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First published in 1964, Alison Adburgham's "Shops and Shopping, 1880-1914: Where and in What Matter the Well-Dressed Englishwoman Bought Her Clothes" is a rightly celebrated and groundbreaking contribution to the social history of retail selling. Adburgham charts the Victorian origins and subsequent ascent of the 'department store', a mode of shopping that offered the customer an enviable selection of wares, a fixed price, and a recreational browsing experience that began with goods placed temptingly behind plate-glass and continued through shops carefully arranged so that customers might wander. These great emporia changed the labours and livelihoods of craftspeople and small shop-keepers, enhanced the reputation of England's capital and regional cities, and even altered the social climate of England. Immaculately researched from primary sources, "Shops and Shopping" is one of the key texts in the scholarly analysis of early mass consumer culture.
First published in 1975, Liberty’s is the biography of a shop and its various owners in London. Responding to the social pressures, class patterns, and governmental policies, the developments in the shop mimic the social changes taking place in London. It is affected by war and depressions, by trade booms and enemy bombs, by changes in fashions and taste. Liberty’s not only reflected these changes but also contributed to the artistic movements and the development of fashionable taste. This book will be of interest to students of history, fashion and sociology.
During the years when George IV ruled the United Kingdom, first as Prince Regent then as King, his extravagant tastes served to characterize the times - the Regency period being identified strongly with new trends in British architecture, fashion and culture. The literary expression of this era was the genre of so-called 'silver fork' novels set in fashionable London society. Initially devoured as authentic insights into the rarefied world of the best social circles, these novels were thus serving as etiquette primers for growing numbers of nouveaux riches. The detail and décor of the novels gives them an enduring socio-historical interest, hence the value of Alison Adburgham's study, first published in 1983, which offers astute readings of such 'silver fork' specialists as Disraeli, Bulwer-Lytton, and Catherine Gore. With an assured eye for the social context of these works, Adburgham explores the class tensions and complex social interactions behind the high sheen of the silver fork.
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, ec...
Fashion and celebrity may be twenty-first century obsessions, but they were also key concepts in Regency culture. Both celebrated and condemned for their popularity, silver fork novels were extremely prolific during this period. This study looks at the social and literary impact of this significant genre.
Essays by leading scholars provide a comprehensive overview of women writers and their work in Restoration and eighteenth-century Britain.
It is a generally accepted fact that in the first half of the nineteenth century, Catherine Gore became the most prolific, if not most popular writer of fashionable novels in England. It is less well known that Mrs. Gore's 200-volume output included eleven extremely popular, if not always critically successful, plays, performed at all three of the Theatres Royal in London: Drury Lane, Covent Garden, and the Haymarket. While several of the plays held the stage in England and the United States well into the second half of the nineteenth century, modern critical appraisals of the works have been hampered by the lack of available texts. Gore on Stage, for the first time provides performance text...
The Pursuit of Pleasure presents the figures of the rambler and the cyprian, the Eighteenth Century precursors to the Parisian flGneur and prostitute. The urban spaces traced by these figures were the clubs, sporting venues, operas, assembly rooms, streets and arcades of central London.Drawing on critical theory, geography and philosophy, The Pursuit of Pleasure extends and critiques the discipline of architectural history from a feminist perspective. The gendering of public space is considered to be a complex and shifting series of moves and looks between men and women, constructed and represented through spatial and social relations of consumption, display and exchange.Illustrated with contemporary prints and drawings, The Pursuit of Pleasure is an extraordinarily rich analysis of the gendered issues of public space at the birth of the modern metropolis.
The Fashion Handbook explores the varied and diverse aspects of the business, bringing together critical concepts with practical information about the industry's structure and core skills, as well as offering advice on real working practices and providing information about careers and training.--[book cover].
This work focuses on the efforts toward reforming women's dress that took place in Europe and America in the latter half of the 18th century and the first decade of the 20th century, and the types of garments adopted by women to overcome the challenges posed by fashionable dress. It considers the many advocates for reform and examines their motives, their arguments for change, and how they promoted improvements in women's fashion. Though there was no single overarching dress reform movement, it reveals similarities among the arguments posed by diverse groups of reformers, including especially the equation of reform with an ideal image of improved health. Drawing on a variety of primary and secondary sources in the USA and Europe - including the popular press, advice books for women, allopathic and alternative medical literature, and books on aesthetics, art, health, and physical education - the text makes a significant contribution to costume studies, social history, and women's studies.