This study explores the ‘ecology of knowledge’ of urban Britain in the Victorian period and seeks to examine the way in which Victorians comprehended the nature of their urban society, through an exploration of the history of Victorian Manchester, and two specific case studies on the fiction of Elizabeth Gaskell and the campaigns for educational extension which emerged out of the city. It argues that crucial to the Victorians’ approaches was the ‘visiting mode’ as a particular discursive formation, including its institutional foundations, its characteristic modes and assumptions, and the texts which exemplify it. Recognition of the importance of the visiting mode, it is argued, offers a fundamental challenge to established Foucauldian interpretations of nineteenthcentury society and culture and provides an important corrective to recent scholarship of nineteenth-century technologies of knowing.

A defining feature of nineteenth-century Britain was its fascination with statistics. The processes that made Victorian society, including the growth of population, the development of industry and commerce, and the increasing competence of the state, generated profuse numerical data. This is a study of how such data influenced every aspect of Victorian culture and thought, from the methods of natural science and the struggle against disease, to the development of social administration and the arguments and conflicts between social classes. Numbers were collected in the 1830s by newly-created statistical societies in response to this 'data revolution'. They became a regular aspect of governmental procedure thereafter, and inspired new ways of interrogating both the natural and social worlds. William Farr used them to study cholera; Florence Nightingale deployed them in campaigns for sanitary improvement; Charles Babbage was inspired to design and build his famous calculating engines to process them. The mid-Victorians employed statistics consistently to make the case for liberal reform. In later decades, however, the emergence of the academic discipline of mathematical statistics - statistics as we use them today - became associated with eugenics and a contrary social philosophy. Where earlier statisticians emphasised the unity of mankind, some later practitioners, following Francis Galton, studied variation and difference within and between groups. In chapters on learned societies, government departments, international statistical collaborations, and different Victorian statisticians, Victorians and Numbers traces the impact of numbers on the era and the intriguing relationship of Victorian statistics with 'Big Data' in our own age.

This book shows how in nineteenth-century Britain, confronted with the newly industrialized and urbanized modern world, writers, artists, journalists and impresarios tried to gain an overview of contemporary history. They drew on two successive but competing conceptual models of overview: the panorama and the compilation. Both models claimed to offer a holistic picture of the present moment, but took very different approaches. This book shows that panoramas (360° views previously associated with the Romantic period) and compilations (big data projects previously associated with the Victorian fin de siècle) are intertwined, relevant across the entire century, and often remediated, making them crucial lenses through which to view a broad range of genre and forms. It brings together interdisciplinary research materials belonging to different period silos to create new understandings of how nineteenth-century audiences dealt with information overload. It argues for a new politics of distance: one that recognizes the value of immersing oneself in a situation, event or phenomenon, but which also does not chastise us for trying to see the big picture. This book is essential reading for students and scholars of nineteenth-century literature, history, visual culture and information studies.

This volume traces the modern critical and performance history of this play, one of Shakespeare's most-loved and most-performed comedies. The essay focus on such modern concerns as feminism, deconstruction, textual theory, and queer theory.

From the New York Times bestselling and critically acclaimed author of The Invention of Murder, an extraordinary, revelatory portrait of everyday life on the streets of Dickens' London. The nineteenth century was a time of unprecedented change, and nowhere was this more apparent than London. In only a few decades, the capital grew from a compact Regency town into a sprawling metropolis of 6.5 million inhabitants, the largest city the world had ever seen. Technology—railways, street-lighting, and sewers—transformed both the city and the experience of city-living, as London expanded in every direction. Now Judith Flanders, one of Britain's foremost social historians, explores the world portrayed so vividly in Dickens' novels, showing life on the streets of London in colorful, fascinating detail.From the moment Charles Dickens, the century's best-loved English novelist and London's greatest observer, arrived in the city in 1822, he obsessively walked its streets, recording its pleasures, curiosities and cruelties. Now, with him, Judith Flanders leads us through the markets, transport systems, sewers, rivers, slums, alleys, cemeteries, gin palaces, chop-houses and entertainment emporia of Dickens' London, to reveal the Victorian capital in all its variety, vibrancy, and squalor. From the colorful cries of street-sellers to the uncomfortable reality of travel by omnibus, to the many uses for the body parts of dead horses and the unimaginably grueling working days of hawker children, no detail is too small, or too strange. No one who reads Judith Flanders's meticulously researched, captivatingly written The Victorian City will ever view London in the same light again.

The first to engage Foucault’s geographies in detail from a wide range of perspectives, this book is framed around his discussions with the journal Hérodote in the mid 1970s. The contributors (including a number of key figures such as David Harvey, Chris Philo, Sara Mills, Nigel Thrift, John Agnew, Thomas Flynn and Matthew Hannah) discuss just what they find valuable – and frustrating – about Foucault’s geographies. This is a book which will both surprise and challenge.

Bringing together approaches from cultural and urban history, as well as German studies and political theory, Clare Copley's probing study reflects on post-unification responses to iconic Nazi architecture to reveal insights into power, legitimacy and memory politics in the Berlin Republic. Analysing public debates, physical interventions into the buildings and the structuring of the memory landscapes around them, the book demonstrates that the politics of memory impact not just upon the built environment of the post-dictatorship city, but upon the way decisions about it are made. In doing so, Nazi Buildings, Cold War Traces and Governmentality in Post-Unification Berlin makes the case for conceiving of a specifically 'post-authoritarian' governmentality and uses the responses to constructions like Goering's Aviation Ministry, Tempelhof Airport and the Olympic complex to explore its features.