Victorian England Research Articles

WOMAN'S FIGHT FOR EMANCIPATION AS REFLECTED IN CHARLOTTE BRONTE'S JANE EYRE

This study aims to analyze woman's fight for emancipation in Jane Eyre novel by Charlotte Bronte, a novel written in the Victorian era and first published in 1847. Woman emancipation refers to woman's struggle to obtain rights that should be given in order for her potential to develop and function fully in certain aspects of life. In this study, the writers use qualitative research because the data are gathered in the form of words rather than numbers. The mimetic approach also employs in order to seek woman’s fight for a better life. There are two kinds of sources namely primary and secondary sources. The primary source is the novel itself whereas the secondary sources are from books and internet references. The result of the analysis shows Jane Eyre’s fight for woman emancipation, she has authority and freedom as a human being who is fully entitled to herself, and is able to decide the best path for herself. By using the feminism theory of Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique, it can be concluded that Jane Eyre is able to show her ability and become a female character who can be an excellent role model in the fight for emancipation.

On the Diversification Trend of English Poetry in the Middle and Late 19th Century

From the Renaissance to the early 19th century, the development of English poetry showed a longitudinal trend. Each era had relatively fixed poetry schools and some outstanding poets, which were sufficient to represent the social spirit of that era. However, in the middle and late 19th century, that is, the Victorian era, English poetry presented a diversified trend of multifarious and double-track development. Romanticism, aestheticism, realism, feminism, symbolism and other schools competed with each other, coexisting and prospering. However, looking at the overall situation, it is not difficult to find that the poetry of this period seems to have certain integrity and common characteristics. That is, it replaces the loud cry of romanticism with deep thinking and introspection, which makes the expression of poetry burst from pure emotion to deep heart. It emphasizes the objectivity of things, pay attention to revealing the true face of things and reject the subjective fantasy of romanticism. The religious philosophy of Tennyson's poetry, the dramatic monologue of Browning's poetry, Matthew Arnold's critical theory and the feminist thoughts of Emily Bronte, Elizabeth Browning and other female writers are all typical representatives of the trend of poetry in this period. In addition, the embodiment of aestheticism in poetry and the voice rhetoric in Hopkin's poetry also make the poetry of this period unique.

Dressing Up: A History of Fancy Dress in Britain

In Dressing Up: A History of Fancy Dress in Britain, Verity Wilson presents a lively and vividly illustrated parade of costumed characters, including Pearly Kings and Queens, Vikings, flower girls, May Queens, highwaymen, suffragettes, Pierrots, musketeers, insects, frogs, cabbages, and folk heroes (and villains). This account covers costumed celebrations and tableaux that have taken place throughout Britain from Queen Victoria’s accession to Queen Elizabeth II’s Coronation. Fancy dress has been somewhat neglected by scholars until recently, except costume histories that have largely focused on eighteenth-century masquerade or the spectacular costume balls of the social elite in the Victorian period.1 In this absorbing social history, Wilson delves into photographic archives and reveals the rich and inventive role that “costume” has played in community events and popular pageants, foregrounding the fancy dress of the people, a collective drama played out in front parlors, village greens, church halls, and local high streets for generations.

The Best Developed Man in Great Britain and Ireland? Eugen Sandow and the Commercialization of Eugenics in Twentieth-Century Britain

Abstract In 1901 Eugen Sandow, a strong man performer turned health authority, hosted a competition in the Royal Albert Hall to determine the ‘best developed man in Great Britain and Ireland’. At the contest, members of the public, the military, and the scientific community watched as Sandow and his judges compared men’s physiques. Typically depicted by historians as a pivotal step in the development of bodybuilding as a sport, this article repositions Sandow’s contest as a public manifestation of British eugenics and concerns about physical deterioration. Welcoming a thousand competitors in its qualifying rounds, Sandow’s contest was advertised with reference to perfecting the British male body and stemming the tide of British degeneration. When the outbreak of the Second South African War in 1899 delayed the contest’s finale, Sandow’s marketers redoubled efforts to depict the contest as an antidote to the physical deterioration of British troops said to have become evident in the conflict. Here it is argued that Sandow simultaneously magnified, and profited, from a broader British eugenic concern about the male body. His competition served as a strong reminder for how widespread such concerns were in late Victorian and early Edwardian Britain and, more importantly, how they could be commercialized.

Middle-Class Déjà Vu: Conditions of Possibility from Victorian England to Contemporary Kathmandu

Although the term “middle class” is often invoked, almost never is the concept defined or theorized in any systematic, coherent manner. What is a middle class or middle-classness? Is there one middle class or many? How are we to understand relationships between middle-class formations in different times and places? Combining perspectives from both anthropology and history, this paper tries to address the problem of how it is that we can call groups “middle class” even if they are culturally very different and separated widely in time and space. How do we conceptualize “middle class” theoretically to account for both what is similar, and what is different? Drawing on the concept of “conditions of possibility”, this paper offers a historical and spatial model of middle class formation, one that attempts to theorize the formation of middle classes, and the emergence of differences between them, in terms of historical processes and patterns of inter- and intra-class spatialization. This involves conceptualizing the emergence of middle classes in the context of global capitalism while also avoiding the teleological reduction that labels some middle-class cultures as merely derivative of others.

Reconsidering Heathcliff in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights

Since Emily Brontë published Wuthering Heights in 1847, critics have debated the nature of Heathcliff’s background. Overwhelmingly, they have viewed Heathcliff as the representation of an Irish, Black, or Roma individual. This paper argues that Brontë incorporated nineteenth-century stereotypes of Jews into her character. Brontë would have been familiar with these stereotypes through her reading of Blackwood’s Magazine which regularly published articles that negatively depicted Jews. Heathcliff’s physical characteristics, his initial inability to speak English, his lineage, and his eventual success all support my contention that Brontë used Jewish stereotypes to create Heathcliff. Additionally, Heathcliff wanders the earth after death, and he is denied access to the Christian afterlife, an idea that confirms his Jewish roots. Such a representation ultimately challenges configurations of Christian identity in Victorian England. By invoking these cruel and unflattering stereotypes, Brontë comments on English society. Heathcliff becomes a character who incorporates both positive qualities and negative stereotypes and allows us to rethink stereotyping.

A benefactor to mankind? Captain Warner's secrets and the politics of invention in early Victorian Britain.

This article delves into Captain Samuel Alfred Warner's dogged campaign to sell two inventions - his submersible mine and "long range" missile - to the British government in the 1840s and 1850s. Departing from a historiography that dismisses Warner as a fraudster, it clarifies how he managed to generate widespread interest in his weapons technologies for nearly twenty years. I therefore analyze three key elements of his self-promotion: his personal branding, his pitch, and his simultaneous embrace and rejection of publicity. Neither elite nor highly educated, Warner ran up against a culture of "polite science" that distinguished disinterested practitioners from profit-minded schemers. To establish his credentials, he emphasized his practical maritime experience and represented himself as a martyr willing to bear the scorn of a disbelieving establishment. In pitching his devices, Warner capitalized on alarmism over border security and the integrity of the empire; he declared that they could hobble France's modernizing navy and quickly end colonial conflicts. When skeptics began to fret over the proliferation of his destructive weapons, Warner flipped the script and lauded the threat of mutual annihilation as a deterrent to needless warfare. The issue of publicity, however, would ultimately be Warner's professional undoing. Despite successful demonstrations, his clashes with official investigators and his refusal to disclose his chemical secrets led critics to dispute the originality of his discoveries. An examination of Warner's self-promotional strategies, his fraught interactions with the British state, and the ambivalent public reaction to his contraptions provides insight into how scientific authority was acquired and lost in this period.

Free Trade without Words: Popular Public Rituals and Corn Law Repeal in the Early 1840s

AbstractThis article examines the folkloric protest and popular political culture during the anti‐Corn Law agitation. It offers a new analysis of the role of customary demonstration based on moral economy in supporting free importation of foreign corn. It examines previously unstudied bread processions during the 1841 general election and effigy burnings of Sir Robert Peel that occurred simultaneously against his minor revision of the Corn Laws in 1842. It argues that the practice of these traditional protests offered a basis on which plebeians understood the emerging idea of Free Trade. While the protesters and more moderate reformers represented by the Anti‐Corn Law League shared a common cause of Corn Law repeal, there was a potential conflict over respectability. Moreover, Chartists could appropriate this popular custom for promoting the People's Charter rather than Free Trade. This article contributes to understanding the relationship between popular custom and radical politics in the wider context of the emergence of Free Trade Britain in the early Victorian period.

The Inculcative Power of Australian Cadet Corps Uniforms in the 1900s and 1910s

The Inculcative Power of Australian Cadet Corps Uniforms in the 1900s and 1910s

:Narrating Trauma: Victorian Novels and Modern Stress Disorders

:<i>Narrating Trauma: Victorian Novels and Modern Stress Disorders</i>

Two Such Different Worlds: Edward J. Hedican and Catherine Anne Wilson on Family and Community in Rural Ontario in the Victorian era

Two Such Different Worlds: Edward J. Hedican and Catherine Anne Wilson on Family and Community in Rural Ontario in the Victorian era

Historical Co-offending Networks: A Social Network Analysis Approach

Abstract Recent decades have witnessed growing use of social network analysis (SNA) to study criminal activities, including that of co-offending. However, few studies have examined co-offending networks within a historical context. This paper focuses on group-based crime in a large English town during the Victorian period, employing SNA methods to examine the prevalence, structure and composition of co-offending relationships. Networks for property, violent and victimless crimes were partitioned to compare co-offending across crime categories. Results indicate that co-offending groups were typically segregated, although there was a loosely-organised community of property crime offenders connected by ‘brokers’ who collaborated with multiple groups. Evidence also suggests that co-offending was largely characterised by assortative mixing in regard to sex, age and marital status.

Professor of the Kiev Theological Academy A. I. Bulgakov as a Researcher of the Religious Life of Victorian England

Professor of the Kiev Theological Academy A. I. Bulgakov as a Researcher of the Religious Life of Victorian England

Degrees of Difficulty: How Women's Gymnastics Rose to Prominence and Fell from Grace by Georgia Cervin

<i>Degrees of Difficulty: How Women's Gymnastics Rose to Prominence and Fell from Grace</i> by Georgia Cervin

Self-Fashioning Illusions: Twinship, Subjectivity, and Neo-Victorianism in Christopher Priest’s &amp;#x2028;The Prestige

Abstract Examining the conflicting approaches to the fragmentation of the self and the feasibility of self-awareness featured in Christopher Priest’s novel The Prestige (1995), this article reflects on the evaluation, and subsequent reinvention, of the Victorian era in the genre commonly known as neo-Victorian fiction. Alfred Borden, the novel’s Victorian protagonist, fashions himself as a unique and unified individual even though his identity is, in fact, composite and alternatingly shared between twin brothers. In contrast, Andrew Westley, Borden’s twentieth-century descendant, experiences an instinctive sense of division through which he rationalizes his life. Featured in temporally distinct storylines, these conflicting perspectives reflect the tensions at work in the neo-Victorian return to the Victorian past. Silencing multiplicity and negating fragmentation, the Victorian characters echo scholarly objections to the use of the term ‘Victorian’: its apparent assertion of coherence and homogeneity when it is actually called to signify an extremely diverse historical period. Conversely, by means of the twentieth-century protagonist’s need to comprehend and embrace division, a need which is fulfilled through Andrew’s familiarization with and acceptance of his past, the novel acknowledges the multivalence of the ‘Victorian’ and its indisputable connection to the present. Exploring Victorian and twentieth-century appreciations of subjectivity, The Prestige sheds light into neo-Victorianism’s self-fashioning strategies, raising the question whether and to what extent neo-Victorian reconfigurations of the Victorian era (re)discover the past, or operate on our potentially misleading preconceptions about the nineteenth century.

The Tramp in British Literature, 1850–1950 by Luke Lewin Davies, and: Vagrancy in the Victorian Age: Representing the Wandering Poor in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture by Alistair Robinson

Reviewed by: The Tramp in British Literature, 1850–1950 by Luke Lewin Davies, and: Vagrancy in the Victorian Age: Representing the Wandering Poor in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture by Alistair Robinson Tamara S. Wagner (bio) Luke Lewin Davies. The Tramp in British Literature, 1850–1950. Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. Pp. xvi + 344. ISBN 978-3-030-73432-9. link. springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-73432-9 (open access). Alistair Robinson. Vagrancy in the Victorian Age: Representing the Wandering Poor in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture. Cambridge UP, 2021. Pp. xi + 254. £75.00. ISBN 978-1-316-51985-1 (hb). The most memorable representations of homelessness in Dickens's writing have chiefly been discussed as a central part of his social criticism. Poor Jo, the crossing-sweeper in Bleak House, after all, became a powerful icon in fund-raising campaigns at the time, reinforced by O. G. Rejlander's photographic interpretation of Dickens's character in Poor Jo (also known as Night in Town [ca. 1860]). However, Dickens's depictions of vagrancy range from the comical scene in which Mr. Pickwick is mistaken for a tramp when he falls asleep in a wheelbarrow, and consequently is carted away, to the escape that the former childminder Betty Higden makes in Our Mutual Friend by choosing itinerant trading over the workhouse. In his fullscale discussion of tramps in British literature, Luke Davies provocatively suggests that Higden therefore partially "fits the tramp conception of homelessness" as a viable option (251), foreshadowing aspects of what he terms "reverse discourse tramp fiction." Recent studies, in fact, have come to explore the divergent aspects of homelessness in Dickens's writing. His many, vastly different, vagrant characters, these studies show, may [End Page 116] productively be read through different lenses apart from the more familiar social issues of urban poverty, industrialization, or the condemnation of a "telescopic philanthropy" that refuses to see anything closer than exotic objects filtered precisely through a medium of distance. Luke Lewin Davies's The Tramp in British Literature, 1850–1950 and Alistair Robinson's Vagrancy in the Victorian Age: Representing the Wandering Poor in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture instead provide detailed insight into Victorian perceptions of various forms of vagrancy. Their discussions reframe our perceptions of Dickens's wide-ranging, divergently represented characters, with their often very different experiences of and reasons for homelessness. Davies's The Tramp in British Literature, 1850–1950 offers an immensely detailed account of the tramp in literary texts that span more than a century, with a focus on the late-Victorian age. Davies's main argument is based on the concept of the tramp as a cultural construct, which he suggests emerged in the mid-nineteenth century, and remained so until the mid-twentieth. Whereas in pre-industrial times vagabonds were associated with and could, in popular culture, be celebrated for their independence, in the wake of industrialization, the identity of this figure became reframed according to productivity versus inutility. Davies takes up the figure of the tramp to reconsider discourses on work in the nineteenth- and early twenty-first century. The literature on tramping that he traverses thus potentially expresses a critique or rejection of productivity as a form of resistance to the growing dichotomy of the deserving versus the underserving poor in nineteenth-century discourses. In such tramp literature, Davies argues, the tramp could represent an alternative to prevailing social norms and hence be connected to a "wider radical discourse that questions the fetishization of work" (3). While offering this intriguing, thought-provoking concept, The Tramp in British Literature displays wide-ranging research on the history and in particular the political discourse surrounding the homeless. The study is well-structured and indeed very clearly signposted, allowing the reader to navigate this wealth of information and detailed analysis. Thus, in order to define modern ideas of vagrancy, the book also offers a brief history that reaches back into the sixteenth century. Davies's strongest point, however, is the application of divergent theoretical paradigms (such as estrangement theory, the Frankfurt School, and postcapitalist theory, among others) to bring together different discourses on the tramp as a construct and a literary figure. Equally...

Victorian Contingencies: Experiments in Literature, Science, and Play by Tina Young Choi

Reviewed by: Victorian Contingencies: Experiments in Literature, Science, and Play by Tina Young Choi John Macneill Miller CHOI, TINA YOUNG. Victorian Contingencies: Experiments in Literature, Science, and Play. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021. 264 pp. $65.00 hardcover. There is something counterintuitive about reviewing Tina Young Choi's new monograph for Studies in the Novel because the book is not particularly invested in the novel at all. That is, in fact, one of its great strengths. Studies of contingency and alternative histories often reserve a special place for fiction, treating it as a unique tool for imagining counterfactual possibilities. Andrew H. Miller's On Not Being Someone Else (2020), for example, highlights the power of fiction to showcase individuality as a partly contingent, partly willed process of rejecting alternative paths to selfhood. Catherine Gallagher's Telling It Like It Wasn't (2018) examines an analogous phenomenon at the collective level, looking at how modern historiography depends on imagining fictional alternatives to the present. Choi enriches these understandings of contingency's relation to fiction by showing how counterfactual possibilities surfaced in a wide variety of nineteenth-century documents that do not fit comfortably within the categories of narrative or fiction. In the process, she suggests just how saturated modern life became with contingent speculation during the Victorian era, situating fiction's supposed uniqueness within a much broader set of discourses that encouraged people to imagine alternate worlds for scientific, economic, and psychological ends. The book begins very remote from literature proper as it charts the connection between early life insurance advertising and Charles Babbage's calculating engines. Babbage's fascination with automatic computation began, Choi suggests, during his early work in life insurance. Selling insurance policies depended both on the emerging [End Page 113] science of actuarial tables and on advertising that highlighted the incalculable aspects of individual futures. The rise of insurance thus indicated both a public recognition of contingent futures and a concomitant attempt to tame such unknowability through rigorous computation. Babbage's attempts to construct calculating engines that allowed for contingency emerged out of these developments, performing what was in essence a numerical transformation of narrative that tried to account for the unforeseeable through a new form of computational storytelling. Contingency plays an equally central role in Choi's discussions of the less commercial sciences. Her second chapter juxtaposes the work of nineteenth-century naturalists with the representation of contingency in the early fiction of George Eliot. She argues that one of the revolutionary contributions of Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology (1830–33) was its imagination of contingent, alternate pasts that nevertheless fell within the constraints of uniformitarian natural law. This injection of possibility into a past whose outcomes we know helped redefine what scientific work looked like in the nineteenth century, as Lyell used counterfactuals to argue for his own theories and to wrest meaningful conclusions from incomplete data sets that had been subject to eons of geological erasure. Eliot's Adam Bede (1859) undertook a similar project at a more human scale. This historical novel returns readers to a past setting that is curiously ahistorical: her turn-of-the-century Hayslope is unmarked by the excitements of warfare or regime change that typify our sense of historical significance. Unlike Lyell's work, Eliot's fiction encourages readers to develop a kind of subjectivity enhanced by the regular practice of thinking through possible futures regardless of whether or not they leave a lasting geopolitical mark. The novel's emphasis on the value of contemplating possibility for its own sake unites Adam Bede with Charles Darwin's On the Origin of the Species (1859); both books embrace the world as an ever-expanding set of potential paths rather than laying emphasis on the finality of closure or a pre-ordained plan. A similar acceptance of playful possibility unfolded in nineteenth-century board games. In the Victorian era, parlor games diverged from an older convention of depicting progress along an established track, replacing drearily straightforward courses with a ramifying garden of forking paths. The process of exploring such paths became a defining feature of play itself, which turned away from an emphasis on winning or losing toward more...

Vagrancy in the Victorian Age: Representing the Wandering Poor in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture

Vagrancy in the Victorian Age: Representing the Wandering Poor in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture

Bite the Hand that Reads: Dickens, Animals and Sanitary Reform by Terry Scarborough

Reviewed by: Bite the Hand that Reads: Dickens, Animals and Sanitary Reform by Terry Scarborough Michelle Allen-Emerson (bio) Terry Scarborough. Bite the Hand that Reads: Dickens, Animals and Sanitary Reform. Edward Everett Root Publishers, 2021. Pp. xxvii + 165. £75.00. ISBN 978-1-911454-96-0 (hb). In "The Two Dog-Shows," appearing in All the Year Round in August, 1862, the anonymous author seizes on the remarkable contrast between the pampered pooches at the Islington dog show and the abandoned creatures at the relatively new institution, the Lost Dogs Home in Holloway: "At the Islington dog-show all was prosperity. Here, all is adversity. There, the exhibited animals were highly valued, and had all their lives been well fed, well housed, carefully watched. Here, for the most part, the poor things had been half-starved and houseless" ("Two Dog-Shows" 495). The article, while it genuinely admires the charitable work of the Lost Dogs Home, seems to have something else on its mind–the social and class divisions of human life which were a marked feature of the nineteenth-century city. As explained in the recent book The Invention of the Modern Dog: Breed and Blood in Victorian Britain (Worboys et al.), this figurative use of animals to engage in discourses about human social relations was quite common in the nineteenth century, a symptom of the erosion of boundaries between animal and human that had begun the century before. Terry Scarborough takes this idea as his starting assumption in Bite the Hand that Reads: Dickens, Animals and Sanitary Reform. Scarborough explores the rhetorical function of animals in Dickens with a specific focus on their role in shaping attitudes towards poverty and those problems closely associated with poverty in the early and mid-nineteenth-century city–filth and disease. Using sanitary reform as a convenient way to describe that nexus of poverty, filth, and disease, Scarborough argues that Dickens effectively created sympathy for marginalized characters by drawing on both sanitary and animal welfare discourses. As Scarborough explains in the context of Dickens's sketch "The Seven Dials," Dickens could manipulate emotional responses to suffering animals "to express the [End Page 112] dilemmas in which the urban poor often became ensnared" (25). In an introduction and five chapters, Scarborough unfolds the rhetorical analysis, looking closely at a few of Dickens's early sketches and four major novels. The decision not to consider Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend is made in the interest of drawing attention to novels less commonly discussed in the context of sanitary reform and of engaging with "the more experimental stages of Dickens's attitudes toward the subject" (x). In a pattern that Scarborough adheres to throughout the book, Chapter 1 opens with a close reading of an article from a general-interest periodical, in which an overt discussion of animal life becomes an occasion for reflections on human poverty and the filthy urban environment. The article Scarborough uses in the first chapter, "List of the Animals in the Gardens of the Zoological Society," from the Quarterly Review, 1836, frames his discussion of several of Dickens's early sketches. In close readings of "Gin Shops," "A Little Talk about Spring, and the Sweeps," and other pieces, Scarborough traces the way Dickens deploys zoological discourses "to tap the conscience […] of the swiftly growing reading public" (11). Scarborough's idea is that in a changing context of animal-human relations, sympathy for one group could be used to develop sympathy for the other. So, for instance, in the case of the chimney-sweeps, Dickens likens the kindly feelings towards sweeps generated by fanciful legends and lore to the kindly (and self-interested) feelings towards animals effected by theories of the transmigration of souls. Scarborough identifies a similar dynamic in Oliver Twist, the focus of Chapter 2. The animal in question is Bill Sikes's hard-used but loyal dog Bull's-eye, who for Scarborough functions as a mediating figure between wary nineteenth-century readers and the socially unacceptable figure of Nancy. Both are "loyal subjects dedicated to the abusive master" (54), but as Scarborough argues, the sympathy that Dickens hopes to cultivate for Nancy can be felt...

Imperial Wine: How the British Empire Made Wine’s New World by Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre

Academic monographs about commodities generally distinguish themselves from the commercial genre by offering more than entertainment for the curious. Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York, 2014) and Erika Rappaport’s A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World (Princeton, 2017) wielded the might of significant economic and political research within their pages, even if the footnotes were neatly stowed out of sight at the back of thick volumes. Wine achieved scholarly recognition as an agent of historical development in David Hancock’s Oceans of Wine: Madeira and the Emergence of American Trade and Taste (New Haven, 2009) and as a social marker in Charles Luddington’s The Politics of Wine in Britain: A New Cultural History (New York, 2013), which is mainly about fortified wines. In her study of British involvement in the production and sale of wine in its settler colonies, Regan-Lefebvre looks at unfortified wine and seeks to show how British imperial vineyards had wide-ranging implications for the future of the metropole and its colonies. Wine became imbricated in colonial claims for legitimacy abroad and within gentrifying modes of consumption at home in Britain. If wine could speak, it would name innumerable aggressive entrepreneurs whose ambitions fueled an important surge in activity outside of Continental Europe.Regan-Lefebvre’s account shows how the modern consumer’s choice of an alcoholic beverage rested on centuries of canny merchant schemes, land grabs, and exploitation of Indigenous peoples. In five initial chapters, she sketches the large framework for her study, beginning with two key assumptions: The argument for making wine rested on a vision of civilizing the frontiers of empire, constituting the very foundation of British claims to legitimacy in lands occupied by Indigenous people; the simple fact of British attachment to alcoholic drinks made wine production a potent driver of commerce. Three principal arenas of action demonstrate these points early in the game, beginning with the Dutch invasion of South Africa, British settlement of Australia, and British cultivation of New Zealand grapes. Regan-Lefebvre gives passing attention to wine in India, Cyprus, Malta, and Canada. She manages to keep every thread of argument in view, showing how wine drinking (as opposed to the consumption of just port or claret) signified an elite but significant activity with a bright, if distant future.In truth, early wines from these places failed to satisfy knowing consumers. The most important off-stage player in this book is France, supplier of the finest wines to a tiny fraction of British consumers. Readers interested in this crucial point regarding Britain will appreciate Regan-Lefebvre’s careful inclusion of tariff legislation across the centuries. The determination to avoid commercial surrender to French supremacy in wine inspired a great deal of colonial entrepreneurial swashbuckling and ambition. Over time, the most knowledgeable vineyard owners grappled with learning more about French methods.Regan-Lefebvre recognizes the arrival of widespread middle-class wine drinking in the Victorian period as a major milestone and contemplates the long arc of commercial effort that made it possible. When tariffs were removed in 1860, she points out, the boost to wine drinking was part of a larger plan of “social engineering” (95). Encouraging the working classes (two-thirds of the British population at the time) to shift from spirits and beer to wine pointed to a new era of gentility, or so the planners hoped. As part of the sociological landscape of alcohol, Regan-Lefebvre reveals the serendipitous convergences leading to broad-based off-license distribution of wine, even if debatable quality earned it the name of “plonk.” She argues that without the boost of such imports, wine drinking could not have become a distinctly British activity, let alone compete with the ubiquitous and sizable consumption of beer.Regan-Lefebvre’s final three chapters about Britain after World War II and modern consumer culture could alone have countenanced a book-length study, particularly since fluctuations in quantity and quality suggest that this period witnessed a true turn to popular wine-drinking. Yet her larger and longer framework is devoted to exposing the power and importance of economic structures. Regan-Lefebvre showcases triumphant twentieth-century capitalism carrying New World wines into a twenty-first century of global mass consumerism. The existence of “affordable and approachable” New World wines is the shared product of imperialism, capitalism, and cultural gentrification (234). This book clearly proves that good commercial wine is one of the ways that the system convinces players that the game is worth playing, another form of the people’s opium that society is loathe to lose.