From Power to Enslavement: Recent Perspectives on the Politics of Art Patronage and Display in the Country House

This chapter examines the food eaten at this time in taverns, inns, and public houses. It focuses on how allegiance to either English or French cuisine expresses patriotism and cosmopolitanism respectively. Patriotism and the consumption of large amounts of beef receive particular emphasis. An examination of food consumed nevertheless finds a considerable variety in the types of food enjoyed, as well as noting the quality, particularly of country house cooking. Divergent national identifications, in turn, are related to the class background of diners, as well as to gender identity. Changes in modes of dining out are viewed in their social, economic, and political contexts.

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The Turn of the Screw and Other Stories

10.1093/owc/9780199536177.001.0001 ◽

2008 ◽

Author(s):

Henry James

Keyword(s):

New York ◽

The Other ◽

Victorian Culture ◽

Ghost Story ◽

Country House ◽

Small Children ◽

New York Edition

A young, inexperienced governess is charged with the care of Miles and Flora, two small children abandoned by their uncle at his grand country house. She sees the figure of an unknown man on the tower and his face at the window. It is Peter Quint, the master's dissolute valet, and he has come for little Miles. But Peter Quint is dead. Like the other tales collected here – ‘Sir Edmund Orme’, ‘Owen Wingrave’, and ‘The Friends of the Friends’ – ‘The Turn of the Screw’ is to all immediate appearances a ghost story. But are the appearances what they seem? Is what appears to the governess a ghost or a hallucination? Who else sees what she sees? The reader may wonder whether the children are victims of corruption from beyond the grave, or victims of the governess's ‘infernal imagination’, which torments but also entrals her? ‘The Turn of the Screw’ is probably the most famous, certainly the most eerily equivocal, of all ghostly tales. Is it a subtle, self-conscious exploration of the haunted house of Victorian culture, filled with echoes of sexual and social unease? Or is it simply, ‘the most hopelessly evil story that we have ever read’? The texts are those of the New York Edition, with a new Introduction and Notes.

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Man and Wife

10.1093/owc/9780199538171.001.0001 ◽

2008 ◽

Author(s):

Wilkie Collins

Keyword(s):

Legal Status ◽

Wilkie Collins ◽

The Novel ◽

Country House ◽

Radical Critique ◽

Starting Point ◽

Marriage Laws ◽

Woman In White ◽

The Moonstone ◽

Status Of Women

This time the fiction is founded upon facts' stated Wilkie Collins in his Preface to Man and Wife (1870). Many Victorian writers responded to contemporary debates on the rights and the legal status of women, and here Collins questions the deeply inequitable marriage laws of his day. Man and Wife examines the plight of a woman who, promised marriage by one man, comes to believe that she may inadvertently have gone through a form of marriage with his friend, as recognized by the archaic laws of Scotland and Ireland. From this starting-point Collins develops a radical critique of the values and conventions of Victorian society. Collins had already developed a reputation as the master of the 'sensation novel', and Man and Wife is as fast moving and unpredictable as The Moonstone and The Woman in White. During the novel the atmosphere grows increasingly sinister as the setting moves from a country house to a London suburb and a world of confinement, plotting, and murder.

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