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The Hughenden Collection of Disraeli Papers at the Bodleian Library in Oxford comprises over 50,000 items relating to the life and work of Benjamin Disraeli and his family. This article tracks hair through the Hughenden Collection in order to explore the collecting habits of Mary Anne Disraeli. It argues that reading Mary Anne Disraeli's story through hair – both hair as object, held in an archive and hair as represented in archival text – reveals aspects of that story occluded by reading only those archival texts with self-evident documentary value. It thus makes the case for a holistic reading of the Disraeli archive, and Victorian collections of personal papers more generally, by taking Mary Anne Disraeli as its central case study. In so doing it also illuminates her story, and points to the necessity of reading the stories of forgotten women through archival silences and absences. Section I reviews recent scholarship on hair in nineteenth-century Britain in order to contextualize Mary Anne Disraeli's case. Section II anatomizes the Hughenden hair collection in order to illuminate Mary Anne's history, her impulses as a collector, and the extent to which her activities complicate scholarly narratives about the sentimental commodification of Victorian hair. Section III gestures towards recent work on the archive and material culture to tease out the consequences of her example for our reading of the archive and our understanding of the texture of Victorian ‘thing culture’ more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In Victorian Britain rags were not only associated with the inadequate clothing of the poor, they were also viewed as a valuable commodity, widely collected for recycling into paper. This essay examines rags as simultaneously despised and precious objects, tracing the connections between Victorian accounts of poverty, the industrial recycling of rags into paper, and the redemption narratives created by Charles Dickens about rescued children. A supporter of Ragged Schools and champion of rags recycling, Dickens drew on the idea of the transformation of dirty rags into clean paper in his representations of ragged children. To him, the recycling of rags indicated the civilizing forces of modernity, and reading Dickens's representations of ragged children in this context reveals how cloth recycling became a paradigm for society's duties towards destitute children. This essay explains Dickens's juxtaposition of ragged children with references to rag-dealing in his novels; by this means he suggested that street children, like their ragged clothing, were capable of being purified and transformed into social usefulness. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The COVID-19 pandemic is revealing the many ways in which infectious disease control is a spatialized enterprise. Stay-at-home orders, travel bans and travel corridors, restrictions on visiting patients in hospitals, and many more regulations, speak to the power of space and place in conditioning the transmission of infectious diseases and the human experiences of them. Such spatializations have an extremely long history but were codified and formalized in the later nineteenth century as knowledge of bacteria, incubation periods, and asymptomatic carriers became more sophisticated. Two developments reflected this in Great Britain. First, the new use of the term 'contact' as a noun and the naming of 'contacts' as a specific population group. Second, the emergence of the 'reception house', a building for people living in overcrowded dwellings who had been exposed to people with infectious diseases but who were not yet showing signs of disease. Drawing on recent scholarship at the boundary of medical history, architectural history and the histories of biopolitics, this paper uses public health reports, architectural plans, and newspapers to reveal the multiple ambiguities of these spaces, where the uncertainties of bacteriological science, the demands of the capitalist labour system, and the rationales of liberal governance coalesced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines a series of investigations into the activities of women engaged in the provision of paid childcare and collectively labelled with the term 'baby-farmer'. This paper looks at the practice of writers representing themselves as 'baby-farming detectives'. Along with exploring the use of the detective investigation as a stylistic device, it will contend that the strictures it imposed informed the relationship these writers have with paid child-carers. The article also explores how the notion of 'detectives' and 'suspects' spoke of an assumed right to subject working-class women to inspection. It concludes that these detective fantasies were ultimately unsuccessful as they were unable to solve either the cases they encountered, or the symbolic problem of baby-farming, leaving these narratives curiously unresolved and their writers impotent. This article not only seeks to explain how and why the link between pecuniary childcare and infant murder was forged and maintained but asserts that this narrative technique has wider implications for scholars of nineteenth-century culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1832 and 1834, Henry Mayhew and Gilbert Abbot à Beckett produced a weekly twopenny paper called The Thief. As its title suggested, this publication consisted of articles, stories and illustrations extracted, condensed and brazenly stolen from other periodicals, magazines, newspapers and books. Modelled on the format of Le Voleur, an early paper of Émile de Girardin, the great innovator of French popular journalism, scholars of Mayhew have generally treated The Thief as inconsequential hack work, if they even mention it at all. This essay, the first analysis of the paper itself, argues that The Thief is less ‘throwaway’ than it first appears. In satirical fashion, the paper used the methods of the radical press to critique the ‘liberal values’ of useful knowledge and free trade. Mayhew's involvement with The Thief connected him with a vibrant radical underground print culture. Moreover, in its suspicion of middle-class liberalism and of the rhetoric of free trade,The Thief set the thematic tone for much of Mayhew's later work. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the phenomenon of scissors-and-paste journalism in the Victorian periodical press and specifically the movement of texts from the United States into Britain. In the nineteenth-century press, exchange editors and subeditors worked for periodical publishers by reading through the daily mass of print and selecting appropriate material to fill blank space in their own periodical. While some newspapers and magazines worked within an exchange network of agreed syndication, other periodicals reprinted works without the permission of authors or publishers. I argue that this technique is actually a more complex phenomenon than the typical ‘cut-and-paste’ method, familiar in existing scholarship, whereby editors lifted whole articles verbatim. I examine examples of scissors-and-paste journalism in theLadies’ Treasury(1857–1895), where, under Eliza Warren Francis’s direction, the magazine reproduced didactic narratives and prescriptive journalism from a wide range of American periodicals. I show that an editor, or likely, Eliza Warren Francis, modified texts in such a way as to anglicize the text, so that it reads within a British vernacular. Despite these language changes, the moralizing message remains constant in both articles. For the editor of theLadies’ Treasury, ‘cut-and-paste’ was actually a three-step process of cut, revise, and then paste the results without full acknowledgement or permission. To put the practice plainly: steal it, change it, and print it. Incorporating women’s periodicals and prescriptive literature into examinations of the transatlantic circulation of ideas and information, this research uncovers an important cultural pattern through the spread of this particular type of journalism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The late-nineteenth century saw private book collecting gain a renewed respectability and cultural cachet as a leisure pursuit for the upper- and middle classes. This paper examines representations of collectors in the literature belonging to a new genre of writing which emerged for the ‘book-hunter’: a late-Victorian variant of the book-collecting passion which could encompass aesthetes and antiquarians as well as aspiring amateurs of more moderate means. It will show how, during the 1880s and 1890s, this particular type of collecting practice was used rhetorically in a range of printed material to venerate ‘gentlemanly’ book-buying, in contrast to feminine forms of engagement with old books in particular. In spite of women's comparative lack of advantage in the market for antiquarian editions, however, I argue that such a critique would not have been articulated so forcefully had women not been taking a determined interest in rare books. Evidence from central London booksellers during this period suggests that a variety of women were making antiquarian collections of their own. Male bibliophiles who denigrated female book-buyers in the periodical press were attempting to partially invent a homosocial tradition of collecting in order to distance their own pursuit from what they saw as the more emasculating elements of modern consumerism. This was a response not just to developments in contemporary print culture, but also to the growing appreciation of second-hand goods of all kinds among affluent female consumers with aesthetic and literary tastes shaped independently of male judgments. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]