Nicola Humble

Isabella Beeton

As with the commander of an army, or the leader of any enterprise, so it is with the mistress of a house.' A founding text of Victorian middle-class identity, Household Management is today one of the great unread classics. Over a thousand pages long, and written when its author was only 22, it offered highly authoritative advice on subjects as diverse as fashion, child-care, animal husbandry, poisons, and the management of servants. To the modern reader expecting stuffy moralizingand watery vegetables, Beeton's book is a revelation: it ranges widely across the foods of Europe and beyond, actively embracing new food stuffs and techniques, mixing domestic advice with discussions of science, religion, class, industrialism and gender roles. Alternately fashionable and frugal, anxious and blusteringly self-confident, Household Management highlights the concerns of the ever-expanding Victorian middle-class at a key moment in its history. The abridged edition does justice to its high status as a cookery book, while also suggesting ways of approaching this massive, hybrid text as a significant document of social and cultural history.

Abridged Edition

Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management

Kimberley Reynolds

Kimberley Reynolds and Nicola Humble here provide a radical revision of Victorian constructions of femininity. Using a wide range of textual examples (including children's literature, sensations fiction, diaries, and autobiography) as well as visual illustrations, Victorian Heroines offers a new look at the representation of women and sexuality in nineteenth-century literature and painting. Arguing against the conventional dyadic model that interprets Victorian fiction in terms of a rigid distinction between the good and bad, the sexual and asexual woman, the authors suggest a more complex paradigm, simultaneously concealing and revealing contradictory attitudes to Victorian womanhood. The book explores the highly erotic fantasy elements frequently found in widely disseminated orthodox female images, and effectively demonstrates how both male and female writers used similar techniques to subvert this orthodoxy. Drawing on contemporary critical and cultural theories, Victorian Heroines is a lucid and accessible analysis of the depiction of women during this period, challenging the prevalent views of recent decades.

Representations of Femininity in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Art

Victorian Heroines

Be it a birthday or a wedding—let them eat cake. Encased in icing, crowned with candles, emblazoned with congratulatory words—cake is the ultimate food of celebration in many cultures around the world. But how did cake come to be the essential food marker of a significant occasion? In Cake: A Global History, Nicola Humble explores the meanings, legends, rituals, and symbolism attached to cake through the ages. Humble describes the many national differences in cake-making techniques, customs, and regional histories—from the French gâteau Paris-Brest, named for a cycle race and designed to imitate the form of a bicycle wheel, to the American Lady Baltimore cake, likely named for a fictional cake in a 1906 novel by Owen Wister. She also details the role of cake in literature, art, and film—including Miss Havisham’s imperishable wedding cake in Great Expectations and Marcel Proust’s madeleine of memory—as well as the art and architecture of cake making itself. Featuring a large selection of mouthwatering images, as well as many examples and recipes for some particularly unusual cakes, Cake will provide many sweet reasons for celebration.

A Global History

Cake

Presents the history of Britain's culinary evolution through the cookery books which have inspired us over the course of a century, beginning with Mrs Beeton and leading to the rise of the celebrity TV chef.

Cook Books and the Transformation of British Food

Culinary Pleasures

Humble presents a study of the novels by and for middle-class women that dominated the publishing market in the first half of the 20th century. She studies the work of authors such as Agatha Christie alongside cultural products such as cookery books.

Nicola Humble

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