This title was first published in 2001. Ruskin said that 1860 marked the beginning of his 'proper work'. This study presents new, historicized readings of important texts and themes from that late period, 1860-1889, discussing in detail works including Unto this Last (1860), the Lectures on Art (1870), Fors Clavigera (1871-1884), and The Bible of Amiens (1880-85), and considering key themes such as Ruskin's politicized regard for Pre-Raphaelitism in the 1870s, and the complex topic of Ruskin and manliness. Claiming new and distinctive importance for this period of Ruskin's work, both in terms of Ruskin's development as a writer and his place in Victorian culture as it moved toward modernity, this book is the first solely devoted to the prolific later years, and draws on much unpublished material.

This title was first published in 2001. Ruskin said that 1860 marked the beginning of his 'proper work'. This study presents new, historicized readings of important texts and themes from that late period, 1860-1889, discussing in detail works including Unto this Last (1860), the Lectures on Art (1870), Fors Clavigera (1871-1884), and The Bible of Amiens (1880-85), and considering key themes such as Ruskin's politicized regard for Pre-Raphaelitism in the 1870s, and the complex topic of Ruskin and manliness. Claiming new and distinctive importance for this period of Ruskin's work, both in terms of Ruskin's development as a writer and his place in Victorian culture as it moved toward modernity, this book is the first solely devoted to the prolific later years, and draws on much unpublished material.

Readers of Victorian non-fictional prose were encouraged to believe that John Ruskin had died in 1860. Not literally, but intellectually and imaginatively. This study of his later life and work, first published in 2001, aims to refresh, revise and overturn certain perceptions about the writer that many readers still hold. This title will be of interest to students of history.

Disrupting the common assumption that the Victorians regarded their eighteenth-century predecessors with little interest or with disdain, the essays in The Victorians and the Eighteenth Century propose a re-examination of these relationships. Together, they expose some of the significant and complex ways in which key aspects and texts of the eighteenth century were situated, read, and transacted within the post-Romantic nineteenth century. Individual essays examine the influence of the work of Pope and the eighteenth-century novelists such as Johnson, Chatterton, and Rousseau on a range of Victorian writers and cultural productions, including Dickens, Eliot, Oliphant, Ruskin, historical fiction, late Victorian art criticism, The English Men of Letters series, and the Oxford English Dictionary. The contributors challenge long-held views about Victorian uses of the past, and offer new insights into how the literature and culture of the eighteenth century helped shape the culture and identity of the nineteenth. This collection of essays by an impressive array of scholars, with a Preface by David Fairer, represents a unique approach to this area of literary history and offers new perspectives on the nature and methodology of 'periodization'. While it is obviously of great interest to students of eighteenth-century and Victorian literature, it will also appeal to readers more broadly concerned with questions of literary influence, periodization, and historiography.

Readers of Victorian non-fictional prose were encouraged to believe that John Ruskin had died in 1860. Not literally, but intellectually and imaginatively. This study of his later life and work, first published in 2001, aims to refresh, revise and overturn certain perceptions about the writer that many readers still hold. This title will be of interest to students of history.

The Victorian era produced artistic achievements, technological inventions and social developments that continue to shape how we live today. This Companion offers authoritative coverage of that period's culture and its contexts in a group of specially commissioned essays reflecting the current state of research in each particular field. Covering topics from music to politics, art to technology, war to domestic arts, journalism to science, the essays address multiple aspects of the Victorian world. The book explores what 'Victorian' has come to mean and how an idea of the 'Victorian' might now be useful to historians of culture. It explores too the many different meanings of 'culture' itself in the nineteenth century and in contemporary scholarship. An invaluable resource for students of literature, history, and interdisciplinary studies, this Companion analyses the nature of nineteenth-century British cultural life and offers searching perspectives on their culture as seen from ours.

Margaret Oliphant Wilson Oliphant (1828-97) had a wide-ranging and prolific literary career that spanned almost fifty years. She wrote some 98 novels, over fifty short stories, twenty-five works of non-fiction, including biographies and historic guides to European cities, and more than three hundred periodical articles. As the self-styled 'general utility woman' for Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, often contributing both fiction and literary reviews to the same issue, she became a major critical voice for her generation. Her influence, usually cast on the side of 'the common reader', was such that it provoked fellow novelists such as Anthony Trollope, Henry James and Thomas Hardy to savage fictional portraits by way of retaliation. The scholarly interest that her work now receives is hampered by difficulty in accessing the full range of her oeuvre: whilst her most famous fictional series, 'The Chronicles of Carlingford', together with a handful of her tales of the supernatural, have gone in and out of print in recent years, the bulk of her fiction and critical writing remains uncollected. This is the most ambitious scholarly critical edition of Oliphant's work ever undertaken.

Margaret Oliphant (1828-97) had a prolific literary career that spanned almost fifty years. She wrote some 98 novels, fifty or more short stories, twenty-five works of non-fiction, including biographies and historic guides to European cities, and more than three hundred periodical articles. This is the most ambitious critical edition of her work.

Disrupting the common assumption that the Victorians regarded their eighteenth-century predecessors with little interest or with disdain, the essays in The Victorians and the Eighteenth Century propose a re-examination of these relationships. Together, they expose some of the significant and complex ways in which key aspects and texts of the eighteenth century were situated, read, and transacted within the post-Romantic nineteenth century. Individual essays examine the influence of the work of Pope and the eighteenth-century novelists such as Johnson, Chatterton, and Rousseau on a range of Victorian writers and cultural productions, including Dickens, Eliot, Oliphant, Ruskin, historical fiction, late Victorian art criticism, The English Men of Letters series, and the Oxford English Dictionary. The contributors challenge long-held views about Victorian uses of the past, and offer new insights into how the literature and culture of the eighteenth century helped shape the culture and identity of the nineteenth. This collection of essays by an impressive array of scholars, with a Preface by David Fairer, represents a unique approach to this area of literary history and offers new perspectives on the nature and methodology of 'periodization'. While it is obviously of great interest to students of eighteenth-century and Victorian literature, it will also appeal to readers more broadly concerned with questions of literary influence, periodization, and historiography.

John Ruskin (1819-1900), one of the leading literary, aesthetic and intellectual figures of the middle and late Victorian period, and a significant influence on writers from Tolstoy to Proust, has established his claim as a major writer of English prose. This collection of essays brings together leading experts from a wide range of disciplines to analyse his ideas in the context of his life and work. Topics include Ruskin's Europe, architecture, technology, autobiography, art, gender, and his rich influence even in the contemporary world. This is the first multi-authored expert collection to assess the totality of Ruskin's achievement and to open up the deep coherence of a troubled but dazzling mind. A chronology and guide to further reading contribute to the usefulness of the volume for students and scholars.

The Victorian era produced artistic achievements, technological inventions and social developments that continue to shape how we live today. This Companion offers authoritative coverage of that period's culture and its contexts in a group of specially commissioned essays reflecting the current state of research in each particular field. Covering topics from music to politics, art to technology, war to domestic arts, journalism to science, the essays address multiple aspects of the Victorian world. The book explores what 'Victorian' has come to mean and how an idea of the 'Victorian' might now be useful to historians of culture. It explores too the many different meanings of 'culture' itself in the nineteenth century and in contemporary scholarship. An invaluable resource for students of literature, history, and interdisciplinary studies, this Companion analyses the nature of nineteenth-century British cultural life and offers searching perspectives on their culture as seen from ours.

Forgetfulness is a book about modern culture and its profound rejection of the past. It traces the emergence in recent history of the idea that what is important in human life and work is what will happen in the future. Francis O'Gorman asks what the absence of history does to our sense of purpose, as well as what belonging both to time and place might mean in cultures without a memory. It is written in praise of the best achievement and deeds of the past, but is also an expression of profound anxiety about what forgetting them is doing to us.

'Love is like any other luxury. You have no right to it unless you can afford it.' It is impossible to be sure who Melmotte is, let alone what exactly he has done. He is, seemingly, a gentleman, and a great financier, who penetrates to the heart of the state, reaching even inside the Houses of Parliament. He draws the English establishment into his circle, including Lady Carbury, a 43 year-old coquette and her son Felix, who is persuaded to invest in a notional railway business. Huge sums of money are at stake, as well as romantic happiness. The Way We Live Now is usually thought Trollope's major work of satire but is better described as his most substantial exploration of a form of crime fiction, where the crimes are both literal and moral. It is a text preoccupied by detection and the unmasking of swindlers. As such it is a narrative of exceptional tension: a novel of rumour, gossip, and misjudgment, where every second counts. For many of Trollope's characters, calamity and exposure are just around the corner.

Forgetfulness is a book about modern culture and its profound rejection of the past. It traces the emergence in recent history of the idea that what is important in human life and work is what will happen in the future. Francis O'Gorman shows how forgetting has been embraced as a requirement for modern existence and how our education, as well as life with fast-moving technology, further disconnects us from our pasts. But he also examines the cultural narratives that urge us to resist our collective amnesia. O'Gorman argues that such narratives, in rich but oblique ways, indicate our guilt about modernity's great unmooring from history. Forgetfulness asks what the absence of history does to our sense of purpose, as well as what belonging both to time and place might mean in cultures without a memory. It is written in praise of the best achievement and deeds of the past, but is also an expression of profound anxiety about what forgetting them is doing to us.

Who, in the name of wonder, had taken the Moonstone out of Miss Rachel's drawer? A celebrated Indian yellow diamond is first stolen from India, then vanishes from a Yorkshire country house. Who took it? And where is it now? A dramatist as well as a novelist, Wilkie Collins gives to each of his narratorsa household servant, a detective, a lawyer, a cloth-eared Evangelical, a dying medical manvibrant identities as they separately tell the part of the story that concerns themselves. One of the great triumphs of nineteenth-century sensation fiction, The Moonstone tells of a mystery that for page after page becomes more, not less inexplicable. Collins's novel of addictions is itself addictive, moving through a sequence of startling revelations towards the final disclosure of the truth. Entranced with double lives, with men and women who only know part of the story, Collins weaves their narratives into a web of suspense. The Moonstone is a text that grows imaginatively out of the secrets that the unconventional Collins was obliged to keep as he wrote the novel.

'The fact is, Mark, that you and I cannot conceive the depth of fraud in such a man as that.' The Reverend Mark Robarts makes a mistake. Drawn into a social set at odds with his clerical responsibilities, he guarantees the debts of an unscrupulous Member of Parliament. He stands to lose his reputation, and his family, future, and home are all in peril. His patroness, the proud and demanding Lady Lufton, is offended and the romantic hopes of Mark's sister Lucy, courted by Lady Lufton's son, are in jeopardy. Pride and ambition are set against love and integrity in a novel that has remained one of Trollope's most popular stories. Set against ecclesiastical events in the Barchester diocese and informed by British political instability after the Crimean War, Trollope's fourth Barchester novel was his first major success. A compelling history of uncertain futures, Framley Parsonage is a vivid exploration of emotional and geographical displacement that grew out of Trollope's own experiences as he returned to England from Ireland in 1859. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

For many years Ruskin has seemed, at best, a conservative thinker on gender roles. At worst, his lecture On Queens' Gardens fromSesame and Lilies was read as alocus classicus of Victorian patriarchal oppression. These essays challenge such assumptions, presenting a wide-ranging revaluation of Ruskin's place in relation to gender, and offering new perspectives on continuing debates on issues of gender - in the Victorian period, and in our own.

There was a power of endurance about her, and a courage that was almost awful. Did Lady Mason forge a codicil to her husband's will, allowing Orley Farm to pass to her son or not? Orley Farm centres on this case of forgery, and the anguish and guilt of Lady Mason. Surrounding this enigmatic woman and her apparent crime are her elderly lover, Sir Peregrine Orme; her principled but thoughtless son, Lucius; and, not least, a group of determined lawyers. Orley Farm contains the plot with which Trollope was most pleased. Drawing on family experience of the loss of an inheritance, the novel tackles the tremendous question of property fraud. The result, as George Orwell observed, is one of the most brilliant novels about a law suit in English fiction. Orley Farm dates from a confident period of its authoras life. It breathes an air of writerly assurance, with Trollope at the height of his competitiveness with Dickens. In this work Trollope claims the Victorian legal novel as his own.

Worrying: A Literary and Cultural History suggests a unique approach to the inner life and its ordinary pains. Francis O'Gorman charts the emergence of our contemporary idea of worry in the Victorian era and its establishment, after the First World War, as a feature of modernity. For some writers between the Wars, worry was the "disease of the age." Worrying examines the everyday kind of worry-the fearful, non-pathological, and usually hidden questioning about uncertain futures. It shows worry to be a natural companion in a world where we try to live by reason and believe we have the right to choose, finding in the worrier a peculiarly contemporary sufferer whose mental life is not only exceptionally familiar, but also deeply strange. Offering an intimately personal account of an all-too-common human experience, and of a word that slips in and out of ordinary conversation so often that it has become invisible in its familiarity, Worrying explores how the modern world has shaped our everyday anxieties.

This volume in the 21st-Century Oxford Authors series offers students and readers a comprehensive selection of the work of Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909). This authoritative edition presents students with a new, more complete, more challenging, but also more credible Swinburne than ever before. This edition presents the first rigorous scholarly edition of a substantial selection of Swinburne's work ever produced. Swinburne was one of the most brilliant and controversial poets of the nineteenth century: a republican; a scorner of established Christianity; a writer of sexual daring; a poet of loss and of love. Yet he is also the most misunderstood poet of the Victorian period. This new edition, with substantial editorial material, presents a new and convincing portrait of a man sharply different from what is usually said of him. Beginning with his unpublished 'Ode to Mazzini' (1857) and ending with his last major critical work on The Age of Shakespeare (1908), this edition offers Swinburne in the round-a man of astonishing consistency whose formal innovations and critical penetration remain persistently engaging as well as provocative. A major introduction explores Swinburne's complicated reaction to the scandal of his first major collection, Poems and Ballads (1866); his life-long commitment to radical voices (Blake, Hugo, Landor, Shelley); his permanent hostility to tyranny; his sense of literature as a living form and of the heroic personality of the artist; his dazzling art criticism and adroit analysis of Renaissance and modern literature; his exceptional elegies for dead friends; his burlesques and richly atmospheric fiction and drama. The edition draws on rich contemporary sources, manuscripts, and the diverse print culture of Swinburne's day, as well as moving through ancient and modern languages that Swinburne wrote with fluency. Explanatory notes and commentary are included to enhance the study, understanding, and enjoyment of these works, and the edition includes an Introduction to the life of Swinburne.

John Ruskin (1819-1900), one of the leading literary, aesthetic and intellectual figures of the middle and late Victorian period, and a significant influence on writers from Tolstoy to Proust, has established his claim as a major writer of English prose. This collection of essays brings together leading experts from a wide range of disciplines to analyse his ideas in the context of his life and work. Topics include Ruskin's Europe, architecture, technology, autobiography, art, gender, and his rich influence even in the contemporary world. This is the first multi-authored expert collection to assess the totality of Ruskin's achievement and to open up the deep coherence of a troubled but dazzling mind. A chronology and guide to further reading contribute to the usefulness of the volume for students and scholars.

"Worrying: A Literary and Cultural History" is a unique approach to the inner life and its ordinary pains. It charts the emergence of our contemporary conception of worry, which originated with the Victorians and became established after the First World War as a feature of modernity. It was, for some writers between the Wars, the 'disease of the age.'"Worrying "considers the kind of worry--fearful, non-pathological, and hidden questioning about uncertain futures--which is every day. It offers a 'short' history of worry as it came into language in the early twentieth century and a 'long' history: an account of worry as the natural bedfellow of a world in which we try to live by reason and believe we have the right to choose. It finds in the worrier a peculiar contemporary sufferer, whose world is not only exceptionally familiar but deeply strange. This book suggests that when we take worry into account, we realize just how little we know of others.Offering an intimately personal account of an all too common human experience, and of a word that slips in and out of ordinary conversation so that it has become invisible in its familiarity, "Worrying" is a book about the sadness of everyday and how the modern world has shaped it.

'For as I look deeper into the mirror, I find myself a more curious person than I had thought.' John Ruskin (1819-1900) was a towering figure of the nineteenth century: an art critic who spoke up for J. M. W. Turner and for the art of the Italian Middle Ages; a social critic whose aspiration for, and disappointment in, the future of Great Britain was expressed in some of the most vibrant prose in the language. Ruskin's incomplete autobiography was written between periods of serious mental illness at the end of his career, and is an eloquent analysis of the guiding powers of his life, both public and private. An elegy for lost places and people, Praeterita recounts Ruskin's intense childhood, his time as an undergraduate at Oxford, and, most of all, his journeys across France, the Alps, and northern Italy. Attentive to the human or divine meaning of everything around him, Praeterita is an astonishing account of revelation. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Victorian Britain offered to the globe an economic structure of unique complexity. The trading nation, at the heart of a great empire, developed the practices of advanced capitalism - currency, banking, investment, money markets, business practices and theory, intellectual property legislation - from which the financial systems of the contemporary world emerged. Cultural forms in Victorian Britain transacted with high capitalism in a variety of ways but literary critics interested in economics have traditionally been preoccupied either with writers' hostility to industrial capitalism in terms of its shaping of class, or with the development of consumerism. Victorian Literature and Finance is the first extended study to take seriously the relationships between literary forms and those more complex discourses of Victorian high finance. These essays move beyond the examination of literature that was merely impatient with the perceived consequences of capitalism to analyse creative relationships between culture and economic structures. Considering such topics as the nature of currency, women and the culture of investment, the profits of a modern media age, the dramatization of risk on the Victorian stage, the practice of realism in relation to business theory, the culture of speculation at the end of the century, and arguments about the uncomfortable relationship between literary and financial capital, Victorian Literature and Finance sets new terms for understanding and theorizing the relationship between high finance and literary writing in the nineteenth century.

For many years Ruskin has seemed, at best, a conservative thinker on gender roles. At worst, his lecture On Queens' Gardens from Sesame and Lilies was read as a locus classicus of Victorian patriarchal oppression. These essays challenge such assumptions, presenting a wide-ranging revaluation of Ruskin's place in relation to gender, and offering new perspectives on continuing debates on issues of gender - in the Victorian period, and in our own.