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5+ teosta 409 jäsentä 6 arvostelua

Tietoja tekijästä

Vic Gatrell is a professor of British history at the University of Essex.

Tekijän teokset

Associated Works

A new view of society; and, Report to the county of Lanark (1970) — Toimittaja — 42 kappaletta

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Yleistieto

Jäseniä

Kirja-arvosteluja

Three stars means "It's OK". I wish I could give it 4 but it defeated me. It should have been so much fun. Before Victorian prudery clamped down a lid of stern disapproval on British behaviour, we were a rowdy, randy lot. The cartoons of Georgian England are Rabelasian, earthy and frequently libellous. The wave of bad behaviour - and of artistic depiction of same - crested in the Regency, and happily this book deals with the "long 18th century"; the four Georges and even, to avoid an abrupt cut-off, tailing off into the 1840s.

There is no doubt Catrell is the master of the subject; the book is authoritative, indeed exhaustive. For, sadly, the light-hearted nature of his subject matter has failed to rub off on him and, for all its intrinsic interest, this is far from being a light read. To be literal, the book itself (printed throughout on glazed paper) is heavy enough to make your arms hurt; don't try it last thing at night unless you fancy combining your bedtime reading with a little weight-lifting.

I feel mean criticising this book on this account; clearly two other reviewers loved every word. And don't get me wrong, the book is full of stuff. I just wish the author's style had been lighter, the print less microscopic, and a good editor had persuaded him to cut the word-count drastically. On the plus side, that heavy paper means the illustrations are numerous, good quality and inset in the text; something which goes quite a way to counterbalance my other quibbles.
… (lisätietoja)
 
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AgedPeasant | 3 muuta kirja-arvostelua | Dec 13, 2020 |
A serious academic work on the sexual attitudes of London from the late 18th to early 19th centuries, using cartoons from the likes of Rowlandson and Gillray as a basis. Well worth reading, though not for the easily shocked. The title of the Introduction gives an idea of what fare is on offer later - 'Lady Worsley's Bottom'. A fascinating insight into a lost world.
 
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JacobKirckman | 3 muuta kirja-arvostelua | Nov 3, 2020 |
In this learned and deeply impassioned work, Gatrell surveys the development of executions in England from the days of the “bloody code” in the late 18th and early 19th centuries—when people were executed for petty theft—through the legal reforms that made murder essentially the only crime punishable by death and finally to the abolition of execution as a public spectacle. He begins by considering what happens to the body during an execution. Even when things went “well,” many a person executed died in prolonged convulsions, the hangman pulling on the dying person’s legs to cause a final asphyxiation. If the drop was misjudged, the victim might be decapitated. If we are going to study this mode of punishment, Gatrell suggests, its realities had better be made clear. This book’s subjects, he reminds us, ‘once lived as we do’ . Using a variety of sources—not just trial records but ballads, broadsides, diaries and letters—Gatrell re-creates the lives and experiences of those who died, those who sentenced them to death, those who watched them die and those who mourned them. This is a work driven by outrage, a narrative alive with fury but one, also, of impeccable scholarship.… (lisätietoja)
 
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Judith.Flanders | 1 muu arvostelu | Apr 28, 2014 |
This is not a subject which would normally have interested me in the slightest - but Vic Gatrell makes the naughtiness of c18th London so vivid and subversive that one cannot but be won over by it all.
½
 
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readawayjay | 3 muuta kirja-arvostelua | Feb 11, 2011 |

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409
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6
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14

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