Welcome to Victorian Gems

Welcome to Victorian Gems, a blog dedicated to small treasures of 19th century English writing. The reason for this blog is that I have recently started going to book fairs and collecting books from the 19th century. I am not interested in first editions, famous titles or novels but in the mostly disregarded works on travel, life style and social observation. Such works can be bought for a couple of pounds but I believe that the information they contain is priceless and provides a view of life which we should preserve. Over the coming months I hope to provide a series of small articles about some of the subject matter in my small but growing collection.

Jack Adams october 2009














































































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Jack Adams is a writer, historian, video producer and project leader for HumanRightsTV.

"Jack Adams, a muff, stupid fellow" source: http://www.victorianlondon.org/publications/sinks-2.htm

As an element of background I would paste here the begining of the text from the Past versus Present project of the Cambridge Victorian Studies Group. This text provides a very good foundation for any enquiry about how Victorian values and ideas formed and the problems we face when trying to understand this fascinating past:

This project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust for five years (2006-11), investigates the development and impact of competing views of the past in the nineteenth century in Britain. Within our own collective memory, the nineteenth century occupies a pivotal place as an age of progress and tradition. The Victorians had a constant, often agonized awareness of their responsibility for creating the future, and also unparalleled access to the past. At the same time as technology and economic development were raising prospects of an unprecedented leap into the future, the same tools and processes were unearthing - through scholarship, archaeology, geology and biology, education and political debate - multiple pasts in wonderful profusion and vexingly contradictory detail. Elites had grappled with similar issues in the eighteenth century, but in an increasingly complex and democratic culture, these problems faced the whole of society. The problem of multiple pasts and the choice of using or transcending them preoccupied the Victorians at all conceptual levels, from the individual's sense of personal development to the global question of the fate of empires. Which pasts should be abandoned, which cherished as foundational? This project will look at this central problem of nineteenth-century British culture from a range of different perspectives and disciplines.

source: http://www.victorians.group.cam.ac.uk/past_versus_present.html