Victorian English History

June, 1877: the petite 29-year-old Annie Besant stands motionless before the 75-year-old Judge towering over her in the Palace of Westminster. Lord Chief Justice Cockburn is presiding over the scandalous 'trial of the century' where Annie Besant and her confidante Charles Bradlaugh have been charged with the unforgiveable crime of publishing and selling a guide to birth control. Charged with obscenity, she argued—controversially and outrageously, for the time—that it was a woman's right to be able to choose to have children.

When one hears the term “Victorian”, many images come to mind. For some, the term conjures up visions of lace and gloves and delicate fans. Others think of tight corsets and even tighter morals. Others, swayed perhaps by one too many British costume dramas, envision gentle elegance and long-lost beauty. Naturally, few people think of multiple dead bodies cast about in the streets or dark bedrooms, most mutilated to a shocking degree, and yet, those tragic images played a significant role not only in late Victorian London, but ever since.

THE EXCALIBUR CASE The myth, the legend, the reality. Professor Challenger and Conan are determined to prove its existence even if it kills them. And it just might. A mystery of the ages is fraught with danger and excitement as a familiar villain appears to complicate the search...and make it deadly! THE WONDERLAND MYSTERY Holmes and Watson are used to cases where the unusual occurs. After all, the very world they live in is an amalgamation of steampunk science and magic. But this mystery has to be one of the most dangerous as well as crazy ones yet when a famous play turns into a murder ...

He will live forever, hunting the undead…. Aaron McReynolds is born in an Ireland where vampires reign and humans rely on secret pacts to keep themselves safe from the ones they dare not speak of. When those promises fail, he takes it upon himself to do whatever it takes to protect his family from the monsters that haunt Killarney. Transforming into a Guardian gives Aaron enormous power, but it also comes with a price. Live forever, but never rest; seek out those who would destroy mankind and terminate them. Discovering the one he loves most of all has turned, Aaron is faced with the ...

Oliver Twist attends a costume ball that ends with parliamentary candidate Trevor Newsome disappearing days before the election. Pinocchio, the Blue Fairy, and Puss in Boots occupy a Swiss castle where immortality may lie hidden. When Long John Silver arrives, Oliver has to do some fast thinking to protect more than just his own life from the pirate who says he only cares about rescuing his daughter. Marooned on Crown of Thorns Island, Oliver must defeat enemies old and new and deal with a tentacled monster and a human one. Child slaves who think they are going to school create automatons ...

Humans are pattern-matching creatures, and astrology is our grandest pattern-matching game. In this ingenious work of history, data scientist Alexander Boxer examines a treasure trove of esoteric classical sources to expose the deep imaginative framework by which - for millennia - we made sense of our fates. Astrology, he argues, was the ancient world's most ambitious applied mathematics problem, a grand data-analysis enterprise sustained by some of history's most brilliant minds, from Ptolemy to al-Kindi to Kepler.

Savory Suppers and Fashionable Feasts offers a delightfully flavorful tour of dining in America during the second half of the 19th century. Susan Williams investigates the manners and morals of that era by looking at its eating customs and cooking methods. As she reveals, genteel dining became an increasingly important means of achieving social stability during a period when Americans were facing significant changes on a variety of fronts - social, cultural, intellectual, technological, and demographic.

When a brutal attack leaves Agatha DeLacey blind, she and the Artful Dodger find themselves at the mercy of an experimental biomech surgery. Though the procedure restores Aggie’s sight, her new eyes come at an unnerving cost, and the changes in Dodger are even more alarming - instead of seeing Aggie as the girl he fancies, he now views her as a potential threat.

While "freaks" have captivated our imagination since well before the 19th century, the Victorians flocked to shows featuring dancing dwarves, bearded ladies, "missing links", and six-legged sheep. Indeed, this period has been described by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson as the epoch of "consolidation" for freakery: an era of social change, enormously popular freak shows, and taxonomic frenzy. Victorian Freaks: The Social Context of Freakery in Britain, edited by Marlene Tromp, turns to that rich nexus, examining the struggle over definitions of "freakery".

A photograph becomes a sudden portal into a Victorian summer almost two hundred years ago… Browsing in an old bookshop, Harry Inman comes across a fragile metal plate showing the image of a famous hotel in Saratoga Springs, NY, dated 1847. He knows he holds in his hand a rare daguerreotype, the earliest form of photography. The small, framed image is eroding, but not before it opens a window into the past, one that pulls Harry literally into another time and space. It is a world that appears increasingly mesmerizing and seductive to him, the Saratoga Springs of grand hotels and Victorian ...

There are many different past presences that continue to ‘reside’ at Bedford Springs as ‘permanent’ guests. That is part of the charm of Bedford Springs, its haunting ambiance. In this book, however, the focus will center on the continuing Victorian presence at Bedford Springs.Many contemporary ‘sightings’, from both staff and guests, have involved Victorian ghosts. Is this mere coincidence, a mistaken identity of perception, a ‘normalcy’ turned ‘anomaly’, or is it something more? We will explore that latter possibility: the Victorian ghost as ‘returning guest’. We ...

An unlikely trio of ghost hunters ply their trade in Victorian England. But have they met their match? London, 1871. When I applied for the position of bookkeeper with Professor Twickham and his daughter, I lied about my qualifications. In turn, they lied about the job for which I was applying. Had we not been so untruthful with each other, there might have been fewer night terrors stalking the inhabitants of the City. Fewer unexplained disappearances. Fewer deaths. Now, nobody is safe from the vengeful spirits we've unleashed. With no time to spare, we face an impossible task: we must ...

Queen Victoria's reign was an era of breathtaking social change, but it did little to create a platform for women to express themselves. But not so within the social sphere of the seance - a mysterious, lamp-lit world on both sides of the Atlantic. Out of the Shadows tells the stories of the enterprising women whose supposedly clairvoyant gifts granted them fame, fortune, and, most important, influence, as they crossed rigid boundaries of gender and class as easily as they passed between the realms of the living and the dead.

Lani hates to leave her beloved Lahaina behind, but she has no choice. Lahaina, 1850. What would you do if you were being forced to marry a man you didn’t love? Lani takes the only option open to her and stows away on a ship bound for San Francisco. Aidan Edwards has clawed his way back from a downward spiral of drinking and self-loathing. Bound for San Francisco, he’s healthy and happy for the first time in years, but he still doesn’t trust himself around women. Can he save the beautiful Hawaiian woman from a disastrous marriage?

Sold to a brothel owner, Lily vows to fight back Lily's happy life in Shanghai becomes a distant memory when her father dies and her devious aunt sells her to a brothel owner in San Francisco. But Lily wasn't born in the Year of the Tiger for nothing. Determined to escape, she watches for her chance in the midst of chaotic Gold Rush San Francisco. With her father gone and her faith in people shattered, Lily refuses to believe that love exists... even after she meets Devon, the young Bostonian who vows to protect her from further harm.

Beatrice Mary Victoria Feodore, later Princess Henry of Battenberg, was the last-born - in 1866 - of Victoria and Albert's children and she would outlive all of her siblings to die as recently as 1944. Her childhood coincided with her mother's extended period of mourning for her prematurely deceased husband, a circumstance which may have contributed to Victoria's determination to keep her youngest daughter as close to her as possible. She would eventually marry Prince Henry of Battenberg in 1885, but only after overcoming her mother's opposition to their union.

When the magical secrets of The Emerald Isle beckon, will she survive answering the call? Ohio, 1846. Valentia McDowell wishes she could rest. Plagued by nightmares of her grandmother’s mysterious brooch lost in Ireland, the well-off young woman aches to find her lost family in Ireland. But as she dodges marriage proposals from odious local farmers, she can’t shake the sense that a powerful inheritance awaits her across the ocean… if she can weather the treacherous journey. Can Valentia uphold a destiny she doesn’t yet understand without losing everyone she loves? An Immigrant's ...

To many Queen Victoria was a ruler shrouded in myth and mystique, portrayed as an aging, stiff widow. But in truth Britain’s longest-reigning monarch was passionate, expressive, humorous, and unconventional. A. N. Wilson’s exhaustively researched and definitive biography includes a wealth of new material from previously unseen sources, showing us Queen Victoria as she’s never been seen before.

The Victorians invented the idea of the future. They saw it as an undiscovered country, one ripe for exploration and colonization. And to get us there, they created a new way of ordering and transforming nature, built on grand designs and the mass-mobilization of the resources of the British Empire.

Sherlock Holmes comes home to an empty home. Impossible. Not on this night of nights. Watson is gone. Ms. Hudson is gone. Harry, Professor Challenger, and Conan have not come over as they should have. Even the Count Dracula has not arrived, and he always comes. What is going on? This is going to be a night to remember for Holmes as he works to solve one of his greatest mysteries.