Passing English of the Victorian Era - Mansplained Edition

This book is an absolute treasure., an unsung trove of historical information and an indispensable glimpse into life in the Victorian era.

This new version of the book contains all the original text, including the pages missing or unreadable from other reprints. Most of the obvious errors from the original printing have been cleaned up, including the confusion over 'Braham the terror' and the mysterious floating '47'.

This edition is not a cut and paste job or a collection of inferior scans – it has been lovingly retyped and checked paragraph by paragraph. We've even expanded some of the songs and poems in the original to their full versions, not just a single verse.

The aim of this new edition is to make the book a reference book for the Victorian language in its own right. Read in its original version, the book can seem a little arcane, with reference to events and people that have long been forgotten by anyone but historians, but would be well-known to the educated man of the time. The author assumed that his reader had a fairly classical education and a firm understanding of social and political events, with Victorian history freshly in their minds. His typical reader would be a well-read gentleman with an understanding of Latin and French, and an appreciation for the theatre and good literature. Few modern readers will understand all of the references given in the text of this book, so this edition has been greatly expanded to make reading it as enjoyable and as enlightening as possible, the aim being to enable understanding without having to look up the people or places mentioned.

To this end hundreds of Publisher’s Notes have been inserted into and among the original text. Each note gives a brief explanation of obscure words, translates foreign terms, gives a brief biography of people mentioned, or otherwise provides further information for the modern reader. It is hoped that these additions improve the usability of what is already a classic piece of work.