Victorian Vulgarity: Taste in Verbal and Visual CultureSusan David Bernstein, Elsie B. Michie Originally describing language use and class position, vulgarity became, over the course of the nineteenth century, a word with wider social implications. Variously associated with behavior, the possession of wealth, different races, sexuality and gender, the objects displayed in homes, and ways of thinking and feeling, vulgarity suggested matters of style, taste, and comportment. This collection examines the diverse ramifications of vulgarity in the four areas where it was most discussed in the nineteenth century: language use, changing social spaces, the emerging middle classes, and visual art. Exploring the dynamics of the term as revealed in dictionaries and grammars; Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor; fiction by Dickens, Eliot, Gissing, and Trollope; essays, journalism, art, and art reviews, the contributors bring their formidable analytical skills to bear on this enticing and divisive concept. Taken together, these essays urge readers to consider the implications of vulgarity's troubled history for today's writers, critics, and artists. |
Contents
Social Mobility MiddleClass Diction and | |
On Making a Spectacle of Oneself in Pickwick | |
WorkingClass Politics in London | |
Vulgar Christianity | |
George Gissing and the LowerMiddle | |
Too Common Readers at the British Museum | |
Jewish Materialism and Spiritual Materiality | |
Anthony Trollopes | |
Celebrating Vulgar | |
Vulgarity Stupidity and Worldliness in Middlemarch | |
Vulgarity in The Picture of Dorian Gray | |
James Tissots Coloured Photographs of Vulgar Society | |
Imperial Reversals and | |
Afterword How Victorian Was Vulgarity? | |
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aesthetic Amy Levy Anthony Trollope argues artist Ayala Ayala's Angel British Museum Cambridge Carlyle century characters Children cinema common Coomaraswamy critical Crosbie culture David Bernstein depicted desire Dickens display distinction domestic Dorian Gray dress Eliot English essay fashion female fiction Gender George George Eliot George Gissing Ghetto Gissing Gissing's Grub Street Havell Henry HMS Calcutta ideal Indian art Israel Zangwill James Jewish Jews Jingle John John Ruskin Lady language liberal Lily literary London Labour lower-middle classes Lydgate marriage material Mayhew middle-class Middlemarch modern nabobs narrative narrator nineteenth nineteenth-century Oxford painting Pickwick Pickwick Papers Picture of Dorian political portrait public space readers Reading Room refinement Reuben Sachs Review Ruskin sexual slang Small House social society spiritual Stubbs suggests Swadeshi taste Tissot traditional Tringle Trollope Trollope's novel University Press vicar Victorian Literature Victorian Vulgarity vulgarity woman women words worldliness writing Wuthering Heights York Zangwill Zangwill's