The Routledge Handbook of Victorian Scandals in Literature and Culture exposes, explores, and examines what Victorians once considered flagrant breaches of decorum. Infringements that were fantasized through artforms or were actually committed exceeded entertaining parlor gossip; once in print they were condemned as socially contaminative but were also consumed as delightfully sensational. Written by scholars in diverse disciplines, this volume
Demonstrates that spreading scandals seemed to have been one of the most entertaining sources of activities but were also normative efforts made by the Victorians to ensure conformity of decorum.
Provides a broad spectrum of infractions that were considered scandalous to the Victorians.
Identifies Victorian transgressions that made the news and that may still shock modern readers.
Covers a gamut of moral infractions and transgressions either practiced, rumored, or fantasized in art forms.
This handbook is an invaluable resource about Victorian literature, art, and culture which challenges its readers to ponder perplexing questions about how and why some scandals were perpetrated and propagated in the nineteenth century while others were not, and what the controversies reveal about the human condition that persists beyond Victoria’s reign of propriety.
Author(s): Brenda Ayres, Sarah E. Maier
Series: Routledge Literature Handbooks
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 625
City: New York
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
List of Figures
List of Contributors
Acknowledgments
Introduction: “Let’s Talk Scandal”
Part 1 Chapters 1–7: Scandalous Victoriana
Chapter 1 The Afterlives of Victorian Scandals: The Memorable, the Neglected, the Factitious
Chapter 2 “Her only fear is convention”: The Bohemian Girl in Victorian Art and Life
Chapter 3 Reading Between the Lines: “Town Jottings” from the Savage Club in the Brighton Guardian, 1877
Chapter 4 Scandalous Stupor: Chloroform and Robbery in Victorian Periodicals
Chapter 5 Suicide as Scandal: Representations from Victorian Life and Art
Chapter 6 Scandalous Women Wearing Cloaks of Religion
Chapter 7 The Darwin Scandal
Part 2 Chapters 8–20: Scandalous Parties
Chapter 8 Victorian Atheists: Cultivating Scandal as a Way of Life
Chapter 9 Scandals in a Religious Sect: Agapemone
Chapter 10 A “Scandalous and Painful Case”: Marriage, Libel, and the Church, 1873‒1895
Chapter 11 The Cause Célèbre of the Year, If Not the Decade: May, Dowager Duchess of Sutherland
Chapter 12 Regina v. Dunn: Lady Angela Burdett-Coutts and the Irish Annoyance
Chapter 13 A Poor Gamble: The Disastrous Elopement of the “Pocket Venus” (Lady Florence Paget)
Chapter 14 “A Voice from the Grave”: Lady Flora Hastings, Queen Victoria, and the Scandal of Pregnancy
Chapter 15 Poisonous Words: Criminal Rhetoric and the Trials of Mary Ann Cotton and Florence Maybrick
Chapter 16 “I Am a Woman All Alone”: The Case of Mrs. Manning
Chapter 17 Lady Lincoln and the Lesser Life of the 1850 Lincoln Divorce
Chapter 18 Militarized Women and Their Heraldry in the Press
Chapter 19 Virtue v. Heroism: Kate Dickinson’s Case Against Colonel Valentine Baker
Chapter 20 Monstrous Martyrdom: The Trials of Oscar Wilde
Part 3 Chapters 21–30: Scandalous Reading and Delightfully Despicable Novels
Chapter 21 Edith Cooper’s Sin: Mapping the Willful Bodies of Michael Field
Chapter 22 “Let us adore spilled blood”: Swinburne and the Scandal of Poems and Ballads
Chapter 23 Edith J. Simcox and the Scandal of Queer Form
Chapter 24 Scandalous Exogamy in Anthony Trollope’s The Prime Minister
Chapter 25 Ouida: Her Scandalous Life and Scandalous Novels
Chapter 26 The Scandalous Deconstruction of Victorian Morals in Anna Lombard: What Made Victoria(ns) Cross?
Chapter 27 Daddy’s Little Angel in the House: The Managing Daughter and the Incest Taboo
Chapter 28 The Nineteenth-Century Sex Worker: Avoiding Surveillance, Stereotypes, and Scandal
Chapter 29 Sexy Dirt: Homosexual Scandal and Late-Victorian Social Reform
Chapter 30 A Confusion of Discourses: Scandal and Degeneracy at the Fin de Siècle
Index
