The Promotion and Constraints of Knowledge: The Changing Structure of Publishing in Victorian Britain

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Raven
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Publishing Industry ◽  
Book Trade ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
The Social ◽  
Financial Infrastructure ◽  
Publishing Houses ◽  
Legal Barriers

This chapter discusses the expansion of publishing and its role in organising knowledge in late Victorian Britain. The greater capitalisation of the industry during the later eighteenth and in the mid and later nineteenth century enabled the expansion of printing and publishing. Book trade profits resulted from the greater diversification of trading practices and financial infrastructure. Prominent publishing houses, like Macmillan, were able to broaden their market appeal to become general trade publishers and dominate the British publishing industry. The chapter also discusses the legislative constraints on publishing and how they erected political and legal barriers to the social extension of knowledge and education during the Victorian period.

scholarly journals John Leech and "Punch" - Tattooing the Story of an Age in a 'Newspaperized World'

Linguaculture ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 63-76
Author(s):  
Simona Catrinel Avarvarei
Keyword(s):  
Henry James ◽  
Literary Fiction ◽  
Modern Concept ◽  
Visual Appearance ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Political Analysis ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Milieu ◽  
Selection Of

As tattoos are both drawing and text that imprint the epidermis in inky arabesques of Delphic symbolism, Punch or The London Charivari acted, for more than one-hundred and sixty-one years (1841-2002) as the sharply witty, bitterly satirical chronicle of its own time. With a weekly circulation of approximately 50,000 – 60,000 issues in the mid-Victorian period, Punch became one of the most influential journalistic witnesses in mid-Victorian Britain, renowned for its unique sense of humour, audacious approach to current social and political matters and, most of all, for an unprecedented mastery of caustic illustrations, in a fresh approach to capture and caricaturise the spirit of the epoch, equally unprecedented in its dynamism and expansion. Although throughout the 1840s the magazine built its popularity more on political analysis than on satirical drawing, ”Punch's Pencillings” would turn the magazine into a vivid fresco, whose inimitable touch and magnetism have come to be osmotically associated with John Leech (1817-1864). With his undeniably remarkable artistic touch he managed not only to define the overall architecture of the magazine, but also to create a new understanding of humorous drawings, introducing the world to the concept of 'cartoon' as we all know it today. This article examines a selection of his three-thousand drawings published in Punch, in an attempt to recompose, through curved charcoal lines, the jigsaw of what Henry James coined as “newspaperized world,” at times when, as Lucy Brown argues, Britain was forging the modern concept of news. It is not only the social, cultural and political milieu that interests us, but also the extratextual implications of a visual appearance and narrative that pervaded the literary scene, as nineteenth-century journalism shared its boundaries with the realm of literary fiction.

Victorian Masculinities, or Military Men of Feeling

2014 ◽  
pp. 210-230
Author(s):  
Holly Furneaux
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Emotional Experience ◽  
Upper Lip ◽  
Private Lives ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Military

This chapter introduces an unlikely figure of ideal Victorian masculinity, the military man of feeling. It uses Thackeray’s exemplary Colonel Newcome, hero of The Newcomes (1853–5), to focus a number of debates central to Victorian ideas of manliness: the composition of the gentleman, the democratization of manly virtue, the social and national roles of army men across ranks. Building upon excellent recent work on the private lives and experience of Victorian men, it examines a mid-nineteenth-century preoccupation with the emotional experience and eloquence of soldiers, and questions the accepted idea that the Victorian period witnessed a decided stiffening of the upper lip. This essay challenges both the abiding stereotype of the emotionally buttoned-up Victorian male, and the idea, expressed in the Victorian period and familiar in our own, that feeling has no place in war.

scholarly journals The Making of a Nineteenth-Century Profession: Shipmasters and the British Shipping Industry

2006 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-118 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valerie Burton
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Structural Changes ◽  
Division Of Labour ◽  
Industrial Society ◽  
Shipping Industry ◽  
Class Division ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Social Divisions ◽  
The Social

Abstract During the second half of the nineteenth century, the occupation of shipmaster was transformed. It was remade as a profession ofandfor the middle class. This development followed from the specialization and division of labour in the shipping industry, and reflected the social divisions of an increasingly class-stratified society. The thesis advanced in this paper assigns a key role in this process to the dynamic of industrial capitalism. The paper argues that class-specific recruitment to the shipmaster's occupation put the values of the professional middle classes to the service of shipowners in the extension of their control over labour. The study examines several facets of this transformation: the state's contribution in the abandonment of mercantilist regulation of maritime labour and the introduction of masters' and mates' certificates of competency in the midnineteenth century; the role of the technological change from sail to steam on the nature and organization of the workforce; the owners' efforts to reduce the shipmaster to a wage employee whose self-interests and self-image made him distinctfrom other workers; and the structural changes in both the shipping industry and the systems of recruitment and training which ensured that the profession of shipmaster would gradually emerge as a middle-class preserve. The remaking of the profession of shipmaster illuminates the larger processes of social differentiation and cultural/ideological production associated with the division and specialization of labour in Victorian Britain. Examining this case in detail advances our understanding of class division in industrial society, particularly as it relates to the important, but singularly neglected, middle-managment professions.

Meeting places: the scientific congress and the host town in the south-west of England, 1836–1877

Urban History ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 246-262 ◽  
Author(s):  
LOUISE MISKELL
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civic Identity ◽  
The South ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
South West ◽  
The Social ◽  
Scientific Congress ◽  
Victorian Science

ABSTRACT:This article presents a case-study of ‘parliaments of science’ and their impact on towns in the south-west of England in the second half of the nineteenth century. These were the week-long annual meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science and other national associations for different branches of knowledge which became a much publicized feature of the social and intellectual calendar of Victorian Britain. With particular reference to Exeter, it is argued that these events were used by towns and cities to assert their status and reputation and to compete with rival urban centres, and it is contended that they should be viewed, along with other cultural initiatives, as an important instrument in the shaping of urban and civic identity in mid-Victorian Britain. The study demonstrates the role of towns as scientific locations in the nineteenth century and suggests that they deserve attention in place-centred studies of Victorian science.

A Christmas Carol: Disability Conceptualised through Empathy and the Philosophy of ‘Technologically Useful Bodies’

2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 176-191
Author(s):  
Ester Vidović
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Models ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Literary Analysis ◽  
Abstract Concepts ◽  
Victorian Era ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Image Schemas ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
The Disabled ◽  
Linguistic Approach

The article explores how two cultural models which were dominant in Great Britain during the Victorian era – the model based on the philosophy of ‘technologically useful bodies’ and the Christian model of empathy – were connected with the understanding of disability. Both cultural models are metaphorically constituted and based on the ‘container’ and ‘up and down’ image schemas respectively. 1 The intersubjective character of cultural models is foregrounded, in particular, in the context of conceiving of abstract concepts such as emotions and attitudes. The issue of disability is addressed from a cognitive linguistic approach to literary analysis while studying the reflections of the two cultural models on the portrayal of the main characters of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol. The studied cultural models appeared to be relatively stable, while their evaluative aspects proved to be subject to historical change. The article provides incentives for further study which could include research on the connectedness between, on one hand, empathy with fictional characters roused by reading Dickens's works and influenced by cultural models dominant during the Victorian period in Britain and, on the other hand, the contemporaries’ actual actions taken to ameliorate the social position of the disabled in Victorian Britain.

The Late-Victorian ‘New Man’ and the Neo-Victorian ‘Neo-Man’

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 105-121
Author(s):  
Margaret D. Stetz
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Gender Relations ◽  
Victorian Fiction ◽  
New Man ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
The New Woman ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Victorian Age

The New Man was a crucial topic of discussion and a continual preoccupation in late-Victorian feminist writing, precisely because he was more often a wished-for presence than an actual one. Nevertheless, creators of neo-Victorian fiction and film repeatedly project him backwards onto the screen of literary history, representing him as having in fact existed in the Victorian age as a complement to the New Woman. What is at stake in retrospectively situating the New Man – or, as I will call him, the ‘Neo-Man’ – in the nineteenth century, through historical fiction? If one impulse behind fictional returns to the Victorian period is nostalgia, then what explains this nostalgia for The Man Who Never Was? This essay will suggest that neo-Victorian works have a didactic interest in transforming present-day readers, especially men, through depictions of the Neo-Man, which broaden the audience's feminist sympathies, queer its notions of gender relations, and alter its definition of masculinity.

Liszt at the Piano: The Impact of Iconography on mid-Nineteenth Century Musicology

2014 ◽  
Vol 55 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 131-144
Author(s):  
Suzanne Marie Francis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Music History ◽  
Collective Identities ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Maximum Benefit ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social ◽  
Iconic Status ◽  
The Impact

By the time of his death in 1827, the image of Beethoven as we recognise him today was firmly fixed in the minds of his contemporaries, and the career of Liszt was beginning to flower into that of the virtuosic performer he would be recognised as by the end of the 1830s. By analysing the seminal artwork Liszt at the Piano of 1840 by Josef Danhauser, we can see how a seemingly unremarkable head-and-shoulders bust of Beethoven in fact holds the key to unlocking the layers of commentary on both Liszt and Beethoven beneath the surface of the image. Taking the analysis by Alessandra Comini as a starting point, this paper will look deeper into the subtle connections discernible between the protagonists of the picture. These reveal how the collective identities of the artist and his painted assembly contribute directly to Beethoven’s already iconic status within music history around 1840 and reflect the reception of Liszt at this time. Set against the background of Romanticism predominant in the social and cultural contexts of the mid 1800s, it becomes apparent that it is no longer enough to look at a picture of a composer or performer in isolation to understand its impact on the construction of an overall identity. Each image must be viewed in relation to those that preceded and came after it to gain the maximum benefit from what it can tell us.

Educational Book and Book Publishing of Moscow Student Community at the Beginning of XX century: Libraries, Publishers, Book Trade

2015 ◽  
pp. 110-116
Author(s):  
A. V. Zaitseva
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Publishing House ◽  
Book Publishing ◽  
Book Trade ◽  
Library Service ◽  
Technical School ◽  
Student Community ◽  
Publishing Houses ◽  
Trading Activities ◽  
The Moment

The article focuses on the libraries and the publishing and book trading organizations established by Moscow students in the early twentieth century. These organizations were founded to make the textbooks more available, cheaper and less deficient than they were at the moment. As the resource of the textbooks, libraries of compatriots’ associations were widespread. At the Moscow University students publishing commissions (parts of benefit societies) printed lecture notes and examination programs. Library, publishing, and trading activities were tightly bound in these societies. In the Moscow Technical School and the Moscow Women High Courses the libraries and publishing houses functioned independently of each other and of economical organizations of students. The students Library of textbooks at the Moscow Agricultural Institute was really unique, as it combined library service with book publishing for a while. Book trade was usually managed by publishers. Besides students organizations within educational institutes, there functioned a cooperative bookstore and a publishing house at the same time, common for all Moscow students. A dream, that never came true, was a Students House and united library collections of textbooks in it. In spite of many complications, the cooperation was successful, and due to it, access to the textbooks was facilitated for many students.

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