Victoria's Year

In the first literary study to focus specifically on the first year of Victoria's reign, Stein examines a wide range of cultural products--visual art and architecture, statistics and maps, scientific writing and popular journalism, and literature itself--to reconstruct the thought and experience of early Victorian England. In the first literary study to focus specifically on the first year of Victoria's reign, Stein examines a wide range of cultural products--visual art and architecture, statistics and maps, scientific writing and popular journalism, and literature itself--to reconstruct the thought and experience of early Victorian England. Surveying such figures as Carlyle, Cruikshank, Dickens, Darwin, Martineau, Ruskin, and Tennyson, he reveals how this particular historical moment was understood and misunderstood by those who lived it, and offers new insights into the process that created the myth of Victorianism.