LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Victorian England: Book
built 265 days ago
Using a blend of narrative, hard-to-find detail and contemporary voices, TheWriter's Guide to Everyday Life in Regency and Victorian England offers a refreshing perspective on the 19th century. With it's wealth of time-lines, appendices and bibliographies, Ms. Hughes's new book allows authors to seamlessly blend their creativity with historical accuracy, whilst saving hours of valuable research time.
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Mental Disability in Victorian England constitutes a fine, constructive and substantial contribution to the history of psychiatry and mental deficiency. It is based on extensive and original research, engages intelligently and diplomatically with recent (rather fractious) historiographical debates, exploits novel methodological tools, is smoothly written and well-presented, and manifestly achieves many of the aims that are clearly set out in the introduction. The book is organised both thematically and chronologically. Although successive chapters chart Earlswood's development from its original incarnation in the 1840s through to the early twentieth century, they ... address a series of interconnected and crucial theoretical and practical issues in the history (and historiography) of mental disability. In addition, each chapter (except curiously Chapter 2) benefits from a concise conclusion, which not only summarises the chapter's main findings but also leads persuasively, and almost seamlessly, into the subject of the following chapter.
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This book contributes to the growing scholarly interest in the history of disability by investigating the emergence of 'idiot' asylums in Victorian England. Using the National Asylum for Idiots, Earlswood, as a case-study, it investigates the social history of institutionalization, privileging the relationship between the medical institution and the society whence its patients came. By concentrating on the importance of patient-centred admission documents, and utilizing the benefits of nominal record linkage to other, non-medical sources, David Wright extends research on the confinement of the 'insane' to the networks of care and control that operated outside the walls of the asylum. He contends that institutional confinement of mentally disabled and mentally ill individuals in the nineteenth century cannot be understood independently of a detailed analysis of familial and community patterns of care. In this book, the family plays a significant role in the history of the asylum, initiating the identification of mental disability, participating in the certification process, mediating medical treatment, and facilitating discharge back into the community. By exploring the patterns of confinement to the Earlswood Asylum, Professor Wright reveals the diversity of the 'insane' population in Victorian England and the complexities of institutional committal in the nineteenth century.
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Food and Cooking in Victorian England is a valuable book. Broomfield's research is far-reaching and her historical arguments are insightful. Her descriptions of Victorian food are terrifically appealing, and her use of recipe books and household advice manuals to examine Victorian culture is quite effective....Certainly, this will illustrate the challenges faced by Victorian housewives better than any nineteenth-century novel ever could.
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