Punch cartoonist, John Bernard Partridge (1861-1945), imagines Wilde in soldier’s uniform, poking fun at Wilde’s national identity, the troubled production history of his French play Salome (1891), and English censorship.]]> John Bernard Partridge]]> Periodicals]]> The Scottish Chiefs, highlights the family’s fascination with military heroism.]]> Robert Ker Porter]]> Books]]> Evelina (1778), only after it became successful, and even then he approached it ‘with fear & trembling,’ wondering whether 'she c[oul]d write a book worth reading'.]]> Charles Burney]]> Books]]> A House of Pomegranates (1891) is Wilde’s second published collection of short stories, following The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888). Wilde dedicated A House of Pomegranates to his wife Constance (1859-1898), a gesture interpreted by some as an implicit apology for his shortcomings as a husband and father to his two sons. Wilde purportedly said that this work was ‘intended neither for the British child nor the British public’, referring perhaps to the dark nature of the tales and their political allegories.]]> Oscar Wilde]]> Books]]> Matthew Baillie]]> Books]]> A Series of Plays appeared in 1798, it caused a stir. Who was the author of this striking work? Some thought it must be the leading writer of the day, Walter Scott. The author was revealed in the third edition as Joanna Baillie (1762-1851), a niece of John and William Hunter. While her uncles and brother Matthew explored human anatomy, Joanna explored the varieties of human passions.]]> Joanna Baillie]]> Books]]> Series of Plays, suggests their closeness and perhaps points to the influence of his medical studies on her own analyses of human nature.]]> Joanna Baillie]]> Books]]> A Study in Scarlet marks the first appearance of this legendary detective. Doyle made several unsuccessful attempts to publish this work before it finally appeared in Beeton’s Christmas Annual in 1887. The following year it was published in book form, featuring six illustrations by his father.]]> Arthur Conan Doyle]]> Books]]> A Treatise on the Blood.]]> John Hunter]]> Books]]> A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) is a founding text of modern feminism. In the decade leading up to this monumental work, Mary helped establish a school for girls and wrote the conduct book Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), and the novel Mary: A Fiction (1788). In all of these works, she argued that women deserved rational educations and greater individual rights in order to be better wives and mothers. But her opportunity to put this philosophy into action was short lived. She died just days after giving birth to her second daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin.]]> Mary Wollstonecraft]]> Books]]> Prelude (1918), T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), and Virginia’s own Mrs Dalloway (1925), and To the Lighthouse (1927). Virginia’s final and posthumously published novel, Between the Acts, features a jacket cover designed by her sister Vanessa Bell.]]> Virginia Woolf]]> Books]]> The Newcomes. Anne lived most of her adult life with her sister Harriet and Leslie Stephen, Harriet’s husband and literary journalist. Anne and Stephen continued to live together after Harriet’s early death in 1875.]]> [Anne Thackeray Ritchie]]]> Books]]> Culture and Anarchy, written in response to the Reform Bill of 1867, presents his view of an idealised English society: a society defined not by social class but by its access to ‘culture’, ‘the best which has been thought and said in the world’. Arnold believed such knowledge would turn ‘a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits’.]]> Matthew Arnold]]> Books]]> Dictionary of National Biography. He contributed 283 entries, among them the lives of his father, Sir James Stephen (1789-1859), and his father-in-law, William Makepeace Thackeray.]]> Edited by Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee]]> Books]]> Dio e l’Uomo [God and Man], first published in 1833. His four children – Maria, Dante, William, and Christina – all carried on their familial legacy, becoming celebrated writers, poets, and painters.]]> Gabriele Rossetti]]> Books]]> Edward Immyns Abbot]]> Painting]]> Encyclopaedia Britannica and the Dictionary of National Biography. In his later years, Richard turned to writing the lives of eminent British statesmen, including the National Colonisation Society founder, Edward Gibbon Wakefield. This copy of Garnett’s biography was previously owned by the Dunedin collector Dr Thomas Hocken.]]> Richard Garnett]]> Books]]> George Richmond]]> Portraits]]> Political Justice (1793) argues for the inevitable progression of humanity towards governance through reason, and this perspective strongly influenced the political views of his future son-in-law, the poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley.]]> William Godwin]]> Books ]]> Percy Bysshe Shelley. Edited by Mrs Shelley]]> Books]]> Evelina (1778), was written in secret. She told only her brother and sister about her plans to publish her own work. She disguised her handwriting to prevent printers from associating the work with the Burney family.]]> [Frances Burney]]]> Books]]> Thomas Henry Huxley]]> Books]]> Patrick Branwell Bronte]]> Ephemera]]> Westward Ho! and The Water-Babies. In the 1850s, Henry spent four years in Australia, working in the goldfields, but never made his fortune. The experience informed several of his novels, including the once-popular Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn (1859). Here is an early 20th-century adaptation of the novel for young Australasian readers.]]> Henry Kingsley]]> Books]]> Journal that inspired her brother William's famous poem 'Daffodils'.]]> Edited by William Knight]]> Books]]>