Books like The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830-1870 — picked by fans

I love this book because it connects the military and the home fronts of the American Civil War. How, for example, specific battles were pursued and fought for the sake of public opinion and how, more generally, political priorities dictated military strategy.

The Confederacy was a slaveholders’ republic that had huge racial, social, and—indeed—gender divisions, which all worsened during the war, but Gallagher also shows how many white southerners, whether or not they owned enslaved people, united behind a Confederate nationalism focused on their equivalent of George Washington and the Continental Army of the American Revolution: Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia. On this foundation, Confederates built their huge ambitions.

I love this book because it conjures up the restless spirit of the U.S. South in the 1850s on the eve of war. Forget the Gone with the Wind image of a refined southern aristocracy. Instead, conscious of slavery’s need to expand in order to survive, slaveholders were mobile hustlers determined to expand southwards into the Caribbean and the rest of Latin America.

The South needed more states and senators to compete with the North. With southern expansionist plans to acquire Cuba blocked by the northern majority, May brilliantly captures the desperation of what amounted to little more than raids of so-called filibusters on places like Nicaragua. For me, I love the context of all these plots and conspiracies: what amounts to a worldview looking south in which slaveholders’ ambitions would take off during the Civil War.

I love this book because, as a wartime bestseller dedicated to the soldiers of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, it captures the Confederate mood during the war. It is at once a remarkable moment in the construction of femininity and masculinity in U.S. history, as Evans charts the headstrong, independent-minded heroine Irene Huntington’s struggles both with her traditionalist slaveholding father and with her self-made lover Russell and, finally, with Electra—her rival in Russell’s affections and whom her philanthropy had raised from poverty.

Irene rejects the traditional passive role of the heiress waiting to get married as she engages in scientific pursuits, educational projects including schools and orphanages, and finally, when war comes at the end of the book in nursing and hospitals. The South in which the characters move is cosmopolitan, a self-conscious advanced civilization in a transatlantic world, including the North and Europe, and driven by evangelical revivalism: the… show more.

I love this book because Genovese puts a lifetime of research and scholarship into the service of searching for an answer to the question: how did slaveholders reconcile slavery and Christian faith? What results from this project is a stunning reconstruction of the mental furniture of the individuals who led the southern states into secession and war. Genovese uncovers what they learned at school, where they traveled, with whom they spoke and interacted, what they read, and what they thought about what they read.

What emerges is a distinct group of individuals who saw themselves as no one’s imitators and from whose understanding of history and the Bible regarded the white southerners they led as God’s chosen people. What kept them awake at night was the uneasy knowledge that this special status in the firmament would not necessarily protect them from God’s wrath. 

Of the many reference resources we encountered in the midst of our obsessive research for our Little Women Cookbook, this one was a favorite (along with the incomparable YHF). It’s just so satisfying to find the perfect book for a project, isn’t it? When we first started out, we thought, “We’d be so lucky to find anything about food from the Civil War era that doesn’t focus on soldiers’ rations, rich people, or the South — especially if it touches on the role of women in everyday culinary culture.” And as if our local university library were a magical genie who heard my wish, there this book was.

In Food in the Civil War Era: The North, editor Helen Zoe Veit provides a bit of background so you can understand the trends behind five Civil War-era cookbooks. Her engaging commentary made this one a surprisingly quick read.… show more.

This is often overlooked by readers of Dickens. I think the term “sketches” is important here at a point where Dickens was still experimenting with his art and particularly his characters which were always going to be his greatest strength. Sketches by Boz is a collection of fascinatingly detailed insights into London life intertwined in episodes (or scenes) as Dickens terms it through a richly caricatured study of a set of interesting lives of the working classes, in a way that only Dickens has ever been able to do. The “sketches” had, prior to this, been serialized in weekly installments (the soap operas of the day). Dickens had experienced sufficient highs and lows of social mobility in his own life to fully qualify his portrayals. "The Tuggses at Ramsgate" is perhaps for me the most memorable but the whole volume is bursting with energetic individuality and character. I have… show more.

This is one of the first books that I remember buying for myself in graduate school. Cullwick’s descriptions of her relationship with upper-class Arthur Munby (whom she eventually married) and the photographs of her dressed as a maid-of-all-work, a lady, a “slave,” an agricultural worker, and a valet highlight Victorian power negotiations and performativity.

Cullwick started working as a servant at the age of eight. From her diaries, I learned much about the daily lives of domestic servants: their relationships with employers, the different levels of service and employment networks, and the sheer amount of hard, physical labor that it took to run a Victorian household.

In this field-defining classic, Ritvo boldly showed the academic world that the relations between humans and other animals are worthy of historical inquiry.

The book delves into various subjects in Victorian life: hunting and the designation of nature reserves, the emergence of pet shows and their relations to class formation, meat consumption, and its national symbolism. The book’s impressive breadth of sources spans from popular newspapers’ illustrations to agricultural studbooks.

While primarily focused on nineteenth-century England, Ritvo's insights have inspired researchers, including myself, to examine similar themes in different cultures and historical periods.

Ah, a Victorian woman feeling restricted, what a shock. Thus, Lady Finchingfield decides to become Mademoiselle Noire, and enthralls Lord Henry. In something of a reaction to the excesses of the Regency period, the Victorian period had more rules than women could keep up with, and this way of addressing—or circumventing them—appealed to me as very creative. The disguise and gentlemen’s club add an aura of suspense so it was a super quick read for me. I love fast-paced books.

Trapped in Time is the quincentennial weekend escape.

Thanks to a bump on Emma’s head, the story takes you on a time-travel excursion back to the Victorian era, where modern-day Emma suddenly finds herself. With no way back to reality, she navigates and manipulates her way into the arms of the aristocratic John to serve a secret purpose.

But as Emma confronts the struggles of women in this era, she faces critical decisions of mind and heart. This story resonated on many levels to see the hard won progress as women we’ve made and that our path continues with batons held high.