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Table of contents (20 chapters)
Reviews
'Victoria's Madmen seeks to argue that it is the perverse, radical and sometimes just downright insane minds of the nineteenth century that really prepared the way for modernity as we now know it. Bloom assembles a canon of 'Victoria's madmen' which freewheels through a bizarre miscellany of subjects including doubles, ghosts, anarchists and vegetarians'
- Times Literary Supplement
'In Victoria's Madmen, Clive Bloom marshals a crowd of men and women to help him dismantle the myth of Victorian conformity and uniformity. Bloom's 'madmen' include spiritualists and anarchists, atheists and visionaries, socialists, nudists and assassins they all contribute to creating a 19th century wilder and richer than the one we usually encounter'
- New Statesman
'As an account of the age and the people who made (or alternatively unmade) it thus, it is a very enlightening, engrossing read.'
- The Bookbag
'This richly diverse book contains a number of gems it coveys well the bubbling energy of those in the Victorian era who swam against the tide, and many of whose ideas would become the language of counter-cultural modernity'
- Times Higher Education
'...a fascinating read. It is all too easy to think of the 19th century as a century entirely filled with pious, conformist churchgoers, demure crinolines and over-stuffed drawing-rooms. Clive Bloom has worked at the margins, deftly interweaving the revolutionary, the rebellious and the downright odd to draw a more complex picture of a time of instability and change, a period filled with sedition as well as certitude. His 19th century is far stranger and more wild and far more exciting.'
- Judith Flanders, author of The Invention of Murder
'Clive Bloom has a fine reputation for writing accessible history. Here he turns his attention to a cluster of Victorians, some well-known, others long-forgotten, who espoused or inspired what seem some of the more bizarre and esoteric ideas of the nineteenth century. A good, thought-provoking read, often surprising and good fun.'
- Clive Emsley, Open University
'Against the deadening, nostalgic idea of 'Victorian values', - usually seen from the establishment point of view - Clive Bloom has mustered a bizarre alternative army of republicans, spiritualists, theosophists, Christian Socialists, anarchists, golden agers, nudists, occultists, foreign revolutionists, environmentalists and civil servants, most of whom were considered mad when they were active. His surprising conclusion is that this apparently barmy army laid the foundations of modernity's counter-culture and in some cases of mainstream culture as well. We have met 'other Victorians' before, but none quite so colourful as these.'
- Professor Sir Christopher Frayling
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Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Victoria's Madmen
Book Subtitle: Revolution and Alienation
Authors: Clive Bloom
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137318978
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan London
eBook Packages: Palgrave History Collection, History (R0)
Copyright Information: Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2013
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-230-31382-8Published: 02 August 2013
Softcover ISBN: 978-1-349-33932-7Published: 01 January 2013
eBook ISBN: 978-1-137-31897-8Published: 13 January 2016
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: X, 309
Topics: History of Britain and Ireland, Cultural History, Political History, Social History, History of Philosophy, Modern History