James Fitzjames was a hero of the early nineteenth-century Royal Navy. A charismatic man with a wicked sense of humour, he pursued his naval career with wily determination. When he joined the Franklin Expedition at the age of 32 he thought he would make his name. But instead the expedition completely disappeared and he never returned. Its fate is one of history's last great unsolved mysteries, as were the origins and background of James Fitzjames – until now. Fitzjames packed a great deal into his thirty-two years. He had sailed an iron paddle steamer down the River Euphrates and fought with spectacular bravery in wars in Syria and China. But Fitzjames was not what he seemed. He concealed several secrets, including the scandal of his birth, the source of his influence and his plans for after the Franklin Expedition. In this first complete biography of the captain of the HMS Erebus, William Battersby draws extensively on Fitzjames' personal letters and journals – most never published before – as well as official naval records, to strip away 200 years of misinformation and half-truths and enables us to understand for the first time this intriguing man and his significance for the Franklin Expedition.

A lively man with a wicked sense of humour, James Fitzjames joined the Franklin Expedition at the age of 32. While he never returned, he left behind a legacy of misinformation, half-truths, and adventures that the author wades through to create a great portrait of this brave Royal Navy hero.

James Fitzjames Stephen (1829-1894) is still highly valued as a judge, as the historian of the criminal law of England, and as the author of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, a forthright disagreement with John Stuart Mill. Stephen's weekly journalism established him as a vigorous cross-examiner in the controversies—cultural, social, religious, political, moral, and philosophical—of his time (and duly, of our time). Collected here now are his essays on the novel and journalism, the co-operation and collusion of these two, their responsibilities and irresponsibilities. Written between 1855 and 1867, while Stephen prosecuted twin careers as barrister and journalist, these reviews bring to bear his formidable powers of mind and of phrasing, scrutinizing many deep and disconcerting novelists—Dickens and Thackeray, Harriet Beecher Stowe and E. C. Gaskell, Flaubert and Balzac. His work also weighs journalism in the scales: from Addison's The Spectator to the Crimean war correspondence of William Howard Russell; from the scabrously detailed law-reports in The Times to the phenomenon of Letters to its Editor; from the high culture of Matthew Arnold to the mass market of 'Railroad Bookselling'.

In this important study Dr Smith uses a wide range of primary materials to provide the first modern comprehensive examination of the work, writings and ideas of James Fitzjames Stephen. Stephen's broad rationalist/utilitarian ethical and intellectual stance manifested itself most prominently in law and social and political philosophy. Stephen's turn of mind led him to perceive the substance of literature and religious orthodoxy as of complementary interest and relevance to the social and political mores of Victorian England, making him one of Dickens' and Cardinal Newman's most formidable and trenchant critics. Dr Smith's account is the first to set Stephen's life and thought in its proper Victorian context, and marks a significant addition to the growing literature on the intellectual history of nineteenth-century England.