# data[].attributes.body
You're Dead To Me - Christmas with Charles Dickens - BBC Sounds

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
You’re Dead To Me - Christmas with Charles Dickens - BBC Sounds

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Join Greg Jenner and discover what Christmas was like with Charles Dickens.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
You’re Dead to Me - Mary Shelley (Radio Edit) - BBC Sounds

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Greg Jenner and the team introduce us to genre-changing literary icon Mary Shelley.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Just as Scrooge wandered London’s streets on a cold Christmas night, Dan Snow follows the ghosts of Charles Dickens’ past to discover the city that inspired his greatest works. With London-born tour guide David Charnick, they slip down hidden alleyways to find the old debtor’s prison that the Dicken…

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Listen to this episode from In Our Time: Culture on Spotify. Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the achievements of the 19th century literary giant, Charles Dickens. George Bernard Shaw said of Little Dorrit that it was "more seditious than Das Kapital".

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Timeline of Life Events | Charles Dickens Info

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Here’s a list of facts, events and dates in the life of Charles Dickens. The Charles Dickens timeline also includes information about the era.

# data[].attributes.headline
British Library: Was children's literature meant to educate or entertain?

# data[].attributes.subject
British Library: Was children's literature meant to educate or entertain?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
How was childhood depicted in the literature of the 18th and 19th century, and how were perceptions of childhood different from those of today? Was children's literature intended to entertain or instruct?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
How was childhood depicted in the literature of the 18th and 19th century, and how were perceptions of childhood different from those of today? Was children's literature intended to entertain or instruct?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
From Charles Dickens to Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell to George Eliot, how did the writers of this period use fantasy, realism, sensationalism, and social commentary? How did literature comment on class division, industrialisation, gender roles and perceptions of childhood?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
From Charles Dickens to Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell to George Eliot, how did the writers of this period use fantasy, realism, sensationalism, and social commentary? How did literature comment on class division, industrialisation, gender roles and perceptions of childhood?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Women writers, anonymity and pseudonyms | The British Library

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In the late 18th and 19th centuries, writing as a profession was largely considered an activity unsuitable for women. Greg Buzwell explores the barriers and the lengths that women authors went to in order to publish their work.

# data[].attributes.headline
Discovering literature: Romantics and Victorians

# data[].attributes.subject
Discovering literature: Romantics and Victorians

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Discover 1,400 collection items, 171 articles, 25 films, 36 teachers' notes and more. Discovering Literature has been supported since its inception by Dr Naim Dangoor CBE, Dangoor Education.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Discovering Literature: Romantics and Victorians

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Discover 1,200 Romantic and Victorian collection items, 167 articles, 25 films, 30 teachers' notes and more. Discovering Literature has been supported since its inception by Dr Naim Dangoor CBE, Dangoor Education.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Emily Bronte's story of Heathcliff and Cathy, of love, hatred, revenge and self-destruction across two generations in a remote moorland home.

In a programme first broadcast in 2017, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Emily Bronte (1818-1848) and her only novel, published in 1847 under the name 'Ellis Bell' just a year before her death. It is the story of Heathcliff, a foundling from Liverpool brought up in the Earnshaw family at the remote Wuthering Heights, high on the moors, who becomes close to the young Cathy Earnshaw but hears her say she can never marry him. He disappears and she marries his rival, Edgar Linton, of Thrushcross Grange even though she feels inextricably linked with Heathcliff, exclaiming to her maid 'I am Heathcliff!' On his return, Heathcliff steadily works through his revenge on all who he believes wronged him, and their relations. When Cathy dies, Heathcliff longs to be united with her in the grave. The raw passions and cruelty of the story unsettled Emily's sister Charlotte Bronte, whose novel Jane Eyre had been published shortly before, and who took pains to explain its roughness, jealousy and violence when introducing it to early readers. Over time, with its energy, imagination and scope, Wuthering Heights became celebrated as one of the great novels in English.

The image above is of Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff and Merle Oberon as Cathy on the set of the Samuel Goldwyn Company movie 'Wuthering Heights', circa 1939.

With

Karen O'Brien
Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford

John Bowen
Professor of Nineteenth Century Literature at the University of York

and

Alexandra Lewis
Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Aberdeen

Producer: Simon Tillotson.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Wuthering Heights

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Emily Bronte's story of Heathcliff and Cathy, of love, hatred, revenge and self-destruction across two generations in a remote moorland home. In a programme first broadcast in 2017, Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Emily Bronte (1818-1848) and her only novel, published in 1847 under the name 'Ellis Bell' just a year before her death.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The life and work of Elizabeth Barrett Browning

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
By using this site, you agree we can set and use cookies. For more details of these cookies and how to disable them, see our cookie policy.

The Women's Printing Society

Prior to and during most of the 19th century, the printing trade was considered an exclusively male industry. Elizabeth Crawford looks at how the Women's Printing Society, founded in 1876, challenged this practice by providing skills and means for women, and promoting feminist ideas throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.

The Women's Printing Society was founded in 1876 by Mrs Emma Paterson (1848-1886) to give women an opportunity of working in the printing trade. The venture was part of a growing movement to open new areas of skilled employment to women so they might earn higher wages and gain greater control over their lives.[1] At this time printing was very much a male preserve; the printing unions forbade their members from training or hiring women, fearing the result would be lower wages.[2] Yet it was considered that all aspects of printing, except for one stage that involved heavy lifting, were suited to the skills regarded as innate in the contemporary gendered view of women. For instance, their nimble fingers were thought quick at picking out and setting up type and their steady care suited to proofreading. Sixteen years earlier a similar operation, the Victoria Press, had been launched by Emily Faithfull (1835-1895), but it had not maintained its original promise, closing in 1882.[3]

Women compositors at The Victoria Press printing office, 1861

View images from this item (1)

Usage terms

This material can only be used for research and private study purposes.

Held by© Illustrated London News/Mary Evans Picture Library

What did the Women's Printing Society offer to women?

The Women's Printing Society offered conditions and hours suited to women. Its apprenticeships, for which women paid £5 as a premium, lasted for three years, compared with the seven years' apprenticeship required of male printers. In 1895 a reporter noted that after their first three months women apprentices were paid three shillings a week and for every further three months another 6p weekly was added, so that towards the end of their apprenticeship they were earning about nine shillings. Once qualified the women might then earn 25 shillings a week, recognised to be a good wage.[4]

Work at the Women's Printing Society began at 9am and ended at 6.30pm on Monday to Friday, with an hour for dinner. At the time this was considered a short working day. Saturday hours were 9am to 1.30pm. Very little overtime was required of the workers, and it was emphasised that the Women's Printing Society retained their employees all the year round rather than laying them off when work was slack, as often happened to male printers.[5]

How did the Women's Printing Society operate?

The first premises of the Women's Printing Society were in Holborn, the business then moving to Great College Street in Westminster, a few doors from the office of one of the main women's suffrage societies. However, in 1893 a fire necessitated another move, this time to Whitcomb Street, close to Trafalgar Square. There, a small binding department opened in 1903.

In 1908 new fire regulations forced another move and this time the Women's Printing Society was able to build its own premises, at 31-35 Brick Street, behind Piccadilly in Mayfair.[6] In 1912 a reporter commented that everything in the premises was 'clean and wholesome; the women all looked healthy, interested and well-dressed, with neat pinafores covering their clothes. The air of cleanliness was unexpected in a printing house, but there it was pervading everything'.[7] The reporter particularly noted the building's roof-garden, 'which is over the dining-room, and is a delightful place, with the fresh breezes from the Green Park and Hyde Park blowing over it'.

Who worked for the Women's Printing Society?

The Women's Printing Society was a co-operative, with shareholders and workers sharing the profits. For instance, in 1911 the dividend offered was ten per cent, with the workers receiving a similar bonus.[8] Many of the workers were also shareholders, some directors making presents of shares to increase the employees' sense of direct participation in the business.

The Women's Printing Society was clearly considered an agreeable place of work, the Pall Mall Gazette reporter commenting in 1912 that several of the 45 women then employed had been there for over 30 years. One of these was Miss Margaret Weede (1854-1924), who had first joined the firm in 1880 as a compositor, succeeding as manager after Mrs Paterson's death in 1886. She had been born in Kensington, where her father was a printer, and, although always known in the business as 'Miss Weede' - indeed 'Weede' was the firm's telegraphic address - in 1897 had married a widower, Alfred Cornish. He was a 'nurseryman', that is, he grew and sold plants, but there was a family 'print' connection as his father had been an exceptionally skilled compositor, specialising in the setting of 'Oriental' typefaces. On her marriage 'Miss Weede' became stepmother to six children, ranging in age from 2 to 18, while still, as the 1901 and 1911 censuses show, working as 'manageress, printing office'.

Miss Weede on managing the Women's Printing Press, 1897

View images from this item (4)

Another long-serving worker was Miss Margaret Ely (1862-1935), who joined the Women's Printing Society when it was first founded. She never married, living at home with her parents in a block of 'model dwellings' in Clerkenwell and then, after they died, with her sister's family in Tufnell Park. At this time one of her nieces was a compositor, likely also employed by the Women's Printing Society, where, by 1901, Margaret Ely had become forewoman in the composing room.

What did the Women's Printing Society publish?

The directors of the Women's Printing Society changed over the years but at one time they included Sarah Prideaux, a renowned arts and crafts bookbinder, Agnes Zimmermann, German-born pianist and composer, and her close friend, Lady Louisa Goldsmid, supporter of many feminist causes. Indeed, it was the growth of interest in these causes that accounted for the initial success of the firm, it being the obvious choice as printer of the rapidly increasing number of feminist books, papers and annual reports. For instance, in the 19th century, among a plethora of publications, the firm printed Swimming and its Relation to the Health of Women, a pamphlet by Mrs Frances Hoggan, one of the first women doctors; between 1891 and 1893 the feminist newspaper The Women's Penny Paper and its successor The Woman's Herald; in 1894 Mrs Millicent Fawcett's speech, Home and Politics; and in 1895 The Citizenship of Women Socially Considered, Louisa Shore's careful account of the contemporary position of women.

'Trade Unions for Women', a pamphlet from Lady Dilke published by the Women's Printing Society (8415.g.63.(13.))

'Home and politics', an address delivered by Mrs Henry Fawcett and published by the Women's Printing Society (8415.g.63.(14.) )

'Swimming and its relation to the health of women', a pamphlet by Mrs Hoggan published by the Women's Printing Society (7306.de.26.(4.))

It was also the printer for both of the main women's suffrage societies, for the Women's Liberal and Liberal Unionist Associations, for Bedford College, London University's women's college, and for girls' schools such as Queen's College. The firm also undertook what was termed 'jobbing work'; in 1887 Agnes Garrett, a professional interior designer and sister to Millicent Fawcett, thanked the Women's Printing Society for printing cards and circulars for her, writing 'I am very much pleased with them, and very grateful for all the trouble you have taken'.[9]

In the 20th century the Women's Printing Society benefitted from the upsurge of interest in the women's suffrage movement, printing, for instance, The Women's Suffrage Cookery Book (1912), compiled to raise funds for the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies, and, as late as 1943, the wartime report of the London and National Society for Women's Service (the precursor of the Fawcett Society). The firm also printed histories of women's institutions, such as Sketch of the Foundation and Development of the London School of Medicine for Women (1915) and The Work of the Women's Emergency Canteens in France 1915-19 (1919), and was the obvious choice as the printer of memoirs written by women supporters of the enterprise, such as Millicent Fawcett's Six Weeks in Palestine (1921).

The Women's Printing Society was still operating from its Brick Street premises when it finally ceased business in 1955.[10] It is to be regretted that the firm has left no archive for it would be interesting to know if close association with so much feminist-centred material had a direct effect on the lives of its employees.

Footnotes

[1] See The Women's Printing Society Ltd: A Retrospect 1876-1908 (London: Women's Printing Society, 1908).

[2] Marianne Van Remoortel, Women, Work and the Victorian Periodical (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), p. 116.

[3] See J S Stone, Emily Faithfull: Victorian Champion of Women's Rights (Toronto: P D Meany, 1994).

[4] M Bateson, Professional Women Upon their Professions: Conversations Recorded by M Bateson (London: Horace Cox, 1895), pp. 80-82.

[5] Retrospect, pp. 7-8.

[6] Retrospect, pp. 3-5.

[7] Pall Mall Gazette, 11 May 1912, p. 12.

[8] Pall Mall Gazette, 11 May 1912, p. 12.

[9] Women's Printing Society: Selected Testimonials, included in 'The Papers of Millicent Garrett Fawcett' Microfilm Collection, Women's Suffrage Collection from Manchester Central Library Part 2 (Marlborough: Adam Matthew Publications, 1995).

[10] London Gazette, 6 May 1955, p. 2,636.
Article text © Elizabeth Crawford

Written byElizabeth Crawford

Elizabeth Crawford is an independent scholar, author of The Women's Suffrage Movement: a reference guide and other books relating to the women's movements in the 19th and 20th centuries. She is also a dealer in books and ephemera by and about women. Her website can be found at womanandhersphere.com.

Sign up to our newsletter

British Library newsletter

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Women's Printing Society | The British Library

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Prior to and during most of the 19th century, the printing trade was considered an exclusively male industry. Elizabeth Crawford looks at how the Women's Printing Society, founded in 1876, challenged this practice by providing skills and means for women, and promoting feminist ideas throughout the 19th and 20th centuries.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
By using this site, you agree we can set and use cookies. For more details of these cookies and how to disable them, see our cookie policy.

Professor Tim Youngs considers how Victorian authors chronicled and questioned Britain's imperial expansion.

In English literature of the 19th century, Empire is often present. Sometimes it appears in the margins. Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (1814), for example, cursorily acknowledges that the estate of the novel's title derives some of its wealth from slavery. Sir Thomas Bertram has plantation holdings in Antigua and visits there, away from the scene of the novel, to attend to business matters. At the end of Elizabeth Gaskell's novel, Mary Barton (1848), the protagonist, her husband and their child are living in Canada. Charles Dickens's Magwitch in Great Expectations (1861) returns from New South Wales, where he had been deported as a convict. In Charlotte Brontë's (1847), Rochester's insane wife from Jamaica, Bertha Mason, is kept hidden away, locked in the attic for a decade.

Fair copy manuscript of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre

This is the fair autograph copy of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre manuscript. The novel was published in 1847 under her pen name Currer Bell.

Usage terms

This material can only be used for research and private study purposes.

In other texts, Empire features more prominently. It is apparent in its complexity and ambivalence in the works of Rudyard Kipling. Many of the adventure novels of popular authors G A Henty, H Rider Haggard and R M Ballantyne were set in imperial spaces or promoted imperial values, though it is important to recognise that expressions of jingoism and xenophobia did not go unopposed.

Exploration

Many of those who travelled in the service of Empire wrote about their journeys. Explorers, missionaries, soldiers, colonial administrators, scientists and others produced accounts of their experiences, whether in the form of letters, diaries, journals, essays or full-length manuscripts. These reflected and could reinforce prejudices against 'race', though they could challenge ignorance, too. Their writings should not be seen as entirely separate from the novels or poetry of the time. Explorers and novelists read some of the same books and one another's works. Exploration and travel narratives employ plots, narrators, protagonists and symbolic episodes, just as autobiographies and novels do. Many British explorers who travelled to Africa, among them Sir Samuel White Baker, Verney Lovett Cameron and Stanley himself, each published at least one novel for children.

Three Sailor Boys: Children's adventure story

An early edition of an adventure novel, Three Sailor Boys, written by the explorer Verney Lovett Cameron. The young protagonists are at one point pursued by cannibals, this was no doubt influenced by Cameron's travels of Africa.

Historians disagree about the extent to which the British Empire was formal or informal, driven by government or independent trading and scientific interests, but it is generally accepted that the second half of the 19th century saw a shift from scientific inquiry to more overtly political and material concerns, culminating in the 'high imperialism' of the 1870s and 1880s. East and Central Africa attracted particular attention from the 1850s: driven by geographical curiosity, especially the search for the sources of the Nile, and by a quest for wealth. John Hanning Speke's Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile (1863) glows with the prospect of opening up for trade the region around Lake Victoria (as he named it after his monarch). The missionary-scientist Dr David Livingstone was explicit about the benefits of spreading the '3 Cs': civilisation, commerce and Christianity. Livingstone's goals were taken up, if distorted, by the man who famously 'found' him in Africa, the Welsh-American journalist Henry Morton Stanley, whose book How I Found Livingstone (1872), helped promote Livingstone's image. More than any other figure, Stanley was responsible for erecting the myth of the 'dark continent', evident in the titles of two of his books: Through the Dark Continent (1878) and In Darkest Africa (1890). Stanley, who was and remains a controversial figure, was also a professional journalist. His expeditions and writings exhibit a brashness and egotism that divided his companions and his readers. His complex personality mirrors many of the contradictions of the age.

Illustration from How I Found Livingstone by Henry M Stanley

This illustration, taken from Henry Stanley's book How I Found Livingstone (1872), is of the famous meeting between Stanley and Dr. Livingstone. Stanley allegedly greeted Livingstone with the statement, " Dr. Livingstone, I presume? ", stated in the caption of the image.

In Darkest Africa by explorer Henry M Stanley

Map taken from Henry Stanley's In Darkest Africa (1890). A broken red line is drawn around the Congo Free State and marks the boundary of the Free Trade Area. In the late 19th century, the area was privately controlled by Belgium's King Leopold II who brutally exploited the region's people and resources.

Questioning empire

The 19th century witnessed the expansion of the British Empire, but this process did not go unquestioned. Doubts about Empire seem to have intensified in the last quarter of a century. Several texts of the 1890s offered warnings about the consequences of Britain's actions overseas. A passage in H G Wells's The War of the Worlds (1898) compares the Martians' attack on the human race with the supposed hunting to extinction of Tasmanian Aborigines by European colonists. Dracula's invasion of England in Bram Stoker's novel has been labelled by critic Stephen D Arata an instance of 'reverse colonisation'. Dracula studied England's language, society and culture to aid his incursion. Published in 1897, the same year as and Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, Richard Marsh's told of attacks in London by a shape-shifting Egyptian worshipper of Isis seeking revenge on politician and future statesman Paul Lessingham.

Joseph Conrad's novella, Heart of Darkness, which many interpret as a critique of the excesses of imperialism, was published in serial form by Blackwood's Magazine in 1899 and in book form three years later. It culminates in a vision of the wilderness invading the 'civilised' world. Although the Congo is not named in the work, it is identifiable. Critics have put forward various candidates, including Stanley himself, as the model for Kurtz, but the scandal surrounding the conduct of two officers on Stanley's ill-fated Emin Pasha Relief Expedition (1887-89) forms part of the story's background. Major Edmund Musgrave Barttelot, whose increasing brutality and apparent mental deterioration aroused hostility among Africans and his fellow officers, was killed, allegedly shot by an African named Sanga. His fellow officer, Irish gentleman James Sligo Jameson, who also failed to survive the expedition, was implicated in what was reported to be the cannibalistic killing of a young slave girl. Whatever the truth of the matter, Jameson's own account, published by his family after his death, has him unwittingly commissioning the murder by handing over six handkerchiefs as advance payment but thinking it was part of a joke. The dreadful events of this expedition were played out in gruesome detail in British newspapers over several months in the late 1880s, provoking troubled questions about Britain's role in Africa.

James Jameson's account of the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition

James Sligo Jameson's account of the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, published posthumously in 1890.

Heart of Darkness reads as a journey into moral and psychological disintegration as its protagonist 'goes native' but its setting perpetuates the idea of darkest Africa. Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe branded Conrad racist, arguing that the tale's symbolism denied black African humanity and culture. Achebe's criticism notwithstanding, much European writing on the Congo uses Heart of Darkness as a reference point.

Illustration of Victorian explorer Henry Morton Stanley

This image appeared in Funny Folks magazinein December 1899. The image is of the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition (1886 -1889); the figure at the front is Henry Stanley and the figure at the back is Emin Pasha.

These late 19th-century works of fiction reflect feelings of instability and apprehension. Their use of multiple narrators strengthens the sense of fragmentation and uncertainty. The threat to order and reason is apparent in their movement away from realism. Dracula and The Beetle turn to the supernatural and revive the Gothic. (Patrick Brantlinger labels their type of writing 'imperial Gothic'.) Wells employs science fiction, or, to use his own term scientific romance. Heart of Darkness employs images and impressions that are often indefinable, as if unmaking the detailed world of the explorers and empire. All of these texts draw on ideas of travel and exploration and take them in new directions. Their metaphors have proved powerful and enduring but are rooted in their imperial contexts.

Footnotes

[1] Arata, Stephen D. 'The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization'. Victorian Studies, 33.4 (Summer 1990), 621-45.

Further reading

Achebe, Chinua. 'An Image of Africa: racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness.' In Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays, 1965-1987. Oxford: Heinemann International, 1988, pp.1-13.

Arata, Stephen D. 'The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization'. Victorian Studies 33, 4 (Summer 1990), 621-45.

Brantlinger, Patrick. Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988.

Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. London: Chatto and Windus, 1993.

Youngs, Tim. Travellers in Africa: British Travelogues, 1850-1900. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994.

Tim Youngs is Professor of English at Nottingham Trent University. He is the author or editor of several books on travel writing. His most recent publications are The Cambridge Introduction to Travel Writing (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and Beastly Journeys: Travel and Transformation at the fin de siècle (Liverpool University Press, 2013).

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.keywords[]
professor tim youngs considers how victorian authors chronicled and questioned britain’s imperial expansion.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
By using this site, you agree we can set and use cookies. For more details of these cookies and how to disable them, see our cookie policy. Professor Tim Youngs considers how Victorian authors chronicled and questioned Britain's imperial expansion. In English literature of the 19th century, Empire is often present.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Oscar Wilde - author of The Picture of Dorian Gray

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Oscar Wilde, flamboyant and witty Anglo-Irish playwright, poet and critic is best-known for The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Melvyn Bragg discusses Oscar Wilde, the Aesthetes and his literary legacy. Was Wilde a reactionary - the last of the romantics - or was he the midwife to modernism?

Melvyn Bragg examines Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetes. In February 1895 Oscar Wilde was at the height of his powers, he was known on both sides of the Atlantic, he was feted in London society and celebrated in the West End where An Ideal Husband continued to play to packed houses as The Importance of Being Earnest opened to ecstatic reviews. "The man who can dominate a London dinner table can dominate the world" he is reputed to have said, and he seemed on course to do just that. But in April that year he was arrested for the crime of 'gross indecency' and his swift decent from omnipotence began; it ended five years later, when exiled and humiliated he died, famously 'beyond his means', in a Paris hotel.Wilde's reputation spent a long time in the wilderness but just over a century after his death his stock is higher than ever before. Now that his rehabilitation seems complete how should we understand his legacy? Was Wilde a reactionary - the last of the romantics - or was he the midwife to modernism? Was there a coherent philosophy behind those beguiling epigrams or was there little more to aestheticism than dressing up and showing off? With Valentine Cunningham, Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford University, Regenia Gagnier, Professor of English at the University of Exeter and Neil Sammells, Dean of Humanities at Bath Spa University and author of Wilde Style.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Melvyn Bragg discusses Oscar Wilde, the Aesthetes and his literary legacy. Was Wilde a reactionary - the last of the romantics - or was he the midwife to modernism? Melvyn Bragg examines Oscar Wilde and the Aesthetes.