Tag: Book Reviews

Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy: The Makings of GKC, 1874-1908 by William Oddie, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008, ix + 401 pp., £25 (hardback) ISBN 978-0-19-955165-1 Born in 1874, Gilbert Keith Chesterton is an important figure for those interested in the varied and cosmopolitan literary-cultural life of London at the end of the nineteenth century. At least he should be seen as an important figure. His development as an influential thinker and writer was shaped by engagement with a

Aristocratic Women and the Literary Nation, 1832-1867 by Muireann O’Cinneide, Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, vii + 241 pp., ₤45 (hardback), ISBN 0-230-54670-6 What would Victorian fiction be without the aristocratic woman? Everyone loves to hate her. Although more trendy recent criticism has spotlighted the wild colonial woman as foil for the Victorian heroine, the aristocratic woman has a longer villainous pedigree. As far back as Richardson’s Pamela, she did her best to wreck the heroine’s happiness. Beautiful, willful, selfish,

Victorian Literature and Finance, edited by Francis O’Gorman, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, xii + 201 pp., £56 (hardback), ISBN 978 0 19 928192 3 At the end of nearly every year from 1998 through 2006, a period encompassing the swelling and bursting of one speculative bubble and the inflation of another, the New York Times awarded its Augustus Melmotte Memorial Prizes for particularly memorable “financial flubs and feats” from the preceding twelve months. The “feats” tend toward the jaw-dropping.

Colonies, Cults and Evolution: Literature, Science and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Writing by David Amigoni, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007, xi + 237 pp., £50 (hardback) ISBN 978 0 521 88458 7 The interdisciplinary relations between Victorian literature and evolutionary science have perhaps rarely commanded more interest and attention than now, in a year which sees the bicentenary of Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species. That David Amigoni’s book offers a fresh and

Gladstone and Dante by Anne Isba (Suffolk: Royal Historical Society Studies in History New Series Volume 49, Boydell and Brewer, 2006), xi + 155 pp, £45 (hardback), ISBN 086 193 2773 Reading Gladstone by Ruth Clayton Windscheffel, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, xvi + 330 pp., illustrated, £55 (hardback), ISBN 978 0 230 00765 9. In his second-hand copy of Erasmus’s Colloquia, William Ewart Gladstone found the previous owner’s inscription: ‘Samuel Powell Purser bought this book on the 11th day of

The Poetry of Chartism: Aesthetics, Politics, History by Michael Sanders, Cambridge University Press, 2009, 299 pp., £50 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-521-89918-5 Michael Sanders announced that The Poetry of Chartism was in the pipeline in a full-page article in The Guardian in March 2007. This was tremendous publicity for the poets of Chartism, even if the article gave the somewhat unfortunate impression that Sanders was a solitary explorer of the unfathomed caverns of Chartist verse. As Sanders acknowledges in his second chapter,