William H. Scheuerle is Professor Emeritus and Dean Emeritus, University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida. He received his B.A. from Muskingum College (Ohio), his M.A. from the University of Pennsylvania, and his Ph.D. in Victorian Literature from Syracuse University. He has served as president and board member of the Research Society of Victorian Periodicals and for eight years edited its international journal Victorian Periodicals Review. He also served as president and board member of the Nineteenth Century Studies Association and was honored by the Association by being awarded the 2007 Presidential Award for “sustained service to the association and significant contributions to nineteenth-century studies."
2012 0-7734-4516-1 The work argues that the ascendency of croquet as a popular sport in England during the middle to late nineteenth century was a direct result of class. He traces the history of the sport and finds that it was one of if not the first sport that men and women could enjoy together. The game initially had an elite social status attached to it: it was first seen as a game suitable for the British gentry, especially for those families whose estates had extensive lawns, or for families wealthy enough to join croquet clubs. It attracted many people because it had a certain ‘snob’ appeal and formed as an upper class leisure time activity, and developed with the middle class due to their rising number at that time.
2010 0-7734-1436-3 Henry Kingsley (1830-1876), the younger brother of famed novelist Charles Kingsley, showed signs of brilliance in his early works, but the majority of the twenty novels he published were either panned or simply ignored. Following a brief period of marginal fame in the early 1860s, the remainder of Kingsley's life was marked by literary failure and poverty.