This Week's Acquisitions
- Elizabeth Harcourt Mitchell, The Church in the Valley: A Tale (SPCK, [1886]). Victorian religious fiction meets time travel! An antidisestablishment novel of rather High Church leanings.
- William Gresley, The Forest of Arden: A Tale Illustrative of the English Reformation, 2nd ed. (Burns, 1842). More High Church historical fiction, featuring Hugh Latimer as one of the central characters. Some further information on Gresley here (scroll down to "Gresley Papers").
- R. P. Blakeney, Popery in its Social Aspect: Being a Complete Exposure of the Immorality and Intolerance of Romanism (George M'Gibbon, n.d.). Blakeney published several anti-Catholic tracts; this one, first published in 1854, was one of the most popular. It was still being reprinted in the 1940s.
- Susan Sontag, In America (FSG, 1999). Polish actress seeks utopia near nineteenth-century Anaheim.
- Kathryn Harrison, The Binding Chair: Or, a Visit from the Foot Emancipation Society (Perennial, 2001). In the early twentieth century, a Chinese woman marries into a Jewish family.
- Katharine Weber, The Little Women (FSG, 2003). A rewrite of--you guessed it--Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (a book I literally read to pieces when I was in elementary school).
- Dennis Denisoff, ed., The Broadview Anthology of Victorian Short Stories (Broadview, 2004). Anthology of twenty-six stories.
- Martha Stoddard Holmes, Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture (Michigan, 2004). Emphasizes melodramatic representations. (Another book to be reviewed for Choice.)
- Michael J. Turner, Pitt the Younger: A Life (Hambledon, 2003). Part of a recent spate of one-volume biographies.
- Tamara Hunt, Defining John Bull: Political Caricature and National Identity in Late Georgian England (Ashgate, 2003). Studies the changing iconography of John Bull, c. 1770s (American Revolution) to c. 1820s (Queen Caroline).
- Anthony Brundage, England's Prussian Minister: Edwin Chadwick and the Politics of Government Growth, 1832-1854 (Penn State, 1988). Chadwick was one of the most famous members of the Poor Law Commission; further information at the Victorian Web.