In The Victorian Homefront, Louise L. Stevenson offers a concise and fascinating portrait of the intellectual lives of ordinary Americans from the Civil War through Reconstruction. She begins where any Victorian would: in the parlor, with an analysis of the material trappings of middle-class self-improvement. From parlor tables and reading chairs, albums and stereoscopes, and houseplants and fancywork, she moves to the books and reading activities that the parlor hosted and encouraged, and then outward to public institutions of learning, both informal and formal.
Stevenson constructs a convincing framework for understanding the intellectual aspirations and activities of middle-class women, children, former slaves, African-American college students, and others in the context of the goals of the nineteenth-century literary and intellectual elite.
"Louise L. Stevenson persuasively argues that Victorian culture was shaped as much by those who lived in the Civil War and Reconstruction period—the receivers of ideas—as by the shapers.... [She] further argues that for Victorians it is not illuminating to separate the private from the public lives....The Victorian Homefront is a pioneering [book] that combines the best of intellectual history and material culture."—The Historian