Nineteenth century Archives

Marble in the Making

Ireland’s geological bedrock, though often overlooked, contains an exceptional range of varicoloured marbles comparable to continental varieties and in some cases superior. Marble in the Making focuses on Victorian Ireland, an architectural landscape characterised by neo-Gothic design and the high point of indigenous marble production. It demonstrates that the architecture of this period is distinguished by native polychromy, a feature that was shaped by the resurgence of Gothic architecture and driven by post-Famine entrepreneurship and industrialisation.

This is the first major study of Irish marble. It uncovers the largely unheard-of marble industry by tracing stone from quarry source to marble works to building. The book’s interdisciplinary approach identifies key marble deposits and their distinctive characteristics, outlines workshop and quarry practices, reconstructs trade paths and reveals connections between communities. It enables a holistic and contextual attribution of architectural marble and broadens the understanding of nineteenth-century Irish Gothic Revival architecture. Moreover, this research repositions Irish marble within an international framework, highlighting its contribution to transnational material culture and geological heritage.

The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham, Volume 14

This volume, which supplements the main chronological series of The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham, contains 252 letters written to and from Jeremy Bentham, 19 letters written to and from individuals other than Bentham but containing material of biographical interest, and the will made by Bentham on 17 August 1785. The letters have either never before been published or been only partially published in previous volumes of The Correspondence. A large number of the letters were written by Bentham’s brother Samuel on his journey to Russia and during his sojourn in Russia, covering the years 1779 to 1791. This meticulously researched and richly annotated volume contains much new information of biographical interest and deepens our knowledge of Bentham’s relationship with his family, with the panopticon penitentiary scheme, and with such ‘disciples’ as Étienne Dumont, Henry Bickersteth, and Leicester Stanhope. Of particular interest will be correspondence with Prince Grigory Alexandrovich Potemkin, Sir Samuel Romilly, Jacques Pierre Brissot de Warville, and John Quincy Adams.

Comparative Perspectives on the Rise of the Brazilian Novel

Comparative Perspectives on the Rise of the Brazilian Novel presents a framework of comparative literature based on a systemic and empirical approach to the study of the novel and applies that framework to the analysis of key nineteenth-century Brazilian novels. The works under examination were published during the period in which the forms and procedures of the novel were acclimatized as the genre established and consolidated itself in Brazil.

The 15 original essays by experienced and early career scholars explore the links between themes, narrative paradigms, and techniques of Brazilian, European and North American novels and the development of the Brazilian novel. The European and North American novels cover a wide range of literary traditions and periods, and are in conversation with the different novelistic trends that characterize the rise of the genre in Brazil. Chapters reflect on both canonical and lesser-known Brazilian works from a comparatist perspective: from the first novel by an Afro-Brazilian woman, Maria Firmina dos Reis’s Ursula (1859) to Machado de Assis’s Dom Casmurro (1900); and from José de Alencar’s Indianist novel, Iracema (1865), to Júlia Lopes de Almeida’s A Falência (The Bankruptcy, 1901).

Early Civilization and the American Modern

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, a particular story about the United States’ role in the long history of world civilization was constructed in public spaces, through public art and popular histories. This narrative posited that civilization and its benefits – science, law, writing, art and architecture – began in Egypt and Mesopotamia before passing ever further westward, towards a triumphant culmination on the American continent.

Early Civilization and the American Modern explores how this teleological story answered anxieties about the United States’ unique role in the long march of progress. Eva Miller focuses on important figures who collaborated on the creation of a visual, progressive narrative in key institutions, world’s fairs and popular media: Orientalist and public intellectual James Henry Breasted, astronomer George Ellery Hale, architect Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, and decorative artists Lee Lawrie and Hildreth Meière. At a time when new information about the ancient Middle East was emerging through archaeological excavation, ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia appeared simultaneously old and new. This same period was crucial to the development of public space and civic life across the United States, as a shared sense of historical consciousness was actively pursued by politicians, philanthropists, intellectuals, architects and artists.

The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham, Volume 13

The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham, Volume 13 contains authoritative and fully annotated texts of all known and publishable letters sent both to and from Bentham between 1 July 1828 and his death on 6 June 1832. In addition to 474 letters, the volume contains three memorandums concerning Bentham’s health shortly before his death, his Last Will and Testament, and extracts from both the Autobiography and the manuscript diaries of Bentham’s nephew George. Of the letters that have been previously published, most are drawn from the edition of The Works of Jeremy Bentham, prepared under the superintendence of Bentham’s literary executor John Bowring. A small number of letters have been reproduced from newspapers and periodicals.

This volume publishes for the first time all the extant correspondence between Bentham and Daniel O’Connell, the Irish Liberator. Other new acquaintances included Charles Sinclair Cullen, barrister and law reformer, and John Tyrrell, the Real Property Commissioner. Throughout the period, Bentham maintained regular contact with old friends and connections, but he also entered into sporadic correspondence with such leading figures in government as the Duke of Wellington, Robert Peel and Henry Brougham. Further afield, Bentham corresponded, amongst others, with the Marquis de La Fayette in France, Edward Livingston in the United States of America and José del Valle in Guatemala.

The Spectral Arctic

Visitors to the Arctic enter places that have been traditionally imagined as otherworldly. This strangeness fascinated audiences in nineteenth-century Britain when the idea of the heroic explorer voyaging through unmapped zones reached its zenith. The Spectral Arctic re-thinks our understanding of Arctic exploration by paying attention to the importance of dreams and ghosts in the quest for the Northwest Passage.

The narratives of Arctic exploration that we are all familiar with today are just the tip of the iceberg: they disguise a great mass of mysterious and dimly lit stories beneath the surface. In contrast to oft-told tales of heroism and disaster, this book reveals the hidden stories of dreaming and haunted explorers, of frozen mummies, of rescue balloons, visits to Inuit shamans, and of the entranced female clairvoyants who travelled to the Arctic in search of John Franklin’s lost expedition. Through new readings of archival documents, exploration narratives, and fictional texts, these spectral stories reflect the complex ways that men and women actually thought about the far North in the past. This revisionist historical account allows us to make sense of current cultural and political concerns in the Canadian Arctic about the location of Franklin’s ships.

Narratives of Low Countries History and Culture

This edited collection explores the ways in which our understanding of the past in Dutch history and culture can be rethought to consider not only how it forms part of the present but how it can relate also to the future.

Divided into three parts – The Uses of Myth and History, The Past as Illumination of Cultural Context, and Historiography in Focus – this book seeks to demonstrate the importance of the past by investigating the transmission of culture and its transformations. It reflects on the history of historiography and looks critically at the products of the historiographic process, such as Dutch and Afrikaans literary history.

The chapters cover a range of disciplines and approaches: some authors offer a broad view of a particular period, such as Jonathan Israel’s contribution on myth and history in the ideological politics of the Dutch Golden Age, while others zoom in on specific genres, texts or historical moments, such as Benjamin Schmidt’s study of the doolhof, a word that today means ‘labyrinth’ but once described a 17th-century educational amusement park. This volume, enlightening and home to multiple paths of enquiry leading in different directions, is an excellent example of what a past-present doolhof might look like.

Mapping Society

From a rare map of yellow fever in eighteenth-century New York, to Charles Booth’s famous maps of poverty in nineteenth-century London, an Italian racial zoning map of early twentieth-century Asmara, to a map of wealth disparities in the banlieues of twenty-first-century Paris, Mapping Society traces the evolution of social cartography over the past two centuries. In this richly illustrated book, Laura Vaughan examines maps of ethnic or religious difference, poverty, and health inequalities, demonstrating how they not only serve as historical records of social enquiry, but also constitute inscriptions of social patterns that have been etched deeply on the surface of cities.

The book covers themes such as the use of visual rhetoric to change public opinion, the evolution of sociology as an academic practice, changing attitudes to physical disorder, and the complexity of segregation as an urban phenomenon. While the focus is on historical maps, the narrative carries the discussion of the spatial dimensions of social cartography forward to the present day, showing how disciplines such as public health, crime science, and urban planning, chart spatial data in their current practice. Containing examples of space syntax analysis alongside full colour maps and photographs, this volume will appeal to all those interested in the long-term forces that shape how people live in cities.