Victorian World

With an interdisciplinary approach that encompasses political history, the history of ideas, cultural history and art history, The Victorian World offers a sweeping survey of the world in the nineteenth century.

This volume offers a fresh evaluation of Britain and its global presence in the years from the 1830s to the 1900s. It brings together scholars from history, literary studies, art history, historical geography, historical sociology, criminology, economics and the history of law, to explore more than 40 themes central to an understanding of the nature of Victorian society and culture, both in Britain and in the rest of the world. Organised around six core themes – the world order, economy and society, politics, knowledge and belief, and culture – The Victorian World offers thematic essays that consider the interplay of domestic and global dynamics in the formation of Victorian orthodoxies. A further section on ‘Varieties of Victorianism’ offers considerations of the production and reproduction of external versions of Victorian culture, in India, Africa, the United States, the settler colonies and Latin America. These thematic essays are supplemented by a substantial introductory essay, which offers a challenging alternative to traditional interpretations of the chronology and periodisation of the Victorian years.

Lavishly illustrated, vivid and accessible, this volume is invaluable reading for all students and scholars of the nineteenth century.

Martin Hewitt is Professor of History and Head of History, Politics and Philosophy at Manchester Metropolitan University. He was the founding editor of the Journal of Victorian Culture, and Secretary of the British Association for Victorian Studies from 2000 to 2010. He has written extensively on the culture of the nineteenth century city and on Victorian Studies as a field. His publications include An Age of Equipoise? Reassessing mid-Victorian Britain (2000), The Diaries of Samuel Bamford, 1858-61 (2000) and The Emergence of Stability in the Industrial City: Manchester 1832-67 (1996).