VICTORIAN STUDIES最新文献

{"title":"Bernard Shaw and the Making of Modern Ireland ed. by Audrey McNamara and Nelson O'Ceallaigh Ritschel (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.2979/vic.2023.a911128","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/vic.2023.a911128","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Bernard Shaw and the Making of Modern Ireland ed. by Audrey McNamara and Nelson O'Ceallaigh Ritschel Susan Harris (bio) Bernard Shaw and the Making of Modern Ireland, edited by Audrey McNamara and Nelson O'Ceallaigh Ritschel; pp. xxvi + 274. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, $119.99, $89.00 ebook. One of the consequences of what Declan Kiberd has famously called the worlding of Irish Studies has been a shift in the field's conception of who the major Irish modernists are. Widening the scope from nationalism to internationalism has created more room in the Irish canon for modern writers whose relationship to the Irish revival and/or Irish nationalism was antagonistic, tangential, or ambivalent. Figures like Oscar Wilde and Samuel Beckett—Irish-born, Irish-educated writers whose careers unfolded outside of Ireland and whose work does not overtly engage Ireland—have moved in from the margins. Somewhat belatedly, George Bernard Shaw is making that journey. In the twenty-first century, Shaw's work is getting renewed critical attention. The past decade has produced new single-author studies like Matthew Yde's Bernard Shaw and Totalitarianism: Longing for Utopia (2013) and Steven Watt's Bernard Shaw's Fiction, Material Psychology, and Affect: Shaw, Freud, Simmel (2018). Shaw has also figured in a number of new investigations of the origins of modern drama in English, including David Kornhaber's The Birth of Theater from the Spirit of Philosophy: Nietzsche and the Modern Drama (2016), Patrick Bixby's Nietzsche and Irish Modernism (2022), and my own Irish Drama and the Other Revolutions: Playwrights, Sexual Politics and the International Left, 1892–1964 (2017). With Bernard Shaw and the Making of Modern Ireland, Audrey McNamara and Nelson O'Ceallaigh Ritschel seek to establish Shaw as a major Irish modernist. Lamenting that Shaw \"remained outside the realms of Irish studies until … 2010\" (2), McNamara and Ritschel have assembled a group of essays that seek to \"demonstrat[e] how influential a figure he was in the ongoing debate and movement toward Irish independence\" and [End Page 342] \"highligh[t] the international vision Shaw had for a modernizing Ireland\" (5). The collection appears to have been inspired by the International Shaw Society's 2012 meeting in Dublin and includes the address given at that conference by Irish President Michael D. Higgins. The collection is part of Palgrave's series \"Bernard Shaw and His Contemporaries,\" which was launched in 2016 with David Clare's Bernard Shaw's Irish Outlook, and which now boasts over twenty titles. Bernard Shaw and the Making of Modern Ireland is shaped by a tension between two different impulses legible in its introduction. Connecting Shaw to the Irish revival, on the one hand, is for some of these authors part of a larger attempt to reconceive that revival as international and cosmopolitan rather than nationalist and insular. On the other hand, there also seems to be a concern to ","PeriodicalId":45845,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN STUDIES","volume":"103 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135448337","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Marx, Engels and Modern British Socialism: The Social and Political Thought of H. M. Hyndman, E. B. Bax and William Morris by Seamus Flaherty (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.2979/vic.2023.a911137","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/vic.2023.a911137","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Marx, Engels and Modern British Socialism: The Social and Political Thought of H. M. Hyndman, E. B. Bax and William Morris by Seamus Flaherty Anna Vaninskaya (bio) Marx, Engels and Modern British Socialism: The Social and Political Thought of H. M. Hyndman, E. B. Bax and William Morris, by Seamus Flaherty; pp. ix + 271. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, $99.99, $99.99 paper, $79.99 ebook, £64.99. As Seamus Flaherty reminds us in the introduction and conclusion to his Marx, Engels and Modern British Socialism: The Social and Political Thought of H. M. Hyndman, E. B. Bax and William Morris, from the 1880s to the 1980s the history of British socialism was largely the concern of historians who were themselves socialist. Certain preconceptions within the socialist tradition thus dictated how the historiography developed; as a result, figures like those who form the focus of Flaherty's own account were misinterpreted, caricatured, or pushed to the margins and neglected. Although William Morris, the most famous (to a general Victorianist audience) of the three figures with whom the book deals, was recuperated, neither H. M. Hyndman, the leader of the first Marxist group in Britain who has been routinely dismissed as a \"Tory radical,\" nor E. B. Bax, the Marxist philosopher consigned to obscurity as an \"impractical academic,\" fared too well (26, 6). Accordingly, while Morris is treated relatively briefly in the final chapter, Hyndman and Bax (the stars of the account) share the rest of the book between them. Flaherty sets out to restore not just the centrality of Hyndman and Bax to the history of Marxist thought, but the centrality of non-Marxist—especially Liberal—thought to the formulation of Hyndman's, Bax's, and Morris's own views. Flaherty succeeds much more fully in the latter task than in the former. Although the evidence for direct influence is not always as strong as could be wished (there is a general tendency in the book to assume, without providing sufficiently compelling proof, that certain texts or writers are influenced by, responding to, or invoking certain others), Flaherty does a thorough job of placing Hyndman and Bax within the broader intellectual history of the late Victorian period. The book's textual analyses situate the publications of Hyndman and Bax in their wider contexts with a level of detail not always possible in synoptic overviews such as Mark Bevir's The Making of British Socialism (2011), to which Flaherty's monograph may be seen as an addendum and, in parts, a corrective. The main strength of the book is this recontextualization of early British Marxist thought as part of a much wider conversation about the meanings of socialism carried out in [End Page 363] print, and in the periodical press in particular, in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s. Thanks to Flaherty, many figures including Herbert Spencer, Arnold Toynbee, John Morley, the British Comtists, Idealist philosophers like Thomas Hill Green and,","PeriodicalId":45845,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN STUDIES","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135448347","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Visualising Britain's Holy Land in the Nineteenth Century by Amanda M. Burritt (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.2979/vic.2023.a911117","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/vic.2023.a911117","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Visualising Britain's Holy Land in the Nineteenth Century by Amanda M. Burritt Nabil Matar (bio) Visualising Britain's Holy Land in the Nineteenth Century, by Amanda M. Burritt; pp. xxi + 239. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, $54.99, $59.99 paper, $44.99 ebook. The nineteenth century was the Great Age of Christian Mission. From Britain, the superpower of the century, and from other parts of Europe and America, travelers, poets, novelists, theologians, and archaeologists all ventured into the world to preach the gospels. The lands of the Bible, extending from Egypt to Palestine, drew large numbers, especially after the introduction of organized tourism by Thomas Cook. Eager to find evidence of faith in an age of growing uncertainty, Britons (and others) wandered with Bible in hand, as had their forebears for centuries, trying to verify, describe, confirm, and experience the truth of the life of Christ. In her engaging book on three British painters, Visualising Britain's Holy Land in the Nineteenth Century, Amanda M. Burritt, from the Graduate School of Education at the University of Melbourne, Australia, examines the works of David Roberts, David Wilkie, and William Holman Hunt. These three painters traveled to and in the Holy Land: Roberts in 1838–39, Wilkie in 1840–41, and Hunt, four times, in 1854–55, 1869–72, 1876–78, and [End Page 319] 1892. Burritt studies their paintings in the context of their religious views expressed in their memoirs, correspondence, and other personal documents. Her aim is to show how much the painters reflected, but also helped define, the distinctively Protestant character of Christianity in England and Scotland—a Christianity that treated the Bible as a historical document to be experienced in its sacred geography. Experience is key to Burritt's argument, which is why she focuses on those British painters who traveled and then imagined/depicted scenes from the Bible, rather than on those who simply relied on their readings—as was the case for two of Hunt's fellow Pre-Raphaelites, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and John Everett Millais. Experience gave legitimacy to scriptural revelation. Although the three painters were quite different in their aesthetics, their denominational backgrounds, and their themes, they all depicted the sites and the peoples they liked to think had not changed since Jesus walked on the Sea of Galilee or in the alleys of Nazareth. Their realism was bold, sometimes audacious: they eschewed idealization, thereby assuring viewers of the historicity of the biblical past. Perhaps most dramatic in this context of authentication was Hunt, who revolutionized the figure of Jesus in British art by moving away from the complex theology of Christianity to the simplicity of Palestinian life. His The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple (1854–60) showed a boy, lost and then found by his parents: a boy, just like a boy next door, being held by his mother. The painting was viewed by thousan","PeriodicalId":45845,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN STUDIES","volume":"72 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135448350","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Early Anthropocene Literature in Britain, 1750–1884 by Seth T. Reno, and: Charlotte Brontë at the Anthropocene by Shawna Ross (review)","authors":"","doi":"10.2979/vic.2023.a911135","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/vic.2023.a911135","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Early Anthropocene Literature in Britain, 1750–1884 by Seth T. Reno, and: Charlotte Brontë at the Anthropocene by Shawna Ross Devin M. Garofalo (bio) Early Anthropocene Literature in Britain, 1750–1884, by Seth T. Reno; pp. xvi + 246. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, $119.99, $119.99 paper. Charlotte Brontë at the Anthropocene, by Shawna Ross; pp. vii + 326. Albany: SUNY Press, 2020, $95.00, $24.95 paper. For scholars of nineteenth-century British literature and the environmental humanities, the Anthropocene concept poses a number of pressing challenges. Among them are preserving historical specificity while tracking transhistorical continuities, scaling between competing forms and forces (as well as levels of reading), and theorizing human species-being without obfuscating intrahuman difference and uneven landscapes of exposure. The two monographs reviewed here are organized around a common set of concerns: the relationship between anthropogenic enterprise and geologic process as emergent in the long nineteenth century, the affordances of aesthetic representation in confrontation with the so-called Anthropocene, and problems of literary history. Their scalar approaches, however, are quite different. Whereas Seth T. Reno's Early Anthropocene Literature in Britain, 1750–1884 cuts across more than a century's worth of aesthetic and scientific cultural production, Shawna Ross's Charlotte Brontë at the Anthropocene centers the oeuvre of one woman writing in a particular place and time. Considered together, these monographs throw into relief some of the possibilities and pitfalls of ecocritical nineteenth-century studies. Reno's Early Anthropocene Literature in Britain takes as its point of focus the \"Romantic Century,\" the bookends of which are the onset of the Industrial Revolution and John Ruskin's 1884 storm-cloud lectures. Eschewing the bounds of periodization, [End Page 357] Reno emphasizes transhistorical porosity. He does so to \"advocate for 1750 as a convenient starting date for the Anthropocene\": it encompasses the rise of industry, agriculture, and commerce in \"the global fossil fuel era\"; marks \"a clear rise in CO2\"; and reveals how \"the eighteenth century is the first time that writers recognized humanity as a geological force of nature\" (4). Whereas, according to Reno, \"most literary studies of the Anthropocene … argu[e] that recognition of anthropogenic climate change does not emerge until the twentieth century,\" Early Anthropocene Literature in Britain \"proposes a novel framework built on the substrate of little-noticed\" eighteenth- and nineteenth-century \"acknowledgments of climate change\" (7). In the project's expansive archive, Reno locates \"a tension between humans as powerful geological agents and humans as insignificant in the vast immensity of deep time and deep space,\" a tension that he argues is constitutive of the Anthropocene (11). Taking shape across four chapters whose elemental structure (earth,","PeriodicalId":45845,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN STUDIES","volume":"17 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135448339","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"From Political Economy to Economics Through Nineteenth-Century Literature: Reclaiming the Social ed. by Elaine Hadley, Audrey Jaffe, and Sarah Winter (review)","authors":"E. Courtemanche","doi":"10.1007/978-3-030-24158-2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24158-2","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45845,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN STUDIES","volume":"64 1","pages":"521 - 524"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2022-11-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1007/978-3-030-24158-2","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45478852","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Edinburgh Companion to Anthony Trollope, edited by Frederik Van Dam, David Skilton, and Ortwin de Graef","authors":"D. Morse","doi":"10.2979/victorianstudies.64.3.09","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/victorianstudies.64.3.09","url":null,"abstract":"Periodical culture, steeped as it was in partisan politics, constitutes an important historical backdrop for the book. Keen’s staging of these debates is meticulously detailed while also marking out quarries of knowledge that have yet to be excavated. In chapter 3, for instance, Keen reflects on the pedagogical limitations of classical learning articulated by a critic in the Edinburgh Review (1802–1929) in a consideration of Robert Edgeworth’s Essays on Professional Education (1809). It would have been interesting to see Keen engage with the volume itself, for Edgeworth was a widely read and vocal proponent of practical education; while Edgeworth remarks that the “value of all knowledge must ultimately be decided by its utility,” these claims are also underwritten by an extensive literature appealing to the concept of learning by doing (Essays on Professional Education [J. Johnson, 1809], 371). Such omissions are regrettable, however, chiefly because they might affirm the idea that Keen already makes so convincingly: namely, that the history of these debates reveals how little we actually understand the terms that underlie our own sense of purpose as humanists. And this is not, moreover, a book about education alone. It is about a cultural impulse to justify pursuits that do not always garner immediate or quantifiable results in the real world. The book’s title refers to the early nineteenth-century world Keen recreates for us—a “Utilitarian Age” replete with fears that, as Thomas Carlyle put it, we are becoming “Mechanical in head and in heart” (“Signs of the Times,” Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, vol. 2 [James Munroe and Company, 1838], 150). But we too live in a “Utilitarian Age,” as Keen puts it, in which an “atmosphere of belligerent intolerance . . . has begun to erode the foundation of the public sphere that, however imperfect, remains crucial for any genuinely democratic society” (158). In our troubled present, the humanities might constitute a form of vital activism not through the promotion of specific precepts or practices, but rather by questioning what we think we know and facing what we do not. Kimberly J. Stern University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill","PeriodicalId":45845,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN STUDIES","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42493523","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Italian Politics and Nineteenth-Century British Literature and Culture by Patricia Cove (review)","authors":"D. Moore","doi":"10.2979/victorianstudies.64.3.24","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/victorianstudies.64.3.24","url":null,"abstract":"poor was part of a larger social movement that clarifies even larger ties to his betterremembered contemporaries, such as William Booth, W. T. Stead, Margaret Harkness, and Jack London, who worked alongside Besant in the struggle to help the working classes. In his contribution to the volume, Eliot notes that Besant believed that, for the “popular minor novelist” (130), literary success “was all ephemeral and fleeting and would eventually evaporate into nothing” (129). The essays in this volume prompt us to question Besant on this point, if not for his stodgy and misguided views then for his prolific and wide-ranging contributions to Victorian literary culture. Heidi Kaufman University of Oregon","PeriodicalId":45845,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN STUDIES","volume":"64 1","pages":"495 - 497"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46891261","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Manliness in Britain, 1760–1900: Bodies, Emotion, and Material Culture by Joanne Begiato (review)","authors":"H. Ellis","doi":"10.2979/victorianstudies.64.3.15","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/victorianstudies.64.3.15","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45845,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN STUDIES","volume":"461 1","pages":"476 - 477"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41263148","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"London and Its Asylums, 1888-1914: Politics and Madness by Robert Ellis (review)","authors":"L. Topp","doi":"10.2979/victorianstudies.64.3.32","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/victorianstudies.64.3.32","url":null,"abstract":"court, the criminal trial) became increasingly important venues to watch the play of justice and the reactions of the condemned. Their readings, combined with Low’s analysis of the tensions between local and national authorities, remind us that the elimination of public hanging created new issues even as it purported to solve old ones. Finally, Stephanie Emma Brown (in a study of Wales) demonstrates the complexity of national and racial issues by demonstrating that there was no simple creation of a so-called Other in the depiction of the condemned according to national, ethnic, and racial categories. As mentioned above, Execution Culture offers a series of intriguing case studies in the ways that an absence becomes present in a culture. Although hangings were always, in part, mediated through description and debate (after all, not everyone attended every hanging), with the passage of the Capital Punishment Amendment Act that mediation assumed even greater importance. Without denying the continued materiality of executions (Low’s essay is particularly strong on this issue), the contributors force us to contend with the possibility that the transfer of the hanging behind prison walls may have increased the cultural presence of the execution within British culture even as it went, as the volume’s title has it, “from public spectacle to hidden ritual.” In his introduction, Low rehearses the ongoing debate among scholars about Michel Foucault and Pieter Spierenburg’s explanations for the decline of public executions. In this debate the usual reference is to Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1977). But I wonder if the lesson of Execution Culture is that we should look elsewhere: to Foucault’s History of Sexuality, volume 1 (1978). After all, a central theme of that book was that repression led not to silence but rather to a proliferation of discourse, with the Victorian period as a crucial moment for this proliferation. We need histories of the death penalty that will link its privatization with the larger discourses around crime, sexuality, disease, and crisis. The chapters in Execution Culture in Nineteenth Century Britain may not provide that history, but they do point a way toward it with careful research and argumentation. Michael Meranze University of California, Los Angeles","PeriodicalId":45845,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN STUDIES","volume":"64 1","pages":"512 - 514"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43309988","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Filth Disease: Typhoid Fever and the Practices of Epidemiology in Victorian England by Jacob Steere-Williams (review)","authors":"P. Gilbert","doi":"10.2979/victorianstudies.64.3.28","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2979/victorianstudies.64.3.28","url":null,"abstract":"For decades, public health practitioners have located the origins of epidemiology in Britain in the mid-nineteenth century, with John Snow’s famous study of the 1854 London cholera epidem‐ ic. His spatial analysis implicating the Broad Street Pump and the Southern and Vauxhall Water Com‐ pany is often seen as a work of unparalleled in‐ spiration and heroic scientific genius. However, in The Filth Disease: Typhoid Fever and the Practices of Epidemiology in Victorian England, historian Jacob Steere-Williams unveils a vibrant world of Victorian epidemiological practice and emerging professionalization far more expansive than this traditional narrative suggests. In this engaging look at nineteenth-century British public health, Steere-Williams explores the origins of the field of epidemiology, looking to high-profile and explos‐ ive epidemics of typhoid fever to trace how epi‐ demiological practice formed, how its boundaries were negotiated, and how evolving theories of transmission and investigative practices shaped etiologies of typhoid. Crucial to this analysis is Steere-Williams’s methodical examination of the extensive Medical Officer of Health Reports pro‐ duced by urban and rural sanitary officials in their search for the index case in outbreaks of the “Filth Disease.” Through these reports and SteereWilliams’s sharp analysis, the dual role of typhoid in public health becomes evident: first, as a lens through which to examine the changing nature of public health and the emergence of epidemiology as a unified profession; and second, as a model disease, shaping epidemiological practice, public health epistemology, and urban and rural concep‐ tions of cleanliness and filth during the same peri‐ od.","PeriodicalId":45845,"journal":{"name":"VICTORIAN STUDIES","volume":"64 1","pages":"505 - 506"},"PeriodicalIF":1.1,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41986656","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}