Utilising the often vivid journals kept by Ashbee and his wife Janet, Alan Crawford documents Ashbee's life and work, the story of the Guild and the part Ashbee played in reform movements that ranged from the conservation of historic buildings to early town planning."--Jacket.

C. R. Ashbee was, some would say, the key man in the British Arts and Crafts movement during the early decades of the twentieth century. Regarded as heir to William Morris in political belief and design reform, Ash bee (and his Guild of Handicraft) gained international fame in his own time and remains a legend today. While much has been written about him, little has been said of his wife. Now Felicity Ashbee breaks the silence in a compelling book about her mother. The book depicts Janet Ashbee as a gifted woman of emotional warmth, strength, and unconventionality, all of which enhanced her husband's work. An accomplished writer and thinker in her own right, Janet Ashbee's life revolved around great historic issues that still resonate today: the socially conscious Arts and Crafts movement, the role of women in contemporary affairs, and embattled ethnic relationships in the Middle East-not to mention marriage and sexual orientation, predicated upon her husband's vibrant and well-known homosexuality. A book of rare insight and significance, Janet Ashbee sheds welcome light on the Arts and Crafts movement and on women in oft-romanticized Victorian and Edwardian British culture.

"Ashbee's most substantial presentation of his ideas on architecture, the arts, town planning and modern life in general, showing the respective influences on him of Bodley, Morris, Frank Lloyd Wright, the English Arts and Crafts movement and American Beaux Arts classicism. It is still stimulating reading today"--abebooks website.

The Simple Life (1981) was Fiona MacCarthy's first book, written while she was the Guardian's design correspondent (and before her acclaimed lives of Eric Gill, William Morris, and Edward Burne-Jones.) It tells of a venturesome effort to enact an Edwardian Utopia in a small town in the Cotswolds. The leader of this endeavour was progressive-minded architect Charles Robert Ashbee, who in 1888 founded the Guild of Handicraft in Whitechapel, specialising in metalworking, jewellery and furniture and informed by the desire to improve society. In 1902 Ashbee and his East London comrades removed the Guild to Chipping Campden in Gloucestershire, hoping to construct a socialistic rural idyll. MacCarthy explores the impact of the experiment on the lives of the group and on the little town they occupied - tracing the Guild's fortunes and misfortunes, hilarious and grave, and the many fellow idealists and artists who were involved (among them William Morris, Roger Fry, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb.)

In the 1880s, fashionable Londoners left their elegant homes and clubs in Mayfair and Belgravia and crowded into omnibuses bound for midnight tours of the slums of East London. A new word burst into popular usage to describe these descents into the precincts of poverty to see how the poor lived: slumming. In this captivating book, Seth Koven paints a vivid portrait of the practitioners of slumming and their world: who they were, why they went, what they claimed to have found, how it changed them, and how slumming, in turn, powerfully shaped both Victorian and twentieth-century understandings of poverty and social welfare, gender relations, and sexuality. The slums of late-Victorian London became synonymous with all that was wrong with industrial capitalist society. But for philanthropic men and women eager to free themselves from the starched conventions of bourgeois respectability and domesticity, slums were also places of personal liberation and experimentation. Slumming allowed them to act on their irresistible "attraction of repulsion" for the poor and permitted them, with society's approval, to get dirty and express their own "dirty" desires for intimacy with slum dwellers and, sometimes, with one another. Slumming elucidates the histories of a wide range of preoccupations about poverty and urban life, altruism and sexuality that remain central in Anglo-American culture, including the ethics of undercover investigative reporting, the connections between cross-class sympathy and same-sex desire, and the intermingling of the wish to rescue the poor with the impulse to eroticize and sexually exploit them. By revealing the extent to which politics and erotics, social and sexual categories overflowed their boundaries and transformed one another, Koven recaptures the ethical dilemmas that men and women confronted--and continue to confront--in trying to "love thy neighbor as thyself."

A Spiritual Bloomsbury is an exploration of how three English writers--Edward Carpenter, E.M. Forster, and Christopher Isherwood--sought to come to terms with their homosexuality by engagement with Hinduism. Copley reveals how these writers came to terms with their inner conflicts and were led in the direction of Hinduism by friendship or the influence of gurus. Tackling the themes of the guru-disciple relationship, their quarrel with Christianity, relationships with their mothers and the problematic feminine, the tensions between sexuality and society, and the attraction of Hindu mysticism; this fascinating work seeks to reveal whether Hinduism offered the answers and fulfillment these writers ultimately sought. Also included is a diary narrating Copley's quest to track down Carpenter's and Isherwood's Vendantism and Forster's Krishna cult on a journey to India.