This Week's Last Month's Acquisitions

It's remarkable how the books reproduce themselves when you go away for a month. Really. I should leave a chaperone...

• Jessie McLaren, Neil Willox: A Story of Edinburgh in the Days of Queen Marie (Oliphant, Anderson, & Ferrier, 1886). Mostly about the influence of John Knox.

• L. Pocklington, The Secret Room: A Story of Tudor Times (RTS, n.d.). The Marian persecutions.

• Pat Barker, Liza's England (Picador, 2000). One woman's life becomes a microcosm of twentieth-century English history.

• Richard Bausch, Hello to the Cannibals (HarperCollins, 2002). Long after her death, the Victorian explorer Mary Kingsley forges a weird "friendship" with a young woman through a series of mysterious letters.

• Frederick Busch, The Mutual Friend (Harper & Row, 1978). A fictional memoir of Charles Dickens.

• Rosamond Lehmann, The Ballad and the Source (HBJ, 1973). An elderly woman reveals the scandal she caused during the Victorian era.

• Betsy Tobin, Bone House (Review, 2000). In 1603, a young housemaid investigates a prostitute's death.

• Betsy Tobin, The Bounce (Review, 2002). In the 1870s, a young man comes to London seeking his mother.

• Laurence Housman, Happy and Glorious: A Dramatic Biography (World Books, 1943). Fictionalized account of Queen Victoria's life.

• Benjamin Disraeli, Letters: 1857-1859, ed. M. G. Wiebe et al. (Toronto, 2004). Impractical birthday present, take II. Thank goodness for that interesting phenomenon known as the slightly damaged dust jacket, which allowed me to purchase this copy for way, way less than the retail price.

• Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (Cambridge, 1989). Abridged edition of Hooker's seminal contribution to the Anglican establishment.

• James Mill, The History of British India, abr. William Thomas (Chicago, 1975). Abridged edition of Mill's famous history, issued as part of Chicago's excellent "Classics of British Historical Literature" series.

• John Brewer, A Sentimental Murder: Love and Madness in the Eighteenth Century (FSG, 2004). A cultural study of the famous murder of Martha Ray.

• Martin Levy, Love and Madness: The Murder of Martha Ray, Mistress of the Fourth Earl of Sandwich (Morrow, 2004). Um, ditto.

• John Charmley, Splendid Isolation? Britain and the Balance of Power, 1874-1914 (Hodder & Stoughton, 1999). Somewhat contrarian study of British foreign policy from Disraeli's second ministry to WWI.

• Clive Emsley, Crime and Society in England 1750-1900 (Longman, 1996). Historical survey of criminology, attitudes to rehabilitation, etc.

• Roy Porter, Mind-Forg'd Manacles: A History of Madness in England from the Restoration to the Regency (Harvard, 1987). Well-known survey by the late (and amazingly prolific) intellectual historian.

• John Barrell, Imagining the King's Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide 1793-1796 (Oxford, 2000). The treason trials of the 1790s.

• Richard Godfrey and Mark Hallett, James Gillray: The Art of Caricature (Tate, 2001). The Tate exhibition catalog.

• Susan P. Casteras, The Defining Moment: Victorian Narrative Paintings from the FORBES Magazine Collection (Mint Museum of Art, 1999). Another exhibition catalog.

• John Hayes, Thomas Gainsborough (Tate, 1980). Yet a third exhibition catalog.

• Lynn Voskuil, Acting Naturally: Victorian Theatricality and Authenticity (Virginia, 2004). Complicates notions of Victorian anti-theatricality by examining melodrama, fiction, archival materials, etc. (I'm reviewing it for Choice.)

• Randall Stevenson, The Oxford English Literary History, Volume 12: 1960-2000. The Last of England? (Oxford, 2004). Upheavals in late twentieth-century British literature.

• Bruce King, The Oxford English Literary History, Volume 13: 1948-2000. The Internationalization of English Literature (Oxford, 2004). The emergence of immigrant literatures in English.