Nineteenth-century Britain was a world in play. The Victorians invented the weekend and built hundreds of parks and playgrounds. In the wake of Darwin, they re-imagined nature as a contest for survival. The playful child became a symbol of the future.
A world in play means two things: a world in flux and a world trapped, like Alice in Wonderland, in a ludic microcosm of itself. The book explores the extent to which play (competition, leisure, mischief, luck, festivity, imagination) pervades nineteenth-century literature and culture and forms the foundations of the modern self. Play made the Victorian world cohere and betrayed the illusoriness of that coherence. This is the paradox of modernity. Kaiser gives an account of how certain Victorian misfits--working-class melodramatists of the 1830s, the reclusive Emily Bronte, free spirits Robert Louis Stevenson and John Muir, mischievous Oscar Wilde--struggled to make sense of this new world. In so doing, they discovered the art of modern life.

All is not well in the Ravener household. Arthur shows little interest in his pretty new bride. He disappears after dinner. Elsie waits up for him into the wee hours of the morning. His bedroom door is locked. Arthur prefers the company of Jack, his "bosom friend" from his college days. A Marriage Below Zero (1889) is a tragicomic account of a desperate woman's attempts to uncover the secret at the center of her husband's life. Her quest for the truth will take her to London, New York, and Paris, where she finally discovers what everyone else has suspected all along. "ALAN DALE" was the pen name of Alfred J. Cohen, novelist, playwright, and the controversial drama critic for Hearst newspapers. Born in Birmingham, England in 1861, Dale immigrated to the U.S. to pursue a career in journalism. In the 1890s, he pioneered the "flippant school" of theatrical journalism, becoming the most feared and famous critic in America. His numerous novels include Jonathan's Home (1885), An Eerie He and She (1890), A Moral Busybody (1894), and A Girl Who Wrote (1902). He died in 1928.

Drawing together contributions from scholars in a range of fields within 19th- and 20th-century cultural, literary, and theater studies, this volume provides a thorough and varied overview of the many forms comedy took in the 19th century. Given the earth-shattering cultural changes and political events that mark the decades between 1800 and 1920—shifting borders, socioeconomic upheaval, scientific and technological innovation, the rise of consumerism and mass culture, unprecedented overseas expansion by European and American imperial powers—it is no wonder that people in the Age of Empire turned to comedy in order to make sense of the contradictions that structure modern identity and navigate the sociocultural fault lines within modern life. Comical, humorous, and satirical cultural artifacts from the period capture the anxieties and aspirations, the petty resentments and lofty ideals, of a world buffeted by change. This volume explores the aesthetic, political, and ethical dimensions of comedy in the context of blackface minstrelsy, nonsense poetry, music hall and pantomime, comic almanacs and joke books, journalism, silent film, popular novels, and hygiene magazines, among other phenomena. It also provides a detailed account of contentious debates among social Darwinists, psychoanalysts, and political philosophers about the meaning and significance of comedy and laughter to human life. Each chapter takes a different theme as its focus: form, theory, praxis, identity, the body, politics and power, laughter, and ethics. These eight divergent approaches to comedy in the Age of Empire add up to an extensive, synoptic coverage of the subject.

Although we know him primarily as the charismatic author of Treasure Island (1883), Kidnapped (1886), Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), and A Child's Garden of Verses (1885), Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) began his career as a witty and innovative essayist. This collection includes a selection of fifteen of Stevenson's most poignant, amusing and personal essays on subjects such as deep-sea diving off the coast of Scotland, child's play, death, the medieval poet-thief Francois Villon, surreal San Francisco, insomnia, and Stevenson's quirky enjoyment of "unpleasant places." An Apology for Idlers and Other Essays includes some of Stevenson's most beloved pieces and lesser-known works that have long been out of print. Stevenson called himself "a literary vagrant." His vagabond spirit and self-deprecation transformed the modern essay. Brimming with esoterica and irony, his essays resist the industrious pace of modern life, entrancing the reader with diverting asides, celebrating the lost art of letting our minds wander. "Look at one of your industrious fellows for a moment," Stevenson beseeches us, "he sows hurry and reaps indigestion." In our increasingly fast-paced world, Stevenson's ethic of idleness can feel simultaneously necessary and alien. An Apology for Idlers and Other Essays features an introduction by editor Matthew Kaiser, which provides rich background information on both Stevenson and the titular essay. One of the few scholarly editions of Stevenson's essays, this meticulously annotated collection is well suited for courses on Stevenson, Scottish literature, late-Victorian literature, life writing, and the art of the essay.

This two-volume anthology charts the socioeconomic, cultural, and psychological anxieties that shaped nineteenth-century British literature and popular culture. In a rapidly changing world, in an era marked by unprecedented prosperity and widespread poverty, the Victorians aggressively policed-and clandestinely crossed-increasingly porous and unstable boundaries. Crime and Horror in Victorian Literature and Culture maps the nineteenth-century British preoccupation with phenomena that rattled Western middle-class subjectivity: criminality, monstrosity, sexual transgression, alien cultures, and the breakdown of social norms. Ranging widely, both chronologically and generically, the anthology provides examples of short and long fiction, poetry, plays, government reports, journalism, social criticism, and polemic from 1829 to 1904. It includes writing on criminology, colonialism, racism, prostitution, sexual exploitation, prison, and capital punishment. Other topics include atypical bodies, mental illness, suicide, and homelessness. Volume I is organized around four rubrics: the slum; the criminal mind; power and punishment; and streetwalking. With a wide range of primary source material and extensive annotations, this volume includes texts out of print since the late nineteenth century, as well as Arthur Morrison's slum novel A Child of the Jago, and works by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Browning, Arthur Conan Doyle, Oscar Wilde, Harriet Martineau, Frances Power Cobbe, Marie Corelli, and many others.

This two-volume anthology charts the socioeconomic, cultural, and psychological anxieties that shaped nineteenth-century British literature and popular culture. In a rapidly changing world, in an era marked by unprecedented prosperity and widespread poverty, the Victorians aggressively policed-and clandestinely crossed-increasingly porous and unstable boundaries. Crime and Horror in Victorian Literature and Culture maps the nineteenth-century British preoccupation with phenomena that rattled Western middle-class subjectivity: criminality, monstrosity, sexual transgression, alien cultures, and the breakdown of social norms. Ranging widely, both chronologically and generically, the anthology provides examples of short and long fiction, poetry, plays, government reports, journalism, social criticism, and polemic from 1829 to 1904. It includes writing on criminology, colonialism, racism, prostitution, sexual exploitation, prison, and capital punishment. Other topics include atypical bodies, mental illness, suicide, and homelessness. Volume II is organized around four rubrics: monstrosity; hauntings; alien worlds; and death. With a wide range of primary source material and extensive annotations, this volume includes a new translation of Emile Durkheim's Suicide: A Study in Sociology, Margaret Oliphant's novella A Beleaguered City, and works by Christina Rossetti, H. G. Wells, Elizabeth Gaskell, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Vernon Lee, and many others.

Based on Sacher-Masoch's own erotic adventures in the late 1860s, Venus in Furs is a groundbreaking account of mistress-slave roleplay, fetishism, and mutual seduction. In a health resort in the Carpathian Mountains, bookish Severin falls in love with the rich and beautiful widow Wanda. He opens his heart to her, sharing the secret of his life: he yearns to be the slave of an abusive goddess wrapped in fur, to be beaten and cuckolded. Together they set out to make his fantasy a reality. They travel to Italy in the guise of a tyrannical mistress and her obedient servant. What begins as a game, however, soon turns deadly serious. The boundaries blur between their public and sexual personas. Wanda develops a taste for blood. Venus in Furs is Sacher-Masoch's revolutionary attempt to imagine a world without male privilege. Leopold von Sacher-Masoch was born in 1836 in Lemberg in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. A prolific novelist, playwright, and historian, he is best known for his erotic obsession with being flagellated and humiliated by powerful women. In addition to Venus in Furs (1870), Sacher-Masoch's many works include Don Juan of Kolomea (1865), Female Sultan (1873), and Galician Stories (1875). He died in Lindheim, Germany in 1895.

"""Reader, if you can embody these descriptions, you have Ameer Ali before you; and while you gaze on the picture in your imagination and look on the mild and expressive face you may have fancied, you, as I was, would be the last person to think that he was a professed murderer, and one who in the course of his life has committed upwards of seven hundred murders."" Set in a British prison in Sagar, India in 1832, and inspired by actual events, Confessions of a Thug (1839) is the picaresque tale of north Indian Thug Ameer Ali, who strangled over seven hundred people in his lifetime. Kidnapped as a child by a criminal gang devoted to the Hindu goddess Kali, Ameer Ali recounts how he rose to prominence as a Thug leader, how he fell ignominiously from power, and how he took vengeance on his enemies. Hero and villain, victim and victimizer, Ameer Ali is a unique figure in Victorian literature: a charming mass murderer. The most famous Anglo-Indian novel of the nineteenth century, Confessions of a Thug is a canonical example of British Orientalism, as well as an unsettling invitation to early Victorian readers to identify with an unrepentant predator. Philip Meadows Taylor was born in Liverpool in 1808. Sent to India at fifteen to make his fortune, he became a lieutenant in the Nizam of Hyderabad s Army. Fluent in several Eastern languages, Taylor was named Assistant Superintendent of Police for the southwestern districts in the Nizam s Dominions, becoming responsible, at age eighteen, for the safety of over a million people. His investigations of Thuggee (thagi), a mysterious murder cult that claimed thousands of lives annually, inspired Confessions of a Thug, which drew attention to the inadequacy of native law enforcement in India. The novel was an immediate success. After serving two decades as an imperial administrator, Taylor moved to Dublin, where he devoted his remaining years to writing novels about British India, including Tara: A Mahratta Tale (1863), Ralph Darnell (1865), and Seeta (1872). He died in 1876. "

" Matthew Kaiser is Associate Professor of English at Harvard University. He is the author of The World in Play: Portraits of a Victorian Concept and the editor of five books, including Alan Dale s A Marriage Below Zero, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch s Venus in Furs, and Philip Meadows Taylor s Confessions of a Thug. His work has appeared in a variety of scholarly journals and essay collections.