Dickens's England : life in Victorian times
"The Victorian period was, in Tennyson's phrase, 'an awful moment of transition'. A society largely based on agriculture and traditional values and social hierarchies was transformed into one both stimulated and disordered by unprecedented growth in science, technology, industry, urbanisation and population, and profound questioning of politics, morality and religion. Its writers, expressing the spirit of what Elizabeth Barrett Browning called 'this live, throbbing age, that brawls, cheats, maddens, calculates, aspires', energetically revealed their responses to the times, and the effect they had on them." "Apart from visiting commentators such as the Americans Emerson and Edgar Allan Poe and the German Count von Puckler-Muskau, the writers featured here include Henry Mayhew (on the London poor), Elizabeth Gaskell and Engels (on industrial life and conditions), William Cobbett, Francis Kilvert and Thomas Hardy (on rural life), Trollope (on church life), Huxley and Darwin (on science and evolution), Ruskin and Walter Pater (on art and culture), and, of course, 'The Inimitable', Dickens himself. The volume also includes contemporary illustrations, verse (ballads, popular songs, poems) and concise introductory material."--BOOK JACKET
Criticism, interpretation, etc
284 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
9780750927413, 0750927410
50843695