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Second sight

The visionary imagination in late Victorian literature

by Catherine Maxwell

This challenging and important study, which examines a range of canonical and less well-known writers, is an innovative reassessment of late Victorian literature in its relation to visionary Romanticism.

It examines six late Victorian writers – Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, Eugene Lee-Hamilton, Theodore Watts-Dunton and Thomas Hardy – to reveal their commitment to a Romantic visionary tradition which surfaces towards the end of the nineteenth century in response to the threat of a growing materialism. Offering detailed and imaginative readings of both poetry and prose, Second Sight shows the different ways in which late Victorian writers move beyond materiality, though without losing a commitment to it, to explore the mysterious relation between the seen and the unseen.

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Healthy living in the Alps

The origins of winter tourism in Switzerland 1860–1914

Susan Barton

The first winter visitors to the Swiss Alps began to arrive in the 1860s and were encouraged to take outdoor exercise as part of their cure regime. They also had healthy visitors and companions who sought recreation while the invalids were resting as part of the sanatoria routine.

Demonstrating that this is not just part of the history of Switzerland but of Britain too, biographical backgrounds of British visitors to the resorts give depth and context to a history of health and winter sports tourism by looking at the kind of people who would spend months of the year in the Alps. A discussion of the application of modern technologies creates an overall view of the growth of health and sports tourism in Switzerland.

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Susan Barton is currently promoting the release of the book via a short tour in Switzerland. She is visiting Leysin and signing copies of the book at the Atelier-Boutique, Gare du Feydey. The book is on a special promotional offer of half price at the shop.

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So Clean

Lord Leverhulme, soap and civilisation

Brian Lewis

This book is an unorthodox biography of William Hesketh Lever, 1st Lord Leverhulme (1851-1925), the founder of the Lever Brothers’ Sunlight Soap empire. Unlike previous biographies, which have focused on the man’s life story and eccentricities, or just considered one aspect of his career, So clean places him squarely in his social and cultural context and is fully informed by recent historical scholarship.

Much more than a warts-and-all biography, the book uses Lever as an entry-point for contextualized and comparative essays on the history of advertising; on factory paternalism, town planning, the Garden City movement and their ramifications across the twentieth century; and on colonialism and forced labour in the Belgian Congo and the South Pacific. It concludes with a discussion of his extraordinary attempt, in his final years, to transform crofting and fishing in the Outer Hebrides.

For more information, please click on the title above.