Social History
Baking and Bakeries
Price: £4.99
ISBN: 978 0 85263 801 9 / Shire Library SLI 156 / 32 pp
Baking bread has been a daily activity from ancient times when simple flat bread was cooked in the ashes of a fire. As well as considering how the process developed up to the present day, this book places bread in its social context. The superiority of a leavened loaf was recognised by the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans, for whom raised loaves were produced in specialised bakeries. Because famine and high prices threatened the stability of the realm, since Norman times government has tried to regulate bread prices and supply. Baking was also a proud craft with an ancient guild. Technological developments in the nineteenth century led to mechanized preparation and simple beehive and side-flue ovens gave way to the drawplate and eventually to the continuous band oven, At home it is now possible to bake cake in a microwave cooker. Whether progress in production has been matched by improved quality and taste in assessed in the final chapter.
Dr H. G. Muller was born in Germany and in 1946 came to England, where he spent the first twenty years of his working life in the milling and baking industry. He obtained the degrees of Bsc and Msc by part-time study at Birkbeck College, London, ad his PhD (London) as an external student. Subsequently he has taught at the Procter Department of Food Science of the University of Leeds where he is a senior lecturer. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Food Science and Technology and the author of many technical and scientific papers and three books.
Bell Founding
Price: £4.99
ISBN: 978 0 85263 911 5 / Shire Library SLI 212 / 32 pp
Chimneys and Chimney Sweeps
Price: £4.99
ISBN: 978 0 74780 553 3 / Shire Library SLI 415 / 32 pp
Enamel Advertising Signs
Price: £4.99
ISBN: 978 0 74780 510 6 / Shire Library SLI 389 / 40 pp
Of the millions of enamel advertising signs produced between 1850 and 1950, only a few thousand survived and the authors describe and illustrate over 100 samples from their own collection.
Markets and Fairs
Price: £12.99
ISBN: 978 0 74780 668 4 / Shire History SHI / 128 pp
Nailmaking
Price: £5.99
ISBN: 978 0 85263 606 0 / Shire Library SLI 87 / 32 pp
Old Medical and Dental Instruments
Price: £4.99
ISBN: 978 0 74780 257 0 / Shire Library SLI 308 / 32 pp
Rope, Twine and Net Making
Price: £4.99
ISBN: 978 0 85263 918 4 / Shire Library SLI 51 / 32 pp
Spinning and Spinning Wheels
Price: £4.99
ISBN: 978 0 85263 469 1 / Shire Library SLI 43 / 32 pp
The principles of spinning have remained unchanged through the age, but the implements for imposing the twist have evolved into the wheels we recognize today. This album traces the development of the spinning wheel. The author explains the principles of spinning, the development of the spindle, the wool wheel and the flax wheel. The mechanics and variations of the U-flyer are also discussed. The album includes a representative survey of European and North American wheels that were used for the home production of wool or linen yard. The tools for the preparation of wool and flax are illustrated as well as other spinning accessories such as the niddy-noddy and click reel. Not written as a ‘how-to’ book, this album provides insight into the tools of traditional domestic skill from which today’s craft revival has evolved. Since its first edition, this album has been a valuable source of information to craftsmen, collectors and historians. The timeless information will delight and interest any reader.
Eliza Leadbeater is a handspinner who has earned a world-wide reputation for her contribution to the craft. She has researched the development of textile hand tools and cottage industries and is the author of Handspinning, a recognized classic among instruction books. For over a decade she lived in a cottage in Cheshire where she designed and manufactured equipment for handspinning, weaving and dyeing. Products she designed are in use all over the world. In the 1980s she returned to the United States and lives in New Hampshire.
Straw and Straw Craftsmen
Price: £4.99
ISBN: 978 0 74780 103 0 / Shire Library SLI 76 / 32 pp
Straw is a most attractive and versatile by-product of cereal crops and must have been use of since very early times. When well harvested and stored it has an attractive appearance and fragrance and a resilience which makes it invaluable for certain purposes. Many uses are purely decorative but in others the resistance of straw to pressure is put to advantage, as in packaging material of many types or for stuffing horse collars or making archery targets. Straw must have been valued for thatch since man first made huts and, either loose or tied together, it has been used for bedding and matting from time immemorial. This book considers the quality of straw and describes some of the crafts and skills that developed over the centuries. Some of these crafts seem to have died out, at least in part of Western Europe. But others have survived and there are good reasons to hope that some of them will again flourish, perhaps in modified form.
Arthur Staniforth worked for many years with the Advisory Services of the Ministry of Agriculture and is now with Reading Agricultural Consultants, specialising in straw utilization. A farmer’s son, he studied agriculture at Wye College and reading University and at the Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture in Trinidad. He formerly worked for the Sudan Government and lectured in agriculture at Khartoum University. He has worked as a consultant for FAO – the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations – and for the OECD and UNESCO. He has travelled extensively in Europe and North America to study the uses of straw and has published articles and papers on straw utilization in a number of journals. He has had two books published – Cereal Straw in 1980 by Oxford University Press and Straw for Fuel, Feed or Fertiliser? in 1982 by Farming Press of Ipswich.
The Edwardian Home
Price: £5.99
ISBN: 978 0 74780 631 8 / Shire Library SLI 443 / 56 pp
This book looks at Edwardian, including the homes of the wealthy as well as those of the middle and lower classes. It should be of interest to those who live in an Edwardian house, and to many more who share the author's nostalgia for this period.
The Home Front
Price: £4.99
ISBN: 978 0 74780 528 1 / Shire Library SLI 400 / 40 pp
The Victorian and Edwardian Sportsman
Price: £4.99
ISBN: 978 0 74780 666 0 / Shire Library SLI 460 / 40 pp
Victorian Britain made sport 'sporting' - respectable, rule-bound and a nationwide obsession. Ancient sports, such as archery and fencing, were revived. New sports, such as tennis and cycling, were invented. Foreign sports, including polo, judo and lacrosse, were imported.
The Victorian Asylum
Price: £5.99
ISBN: 978 0 74780 669 1 / Shire Library SLI 461 / 56 pp
The Victorian lunatic asylum has a special place in history. Dreaded and reviled by many, these nineteenth-century buildings provide a unique window on how the Victorians housed and treated the mentally ill. Despite initially good intentions, they became warehouses for society’s outcasts at a time when cures were far fewer than hoped for. Isolated, hidden in the countryside and surrounded by high walls, they were eventually distributed throughout Britain, the Empire, the Continent and North America, with 120 or so in England and Wales alone. Now the memory of them is fading, and many of the buildings have gone or are threatened. Most have been closed as hospitals since the 1980s and either been demolished or turned into prestigious private apartments, their original use largely forgotten. Their memory deserves rehabilitation as a fascinating part of Victorian life that survived into modern times. In The Victorian Asylum Sarah Rutherford gives an insight into their history, their often imposing architecture and their later decline and brings to life these haunting buildings, some of which still survive today.
Sarah Rutherford is a Kew-trained horticulturist who obtained an MA in the conservation of historic parks and gardens at York University. She later worked for English Heritage assessing sites across England for the Register of Historic Parks and Gardens, becoming Head of the Register. During this time she researched and completed her doctoral thesis on the landscapes of nineteenth-centuury lunatic asylums and visited many before they were closed and redeveloped. She is now an enthusiastic freelance consultant researching and writing conservation plans for parks and gardens.
The Victorian Chemist and Druggist
Price: £4.99
ISBN: 978 0 85263 583 4 / Shire Library SLI 80 / 32 pp
The Victorian Domestic Servant
Price: £4.99
ISBN: 978 0 74780 368 3 / Shire Library SLI 338 / 32 pp
In 1851 there were over one million servants in Britain. This work covers a range of domestic service in the nineteenth century, describing the work and conditions of servants and giving an insight into the strict social hierarchy, which was strong 'below stairs' as above.
The Victorian Hospital
Price: £5.99
ISBN: 978 0 74780 696 7 / Shire Library SLI 356 / 48 pp
Nowadays most seriously ill people would want to go to hospital, where they have a reasonable chance of recovery. But the experience of a sick person in the 1830s was completely different. There were few hospitals and the treatment available was hardly an improvement on being nursed at home. During the Victorian period there was a massive expansion in the number of hospitals in Britain and they were increasingly the focus of health care and medical education. Yet despite the growing role of hospitals, there were wide variations in the quality of medical services available. They ranged from celebrated specialist hospitals served by famous surgeons to appalling workhouse infirmaries where the patients were looked after by untrained pauper nurses. This book describes the different types of hospitals and the changes that took place in the Victorian era. During this period there were considerable advances in surgery and nursing so that hospitals became more like the kind of establishment we are familiar with today.
Lavinia Mitton is a lecturer in social policy at the University of Kent. She is a graduate of the University of Oxford, where she studied at Somerville College. She obtained an MSc at Wolfson College, Oxford, and specialised in the social history of medicine. She has worked as a researcher at the University of Cambridge, where she also tutored students in economic history. She authored this book while writing a doctoral thesis on the history of social policy at the London School of Economics.
The Victorian Policeman
Price: £4.99
ISBN: 978 0 74780 591 5 / Shire Library SLI 428 / 40 pp
The Victorian Public House
Price: £4.99
ISBN: 978 0 74780 573 1 / Shire Library SLI 423 / 40 pp
The Victorian public house evolved out of the traditional tavern and the humble beerhouse in response to the novel challenge of the garish but soulless gin palace. Incorporating such innovations as plate-glass windows, gas lighting, the hydraulic beer-engine and the island bar, the reinvented pub became a central feature of working-class life.
The Victorian Schoolroom
Price: £4.99
ISBN: 978 0 74780 243 3 / Shire Library SLI 302 / 32 pp
The Victorian Undertaker
Price: £4.99
ISBN: 978 0 74780 331 7 / Shire Library SLI 330 / 32 pp
The Victorians were, were relatively at ease with death and there is much in this book to interest social historians, those interested in historical costume and transport enthusiasts, as there is a section on the development of the horse-drawn hearse.
The Victorian Workhouse
Price: £4.99
ISBN: 978 0 74780 355 3 / Shire Library SLI 334 / 32 pp
Whether it was 'the batille', 'the spike', 'the work'us' or simply 'the house', the Victorian workhouse was the cause of dread and shame for thousands of men, women and children. This book looks at the principles that lay beind the New Poor Law of 1834, at the design and construction of workhouses, and at the lives of those who entered them.
Victorian and Edwardian Prisons
Price: £4.99
ISBN: 978 0 74780 641 7 / Shire Library SLI 450 / 40 pp
Although they have existed in Britain for over a thousand years, it was not until the nineteenth century that prisons became the cornerstone of the penal system. This book looks at the development of prison buildings, life and labour of prisoners, and the position of prison officers.