Over the course of the long 18th century, many of England's grandest country houses became known for displaying noteworthy architecture and design, large collections of sculptures and paintings, and expansive landscape gardens and parks. Although these houses continued to function as residences and spaces of elite retreat, they had powerful public identities: increasingly accessible to tourists and extensively described by travel writers, they began to be celebrated as sites of great importance to national culture. This book examines how these identities emerged, repositioning the importance of country houses in 18th-century Britain and exploring what it took to turn them into tourist attractions. Drawing on travel books, guidebooks, and dozens of tourists' diaries and letters, it explores what it meant to tour country houses such as Blenheim Palace, Chatsworth, Wilton, Kedleston and Burghley in the tumultuous 1700s. It also questions the legacies of these early tourists: both as a critical cultural practice in the 18th century and an extraordinary and controversial influence in British culture today, country-house tourism is a phenomenon that demands investigation.

From country lanes to thatch roofs, a stroll through the enduring appeal of the nineteenth-century trope of rural English bliss. A Sweet View explores how writers and artists in the nineteenth century shaped the English countryside as a partly imaginary idyll, with its distinctive repertoire of idealized scenery: the village green, the old country churchyard, hedgerows and cottages, scenic variety concentrated into a small compass, snugness and comfort. The book draws on a very wide range of contemporary sources and features some of the key makers of the “South Country” rural idyll, including Samuel Palmer, Myles Birket Foster, and Richard Jefferies. The legacy of the idyll still influences popular perceptions of the essential character of a certain kind of English landscape—indeed for Henry James that imagery constituted “the very essence of England” itself. As A Sweet View makes clear, the countryside idyll forged over a century ago is still with us today.

Indian Travel Writing in the Age of Empire studies a variety of travel narratives by Indian kings, evangelists, statesmen, scholars, merchants, leisure travellers and reformers. It identifies the key modes through which the Indian traveller engaged with Europe and the world-from aesthetic evaluations to cosmopolitan nationalist perceptions, from exoticism to a keen sense of connected and global histories. These modes are constitutive of the identity of the traveller. The book demonstrates how the Indian traveller defied the prescriptive category of the 'imperial subject' and fashions himself through this multilayered engagement with England, Europe and the world in different identities.

A classic collection filled with tales of the paranormal past—illustrations included. Travel back into supernatural history with the early twentieth-century ghost hunter and author Elliott O’Donnell as he recounts the frightening stories of: · The Erskines of Mar · The Lambton Worm · The Peasant Boy’s Curse · The Screaming Skulls of Calgarth · Corfe Castle and the Curse of St. Dunstan · Dread Coruisk · The Curse of Rudesheim and more Famous Curses is part of The Paranormal, a series that resurrects rare titles, classic publications, and out-of-print texts, as well as publishes new supernatural and otherworldly ebooks for the digital age. The series includes a range of paranormal subjects from angels, fairies, and UFOs to near-death experiences, vampires, ghosts, and witchcraft.

This is a book about a longstanding network of writers and writings that celebrate the aesthetic, socio-political, scientific, ecological, geographical, and historical value of trees and tree spaces in the landscape; and it is a study of the effect of this tree-writing upon the novel form in the long nineteenth century. Trees in Nineteenth-Century English Fiction: The Silvicultural Novel identifies the picturesque thinker William Gilpin as a significant influence in this literary and environmental tradition. Remarks on Forest Scenery (1791) is formed by Gilpin’s own observations of trees, forests, and his New Forest home specifically; but it is also the product of tree-stories collected from ‘travellers and historians’ that came before him. This study tracks the impact of this accumulating arboreal discourse upon nineteenth-century environmental writers such as John Claudius Loudon, Jacob George Strutt, William Howitt, and Mary Roberts, and its influence on varied dialogues surrounding natural history, agriculture, landscaping, deforestation, and public health. Building upon this concept of an ongoing silvicultural discussion, the monograph examines how novelists in the realist mode engage with this discourse and use their understanding of arboreal space and its cultural worth in order to transform their own fictional environments. Through their novelistic framing of single trees, clumps, forests, ancient woodlands, and man-made plantations, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Thomas Hardy feature as authors of particular interest. Collectively, in their environmental representations, these novelists engage with a broad range of silvicultural conversation in their writing of space at the beginning, middle, and end of the nineteenth century. This book will be of great interest to students, researchers, and academics working in the environmental humanities, long nineteenth-century literature, nature writing and environmental literature, environmental history, ecocriticism, and literature and science scholarship.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. The study investigates the cultural production of the visual iconography of popular pleasure grounds from the eighteenth century pleasure garden to the contemporary theme park. Deborah Philips identifies the literary genres, including fairy tale, gothic horror, Egyptiana and the Western which are common to carnival sites, tracing their historical transition across a range of media to become familiar icons of popular culture.Though the bricolage of narratives and imagery found in the contemporary leisure zone has been read by many as emblematic of postmodern culture, the author argues that the clash of genres and stories is less a consequence of postmodern pastiche than it is the result of a history and popular tradition of conventionalised iconography.

Eleanor Herring's unique study of street furniture in post-war Britain considers how objects which are now familiar parts of our urban environment were designed to populate public spaces. Herring explores the design of lampposts, post boxes, parking meters, and signage in the context of a government backed by various bodies keen to propagate 'good' modern design, in a Britain whose towns and cities had been laid waste by bombing and the privations of war. She also considers the innate conservatism of local communities and councils, wary of a standardised street design imposed from above. She traces how the design of street furniture became the site of a fierce struggle which exposed deep-seated anxieties about class, taste and power. Herring's original research draws on archival material and on interviews with leading figures in urban design, including graphic designer Margaret Calvert and industrial designer Kenneth Grange.