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High Society: The English Social Elite, 1880-1914
Book by Horn, Pamela
256 pages, Hardcover
First published October 1, 1992
About the author
Pamela Horn
56 books20 followersPamela Horn is an historian specialising in Victorian social history. The author of acclaimed books on rural life, servant lives and childhood, she lectured on economic and social history at Oxford Polytechnic, now Oxford Brookes University, for over twenty years.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
November 8, 2014
Horn is a very well-regarded author in the field of 19th-century social history at all its levels, but here she restricts herself to the uppermost levels and only in the last generation, when the Prince of Wales was having a decided effect on people’s attitudes toward “Victorianism” and the Great War was just over the horizon. As usual, her approach here is topical, including chapters on the “daily round” of men and women, the rituals of the drawing room and the levée, the role of sports among those with nothing much else to do, how the upper class dabbled in imperial politics and warfare, and the part the servant class (the largest single employment category in the country late in the century) played in making it possible for their masters to live the way they chose. She quotes heavily (again, as usual) from contemporary diaries and later autobiographies and almost everything is footnoted, which will enable students to enhance their knowledge even further.
March 10, 2008
I'm an anglophile and I like high society. This book is a perfect combo.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews