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General Collected editions kick off this year's review. The Victorian Studies Reader (Routledge, pbk £22.99), R. McWilliam and K. Boyd (eds), contains some of the groundbreaking essays that made the cultural history of the nineteenth century (authors featured include Mary Poovey, Simon Gunn, Patrick Joyce, Anna Clark and Gertrude Himmelfarb) and is essential for scholars and students. At the other end of the career spectrum, R. Crone, (ed.), New perspectives in British cultural history (Cambridge Scholars, pbk £34.99) is a collection of papers from early career scholars which aims to set a new agenda for cultural history. This year sees a profusion of specialised collected editions. F. O'Gorman (ed.), Victorian literature and finance (OUP: £56 hbk) includes essays on gender, race, risk and profit. A. Olechnowicz (ed.), The monarchy and the British nation, 1780 to the present (CUP, pbk £19.99) makes an important contribution to a strangely neglected area of research given the symbolic significance of the monarchy for much of the modern British period. W. Sweet and R. Feist (eds) Religion and the challenges of science (Ashgate, £55) seeks to rethink the relationship between religion and science and begins with chapters on the perceived Victorian crisis in faith. Scholarly interest in the Victorians and science continues to be strong. D. Morse and M. Danahy (eds), Victorian animal dreams: representations of animals in Victorian literature and culture (Ashgate, £55) locates the twenty-first century's concern with animal rights in the Victorian's interest in animal status and welfare. With essays on subjects as far ranging as beetlemania, dying like a dog, horses and sexuality, this collection represents an excellent cross-section of the current trends in animal studies. A. Stiles (ed.), Neurology and literature, 1860-1920 (Palgrave, £48) considers the overlap between science and culture through the fiction of medical men such as Weir Mitchell and Wendell Holmes in addition to examining the presence of nervous disease in mainstream fiction. J. Buzard, J. Childers and E. Gillooly (eds), Victorian prism: refractions of the Crystal Palace (Virginia U.P., £38.50) considers the Palace in the geographical and imaginative space of mid-nineteenth century culture and commerce. D. Bell (ed.), Victorian visions of global order: empire and international relations in nineteenth-century political thought (CUP: £50 hbk) includes essays on free trade, international law, liberalism, humanitarianism and the global state. Bell's own book, The idea of a greater Britain: empire and the future world order, 1860-1900 (Princeton U.P., £34.95), examines how an Anglo-Saxon community was conceptualised beyond the United Kingdom's borders. Other monographs this year include R. Ireland's 'A want of good order and discipline': rules, discretion and the Victorian prison (Wales U.P., £48), a book that offers a detailed insight into Carmarthen gaol in the mid-Victorian period. Continuing the interest in Afterlives, J. Parker's 'England's darling': the Victorian cult of Alfred the Great (Manchester U.P., £55) examines the reinvention of Alfred to serve nineteenth-century political and cultural needs. S. Morgan, A Victorian woman's place: public culture in the nineteenth century (Tauris, £57.50) argues that women played a pivotal role in the formation of public policy. C. Nelson, Family ties in Victorian England (Praeger, £22.95) considers the importance of family in the imaginative and lived experience of the Victorians. H. S. Jones, Intellect and character in Victorian England: Mark Politics T. Schnieder, 'J. S. Mill and Fitzjames Stephen on the American Civil War' (Hist. Pol. Thought, 28), considers the early journalistic writing of these thinkers to argue that many of their ideas were formed around 1860, more than a decade before Stephen's Liberty, Equality, Fraternity was published. K. Morgan, 'British Guild socialists and the exemplar of the Panama Canal' (ibid.) considers the implications of the construction of the Panama Canal by the US Military in 1900-1914 for socialist thought. By paying close attention to S. G. Hobson, he argues that British Guild Socialists continued to be attracted to the Fabian idea of large-scale enterprise, organisational hierarchy and the importance of the expert, which would later explain their attachment to Soviet Russia and labour corps in inter-war Britain. Moving to Brazilian comparison, J. Smith, 'Limits of diplomatic influence: Brazil versus Britain and the United States, 1886-1894' (History, 92), suggests that Britain and America's failure to secure a commercial treaty with Brazil and the Brazilian Naval Revolt not only demonstrates the restrictions on British influence, but also Brazil's success in negotiating a national identity free from external constraints. D. Cannadine, 'The History of Parliament: Past, Present and Future?', considers the 'History of Parliament' directory in relation to other Victorian biographical and geographical prosopographies (Parl. Hist., 26). D. Grube, 'Religion, power and parliament: Rothschild and Bradlaugh revisited', traces the changing relationship between Protestantism and 'Britishness', by focusing on debates surrounding Rothschild and Bradlaugh's attempts to claim their parliamentary seats (History, 92). R. Saunders, 'The politics of reform and the making of the Second Reform Act, 1848-1867', examines how diverging understandings of reform in the 1850s impeded the passing of the Second Reform Act until 1867 (Hist. J., 50). Returning to a familiar subject, A. Warren, 'Lord Salisbury and Ireland, 1859-87: Principles, Ambitions and Strategies', asks for a reinterpretation of Lord Salisbury's involvement in Irish politics. E. Tenbus, 'We fight for the cause of God: English Catholics, the education of the poor and the transformation of Catholic identity in Victorian Britain' (JBS, 46), suggests that the experience of being a minority group in the nineteenth century gave Catholics the confidence to navigate the 'minefield' of politics so that they began the twentieth century with political confidence. A. Hattersley, 'Paternalism and education on Landed Estates in Rural Northumberland, 1850-1900', examines the continuation of paternalistic ideals of the landed gentry with the introduction of state intervention, suggesting that far from diminishing their role, it expanded with the need to obtain government grants (Northern Hist., 44). S. Morgan, 'The reward of public service: nineteenth-century testimonials in context', considers the significance of testimonials in civic cultures. In particular, he reinterprets its role in factory culture to challenge previous paternalistic ideas (Hist. Res., 80). P. J. Shinner, 'Pocket borough to county borough: power relations, elites and politics in nineteenth-century Grimsby', argues that the power dynamic in Grimsby does not necessarily highlight a shift from the landed gentry to the emerging middle classes (UH, 34). A. Pionke, 'I do swear: oath-taking among the elite public in Victorian England' (VS, 49), considers the shifting relationship between the sacred, status and the oath as such practices increasingly succumbed to political and literary parody. The political relationship between Britain and France was a prominent theme this year. By investigating the friendship between the third Earl of Malmesbury and Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, G. Hicks, 'An overlooked entente: Lord Malmesbury, Anglo-French relationship and the Conservatives' recognition of the Second Empire, 1852', offers new insights into Conservative foreign policy and Anglo-French relations during the 1852 Derby government (History, 92). R. Whatmore, 'Etienne Dumont, the British Constitution, and the French Revolution', considers how Etienne Dumont drew on the early work of the radical Jeremy Bentham, to consider the impact this had on Dumont's later thinking and the French political system at large (Hist. J., 50). G. Cubbitt, 'The political uses of