The Spectacle of Intimacy: A Public Life for the Victorian Family

Chase, Karen and Michael Levenson

ISBN 10: 0691006687 / ISBN 13: 9780691006680

Published by Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2000

About this Item

Inscribed and signed by authors on front free endpaper. Dust jacket has some edge tears and edge folds. Book is used with some minor wear. Some pages have dog-eared (folded) corners for place finding. Tightly bound copy with clean interior having no markings, writing, underlining, or highlighting in margins or text block. Inv. # 13290.

Seller Inventory # 013290

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Spectacle of Intimacy: A Public Life for the Victorian Family
• Publisher: Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ
• Publication Date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0691006687
• ISBN 13: 9780691006680
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: Very Good -
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good -
• Signed: Inscribed by Author(s)

About this title

Synopsis

Love of home life, the intimate moments a family peacefully enjoyed in seclusion, had long been considered a hallmark of English character even before the Victorian era. But the Victorians attached unprecedented importance to domesticity, romanticizing the family in every medium from novels to government reports, to the point where actual families felt anxious and the public developed a fierce appetite for scandal. Here Karen Chase and Michael Levenson explore how intimacy became a spectacle and how this paradox energized Victorian culture between 1835 and 1865. They tell a story of a society continually perfecting the forms of private pleasure and yet forever finding its secrets exposed to view. The friction between the two conditions sparks insightful discussions of authority and sentiment, empire and middle-class politics.


The book recovers neglected episodes of this mid-century drama: the adultery trial of Caroline Norton and the Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne; the Bedchamber Crisis of the young Queen Victoria; the Bloomer craze of the 1850s; and Robert Kerr's influential treatise, celebrating the ideal of the English Gentleman's House. The literary representation of household life--in Dickens, Tennyson, Ellis, and Oliphant, among others--is placed in relation to such public spectacles as the Deceased Wife's Sister Bill of 1848, the controversy over divorce in the years 1854-1857, and the triumphant return of Florence Nightingale from the Crimea. These colorful incidents create a telling new portrait of Victorian family life, one that demands a fundamental rethinking of the relation between public and private spheres.

About the Author

Karen Chase, Professor of English at the University of Virginia, is the author of Eros and Psyche: The Representation of Personality in Charlotte Brontė, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot. She has also written a book-length critical study of Middlemarch.
Michael Levenson is also Professor of English at the University of Virginia. He is the author of A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine 1908-1922 and Modernism and the Fate of Individuality: Character and Form in the Modern English Novel, and is the editor of the Cambridge Companion to Modernism.