Reprint of the original, first published in 1877.

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER XIII. MISSION WORK IX BETHNAL GREEN. I Was acquainted at this time with a young' curate, with whem I had somo time boforo made a pedestrian tour through somo of the most beautiful portions of the beautiful county of Kent, and who had lately exchanged his first curacy at Haverstock Hill for a similar engagement in the district of SL Philip, Bcthnal Green. On tho occasion of my first visit to him after this change, our conversation turned upon hemo missions, and I was led to make some remarks, derived from my own observation, upon the incompetency of many of thc Beripture-readora, whose mission-fields were the' industrial quarters of our large towns, for the accomplishment of the end for which they wero appointed. They may be tolerably well qualified to deal with the indifferent and the ignorant, I observed; but they are utterly incompetent to remove the doubts or meet the arguments of the many intelligentmen to bo found in largo towns who reject the ISible as a divine revelation. They way be useful nn.xiliaries of the clergy in visiting the poor inein- Ihts of u congregation, and tolerably successful in bringing into the fold of the Chureh the ignorant and the indifferent; but they don't realize my idea nf whut a Christian missionary in the homo field hhould Ihi in tin ngc like the present. There is great difliculty in obtaining men whe would, returned the curate. It is true they are not very highly paid; but many of them, notably those employed by the City Missionary Society, are as well paid as a largo proportion of curates, whe are drawn from a higher and more educated class. The Churehes, said I, in continuance of the thought that was in my mind, send to the ignorant heathen of Africa and Malaysia men qualified by education for the ministr...

The nineteenth century was a time of 'movements' - political, social, moral reform causes - which drew on the energies of men and women across Britain. This book studies radical reform at the margins of early Victorian society, focusing on decades of particular social, political and technological ferment: when foreign and British promoters of extravagant technologically assisted utopias could attract many hundreds of supporters of limited means, persuaded to escape grim conditions by emigration to South America; when pioneers of vegetarianism joined the ranks of the temperance movement; and when working-class Chartists, reviving a struggle for political reform, seemed to threaten the State for a brief moment in April 1848. Through the forgotten figure of James Elmslie Duncan, 'shabby genteel' poet and self-proclaimed 'Apostle of the Messiahdom', The Poetry and the Politics considers themes including poetry's place in radical culture, the response of pantomime to the Chartist challenge to law and order, and associations between madness and revolution.Duncan became a promoter of the technological fantasies of John Adolphus Etzler, a poet of science who prophesied a future free from drudgery, through machinery powered by natural forces. Etzler dreamed of crystal palaces: Duncan's public freedom was to end dramatically in 1851 just as a real crystal palace opened to an astonished world. In addition to Duncan, James Gregory also introduces a cast of other poets, earnest reformers and agitators, such as William Thom the weaver poet of Inverury, whose metropolitan feting would end in tragedy; John Goodwyn Barmby, bearded Pontiffarch of the Communist Church; a lunatic 'Invisible Poet' of Cremorne pleasure gardens; the hatter from Reading who challenged the 'feudal' restrictions of the Game Laws by tract, trespass and stuffed jay birds; and foreign exotics such as the German-born Conrad Stollmeyer, escaping the sinking of an experimental Naval Automaton in Margate to build a fortune as theAsphalt King of Trinidad.Combining these figures with the biography of a man whose literary career was eccentric and whose public antics were capitalised upon by critics of Chartist agitation, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in radical reform and popular political movements in Victorian Britain.

This book is the first full-length study of one of the most widely read publications of Victorian Britain, the London Journal, inserting the story of this magazine into the wider context of the Victorian mass-market periodical. It draws on traditional modes of scholarship in history, art history, and literature as well as on developments in sociology, psychoanalysis, and cultural theory. However, the author ultimately relies on new and extensive primary research to ground the changing ways in which the reading public became consumers of literary commodities on a scale never before seen. Previous commentators have coded the mass market as somehow always 'feminine', and King offers a genealogy of how such a gender identity came about. Finally, King recontextualizes within the Victorian mass market three key nineteenth-century novels-Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, Mary Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret, and Émile Zola's The Ladies' Paradise-and in so doing suggests radically new and unexpected meanings.

Nineteenth-century Britain was one of the birthplaces of modern vegetarianism in the west, and was to become a reform movement attracting thousands of people. From the Vegetarian Society's foundation in 1847, men, women and their families abandoned conventional diet for reasons as varied as self-advancement via personal thrift, dissatisfaction with medical orthodoxy, repugnance towards animal cruelty and the belief that carnivorism stimulated alcoholism and bellicosity. They joined in the pursuit of a more perfect society in which food reform combined with causes such as socialism and land reform. James Gregory provides an extensive exploration of the movement, with its often colourful and sometimes eccentric leaders and grass-roots supporters. He explores the rich culture of branch associations, competing national societies, proliferating restaurants and food stores and experiments in vegetarian farms and colonies. 'Of Victorians and Vegetarians' examines the wider significance of Victorian vegetarians, embracing concerns about gender and class, national identity, race and empire and religious authority. Vegetarianism embodied the Victorians' complicated response to modernity. While some vegetarians were averse to features of the industrial and urban world, other vegetarian entrepreneurs embraced technology in the creation of substitute foods and other commodities. Hostile, like the associated anti-vivisectionists and anti-vaccinationists, to a new 'priesthood' of scientists, vegetarians defended themselves through the new sciences of nutrition and chemistry. 'Of Victorians and Vegetarians' uncovers who the vegetarians were, how they attempted to convert their fellow Britons (and the world beyond) to their 'bloodless diet' and the response of contemporaries in a variety of media and genres. Through a close study of the vegetarian periodicals and organisational archives, extensive biographical research and a broader examination of texts relating to food, dietary reform and allied reform movements, James Gregory provides us with the first fascinating foray into the impact of vegetarianism on the Victorians. In doing so he gives revealing insights into the development of animal welfare, other contemporary reform movements and the histories of food and diet.

Working- and middle-class radical politics in England from the fall of Chartism in 1848 to the 1870s.

This book serves as a retrieval and reevaluation of a rich haul of comic caricatures from the turbulent years between the Reform Bill crisis of the early 1830s and the rise and fall of Chartism in the 1840s. With a telling selection of illustrations, this book deploys the techniques of close reading and political contextualization to demonstrate the aesthetic and ideological clout of a neglected tranche of satirical prints and periodicals dismissed as ineffectual by historians or distasteful by contemporaries. The prime exhibits are the work of Robert Seymour and C.J. Grant giving acerbic comic edge to the case for reform against class and state oppression and the excesses of the monarchical regime under the young Queen Victoria.