Soldier, hero, and politician, the Duke of Wellington is one of the best-known figures of nineteenth-century England. From his victory at Waterloo over Napoleon in 1815, he rose to become prime minister of his country. But Peter Sinnema finds equal fascination in Victorian England's response to the Duke's death. The Wake of Wellington considers Wellington's spectacular funeral pageant in the fall of 1852--an unprecedented event that attracted one and a half million spectators to London--as a threshold event against which the life of the soldier-hero and High-Tory statesman could be re-viewed and represented. Canvassing a profuse and dramatically proliferating Wellingtoniana, Sinnema examines the various assumptions behind, and implications of, the Times's celebrated claim that the Irish-born Wellington "was the very type and model of an Englishman." The dead duke, as Sinnema demonstrates, was repeatedly caught up in interpretive practices that stressed the quasi-symbolic relations between hero and nation. The Wake of Wellington provides a unique view of how in death Wellington and his career were promoted as the consummation of a national destiny intimately bound up with Englishness itself, and with what it meant to be English at midcentury.

Originally published in 1998, Dynamics of the Pictured Page provides a critical study of the world's first regularly illustrated newspaper, the Illustrated London News, founded by Herbert Ingram in 1842. Focusing on the first decade of this enormously influential weekly, this book situates the ILN within the publishing history of periodicals, arguing not only for a better understanding of those new modes of production engendered by an illustrated newspaper, but also for the need to theorize the relations between engraved images and printed text that constituted the ILN, which advertised itself as an unprecedented 'marriage' between art and literature. Through a series of interpretive interventions that focus on categories that would have had especially powerful reverberations for Victorian readers (for example, the home, the railway, the public funeral, and serialized literature), this book traces the newspaper's complex strategies of appeal to a middle-class English readership. This book will appeal to students of nineteenth-century literature and history (especially those with an interest in publishing history and the history of the press), as well as to Victorian studies scholars.

Originally published in 1998, Dynamics of the Pictured Page provides a critical study of the world's first regularly illustrated newspaper, the Illustrated London News, founded by Herbert Ingram in 1842. Focusing on the first decade of this enormously influential weekly, this book situates the ILN within the publishing history of periodicals, arguing not only for a better understanding of those new modes of production engendered by an illustrated newspaper, but also for the need to theorize the relations between engraved images and printed text that constituted the ILN, which advertised itself as an unprecedented 'marriage' between art and literature. Through a series of interpretive interventions that focus on categories that would have had especially powerful reverberations for Victorian readers (for example, the home, the railway, the public funeral, and serialized literature), this book traces the newspaper's complex strategies of appeal to a middle-class English readership. This book will appeal to students of nineteenth-century literature and history (especially those with an interest in publishing history and the history of the press), as well as to Victorian studies scholars.

Soldier, hero, and politician, the Duke of Wellington is one of the best-known figures of nineteenth-century England. From his victory at Waterloo over Napoleon in 1815, he rose to become prime minister of his country. But Peter Sinnema finds equal fascination in Victorian England's response to the duke's death. The Wake of Wellington considers Wellington's spectacular funeral pageant in the fall of 1852-an unprecedented event that attracted one and a half million spectators to London-as a threshold event against which the life of the soldier-hero and High Tory statesman could be re-viewed and represented. Canvassing a profuse and dramatically proliferating Wellingtoniana, Sinnema examines the various assumptions behind, and implications of, the Times's celebrated claim that the Irish-born Wellington "was the very type and model of an Englishman." The dead duke, as Sinnema demonstrates, was repeatedly caught up in interpretive practices that stressed the quasi-symbolic relations between hero and nation. The Wake of Wellington provides a unique view of how in death Wellington and his career were promoted as the consummation of a national destiny intimately bound up with Englishness itself, and with what it meant to be English at midcentury.

'The spirit of self-help is the root of all genuine growth in the individual; and, exhibited in the lives of many, it constitutes the true source of national vigour and strength.' A bestseller immediately after its publication in 1859, Self-Help propelled its author to fame and rapidly became one of Victorian Britain's most important statements on the allied virtues of hard work, thrift, and perseverance. Interpreted by some as a paean to personal avarice, Smiles's most celebrated book is in fact a practical and engaging tribute to the working- and lower-middle classes, in whom he identified the capacity for self-improvement and for whom he tirelessly advocated the right of social advancement. Part practical guide, part proverbial testament, part secular hagiography, this literary hybrid turns biography into an inspirational medium that awakens readers to their own potential and instils the desire to succeed. Smiles's book is the precursor of today's motivational and self-help literature, although its vision is significantly more cosmopolitan than that of most books in a still-expanding genre. This edition includes a fully indexed glossary to the more than 750 names discussed by Smiles. 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.

Late nineteenth-century Britain experienced an unprecedented explosion of visual print culture and a simultaneous rise in literacy across social classes. New printing technologies facilitated quick and cheap dissemination of images—illustrated books, periodicals, cartoons, comics, and ephemera—to a mass readership. This Victorian visual turn prefigured the present-day impact of the Internet on how images are produced and shared, both driving and reflecting the visual culture of its time. From this starting point, Drawing on the Victorians sets out to explore the relationship between Victorian graphic texts and today’s steampunk, manga, and other neo-Victorian genres that emulate and reinterpret their predecessors. Neo-Victorianism is a flourishing worldwide phenomenon, but one whose relationship with the texts from which it takes its inspiration remains underexplored. In this collection, scholars from literary studies, cultural studies, and art history consider contemporary works—Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Moto Naoko’s Lady Victorian, and Edward Gorey’s Gashlycrumb Tinies, among others—alongside their antecedents, from Punch’s 1897 Jubilee issue to Alice in Wonderland and more. They build on previous work on neo-Victorianism to affirm that the past not only influences but converses with the present. Contributors: Christine Ferguson, Kate Flint, Anna Maria Jones, Linda K. Hughes, Heidi Kaufman, Brian Maidment, Rebecca N. Mitchell, Jennifer Phegley, Monika Pietrzak-Franger, Peter W. Sinnema, Jessica Straley