This book considers the ways in which women writers used the powerful positions of author and editor to perform conventions of gender and genre in the Victorian period. It examines Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Ellen Wood, and Florence Marryat's magazines (Belgravia, Argosy, and London Society respectively) alongside their sensation fiction to explore the mutually influential strategies of authorship and editorship. The relationship between sensation's success as a popular fiction genre and its serialisation in the periodical press was not just reciprocal but also self-conscious and performative. Publishing sensation in Victorian magazines offered women writers a set of discursive strategies that they could transfer onto other cultural discourses and performances. With these strategies they could explore, enact, and re-work contemporary notions of female agency and autonomy, as well as negotiate contemporary criticism. Combining authorship and editorship gave these middle-class women exceptional control over the shaping of fiction, its production, and its dissemination. By paying attention to the ways in which the sensation genre is rooted in the press network this book offers a new, broader context for the phenomenal success of works like Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret and Ellen Wood's East Lynne. The book reaches back to the mid-nineteenth century to explore the press conditions initiated by figures like Charles Dickens and Mrs Beeton that facilitated the later success of these sensation writers. By looking forwards to the New Woman writers of the 1890s the book draws conclusions regarding the legacies of sensational author-editorship in the Victorian press and beyond.

John Wolffe provides an authoritative account of evangelicalism from the 1790s to the 1840s, making extensive use of primary sources. A compelling book, rich in detail, that will excite history buffs, students and professors, and any reader interested in the development of evangelicalism.

Over the long eighteenth century English governance was transformed by large adjustments to the legal instruments and processes of power. This book documents and analyzes these shifts and focuses upon the changing relations between legal authority and the English people.

This original study aims to provide a contribution to international relations and British political history. Its analysis of the birth of the British peace movement includes a historiography of British politics and many theories about international relations.

A huge work of reference. A fresh perspective on a crucial time for courts, policing and punishment. Shows how individuals, concerned parties and vested interests drove many of the era's developments. A colourful account, which captures the essence of the period. Running to nearly 700 pages, this comprehensive work on the development of summary jurisdiction, early policing and the emergence of London's embryonic modern criminal justice system looks at every aspect of these topics from numerous perspectives and across the eighteenth century. The 'whores' and 'highwaymen' of Gregory Durston's title are just some of the dubious characters met within this absorbing work, including thief-takers, trading justices, an upstart legal profession whose lower orders developed various ways to line their own pockets and magistrates and clerks who often preferred dealing with those cases which attracted fees. The book shows how little was planned by government or the authorities, and how much sprang up due to the efforts of individuals-so that the origins of social control, particularly at a local level, had much to do with personal ideas of morality, class boundaries and perceived threats, serious and otherwise. Based on news reports, Old Bailey and local archives, and other solid records the book weaves a compelling picture of a critical time in English history, through the voices of contemporary observers as well as the best of writings by experts ever since. At its broadest point, the book spans the period from the Glorious Revolution to the early 1820s. It falls into three parts: Crime and the Metropolis-including Metropolitan crime, attitudes to crime and policing, explanations for crime, and criminal law and procedure. Policing-including policing the metropolis, constables, the watch, beadles, the role of the military, and the detection of crime. Justice-including the magistracy and its work, ways of prosecution, trial in the lower and higher courts, and the penal regimes of the day. Whores and Highwaymen concentrates on the Metropolis but also compares other parts of England and Wales. Author Gregory Durston MA, DipL, LLM, PhD, of the Middle Temple and Lincoln's Inn, Barrister, studied history for his first degree before turning to the law. He is currently Reader in Law at Kingston University.

This collection of specially commissioned essays provides the first social history of masculinity in the ‘long eighteenth century’. Drawing on diaries, court records and prescriptive literature, it explores the different identities of late Stuart and Georgian men. The heterosexual fop, the homosexual, the polite gentleman, the blackguard, the man of religion, the reader of erotica and the violent aggressor are each examined here, and in the process a new and increasingly important field of historical enquiry is opened up to the non-specialist reader. The book opens with a substantial introduction by the Editors. This provides readers with a detailed context for the chapters which follow. The core of the book is divided into four main parts looking at sociability, virtue and friendship, violence, and sexuality. Within this framework each chapter forms a self-contained unit, with its own methodology, sources and argument. The chapters address issues such as the correlations between masculinity and Protestantism; masculinity, Englishness and taciturnity; and the impact of changing representations of homosexual desire on the social organisation of heterosexuality. Misogyny, James Boswell's self-presentation, the literary and metaphorical representation of the body, the roles of gossip and violence in men's lives, are each addressed in individual chapters. The volume is concluded by a wide-ranging synoptic essay by John Tosh, which sets a new agenda for the history of masculinity. An extensive guide to further reading is also provided. Designed for students, academics and the general reader alike, this collection of essays provides a wide-ranging and accessible framework within which to understand eighteenth-century men. Because of the variety of approaches and conclusions it contains, and because this is the first attempt to bring together a comprehensive set of writings on the social history of eighteenth-century masculinity, this volume does something quite new. It de-centres and problematises the male ‘standard’ and explores the complex and disparate masculinites enacted by the men of this period. This will be essential reading for anyone interested in eighteenth-century British social history.