Flanders, Judith – The Bell Bookshop

Rites of passage

Emma — Thu, 27 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

‘There is no aspect of Victorian death that does not make it into Judith Flanders’s latest investigation into 19th-century life’ – The Sunday Times

‘Flanders writes with sharp intelligence and first-class scholarly attention to detail’ – The Telegraph

In Rites of Passage, acclaimed historian Judith Flanders deconstructs the intricate, fascinating, and occasionally – to modern eyes – bizarre customs that grew up around death and mourning in Victorian Britain.

Through stories from the sickbed to the deathbed, from the correct way to grieve and to give comfort to those grieving, to funerals and burials and the reaction of those left behind, Flanders illuminates how living in nineteenth-century Britain was, in so many ways, dictated by dying.

This is an engrossing, deeply researched and, at times, chilling social history of a period plagued by infant death, poverty, disease, and unprecedented change. In elegant, often witty prose, Flanders brings the Victorian way of death vividly to life.

Rites of passage

Emma — Thu, 29 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

‘Nobody knows more about everyday life in Victorian Britain than Judith Flanders’ – Douglas Robert-Fairhurst, author of Metamorphosis and The Turning Point

Through stories from the sickbed to the deathbed, from the correct way to grieve and to give comfort to those grieving to funerals and burials and the reaction of those left behind, Flanders illuminates how living in nineteenth-century Britain was, in so many ways, dictated by dying.

A place for everything

Emma — Thu, 04 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

‘A delightfully quirky sturdy . . . [Flanders] is a meticulour historian with a taste for the offbeat; the story of the alphabet suits her well . . . Fascinating.’ Sunday Times

Once we’ve learned it as children, few of us think much of the alphabet and its familiar sing-song order. And yet the order of the alphabet continues to play a major role in our adult lives. From school registers to electoral rolls, from dictionaries and encyclopaedias to library shelves, our lives have been ordered from A to Z. Long before Google searches, this magical system of organization gave us the ability to sort through centuries of thought, knowledge and literature, allowing us to sift, file, and find the information we have, and to locate the information we need.

In A Place for Everything, acclaimed historian Judith Flanders fascinatingly lays out the gradual triumph of alphabetical order, from its use as a sorting tool in the Great Library of Alexandria to its current decline in prominence in the digital age. Along the way, the reader encounters a wonderful cast of characters,from the great collector Robert Cotton, who catalogued his manuscripts by the names of the busts of the Roman emperors surmounting his book cases, to the unassuming sixteenth-century London bookseller who ushered in a revolution by listing his authors by ‘sirname’ first.

‘One of the many fascinations of Judith Flanders’ book is that it reveals what a weird, unlikely creation the alphabet is.’ Guardian

Circle Of Sisters

Emma — Thu, 02 May 2002 00:00:00 +0000

The Macdonald sisters — Alice, Georgiana, Agnes and Louisa — started life among the ranks of the lower-middle classes, with little prospect of social advancement. But as wives and mothers they made a single family of the poet Rudyard Kipling, the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones, Edward Poynter, President of the Royal Academy, and the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin. In telling their remarkable story, Judith Flanders displays the fluidity of Victorian society, and explores the life of the family in the 19th century.