The latter years of the Victorian era witnessed a massive expansion in the tourist industry. the advent of railways and better roads had, at last, made travel tolerable. For previous generations serious travel had been restricted to the Grand Tour, the

Since at least the Reformation, English men and women have been engaged in visiting, exploring and portraying, in words and images, the landscape of their nation. The Invention of the English Landscape examines these journeys and investigations to explore how the natural and historic English landscape was reconfigured to become a widely enjoyed cultural and leisure resource. Peter Borsay considers the manifold forces behind this transformation, such as the rise of consumer culture, the media, industrial and transport revolutions, the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and the Gothic revival. In doing so, he reveals the development of a powerful bond between landscape and natural identity, against the backdrop of social and political change from the early modern period to the start of the Second World War. Borsay's interdisciplinary approach demonstrates how human understandings of the natural world shaped the geography of England, and uncovers a wealth of valuable material, from novels and poems to paintings, that expose historical understandings of the landscape. This innovative approach illuminates how the English countryside and historic buildings became cultural icons behind which the nation was rallied during war-time, and explores the emergence of a post-war heritage industry that is now a definitive part of British cultural life.

The history of globalisation is usually told as a history of shortening distances and acceleration of the flows of people, goods and ideas. Channelling Mobilities refines this picture by looking at a wide variety of mobile people passing through the region of the Suez Canal, a global shortcut opened in 1869. As an empirical contribution to global history, the book asks how the passage between Europe and Asia and Africa was perceived, staged and controlled from the opening of the Canal to the First World War, arguing that this period was neither an era of unhampered acceleration, nor one of hardening borders and increasing controls. Instead, it was characterised by the channelling of mobilities through the differentiation, regulation and bureaucratisation of movement. Telling the stories of tourists, troops, workers, pilgrims, stowaways, caravans, dhow skippers and others, the book reveals the complicated entanglements of empires, internationalist initiatives and private companies.

The author of numerous books on Geoffrey Chaucer, the nineteenth-century scholar, Mary Eliza Haweis, has been largely erased from general histories of Chaucer studies. In her critical biography, Mary Flowers Braswell traces Haweis’s career, bringing her out of obscurity and placing her contributions to Chaucer scholarship in the context of those of influential Chaucerians of the period such as Frederick James Furnivall, Walford Dakin Selby, and Walter Rye. Braswell draws on extensive archival research from a broad range of late-Victorian newspapers, journals, and society papers to weave a fascinating picture of Haweis’s own life and work, which in quantity and quality rivaled that of her contemporaries. Haweis, we discover, corrected assumptions related to the Chaucer seal and texts, bringing her findings to the attention of the public in works such as Chaucer for Schools, the first textbook on the poet. Braswell also sheds light on the ways in which fashion, society, culture, art, and leisure activities intermingled with scholarship, archival recovery, museum work, editing, writing, and publishing in the late-Victorian middle and upper classes. Concluding with a discussion of Haweis’s forgotten role as head of the Chaucer section for the National Home Reading Union, Braswell’s book makes a strong case both for Haweis’s influence as a Chaucer scholar and her importance as an educator in nineteenth-century Britain and the United States.

British Images of Germany is the first full-length cultural history of Britain's relationship with Germany in the key period leading up to the First World War. Richard Scully reassesses what is imagined to be a fraught relationship, illuminating the sense of kinship Britons felt for Germany even in times of diplomatic tension.