* The first title to describe Victorian religious figures in the context of their times* A comprehensive illustrated catalog of well over 200 figures with an assessment of their dating and rarity* Individual descriptions of the figures in their biblical or historic settingsA multitude of colourful and na�ve biblical and other religious pottery figures found their way into 19th century Victorian homes in Britain. They were bought by tradesmen, shop-keepers, clerks, teachers and the more skilled working class people. This book tells the story of these Staffordshire pottery figures, which sold in their thousands to stand on the mantelpieces of Christian families, both Protestant and Catholic.Three chapters provide a social history context: the religious background, an assessment of who purchased the figures, the Victorian home and how it was furnished. The final four chapters review the pottery figures themselves, which are based on the Old Testament, the New Testament, relevant religious themes and portraits of preachers. A catalogue of well over 200 figures in full colour with an assessment of their dating and rarity completes the book.This is the first comprehensive record of Victorian religious figures placed in the context of their times.

This unique book offers an in-depth look at the cultural, socio-economic, religious, political, and technological conditions that defined the subject matter of Staffordshire Figures. Each chapter is a self-contained study of the potteries, the potters, and various categories of pre-Victorian and Victorian figures including spaniels and other animals, the monarchy, religious figures, children, heroes and rouges, architectural figures and much more. Included are over 550 superb color photographs of Staffordshire figures (some previously unrecorded), and detailed captions with values.

All lovers of British history and ceramics enthusiasts will want to own the first comprehensive collectors' reference book devoted exclusively to early 19th century enamel painted figures made in the Staffordshire potteries. In this lavish volume, over 400 superb color photographs of figures from museums and private collections serve as time capsules. Along with a meticuously researched text, they reveal astonishing information about life almost two centuries ago. The book also explores and illustrates design sources used for the figures and divulges a wealth of information for collectors.

This book broadens the discussion of pottery and china in the Victorian era by situating them in the national, imperial, design reform, and domestic debates between 1840 and 1890. Largely ignored in recent scholarship, Ceramics in the Victorian Era: Meanings and Metaphors in Painting and Literature argues that the signification of a pot, a jug, or a tableware pattern can be more fully discerned in written and painted representations. Across five case studies, the book explores a rhetoric and set of conventions that developed within the representation of ceramics, emerging in the late-18th century, and continuing in the Victorian period. Each case study begins with a textual passage exemplifying the outlined theme and closes with an object analysis to demonstrate how the fusing of text, image, and object are critical to attaining the period eye in order to better understand the metaphorical meanings of ceramics. Essential reading not only for ceramics scholars, but also those of material culture, the book mines the rich and diverse archive of Victorian painting and literature, from the avant-garde to the sentimental, from the well-known to the more obscure, to shed light on the at once complex and simple implications of ceramics' agencies at this time.

The variety of animal figures produced in Staffordshire, England, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are beautifully illustrated with over 400 color photographs. Chapters on animals in art, British ceramics, Staffordshire potteries, and production techniques and styles. Informative captions provide descriptions, dates of manufacture, and current values.

Gender, Crime, and Murder in Victorian England seeks to provide a comprehensive examination of the notorious Mannings' ‘Bermondsey murder’, and its wider implications in Victorian criminal narrative and popular culture. Exploring the ongoing textual afterlife of Maria Manning, including significant literary contributions by Charles Dickens through his characters Mademoiselle Hortense and Madame Defarge, this volume illuminates representations both echoed and challenged in mid-nineteenth-century conceptions of gender, sexuality, class, nationality, religion, and criminality. This volume also examines the five largely forgotten cases of female homicide from the same year and the imagined discourse perpetuated in fictional personifications. Utilising a wide breadth of literary and historical research, this volume provides readers with a thorough understanding of the various cultural implications of crime and gender in the Victorian period to be read, remembered, and reinterpreted today. Located simultaneously in the fields of feminist, historical, and literary criticism, this volume is invaluable to students of nineteenth-century literature and culture, and researchers with an interest in criminology and media culture.