


Book Description

"Suppose that everything we think we know about the Victorians is wrong." So begins Inventing the Victorians by Matthew Sweet, a compact and mind-bending whirlwind tour through the soul of the nineteenth century, and a round debunking of our assumptions about it. The Victorians have been victims of the "the enormous condescension of posterity," in the historian E. P. Thompson's phrase. Locked in the drawing room, theirs was an age when, supposedly, existence was stultifying, dank, and over-furnished, and when behavior conformed so rigorously to proprieties that the repressed results put Freud into business. We think we have the Victorians pegged--as self-righteous, imperialist, racist, materialist, hypocritical and, worst of all, earnest. Oh how wrong we are, argues Matthew Sweet in this highly entertaining, provocative, and illuminating look at our great, and great-great, grandparents. One hundred years after Queen Victoria's death, Sweet forces us to think again about her century, entombed in our minds by Dickens, the Elephant Man, Sweeney Todd, and by images of unfettered capitalism and grinding poverty. Sweet believes not only that we're wrong about the Victorians but profoundly indebted to them. In ways we have been slow to acknowledge, their age and our own remain closely intertwined. The Victorians invented the theme park, the shopping mall, the movies, the penny arcade, the roller coaster, the crime novel, and the sensational newspaper story. Sweet also argues that our twenty-first century smugness about how far we have evolved is misplaced. The Victorians were less racist than we are, less religious, less violent, and less intolerant. Far from being an outcast, Oscar Wilde was a fairly typical Victorian man; the love that dared not speak its name was declared itself fairly openly. In 1868 the first international cricket match was played between an English team and an Australian team composed entirely of aborigines. The Victorians loved sensation, novelty, scandal, weekend getaways, and the latest conveniences (by 1869, there were image-capable telegraphs; in 1873 a store had a machine that dispensed milk to after-hours' shoppers). Does all this sound familiar? As Sweet proves in this fascinating, eye-opening book, the reflection we find in the mirror of the nineteenth century is our own. We inhabit buildings built by the Victorians; some of us use their sewer system and ride on the railways they built. We dismiss them because they are the age against whom we have defined our own. In brilliant style, Inventing the Victorians shows how much we have been missing.




Victorian Women Writers and the Other Germany


Book Description

Shedding new light on the alternative, emancipatory Germany discovered and written about by progressive women writers during the long nineteenth century, this illuminating study uncovers a country that offered a degree of freedom and intellectual agency unheard of in England. Opening with the striking account of Anna Jameson and her friendship with Ottilie von Goethe, Linda K. Hughes shows how cultural differences spurred ten writers' advocacy of progressive ideas and provided fresh materials for publishing careers. Alongside well-known writers – Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Michael Field, Elizabeth von Arnim, and Vernon Lee – this study sheds light on the lesser-known writers Mary and Anna Mary Howitt, Jessie Fothergill, and the important Anglo-Jewish lesbian writer Amy Levy. Armed with their knowledge of the German language, each of these women championed an extraordinarily productive openness to cultural exchange and, by approaching Germany through a female lens, imported an alternative, 'other' Germany into English letters.




Anglo-German Linguistic Relations


Book Description

This is a collection of papers presented at the conference «Anglo-German Linguistic Relations», held at Queen Mary, University of London in November 2007. The papers cover a wide variety of topics about the relationship between the English and German languages or relate to cultural and literary contacts between English-speaking and German-speaking regions. Individual papers discuss Anglo-German linguistic interplay and affinities both as contemporary phenomena and from a historical perspective. Themes include codification, translation and discourse production from the 17th century to the Second World War; shared metaphors in English and German; political propaganda in English and German; and authorial positioning and perspective in a selection of autobiographical and literary works.




Disability and the Victorians


Book Description

Disability and the Victorians investigates the attitudes of Victorians towards people with impairments, illustrates how these influenced the interventions they introduced to support such people and considers the legacies they left behind by their actions and perspectives. A range of impairments are addressed in a variety of contexts.




After the Victorians


Book Description

Blending military, political, social, and cultural history of the most dramatic kind, distinguished historian Wilson offers an absorbing portrait of the decline of one of the world's great powers. The result is a fresh account of the birth pangs of the modern world, as well as a timely analysis of imperialism and its discontents.




The Victorians


Book Description

A revisionist panorama of the nineteenth century examines the era's material and spiritual changes in the wake of emerging British capitalism and imperialism.




Crossing Borders in Victorian Travel


Book Description

How did Victorian travellers define and challenge the notion of Empire? How did the multiple forms of Victorian travel literature, such as fiction, travel accounts, newspapers, and poetry, shape perceptions of imperial and national spaces, in the British context and beyond? This collection examines how, in the Victorian era, space and empire were shaped around the notion of boundaries, by travel narratives and practices, and from a variety of methodological and critical perspectives. From the travel writings of artists and polymaths such as Carmen Sylva and Richard Burton, to a reassessment of Rudyard Kipling’s, H. G. Wells’s and Julia Pardoe’s cross-cultural and cross-gender travels, this collection assesses a broad range of canonical and lesser-studied Victorian travel texts and genres, and evaluates the representation of empires, nations, and individual identity in travel accounts covering Europe, Asia, Africa and Britain.




Friedrich Max Müller and the Role of Philology in Victorian Thought


Book Description

The German comparative philologist Friedrich Max Müller (1823-1900) was one of the most influential scholars in Victorian Britain. Müller travelled to Britain in 1846 in order to prepare a translation of the Rig Veda. This research visit would turn into a lifelong stay after Müller was appointed as Taylor Professor of Modern Languages at Oxford in 1854. Müller’s activities in this position would exert a profound influence on British intellectual life during the second half of the nineteenth-century: his book-length essay on Comparative Mythology (1856) inspired evolutionist thinkers such as Herbert Spencer and Edward Burnett Tylor and made philology into one of the master sciences at mid-century; his debates with Charles Darwin and his followers on the origin of language constituted a significant component of religiously informed reactions to Darwin’s ideas about human descent; his arguments concerning the interdependence of language and thought influenced fields such as psychology, neurology, paediatrics and education until the end of the nineteenth century; his theories concerning an ‘Aryan’ language that purportedly predated Sanskrit and ancient Greek led to controversial debates on the relations between language, religion and race in the Indian subcontinent and beyond; and his monumental 50-volume edition of the Sacred Books of the East helped to lay the foundations for the study of comparative religion. Müller’s interlocutors and readers included people as various as Alexander von Humboldt, Darwin, George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ferdinand de Saussure, Ernst Cassirer, Mohandas K. Gandhi and Jarwaharlal Nehru. This volume offers the most comprehensive and interdisciplinary assessment of Müller's career to date. Arising from a conference held at the German Historical Institute in London in 2015, it brings together papers by an international group of experts in German studies, German and British history, linguistics, philosophy, English literary studies, and religious studies in order to examine the many facets of Müller’s scholarship. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Publications of the English Goethe Society.




The Vikings and the Victorians


Book Description

Andrew Wawn draws together a wide range of source material, including novels, poems, lectures and periodicals, to give a comprehensive account of the construction and translation of the Viking age in 19th century Britain.