Julia Margaret Cameron’s portrait of her niece Julia Prinsep Jackson, the mother Virginia Woolf

Casting around for a book to write after I finished The Perfect Man, my life of Victorian strongman Eugen Sandow, I thought that my sainted publisher (aka Catherine Pope of Victorian Secrets and this blog) might be interested in the tale of the seven Pattle sisters who in their day were more celebrated that the Mitford sisters in the twentieth century.

The most enduringly famous of the sisters is Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879), whose photographs are on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum until February 21. She took up photography after being introduced to the new invention by her friend the astronomer Sir John Herschel, and her images of her social circle, from famous men to children and servants, are highly evocative.

Julia Margaret was the fourth of ten children born in early nineteenth century Calcutta to James and Adeline Pattle. The other surviving sisters were Adeline (b.1812), Sarah (b.1816), Maria (b.1818), Louisa (b.1821), Virginia (b.1827) and Sophia (b. 1829). Their grandfather was the Chevalier Antoine de L’Etang, a French aristocrat exiled to India after he flirted excessively with Queen Marie Antoinette when serving as her pageboy. He ended up running a riding school in Pondicherry. Their father was James Pattle, a successful Anglo-Indian merchant who when he died was shipped back to London in a barrel of rum for burial in Camberwell. He was a heavy drinker, and family legend suggests he burst out of the barrel on the way home.

With the exception of Julia, the sisters were renowned for their beauty. When Virginia came to London, the fellow Anglo-Indian William Thackeray was besotted to the extent that he wrote a babbling portrait in Punch. “When she comes into the room, it is like a beautiful air of Mozart breaking on you…[nature] has endowed this young lady with every kind of perfection…a charming face…a perfect form, a pure perception and heart…”

But Thackeray had lost his fortune, and didn’t stand a chance with Virginia. She married Lord Eastor, of Eastnor Castle, who became 3rd Earl Somers. The other sisters all made advantageous matches, Adeline marrying a military man who became a General, Sophia marrying a baronet, Louisa, a High Court Judge, Maria, the distinguished Dr Jackson. Sarah married Henry Thoby Prinsep, Member of the Council of India and Oriental scholar, himself one of seven brothers.

On returning from India, the Prinseps lived at Little Holland Park in Kensington, the place where the artist GF Watts came to tea, met and married Ellen Terry. The marriage lasted one year, but Watts stayed on at Little Holland House for more like twenty. Other guests at the salon included Herschel, Gladstone, Tennyson and Browning, creating the milieu captured in Julia Margaret Cameron’s pictures.

The sisters floated about the gardens, “robed in splendid Venetian draperies…talking with foreign emphatic gestures,” wrote Virginia Woolf.  Woolf’s mother Julia nee Jackson was daughter of Maria nee Pattle, one of the six Pattle sisters, and she was named after her great-aunt Virginia. There is a definite whiff of Pattledom in Virginia Woolf’s writing and style.

The sisters would in theory make a fascinating subject for a group biography, along the lines of Judith Flanders’ Circle of Sisters, which chronicles the lives of the four Macdonald sisters. The Pattles must have written thousands of letters to one another over the years, from India to London and Paris, and there must have been diaries galore. But despite rooting round, I only managed to find partial correspondence from two of the sisters. There was simply not enough material to attempt the book, let alone do a joint biography taking in the seven Prinsep brothers as well, as once crossed my mind.

I wrote a book about Victorian engineers instead.¹ I leave the Pattle sisters to a more intrepid biographer, or perhaps to a novelist, who could chronicle the journey from Anglo-India to the fashionable bohemian world of Little Holland House and on another generation or two to the Bloomsbury set.

1. Iron Men, published by Anthem Press. [↩]

We’re very pleased to announce a new critical edition of Catherine Crowe’s ‘The Story of Lilly Dawson’, edited by Ruth Heholt.

Shipwrecked as a young girl, middle-class Lilly Dawson is kidnapped by smugglers and forced to work as their servant. Terrified by the prospect of a forced marriage, this Victorian Cinderella flees captivity and has to navigate an outside world she finds both oppressive and dangerous. ‘The Story of Lilly Dawson’ is a romping tale of pirates, outlaws, murder, mistaken identity, lust and betrayal.

This edition includes a critical introduction, explanatory footnotes,  selection of contemporary reviews, and extracts from Crowe’s other work.

For more information, please visit:

http://victoriansecrets.co.uk/catalogue/the-story-of-lilly-dawson/

We’re delighted to announce a new critical edition of A City Girl by John Law (pseudonym of Margaret Harkness), edited by Deborah Mutch, and with additional material by Terry Elkiss.

In her first novel, Harkness presents a vivid and troubling depiction of working-class life in late-Victorian London. Based on her own experience of the slums, she exposes the appalling conditions experienced by women in the casual labour force and their desperate struggle for economic security.

This edition includes a critical introduction, explanatory footnotes, Margaret Harkness biography, and additional contextual material.

For more information, please visit:

http://victoriansecrets.co.uk/catalogue/a-city-girl/

We’re very pleased to announce the publication of Selected Stories of Morley Roberts, edited by Markus Neacey.

You might know Roberts as the first biographer and friend of George Gissing, but he was also an accomplished writer of fiction. In a career spanning over 50 years, Roberts wrote hundreds of short stories and was one of the most successful operators in the Victorian-Edwardian literary marketplace.

We’re thrilled to announce the publication of The Cockney Who Sold the Alps: Albert Smith and the Ascent of Mont Blanc by Alan McNee.

Albert Smith is one of the most famous Victorians of whom you’ve probably never heard. During his lifetime, he was a household name, thrilling audiences with his Ascent of Mont Blanc show at London’s Egyptian Hall. An inveterate showman, Smith was also a doctor, journalist, raconteur, novelist, travel writer, and playwright. His many talents were outstripped only by his boundless self-belief and huge personality. Even Queen Victoria described him in her journal as “inimitable”, an epithet Smith’s contemporary Charles Dickens liked to reserve for himself.

For more information, please visit:

http://victoriansecrets.co.uk/catalogue/the-cockney-who-sold-the-alps-albert-smith-and-the-ascent-of-mont-blanc/

True crime isn’t usually my cup of tea, but I found myself completely transfixed by Elizabeth Jenkins’s Harriet (1934) last year. Based on the infamous Penge murder trial of 1877, the novel recounts the short life and pitiful death of Harriet Staunton, a middle-class woman with what we would now call ‘learning difficulties’. Although she struggled to read and write, Harriet took great pride in her appearance and enjoyed a luxurious lifestyle with a comfortable income. Her loving mother did everything to make Harriet’s life normal, never imagining her daughter would become the victim of a merciless fortune-hunter.

The charming but callous Louis Staunton quickly wooed Harriet, motivated by the knowledge that wives’ assets were assumed by the husband on marriage. Soon tiring of her odd behaviour, he paid his brother Patrick and sister-in-law Elizabeth to care for Harriet and their baby. Louis then promptly moved in with his lover, Alice. Harriet was subjected to intolerable cruelty, the facts of which became chillingly clear in the sensational trial that followed. Fortunately, Jenkins manages to convey the horror of Harriet’s story without relying on explicit descriptions of torments she suffered. This is very much a psychological thriller, and one told with great verve and insight.

Valancourt Books has just published a new edition of Harriet and I was delighted that they asked me to contribute an afterword. While reading the trial proceedings and researching the background to the case was deeply uncomfortable, I felt that Harriet’s treatment says a great deal about the position of women in the nineteenth century and how easy it was to deny them subjectivity. Louis was able to take advantage of women’s legal vulnerability at the time and Harriet’s mother was powerless to prevent him. On marriage, Harriet’s considerable assets became his to do with as he pleased. She endowed him with all her worldly goods; he gave her nothing. In fact, it appears that Harriet’s plight lent impetus to the campaign for the Second Married Women’s Property Act, which finally allowed women to own property in their own name.

In my afterword, I also explain what happened following the trial, and how Queen Victoria became involved in this extraordinary case. The transcription of the trial is full of revelations, contradictions, and outright denials, all of which Jenkins deftly constructs into a taut and compelling story. Such is the veracity and intensity of her novel, Jenkins actually came to regret having written it. She felt uncomfortable with exploring a real-life case as fiction, and Harriet’s sufferings were particularly difficult to read following the horrors of the Second World War. Notwithstanding the author’s reservations, Harriet remains a provocative and important novel. By placing her victim at the centre of the narrative, Jenkins gives Harriet the attention and respect she was denied as a wife.

For rights reasons, this edition of Harriet is currently only available in the US. For more information, please visit the Valancourt Books website.

Although originally a character in Thomas Morton’s play Speed the Plough (1798), Mrs Grundy has enjoyed greater fame as the arbiter of nineteenth-century moral standards. In Mrs Grundy’s Enemies, Anthony Patterson selects for his study a range of authors – including Emile Zola, H G Wells, and George Egerton – who courted controversy with their frank portrayal of sexuality. He discusses how the culture of censorship shaped fiction, and examines the ways in which novelists challenged the dominant conservative ideology. Ultimately, Patterson makes a convincing argument that it was the Realists of the late Victorian era who faced resistance to literary innovation, long before the Modernists of the next century. Indeed, Mrs Grundy’s Enemies was also the title of a novel by George Gissing that remained unpublished after his publisher decided it was morally dubious.

In his introduction, Patterson establishes the context of the literary marketplace in which these authors were operating. As he observes, the all-powerful circulating libraries such as Mudie’s “provided one of the most effective means of regulating literature in middle-class Victorian society,” (13) and authors upset them at their peril. The 1857 Obscene Publications Act also posed the threat of legal sanction, as Henry Vizetelly discovered. The publisher was tried twice for his English translations of French novels, and on the second occasion, he was imprisoned for three months.

Zola, as we discover in Chapter 1, was the (low) standard against which British authors were judged. Nana (1880), in particular, offered the terrifying image of a sexually incontinent woman who might serve as a bad example for wholesome English women and imperil the nation’s moral health. La Terre (1887) was even worse, with scenes of rape, incest, and bull bothering. As Patterson argues, Zola’s Naturalism “signifies a watershed for sexual representation in English fiction,” (28) and anything that frightened Mrs Grundy was condemned as Zolaesque.
George Moore was one of the authors heavily influenced by Zola’s Naturalism, and he dominates Chapter 2. Moore fell foul of Mudie’s Circulating Library and eventually persuaded the redoubtable Vizetelly to publish a cheap edition of his novel A Mummer’s Wife (1885). Not content with this coup, Moore also published Literature at Nurse, or Circulating Morals, a pamphlet in which he launches a blistering attack on Mudie, who he accuses of infantilising the reading public by exercising unwarranted censorship. Moore certainly saw himself as a crusader, “posing as a defender of artistic freedom against the forces of prudery and philistinism” (66). However, as Patterson points out, Moore was simply trying to replace one form of chauvinism with another. While he liked to think of himself as progressive, his heroines faced thoroughly conventional fates and his writing “did little to disturb the hegemony of middle-class men” (95).

In Chapter 3, Grant Allen faces similar criticism. While he depicts an emancipated woman in his notorious novel The Woman Who Did (1895), he ensures she meets with an ignominious end. “In Allen’s bright eugenic future,” Patterson observes, “the position of women remains subservient to men and their ultimate function remains to bear children for the benefit of the race.” (141) Allen was trying to shock, rather than make a radical argument. All gong and no dinner, one might say. Both Moore and Allen railed against censorship, specifically claiming that it ‘feminised’ literature by ensuring that readers had access only to rubbishy romantic novels by women authors. In A Mummer’s Wife, Moore attributes his heroine’s downfall to her love of inflammatory fiction by the likes of Florence Marryat and Mary Elizabeth Braddon. For Moore, women’s popular fiction suggests a morally ambiguous universe in which heroines err and are rewarded with the realisation of their unwholesome desires. Only male authors can be trusted to set a good example.

The women fight back in Chapter 4, with George Egerton (Mary Chavelita Dunne Bright) pointing the finger at men and their desire to silence female voices. When her short story collection Keynotes and Discords (1893) provoked critical outrage, Egerton denounced this censorship as literally man-made. Patterson also considers Ella Hepworth Dixon’s The Story of a Modern Woman (1894) and George Paston’s (Emily Morse Symonds) A Writer of Books (1899), with their exposé of hypocrisy in the publishing industry. Unsurprisingly, Mary Cholmondeley’s Red Pottage (1899) and its dramatic censorship scene are central to this chapter. Aspiring author Hester Gresley discovers that her brother has burned her manuscript, refusing to believe that the work of a woman could be of any literary merit. Patterson concludes that the novel “demonstrates how patriarchy limits women’s potential as creative artists through figuring them as immoral, incompetent or reductively dogmatic” (176).

In the final chapter, Patterson advances to the Edwardian period, showing how novels that appear superficially to champion female sexual freedom actually conform to normative models. H G Wells’s Ann Veronica (1909), for example, portrays a sexually liberated woman, but one who is transformed into a dutiful wife by the end of the narrative. There has been no perceptible progress since the publication of Allen’s The Woman Who Did, fourteen years earlier. Wells might have been thematically bold, but he was also keen to uphold the sexual double standard.
Patterson concludes that the censorship debate “should not be simplified into a conflict of progressive writers and conservative critics,” (220) as there were internecine wars, too, especially between male and female writers. While much has been written on gender and the Victorian novel, Patterson’s book presents a new and welcome perspective by focusing on the censorship that was ever-present, yet seldom explicitly acknowledged. Mrs Grundy’s Enemies is lucidly written, compellingly argued, and frequently illuminating.

Anthony Patterson’s Mrs Grundy’s Enemies: Censorship, Realist Fiction and the Politics of Sexual Representation is published by Peter Lang, who kindly sent a review copy.

We’re very pleased to announce a new edition of Eliza Lynn Linton’s Sowing the Wind. It’s Linton’s most sensational novel, with a heady mix of miscegenation, inheritance, madness, and croquet.

Our edition includes a critical introduction by Deborah T. Meem and Kate Holterhoff, explanatory footnotes, and additional contextual material.

For more information, please visit:

http://victoriansecrets.co.uk/catalogue/sowing-the-wind/

Victorian Secrets also publishes Eliza Lynn Linton’s The Autobiography of Christopher Kirkland.

One of the many joys of delving into the nineteenth century is meeting the numerous vibrant characters who inhabited it. I first encountered ‘Lord’ George Sanger when researching the Hyde Park celebrations that marked Queen Victoria’s accession. Over nine days in June 1838, Sanger and his circus family thrilled the crowds with learned pigs and clairvoyant ponies. Their remarkable troupe also included ‘Living Curiosities’: the pig-faced woman, the living skeleton, the world’s tallest woman, and cannibal pigmies. Something for everyone, I’m sure you’ll agree.

To my delight, I discovered that Sanger had written an autobiography. Well, it’s likely to have been ghostwritten by the journalist George R Sims: Sanger, like many nineteenth-century circus folk, was unable to write. In Seventy Years a Showman, Sanger comes across as an indulgent father and benevolent employer who managed everything through a calm benevolence, rather than with a rod of iron. My view of him then shifted after reading The Sanger Story, based on the memories of his grandson, George Sanger Coleman. He recalls how his grandfather often spoke movingly of the death of his daughter Lavinia, but omitted to mention his blind fury when she eloped with a clown. Unusually perhaps for the Victorian period, Sanger’s marriage appears to have been a genuinely happy one. No doubt his wife’s former career as a lion-tamer provided her with invaluable skills.

From the humblest of beginnings in an overcrowded caravan, the Sangers built a hugely successful entertainment business, ultimately boasting one of the world’s most distinctive brands. This achievement is set against the backdrop of an England that changed beyond recognition during the nineteenth century, with the arrival of the railways, rapid industrialisation, and unprecedented social reform. Along his journey, Sanger encounters Chartists, body-snatchers, and health and safety inspectors, all of whom are treated with equal disdain.

Sanger’s colossal pride (some might say hubris) is evidenced by the self-designated title ‘Lord’. Dismissed in these memoirs as a bit of harmless fun to trump the ‘Honourable’ Buffalo Bill Cody during a legal battle, Sanger retained it throughout his career. His grandson later wrote that it had more to do with conceit, Sanger repeatedly declining a knighthood, as it meant dropping the ‘Lord’.

There was, however, a softer side to Sanger. Notwithstanding the exploitation of the learned pig and the pig-faced lady (actually a bear), he treated his animals well. Ajax the elephant was a particular favourite, and seems to have been more indulged that Sanger’s own children. The elephant’s particularly dexterous tongue repeatedly got his own into bother. Sanger’s admirer G B Burgin remembers how he once stole the produce from a passing greengrocer’s cart:

By the time the greengrocer discovered his loss the last stick of celery had vanished, and old Ajax looked round with an air of innocent wonderment as to what was the matter.

Ajax also managed to get himself wedged in the doorway of a grocer’s shops. While the circus men broke down the brick work to free him, Ajax “stuffed himself with the contents of every biscuit tin and everything else he fancied within the reach of his trunk;” the grocer watched in impotent rage. Not everyone was pleased when the circus came to town.

Sanger’s memoirs end with his retirement to East Finchley and the admission: “I feel that the latter days of my career … have not the interest for my reader that attaches to the earlier period.” But any ideas he might have had of quietly fading away were thwarted. Although he declared “I shall remain a showman until the end of my days,” what followed was probably not what he had in mind.

On 28 November 1911, Sanger’s employee Herbert Charles Cooper attacked him with a hatchet before hurling himself under a speeding train. Sanger’s family maintained this was an unprovoked attack on a harmless old man. Less subjective accounts suggest that Sanger had tormented Cooper, provoking him beyond endurance. Whatever happened – and we can never be certain – Sanger met with an appropriately spectacular end. He was buried in Margate alongside his beloved wife, after thousands travelled to his funeral. Even in death, he attracted a crowd.
Of course, few autobiographies are truly candid, and Sanger undoubtedly exaggerates his achievements and downplays his mistakes. Nevertheless, if even half of it is true, Sanger’s was surely an exceptional life.

Seventy Years a Showman by ‘Lord’ George Sanger (with an introduction by Catherine Pope) is available as an ebook.

We’re pleased to announce a new ebook edition of Lord George Sanger’s extraordinary memoirs, Seventy Years a Showman. Sanger was one of the nineteenth century’s most flamboyant figures, and he recalls the remarkable events of a life populated by learned pigs, clairvoyant ponies, and equestrian baboons.

In her new introduction, Catherine Pope reveals how Sanger’s death was as spectacular and surprising as one of his circus shows.

For more information, please visit:

http://victoriansecrets.co.uk/catalogue/seventy-years-a-showman/

We’re pleased to announce a new ebook edition of Jerome K. Jerome’s comic classic, Three Men on the Bummel, complete with an introduction from biographer Carolyn Oulton and all the original illustrations. This time the men are on wheels as we follow them on a bicycle tour through Germany’s Black Forest. Prepare yourself for cultural stereotypes, disobedient beetles, and many mishaps along the way.

To find out more, please visit:

http://victoriansecrets.co.uk/catalogue/three-men-on-the-bummel/

Victorian Secrets also publishes Three Men in a Boat, Weeds: A Story in Seven Chapters, and Below the Fairy City: A Life of Jerome K. Jerome.

We’re thrilled to have published a new critical edition of Sarah Grand’s The Beth Book, edited by Jenny Bourne Taylor. As far as we’re concerned, this is one of the most important novels of the nineteenth century (and actually Catherine’s favourite).

First published in 1897, The Beth Book – Being a Study from the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius, is a semi-autobiographical novel offering a portrait of the artist as a young woman. Grand’s compelling story recounts in vivid detail the childhood of her young heroine, Beth, a spirited and intelligent girl who challenges the constraints placed upon her.

To find out more, please visit:

http://victoriansecrets.co.uk/catalogue/the-beth-book/

We’re very pleased to announce a new edition of Grania by Emily Lawless, edited by Michael O’Flynn.

First published in 1892, Grania is the story of a fisherman’s daughter from the Islands of Aran, off the coast of Galway. Grania O’Malley’s life is circumscribed by family duty and her destiny as wife to her feckless fiancé, Murdough Blake. When she realises he wants her only for her money and property, Grania rejects him in favour of heroism, although with tragic consequences.

With her unique poetic style, Emily Lawless evokes a vivid picture of island life, with its unforgiving landscape and grinding poverty.

To find out more, please visit:

http://victoriansecrets.co.uk/catalogue/grania/

We’re very happy to announce a new critical edition of Elizabeth Robins’s rousing suffragette novel, The Convert.  First published in 1907 The Convert was based on Elizabeth Robins’ hugely successful play, Votes for Women! which advocated militancy as the only means of achieving female suffrage.

This edition includes a critical introduction by Emelyne Godfrey, explanatory footnotes, bibliography, and further contextual material.

For more information please visit:

http://victoriansecrets.co.uk/catalogue/the-convert-by-elizabeth-robins/

We’re delighted to have published a new critical edition of Rhoda Broughton’s Not Wisely, but Too Well, edited by Tamar Heller. This is not only a good read, but also a very important novel in terms of literary censorship, as Broughton was obliged to “expunge it of coarseness” before it could be published. Notwithstanding the extensive editorial changes, Broughton’s novel remains a pioneering portrayal of female sexuality, or what Geraldine Jewsbury called “highly coloured & hot blooded passion”.

The original and shocking conclusion is included in the appendices, along with details of other revisions, and also a selection of contemporary reviews.

To find out more, please visit:

http://victoriansecrets.co.uk/catalogue/not-wisely-but-too-well/

We are very pleased and excited to announce the publication of our first monograph, Carolyn Lambert’s The Meanings of Home in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Fiction. In this beautifully written study, Carolyn Lambert explores the ways in which Elizabeth Gaskell challenges the nineteenth-century cultural construct of the home as a domestic sanctuary offering protection from the external world.

The Meanings of Home has been met with a warm critical reception. The Gaskell Journal described it as “Satisfying, comprehensive and thoroughly enjoyable to read,” while Women: A Cultural Review concluded that “Lambert does justice to her subject, offering a sympathetic and nuanced portrayal of a writer who put the conflicting aspects of her own experience to rich fictional use.”

For more information, please visit:

http://victoriansecrets.co.uk/catalogue/the-meanings-of-home-in-elizabeth-gaskells-fiction/

We’re very happy to announce a new ebook edition of Jenny Bourne Taylor’s classic study of Wilkie Collins, In the Secret Theatre of Home. In his 1852 novel Basil, Wilkie Collins’ narrator concludes that “those ghastly heart-tragedies laid open before me … are not to be written, but … are acted and reacted, scene by scene, year by year, in the secret theatre of home.” Taking this memorable quote as her starting point, Taylor demonstrates how Victorian psychology is central to an understanding of the complexity and vitality of Collins’s fiction, exploring the boundaries of mind/body, sanity/madness, and consciousness/unconsciousness.

For more information, please visit:

http://victoriansecrets.co.uk/catalogue/in-the-secret-theatre-of-home-wilkie-collins-sensation-narrative-and-nineteenth-century-psychology/

We’re very pleased to announce a new ebook edition of No Place for Ladies.

The pioneering work of Florence Nightingale has become legendary, but in this book  Helen Rappaport champions the contribution of the women whose stories have gone largely untold – the nurses, cantinières and army wives who played a vital, but often overlooked, role in the theatres of war. Mary Seacole’s establishment of ‘The British Hotel’ near Balaclava supplied fatigued soldiers with much-needed comforts and medical attention, earning her the love and respect of many men, but no official recognition.  This book gives her achievements the attention they deserve.

To find out more, please visit:

http://victoriansecrets.co.uk/catalogue/no-place-for-ladies-the-untold-story-of-women-in-the-crimean-war/

We are pleased to announce a new ebook edition of Victorian Curiosities by Jeremy Nicholas.

Based on Don Lemon’s 1890 Everybody’s Scrapbook of Curious Facts, this collection of stray Victoriana is the perfect book for odd moments. Its charm lies in its total unpredictability and in the sense of disbelief and wonderment it generates in the modern reader.

No sooner have you discovered the advantages of ‘Greasing Soldiers’ Feet’ than you are confronted with ‘Executions Everywhere’ — the methods employed, country by country, of dispatching criminals. Next, you might stumble across ‘Newspaper Names in the Far West’, ‘Language of the Parasol’, ‘The Flapping of a Fly’s Wing’ or advice on ‘When to Pare the Finger Nails’ — subjects which rise to a bewildering height of triviality. Who could fail to be entranced by such life-enhancing serendipity?

Lemon’s original entries are complemented by a selection of contemporary illustrations.

To find out more, please visit:

http://victoriansecrets.co.uk/catalogue/victorian-curiosities/

We’re very pleased to announce our new critical edition of George Gissing’s Thyrza, edited by Pierre Coustillas.

First published in 1887, Gissing intended Thyrza to “contain the very spirit of London working-class life”. His story tells of Walter Egremont, an Oxford-trained idealist who gives lectures on literature to workers, some of them from his father’s Lambeth factory. Thyrza Trent, a young hat-trimmer, meets and falls in love with him, forsaking Gilbert Grail, an intelligent working man who Egremont has put in charge of his library.

In a tale of ambition, betrayal and disillusionment, Gissing’s heroine aspires to purity and self-improvement. Trapped by birth and circumstance, she is unable to escape her destiny. Thyrza Trent is the embodiment of Gissing’s preoccupation with sex, class and money, and through her he exposes a society intrinsically opposed to social mobility.

To find out more, please visit:

http://victoriansecrets.co.uk/catalogue/thyrza/

We’re pleased to announce a new edition of Walter Besant’s All Sorts and Conditions of Men.

First published in 1882, the novel chronicles daily life in the East-end district of Whitechapel Road, where people go about their business with an air of quiet resignation. Their lives are transformed by the arrival of Angela Messenger, a young Girton-educated heiress who assumes the identity of a dressmaker so that she might gain an understanding of this “striving, eager, anxious humanity”. Meanwhile, Harry Goslett learns he is not an aristocrat but the son of a lowly army sergeant. Determined to return to his true roots, he moves to the East End, ending up in the same boarding house as Miss Messenger. The two discover a mutual interest in social reform, imagining a Palace of Delight to provide “a little more of the pleasures and graces of delight” for the local community.

Although subtitled ‘An Impossible Story’, the novel inspired the building of the People’s Palace on Mile End Road, opened by Queen Victoria on 14 May 1887. The palace housed a concert hall/ballroom, a gymnasium, a library, a swimming pool, an art school, and a technical college.

Find out more at: http://victoriansecrets.co.uk/catalogue/all-sorts-and-conditions-of-men/

Our final biography of 2012 is The First Adman: Thomas Bish and the Birth of Modern Advertising. Well, it’s not really a biography, as Bish was an elusive figure who became overshadowed by his own creativity.

The First Adman reveals the untold story of how modern advertising was pioneered 200 years ago by the entrepreneur, self-publicist and dodgy Member of Parliament, Thomas Bish. Royalty and politicians courted this early media star and society figure, who was one of the best-known men in the land and allegedly more famous than the prime minister himself.

Bish’s promotional creativity helped the old state lottery raise the equivalent of £2 billion for good causes, also bringing him great wealth. Hiring the essayist Charles Lamb as a copywriter and George Cruikshank to illustrate his advertisements, Bish professionalised ad campaigns. Techniques he pioneered include spin doctoring, graphic design, modern typography, direct marketing, and even early market research. Unfortunately his talents did not prevent him from being expelled from both the Stock Exchange and the House of Commons. Although in many ways a thorough rogue, Bish was one of the few prominent Englishmen to argue that the Irish were being unfairly treated, and his Plea for Ireland made a compelling case for economic stimulus, a position that earned him the friendship of Daniel O’Connell.

The complexity, inventiveness and sheer audacity of Bish are all captured in this rollicking story.

To find out more, please visit:

http://victoriansecrets.co.uk/catalogue/the-first-adman-thomas-bish-and-the-birth-of-modern-advertising/

Continuing our biography-fest, we are pleased to announce a new biography of Dame Clara Butt.

Dame Clara Butt (1872-1936) was one of the most celebrated singers of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, a symbol of the glory of a Britain on whose Empire the sun never set. Standing an Amazonian 6’2″ tall, Clara had a glorious contralto voice of such power that when she sang in Dover, Sir Thomas Beecham swore she could be heard in Calais. She was a great favourite of Queen Victoria, who helped pay for her studies. Dame Clara was also one of the few people who managed to remain friends with Marie Corelli.

In the first biography since her death, Maurice Leonard tells Dame Clara Butt’s remarkable story, from humble beginnings in Sussex, to her dazzling apotheosis by an adoring nation. With humour and insight, Leonard reveals the woman behind the cultural icon.

For more information, please visit:

http://victoriansecrets.co.uk/catalogue/hope-and-glory-a-life-of-dame-clara-butt/

We are very pleased to announce publication of a major new biography of Jerome K. Jerome by Carolyn W. de la L. Oulton. Jerome K. Jerome (1859-1927) was the author of Three Men in a Boat, one of the best-loved books in the English language, but much of his prolific career has been left unexplored.  Over a period of forty years, Jerome was variously a humourist,  novelist, journalist, essayist and dramatist, leaving behind him a prodigious quantity of work, belying his famous quote “I like work. It fascinates me. I could sit and look at it for hours.”

Find out more about Below the Fairy City: A Life of Jerome K. Jerome or read the prologue.

14th July 2012, 2pm

St Nicholas’ Church, Brighton

Join Brighton-based publisher Victorian Secrets and author David Waller to discuss his critically-acclaimed book The Perfect Man — a biography of Eugen Sandow, the Victorian strongman who possessed what was deemed to be the most perfect male body and became an international phenomenon.

This event is part of the Clifton Montpelier & Powis Festival, featuring music, literary events, and film.

To book a ticket, please call the box office on 01273 709709 or visit www.brightonticketshop.com. Tickets also available on the door.

We’re delighted to announce a new collection of short stories by distinguished literary critic Barbara Hardy.

Dorothea’s Daughter is based on novels by Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy. They are postscripts, rather than sequels, entering into dialogues with the original narratives by developing suggestions in the text. The authors’ conclusions are respected, with no changes made to the plot; instead, Barbara Hardy draws out loose threads in the original fabric to weave new material, imagining moments in the characters’ future lives.

To find out more, please visit the Dorothea’s Daughter webpage.

We’re very pleased to announce a new critical edition of Eliza Lynn Linton’s autobiography-in-drag, The Autobiography of Christopher Kirkland, edited by Deborah T. Meem and Kate Holterhoff.

In this astonishing work of literary transvestism, Linton adopts a male persona in order to recount her loss of faith at an early age, her sexual relationships with other women, and her disastrous marriage to the engraver William Linton. She told her publisher, George Bentley: “I have put my very Soul, my life into these pages.” In later life, she said it as “an outpour no one hears me make by word of mouth, a confession of sorrow, suffering, trial, and determination not to be beaten, which few suspect is the underlying truth of my life.”

This edition is completely reset and includes: an introduction, explanatory footnotes, contemporary reviews, extracts from George Layard’s biography of Linton, and extracts from Linton’s novel Sowing the Wind.

To find out more, please visit The Autobiography of Christopher Kirkland webpage.

We’re pleased to announce a new critical edition of F. Anstey’s comic novel Vice Versâ – a story so funny, it is famed for causing Trollope’s fatal stroke (to the modern reader, that could be either an endorsement or a terrible warning).

First published in 1882, Vice Versâ shows the disastrous consequences of having one’s wishes granted. After delivering a pompous lecture to his son Dick, stuffy Paul Bultitude declares his wish to be a schoolboy once more so he can enjoy the carefree existence of youth. Unfortunately for him, he happens to be clutching the mysterious and magical Garudâ stone, and suddenly finds himself transformed into the diminutive body of his son. Dick quickly uses the stone to his own advantage, assuming his father’s portly character and swapping roles. While Dick gets the opportunity to run his father’s business in the City and wreak havoc on the household, Paul must endure the privations of the brutal boarding school he forced young Dick to attend. Determined not to lose his dignity, Paul retains his former bombastic demeanour, leading to a series of hilarious episodes with the cane-wielding Dr Grimstone.

This new scholarly edition includes a comprehensive critical introduction by Peter Merchant, author biography, explanatory footnotes, and a wealth of contextual material. To find out more, please visit the Vice Versâ page.

We are pleased to announce a new critical edition of George Moore’s controversial novel, A Mummer’s Wife. First published in 1885, the novel tells the story of Kate Ede, a bored Midlands housewife unhappily married to an asthmatic draper. When a handsome travelling actor comes to lodge with her family, Kate succumbs to temptation, with disastrous consequences.

The shocking themes of alcoholism and adultery led to the novel being banned by Mudie’s, thus initiating a war of attrition between Moore and the circulating libraries. In his introduction to this edition, Anthony Patterson considers Moore’s work in the context of literary production and censorship, and also examines the novel’s themes.

This completely reset edition also includes:

• a preface by Moore’s biographer, Professor Adrian Frazier
• critical introduction, author biography and explanatory footnotes by Anthony Patterson
• the full text of Literature at Nurse, Moore’s polemic pamphlet in which he attacked the Grundyism of the circulating libraries.
• extracts from Moore’s A Communication to My Friends, in which he describes his first meeting with publisher Henry Vizetelly and the evolution of “A Mummer’s Wife”
• Moore’s preface to Zola’s Piping Hot!
• an excerpt from the autobiography of Jimmy Glover, whose experiences as an actor influenced the novel

For more information, please visit:

http://victoriansecrets.co.uk/books/a-mummers-wife/

We are very pleased to announce the release of Helen C. Black’s Notable Women Authors of the Day.

First published in 1893, Notable Women Authors of the Day began life as a series of interviews published in the popular women’s magazine the Lady’s Pictorial. The 30 featured authors were among the most successful of the late nineteenth century, and many were household names.

The interviews offer a tantalising glimpse into the life the Victorian woman writer, revealing the challenges of balancing their personal and professional lives. Helen C. Black describes the author and her home, sharing with the reader details of domestic arrangements and writing habits.   Told in the second person, the interviews create an immediacy and intimacy between the authors and the reader.

This new edition is based on the 1906 text, including the original portraits, along with a wealth of new material:

• preface by Troy J. Bassett on Helen C. Black and the Lady’s Pictorial
• critical introduction
• explanatory footnotes
• updated profiles on the Notable Women
• suggestions for further reading

For more information, and for details on how to order copies, please visit:

http://victoriansecrets.co.uk/books/notable-women-authors-of-the-day/

We are pleased to announce a new critical edition of George Gissing’s Demos, edited by Debbie Harrison.

Demos tells the story of London mechanic and ardent socialist Richard Mutimer, who unexpectedly inherits a fortune at the expense of the presumed heir, aristocratic Hubert Eldon. Mutimer leaves behind his old life to establish a model village for ironworkers in the idyllic Midland town of Wanley. He also deserts the girl who loves him, as he seeks to assume the social status of the middle-class capitalists he once despised.

This edition includes:

A preface by Pierre Coustillas; a critical introduction and notes by Debbie Harrison; suggestions for further reading; George Gissing biography & chronology; an appendix on the politics of Demos.

For more information, please see the Demos webpage.

We are pleased to announce a new critical edition of Rudyard Kipling’s semi-autobiographical first novel, The Light that Failed.

The Light that Failed tells the story of war artist Dick Heldar, his doomed love for childhood sweetheart Maisie, and his descent into blindness. Through Dick, Kipling considers the relationship between art and life, espousing his belief that the artist has a duty to paint only what he knows to be true.

This edition, edited by Paul Fox, includes: introduction, biography of Kipling, suggestions for further reading, explanatory footnotes, the alternative “happy ending” from the serialised version.

For more information, please see the our web page for The Light that Failed.

Victorian Secrets is pleased to annouce a new critical edition of Alice Perrin’s East of Suez.

Originally published in 1901, East of Suez was Perrin’s first collection of short stories.  Her fascinating and thought-provoking tales of Anglo-Indian life rival the best work of Kipling, and were hugely successful in their day.  Perrin tells stories of illicit love and betrayal set against a beautifully-drawn backdrop of the mystical east, interweaving the supernatural with exquisite details of her characters’ lives.  As the Times wrote in her obituary: “She wrote a simple, unforced style, and the reader feels keenly the heat, the dust, the moonrise, the night calls, and all the sights and sounds and smells of the unchanging East.”

This edition includes a scholarly introduction by Melissa Makala, author biography, suggestions for further reading, explanatory notes, contextual material on the British Raj, and original illustrations from the serialisation of the stories.

For more information, please visit the East of Suez webpage.

We are very pleased to announce that our new edition of Florence Marryat’s fin-de-siècle sensation The Blood of the Vampire is now published.  This edition features a critical introduction by Greta Depledge, suggestions for further reading, explanatory notes, and additional contextual material on the novel’s themes.

To find out more, please visit the The Blood of the Vampire webpage.

We are very pleased to announce that our new edition of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s sensation classic Henry Dunbar is now published.  This edition features a critical introduction by Anne-Marie Beller, suggestions for further reading, explanatory notes, and additional contextual material.

To find out more, please visit the Henry Dunbar webpage.

We are very pleased to announce that our new critical edition of George Gissing’s Workers in the Dawn has now been published.  It features a preface by leading Gissing expert Pierre Coustillas, a critical introduction by Debbie Harrison, a unique map of Arthur Golding’s London by Richard Dennis, suggestions for further reading, a George Gissing chronology, and explanatory notes.

We’re pleased to announce that our new edition of Rhoda Broughton’s Twilight Stories has just been published.  This edition features a critical introduction from Emma Liggins and suggestions for further reading.  More details on the Twilight Stories page.

We’re pleased to announce that our new edition of Charlotte Riddell’s Weird Stories has just been published.  This edition features a critical introduction from Emma Liggins and suggestions for further reading.  More details on the Weird Stories page.