I’m fascinated by the Victorians – and I’ve spent most of my career trying to understand them – because they’re so like us and so unlike us in many ways. They’re familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. I’m a historian of science, and I’m passionate about trying to understand why we think about the world – and about science – the way we do. I think it started with the Victorians, so understanding them really matters and getting it right rather than repeating the same old stories. I hope these books will help you put the Victorians in their place the way they helped me.
I wrote
How the Victorians Took Us to the Moon: The Story of the 19th-Century Innovators Who Forged Our Future
I think this is just such a fantastic book. It blows away the whole idea that the Victorians were prudes, embarrassed about anything to do with sex. If you really don’t want to know what your great great grandparents got up to in the bedroom, then stay away from this book.
I really like the way Fern Riddell tells her story, too. Each chapter has a different fictional character to take you though the story. I think its really original – and you’ll never think about the Victorians the same way again.
An exciting factual romp through sexual desire, practises and deviance in the Victorian era. The Victorian Guide to Sex will reveal advice and ideas on sexuality from the Victorian period. Drawing on both satirical and real life events from the period, it explores every facet of sexuality that the Victorians encountered. Reproducing original advertisements and letters, with extracts taken from memoirs, legal cases, newspaper advice columns, and collections held in the Museum of London and the British Museum, this book lifts the veil from historical sexual attitudes.
What I really admire about this book is the way it brings to life bits of the Victorian past that are easily overlooked, even though lots of them are still there all around us. The Victorians were in love with their engineers and their monumental works: bridges, buildings, railways, steamships. They were their future.
I like the way Rolt takes us on a deep dive into the world the engineers built and draws pen portraits of the men themselves: larger than life, ambitious, brash. Think of that famous photo of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, chomping his cigar and a stovepipe hat on his head. That was them.
L T C Rolt was an engineer and pioneer of industrial history; in this book he combined these two passions to give us a fascinating account of the men who 'made' Britain. From Brunel to Telford, he takes us on a journey from the first railway tracks being laid down to bridges spanning hitherto unimagined lengths, through to the 'invention' and mastery of the gas and electricity, which we take for granted today. The Victorians were at the forefront of modern technology in their time, but often came to see it as a blight on their landscape and struggled to…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
We’ve all seen them, those big British spectaculars – at royal coronations, funerals, and weddings. What I admire most about Cannadine’s book is the way he doesn’t just remind us that the Victorians invented all this but why it was so important to them too.
The Victorians were in love with spectacle – and making spectacles of themselves (think about those big Victorian dresses!) Cannadine is great at putting spectacle at the centre of their political world, too. Showing off was a way of showing power.
With the return of Hong Kong to the Chinese government in 1997, the empire that had lasted three hundred years and "upon which the sun never set" finally lost its hold on the world and slipped into history. But the question of how we understand the British Empire--its origins, nature, purpose, and effect on the world it ruled--is far from settled. In this incisive work, David Cannadine looks at the British Empire from a new perspective--through the eyes of those who created and ruled it--and offers fresh insight into the driving forces behind the Empire. Arguing against the views of…
This is it. The original Victorian expose. I love the way Lytton Strachey takes his parents’ generation and pokes fun at their heroes. This is the first attempt to burst the Victorians’ bubble, and I think it’s brilliant. More than that, I don’t really think you can understand anything that’s been written about them since without starting here.
Strachey picks on four Victorian greats – Florence Nightingale included – and strips them naked. Not so great after all, he concludes. It’s the original tell-all biography.
Eminent Victorians marked an epoch in the art of biography; it also helped to crack the old myths of high Victorianism and to usher in a new spirit by which chauvinism, hypocrisy and the stiff upper lip were debunked. In it Strachey cleverly exposes the self-seeking ambitions of Cardinal Manning and the manipulative, neurotic Florence Nightingale; and in his essays on Dr Arnold and General Gordon his quarries are not only his subjects but also the public-school system and the whole structure of nineteenth-century liberal values.
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
OK, yes, I know. It’s fiction, and the first steampunk novel too. But I think that sometimes fiction can tell us (almost) as much as factual history about the past, if the authors have done their research – and Gibson and Sterling absolutely have. I can even tell just what academic papers they’d been reading!
It’s alternative history Victorian, But I think it tells us a lot about the real Victorians too, because it shows just how much technology mattered to their sense of who they were and what made them different from their parents. And, obviously, it’s a great story.
In 1855, London swelters in a poisonous heatwave. The computer age has arrived a century ahead of time and the Industrial Revolution is in full swing. However, there is a conspiracy afoot, linking Britain with the France of Louis Napoleon and the Manhattan commune of Karl Marx.
The rich and fascinating history of the scientific revolution of the Victorian Era, leading to transformative advances in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
The Victorians invented the idea of the future. They saw it as an undiscovered country, one ripe for exploration and colonization. And to get us there, they created a new way of ordering and transforming nature, built on grand designs and the mass-mobilization of the resources of the British Empire.
With their expert culture of accuracy and precision, they created telegraphs and telephones, electric trams and railways, built machines that could think, and devised engines that could reach for the skies. When Cyrus Field’s audacious plan to lay a telegraph cable across the Atlantic finally succeeded in 1866, it showed how science, properly disciplined, could make new worlds. As crowds flocked to the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the exhibitions its success inaugurated, they came to see the future made fact—to see the future being built before their eyes.
In this rich and absorbing book, a distinguished historian of science tells the story of how this future was made. From Charles Babbage’s dream of mechanizing mathematics to Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s tunnel beneath the Thames to George’s Cayley’s fantasies of powered flight and Nikola Tesla’s visions of an electrical world, it is a story of towering personalities, clashing ambitions, furious rivalries and conflicting cultures—a rich tapestry of remarkable lives that transformed the world beyond recognition and ultimately took mankind to the Moon.
