|
Charles Edward Mudie
Charles Edward Mudie (18 October 1818, in Chelsea – 28 October 1890), English publisher and founder of Mudie's Lending Library and Mudie's Subscription Library, was the son of a second-hand bookseller and newsagent. Mudie's efficient distribution system and vast supply of texts revolutionized the circulating library movement, while his "select" library influenced Victorian middle-class values and the structure of the three-volume novel. He was also the first publisher of James Russell Lowell's poems in England, and of Emerson's ''Man Thinking''. Early life Charles Edward Mudie was born in 1818 to Scottish parents in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea. He received most of his education by assisting in the family newspaper shop until he was twenty-two. In 1840, Mudie opened his first shop on Upper King Street, Bloomsbury. Mudie's Lending Library Mudie originally opened his circulating library to give the public greater access to non-fiction works — which comprised nearly one third of his ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chelsea, London
Chelsea is an affluent area in west London, England, due south-west of Charing Cross by approximately 2.5 miles. It lies on the north bank of the River Thames and for postal purposes is part of the south-western postal area. Chelsea historically formed a manor and parish in the Ossulstone hundred of Middlesex, which became the Metropolitan Borough of Chelsea in 1900. It merged with the Metropolitan Borough of Kensington, forming the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea upon the creation of Greater London in 1965. The exclusivity of Chelsea as a result of its high property prices historically resulted in the coining of the term "Sloane Ranger" in the 1970s to describe some of its residents, and some of those of nearby areas. Chelsea is home to one of the largest communities of Americans living outside the United States, with 6.53% of Chelsea residents having been born in the U.S. History Early history The word ''Chelsea'' (also formerly ''Chelceth'', ''Chelchith' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Charles Darwin
Charles Robert Darwin ( ; 12 February 1809 – 19 April 1882) was an English naturalist, geologist, and biologist, widely known for his contributions to evolutionary biology. His proposition that all species of life have descended from a common ancestor is now generally accepted and considered a fundamental concept in science. In a joint publication with Alfred Russel Wallace, he introduced his scientific theory that this branching pattern of evolution resulted from a process he called natural selection, in which the struggle for existence has a similar effect to the artificial selection involved in selective breeding. Darwin has been described as one of the most influential figures in human history and was honoured by burial in Westminster Abbey. Darwin's early interest in nature led him to neglect his medical education at the University of Edinburgh; instead, he helped to investigate marine invertebrates. His studies at the University of Cambridge's Christ's Col ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Anthony Trollope
Anthony Trollope (; 24 April 1815 – 6 December 1882) was an English novelist and civil servant of the Victorian era. Among his best-known works is a series of novels collectively known as the '' Chronicles of Barsetshire'', which revolves around the imaginary county of Barsetshire. He also wrote novels on political, social, and gender issues, and other topical matters. Trollope's literary reputation dipped somewhat during the last years of his life, but he had regained the esteem of critics by the mid-20th century. Biography Anthony Trollope was the son of barrister Thomas Anthony Trollope and the novelist and travel writer Frances Milton Trollope. Though a clever and well-educated man and a Fellow of New College, Oxford, Thomas Trollope failed at the Bar due to his bad temper. Ventures into farming proved unprofitable, and he did not receive an expected inheritance when an elderly childless uncle remarried and had children. Thomas Trollope was the son of Rev. (Thomas) Ant ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Palliser Novels
The Palliser novels are novels written in series by Anthony Trollope. They were more commonly known as the Parliamentary novels prior to their 1974 television dramatisation by the BBC broadcast as ''The Pallisers''. Marketed as "polite literature" during their initial publication, the novels encompass several literary genres including: family saga, bildungsroman, picaresque, as well as satire and parody of Victorian (or English) life, and criticism of the English government's predilection for attracting corrupt and corruptible people to power. The common threads throughout the series are the wealthy aristocrat and politician Plantagenet Palliser, and his wife, Lady Glencora. The plots involve British and Irish politics in varying degrees, specifically in and around Parliament. The Pallisers do not always play major roles, and in ''The Eustace Diamonds'' they merely comment on the main action. The series overlaps with Trollope's Chronicles of Barsetshire, also a series of six n ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 185430 November 1900) was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel ''The Picture of Dorian Gray'', and the circumstances of his criminal conviction for gross indecency for consensual homosexual acts in "one of the first celebrity trials", imprisonment, and early death from meningitis at age 46. Wilde's parents were Anglo-Irish intellectuals in Dublin. A young Wilde learned to speak fluent French and German. At university, Wilde read Literae Humaniores#Greats, Greats; he demonstrated himself to be an exceptional Classics, classicist, first at Trinity College Dublin, then at Magdalen College, Oxford, Oxford. He became associated with the emerging philosophy of aestheticism, led by two of his tutors, Walter Pater and John Ruskin. After university, Wilde m ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Importance Of Being Earnest
''The Importance of Being Earnest, A Trivial Comedy for Serious People'' is a play by Oscar Wilde. First performed on 14 February 1895 at the St James's Theatre in London, it is a farcical comedy in which the protagonists maintain fictitious personae to escape burdensome social obligations. Working within the social conventions of late Victorian London, the play's major themes are the triviality with which it treats institutions as serious as marriage, and the resulting satire of Victorian morality, Victorian ways. Some contemporary reviews praised the play's humour and the culmination of Wilde's artistic career, while others were cautious about its lack of social messages. Its high farce and witty dialogue have helped make ''The Importance of Being Earnest'' Wilde's most enduringly popular play. The successful opening night marked the climax of Wilde's career but also heralded his downfall. The John Douglas, 9th Marquess of Queensberry, Marquess of Queensberry, whose son Lor ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Saturday Review (London Newspaper)
''The Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science, and Art'' was a London weekly newspaper established by A. J. B. Beresford Hope in 1855. The first editor was the ''Morning Chronicle''s ex-editor John Douglas Cook (1808?–1868), and many of the earlier contributors had worked on the ''Chronicle''. Cook was a Scotsman who had lived in India: he had a house in Tintagel, Cornwall, and is buried there. A stained-glass window in the parish church commemorates him. The political stance of the ''Saturday Review'' was Peelite liberal Conservatism. The paper, benefiting from the recent repeal of the Stamp Act, aimed to combat the political influence of ''The Times''. The first issue appeared on 3 November 1855. Frank Harris was editor from 1894 to 1898. Contributors included Dorothy Richardson, Lady Emilia Dilke, Anthony Trollope., H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Eneas Sweetland Dallas, Max Beerbohm, Walter Bagehot, James Fitzjames Stephen, Charles Kingsley, Max Müller, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bab Ballads
''The Bab Ballads'' is a collection of light verses by W. S. Gilbert (1836–1911), illustrated with his own comic drawings. The book takes its title from Gilbert's childhood nickname. He later began to sign his illustrations "Bab". Gilbert wrote the "ballads" collected in the book before he became famous for his comic opera librettos with Arthur Sullivan. In writing these verses Gilbert developed his "topsy-turvy" style in which the humour is derived by setting up a ridiculous premise and working out its logical consequences, however absurd. The ballads also reveal Gilbert's cynical and satirical approach to humour. They became famous on their own, as well as being a source for plot elements, characters and songs that Gilbert recycled in the Gilbert and Sullivan operas. They were read aloud at private dinner-parties, at public banquets and even in the House of Lords. The ballads have been much published, and some have been recorded or otherwise adapted. Early history Gi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Emma (manga)
is a Japanese historical romance manga by Kaoru Mori. It was published by Enterbrain in the magazine ''Comic Beam'' and collected in 10 tankōbon volumes. The series has been adapted as an anime television series, entitled . The manga is licensed in English in North America by Yen Press and the anime is licensed in English by Right Stuf International, Nozomi Entertainment. Set in Victorian era, Victorian London at the end of the 19th century, ''Emma'' is the story of a maid, housemaid who falls in love with a member of the gentry. However, the young man's family disapproves of him associating with people of the lower classes. Overview Both the manga and anime versions of ''Emma'' are unique for being set in a setting seldom visited by either medium without some fantasy or Speculative fiction, speculative element. The author and illustrator of the manga, Kaoru Mori, is a self-professed Anglophile, and attempted to recreate 1895 London with meticulous detail. The manga has a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jacob's Room
''Jacob's Room'' is the third novel by Virginia Woolf, first published on 26 October 1922. The novel centres, in a very ambiguous way, around the life story of the protagonist Jacob Flanders and is presented almost entirely through the impressions other characters have of Jacob. Thus, although it could be said that the book is primarily a character study and has little in the way of plot or background, the narrative is constructed with a void in place of the central character if, indeed, the novel can be said to have a 'protagonist' in conventional terms. Motifs of emptiness and absence haunt the novel and establish its elegiac feel. Jacob is described to us, but in such indirect terms that it would seem better to view him as an amalgam of the different perceptions of the characters and narrator. He does not exist as a concrete reality, but rather as a collection of memories and sensations. Plot summary Set in pre-war England, the novel begins in Jacob's childhood and follows h ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Virginia Woolf
Adeline Virginia Woolf (; ; 25 January 1882 28 March 1941) was an English writer, considered one of the most important modernist 20th-century authors and a pioneer in the use of stream of consciousness as a narrative device. Woolf was born into an affluent household in South Kensington, London, the seventh child of Julia Prinsep Jackson and Leslie Stephen in a blended family of eight which included the modernist painter Vanessa Bell. She was home-schooled in English classics and Victorian literature from a young age. From 1897 to 1901, she attended the Ladies' Department of King's College London, where she studied classics and history and came into contact with early reformers of women's higher education and the women's rights movement. Encouraged by her father, Woolf began writing professionally in 1900. After her father's death in 1904, the Stephen family moved from Kensington to the more bohemian Bloomsbury, where, in conjunction with the brothers' intellectual friends, t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Invisible Man
''The Invisible Man'' is a science fiction novel by H. G. Wells. Originally serialized in ''Pearson's Weekly'' in 1897, it was published as a novel the same year. The Invisible Man to whom the title refers is Griffin, a scientist who has devoted himself to research into optics and who invents a way to change a body's refractive index to that of air so that it neither absorbs nor reflects light. He carries out this procedure on himself and renders himself invisible, but fails in his attempt to reverse it. A practitioner of random and irresponsible violence, Griffin has become an iconic character in horror fiction. While its predecessors, ''The Time Machine'' and ''The Island of Doctor Moreau'', were written using first-person narrators, Wells adopts a third-person objective point of view in ''The Invisible Man''. The novel is considered influential, and helped establish Wells as the "father of science fiction". Plot summary A mysterious man, Griffin, referred to as 'the strang ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
.jpg "Click for more on -> Chelsea, London")
_1889%2C_May_23._Picture_by_W._and_D._Downey.jpg "Click for more on -> The Importance Of Being Earnest")
