Although 150 years have passed since Princess Victoria became Queen, the first twelve months of her reign remain relatively unexplored. In the first literary history to focus specifically on the year 1837-1838, Richard L. Stein examines a wide variety of cultural products--in visual art and architecture, statistics and maps, scientific writing and popular journalism, and literature itself--to reconstruct the thought and experience of England in "Victoria's Year." Surveying such figures as Carlyle, Cruikshank, Darwin, Dickens, Martineau, Ruskin, Tennyson, and Turner, this wide-ranging volume examines the connections and discontinuities within the values, beliefs, and modes of representation of this brief cultural moment, describing how various arts struggled to produce new, legible, and stable signs to reflect unprecedented modes of experience in a rapidly changing culture. Stein shows how this quest for legibility and certainty was often undermined from inside and out, and the
ways in which "the order of things," in Foucault's sense of the phrase, was constantly being reasserted or broken down. Revealing how this particular historical moment was understood by those who lived it, and how an array of cultural products served to mediate the most radically new and unfamiliar aspects of the age, Victoria's Year offers new insights into the process that created the myth of Victorianism.
Industry Reviews
"Stein wonders 'to what extent...the first year or so of the new reign' had a 'definite character of its own.' He explores this interesting question through analyzing a wide range of materials: the arts and architecture, statistics and maps, scientific writing and popular journalism, and, of course, literature. Carlyle, Darwin, Dickens, Ruskin, and Tennyson figure prominently, all the more interestingly because of Stein's ability to connect their works to
those of lesser-known figures. This intellectually absorbing book offers a fresh, illuminating perspective on the beginning of the Victorian period."--Library Journal
"An important book--subtle, wide-ranging, perceptive--and a reader's delight."--Modern Philology
"A compelling depiction of a rich culture brinking on further riches."--ALA Booklist
"One of the pleasures of Victoria's Year is its eye-swivelling unpredictability....[It] succeeds as well as any bok now could in answering its initial questions: 'What was the feel of things--of the physical world, of mental and moral life?'....[A] delightful book."--Times Literary Supplement
"Offers readers an informed sense of what was going on, what it might have felt like, in that era of great change, to read and write and think....Victoria's Year raises complex questions about early Victorian culture and about the nature of historical inquiry; it blends a thorough immersion in primary materials with a sophisticated understanding of both modern scholarship and modern literary theory. Richard Stein should be complimented, not only for
his intellectual rigor but also for his personal engagement, which makes his book as readable as it is enlightening."--Nineteenth-Century Literature
"Skillfully interweaves literary and popular culture by topically organizing the book around such motifs as 'the stolen child'...and such philosophical issues as the epistemology of travel....His interpretations of visual materials are insightful as are his examinations of early Victorian scientific works. His writing is lucid and elegant. Recommended for college and university libraries."--Choice
"Present[s] enlightening reviews and interpretations of other scholars' work that make them notable and useful additions to the study of nineteenth-century culture."--Nineteenth Century Prose
"Victoria's Year makes a serious contribution to our understanding of Victorian England and of Martineau and many of the other relatively forgotten, but still important, figures he discusses."--George Landow, Brown University
