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If someone had thought to ask Queen Victoria what sort of daughter she didn’t want, she might have described Princess Louise: a smoker, a cyclist, and a strong-minded feminist who consorted with the likes of Josephine Butler and George Eliot. It is this tense mother-daughter relationship that dominates Lucinda Hawksley’s lively and enjoyable biography of an intriguing royal whose attitude to sex was distinctly unvictorian. ...

I’ve always been slightly chary of Will Warbuton (1905), having been warned that it features a happy ending. Anyone familiar with Gissing’s novels will know that he is relentlessly bleak, and anything else would be plain wrong. Much to my relief, misery still abounds in this story, and Gissing’s characteristic obsession with money, sex, and class is evident throughout. Will Warburton is an essentially cheery soul whose financial security is destroyed by the recklessness of an unreliable friend. Having only a few hundred pounds in the bank and a widowed mother and a sister to support, the middle-class Warburton resolves to buy a grocery business in South London. Although resigned to this twist of fate, he struggles with the “sickening weariness of routine” and the humiliation of serving behind a counter. Emasculated by his ill-fortune and class relegation, he is easy prey to a dishonest landlady, who exploits his meagre and hard-won income. Indeed, Warburton epitomises Gissing’s ubiquitous trope, that of the man whose iniquitous social position is determined by his financial situation. ...

This is a preprint of a review published in Britain and the World, Volume 6, pp. 298-300. The title of this book is slightly misleading, as the reader learns little of Alice Liddell, the girl who famously inspired Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Instead, in this slim volume, Simon Winchester focuses his attention on Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) and his adventures in photography. We learn about Dodgson’s experiences as an awkward youth and his circumscribed life following admission to Christ Church College, Oxford, where he took holy orders and, therefore, a vow of celibacy. ...

If anything is guaranteed to get my feminist dander up, it’s the idea of wifely perfection, and this enthralling book had me seething from start to finish. On a summer’s day in 1769, wealthy (but unprepossessing) bachelor Thomas Day visited the orphan hospital in Shrewsbury to choose himself a wife. This was not the way a gentleman usually embarked upon courtship, even in the eighteenth century, but at the grand age of twenty-one, Day had already decided that his womanly ideal did not exist: therefore, he would have to create her. He required someone “completely subservient to his needs and whims and utterly in thrall to his ideas and beliefs”. ...

To be decadent in an age of utility was unforgivable, as Frederick Park and Ernest Boulton were to find out in a trial that scandalised London in 1870. Better known as Fanny and Stella, the two young clerks were arrested and charged with outraging public decency by dressing as women and “conspiring to incite others to commit unnatural offences”. As there were no specific laws against cross-dressing and “unnatural offences” (i.e. buggery) were difficult to prove, the court case was as oblique as it was sensational. In this enthralling account, Neil McKenna chronicles the arrest and cross-examination of Ernest “Stella” Boulton and Frederick “Fanny” Park by using court transcriptions and letters between the accused and their circle. Where there are gaps, McKenna uses his imagination, inhabiting their world seamlessly and appropriating the colourful language of fin-de-siècle London. ...

The trouble with reading a lot of Victorian potboilers is that they start to seem like reality. The madwoman in the attic is a pervasive image throughout nineteenth-century culture, from Bertha Mason, through to Laura Fairlie and Lady Audley. In this gripping and insightful study, Sarah Wise reveals that it was actually husbands who were most at risk of being detained against their will. It makes sense when you think about it: men were the main inheritors of wealth, also assuming their wife’s property upon marriage. Consequently, there was a “high bar” set for men to prove themselves fit to control that wealth, and every incentive for their enemies to demonstrate otherwise. ...

Anyone who has developed their own photographs will recall that miraculous moment as the image slowly materialises before your very eyes. The story behind the discovery of this alchemical technique is no less exciting. As with most good stories, there is a rivalry at its heart, albeit an unintentional one. During the 1830s two men on opposite sides of the Channel threw their considerable talents into one quest: to permanently capture a camera image on paper. Their characters couldn’t have been more different. Louis Daguerre was a flamboyant artist of humble parentage and limited education; Henry Fox Talbot had been born into the English landed gentry and went on to graduate from Cambridge. Talbot was the archetypal gentleman scientist, funding his hobby with a generous trust fund; Daguerre, meanwhile, was obliged to earn while he learned, becoming an extraordinarily accomplished painter of stage effects. Notwithstanding their differences, both men managed to simultaneously develop their own process for ‘capturing the light’. ...

As Russophobia gripped Britain, the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1854 provoked joy among many who wanted to give the “Rooshians” a jolly good beating. At the forefront of the warmongers was Queen Victoria, who longed to don armour and join soldiers on the frontline. But this imagined glory soon faded to reveal the harsh realities of conflict, and the queen spent much of her time writing letters of condolence to bereaved families, and also quietly funding the fitting of prosthetic limbs for the injured. ...

First published in 1887, Gissing intended Thyrza to “contain the very spirit of London working-class life”. He spent long hours researching the novel in south London, watching and listening to the inhabitants as they went about their business. His story tells of Walter Egremont, an Oxford-trained idealist who gives lectures on literature to workers, some of them from his father’s Lambeth factory. Thyrza Trent, a young hat-trimmer, meets and falls in love with him, forsaking Gilbert Grail, an intelligent working man who Egremont has put in charge of his library. ...

Much as I would like to pay a visit to Victorian London, I fear my acute olfactory sense would send me scurrying back to the 21st century. Fortunately, in The Victorian City Judith Flanders has allowed me to experience the sights, sounds and dubious smells of the heaving metropolis without leaving my armchair. During the nineteenth century, London’s population doubled, exacerbating the problems of poverty and squalor that have become so emblematic of the age. While Charles Dickens is famed for his literary imagination, he was also a keen observer of the life that teemed all around him. He thought nothing of walking 30 miles per day (and often by night), and during these excursions would chronicle tiny details of the era that has come to be named after him. As Flanders points out, “in Dickens’ own time, the way people lived was not Dickensian, merely life,” and it was a hard life. Young watercress-sellers would tramp the streets for hours on end, just to earn a few pence – hopefully enough to buy them a hot potato or some whelks on the way home. Pie-sellers also scratched out a meagre leaving, their margins eaten away by the Corn Laws. To the delight of small boys, however, they would always toss a coin: if the customer won, he got the pie for free. ...