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This article uses a new method to gauge eighteenth-century crime. It counts the crimes committed against metropolitan London's justices noted in newspapers and in the Old Bailey Sessions Papers, and finds crime more prevalent than current historiography acknowledges. The article contests current claims that the manner in which newspapers noted crime constructed their readers' perception of crime, making their readers believe crime was much more horrific, and the judicial system much more just, than readers would otherwise have thought they were. The article also argues that some crimes were attacks on the powerful because they were powerful. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, with the founding of the German nation-state, the removal of various restrictions on the distribution of newspapers, a decrease in the price of paper and an improvement in printing techniques, lighting and means of communication opened the way in Germany for the mass distribution of reading material, in general, and newspapers in particular. In those years a closely-knit network of distribution of newspapers and journals developed which had a decisive role in popularising a reading culture in the period of transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries. Various aspects of this system of distribution are considered through examination of three points of distribution of newspapers and journals; bookshops in railway stations, kiosks and the sale of newspapers on the streets. Methods of distributing newspapers and the position of these points of distribution in the social space are considered to decipher the social and cultural significance of these points of distribution as 'reading sites': that is, as places where readers and newspapers came together, representing a variety of social, economic and cultural interests. Thus the aim of this paper is not only to examine the points of distribution as 'reading sites' but to reveal these places as 'sights of reading'; that is, as places that helped people orient themselves in the modern space. Orientation in the modern urban space depended more and more on the eyes and this rapid development of the 'viewing' culture led to an increase in semiotic sensibility and to a need for means of learning and sources of information to cultivate this sensibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides information on the selection and access of modern public records in Great Britain. A definition of public records as defined in the Public Records Acts of 1958 is given. It enumerates the elements of authority and responsibility from which the system and procedures laid down in the 1954 Report of the Grigg Committee and the Public Records Acts of 1958 and 1967 for dealing with selection and access were based on. It also presents information on the provisos to ensure that an administrative criterion at First Review would be synonymous with a historical criterion.

Compared with what had occurred in the first half of the century, the period from 1850 to 1870 encouraged mid-century Victorians to conclude that they were living in a more orderly society, a flawed perception that some historians have tended to endorse rather uncritically. In fact, disorderly events were probably more common in that period than in the 1840s, but they were also generally localized and less intense. This article, based on close scrutiny of the Home Office Disturbance Papers and using a wide range of examples, reveals the ubiquity of disorder and shows that the authorities, both local and national, were ready to deploy overwhelming military force to prevent the formation of potentially disorderly crowds, or to confront and disperse them once assembled. To date, the various explanations historians have offered for greater working-class orderliness are incomplete since they do not take into account the idea of deterrence. To contain disorder the authorities turned to the military, as they had always done before, but by exploiting the technologies of the industrial age – the railway and the telegraph – they were able to deploy deterrent force more effectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses how advertisements placed in British Victorian periodicals specializing in promoting potential matrimonial prospects shed light on Great Britain's social history of its lower middle class. The popular culture street literature typically featured upwards of 500 advertisements by tradesmen and domestics searching for like-minded companions. The British matrimonial press was created during the mid-nineteenth century when newspapers ceased the practice of accepting personal advertisements.

The expansion of settlement in the English colonies in America after 1607 led to a demand for labour which was met by white indentured servitude before the growth of black chattel slavery. However, from its inception the trade in indentured servants was characterized by the abuse of servants by unscrupulous recruiters and of merchants by criminals who made false accusations against them. Two different policy solutions were introduced to address this abuse and both punitive and preventive measures were seen as appropriate methods of regulation. However, making a successful social policy was difficult despite good intention. There was no consensus about an economic activity which raised complicated economic, social and political issues and conflicts of interest; the measures were not introduced as a co-ordinated policy and were in the hands of different agencies; punitive proposals to increase the penalties for child stealing put falsely accused merchants at risk; and the extension of preventive servant registration in private hands for profit became politically unacceptable if it was to be compulsory. As a consequence, the 1671 bill 'to prevent stealing and transporting children, and other persons', despite being passed by both Houses of Parliament, was never enacted and policy to make the offence of stealing a person as serious an offence as stealing a horse was not fulfilled for a further 143 years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper queries the mounting tide of discontent with social analysis embodied in British history's recent ‘linguistic turn’. Using the trajectory of Gareth Stedman Jones's work as a basis for discussion, the authors compare the treatment of politics within both linguistic and social historical frameworks. They argue that the privileging of discourse or language in the work of Stedman Jones and others paradoxically undermines their revisionist aim to restore ‘the political’ from the socio-economic reductionisms of earlier historical enquiry. It will be suggested that the revisionists' substitution of language for social position as the ‘prefigurativeƁ and ‘nonreferential’ source of subjective identity and political affiliation effectively precludes the possibility of politics understood as a contingent and negotiated process. To the contrary, it is precisely the referential and metaphorical character of language properly understood which both enables and constrains that human agency on which political mobilization depends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper evaluates the historiography of education science and industry during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, arguing that it has focused on narrowly-defined questions of industrial demand and educational supply. The paper then points to the need to introduce a range of new perspectives and link the issue to other facets of social history. These include such areas as the technical and social relationships between academic science and industrial technology, the social as opposed to cognitive functions of education, the concrete mechanisms which stimulated industrial recruitment of scientific and technical staff and the impact of this on deskilling on the shop-floor. The article argues that many dimensions of the issue can best be understood in terms of the articulation of the public and private domains and the imperatives of control within industry, broadly understood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a response to Richard Rodger's comment on a paper regarding employers' attitudes in Great Britain during the mid-Victorian period. Rodger underestimates the impact of the prevailing entrepreneurial ideology and incorrectly minimizes the consequent social tensions. Diverse economic superstructures and regional disparities when combined with the employer's individual social and political bias made a cohesive employing class impossible. The statistical evidence presented by Rodger fails to take into account the disproportionate influence of factory owners and capitalists on society.

The article focuses on public records policy in Great Britain, specifically the privileged access arrangement. It discusses the lead role played by the press in battling against the shroud of government secrecy. It outlines the major developments which have taken place in the debate over public records policy. It explains the grounds for closing material for more than 30 years and for retaining material. It discusses the effect of closed files and the destruction of official records on research.

The article discusses the development of provincial urban culture in Great Britain. The paper deals with the influence of leisure and luxury on the development of provincial urban culture between the late seventeenth and mid-eighteenth centuries. Moreover, it examines the four areas of urban life. These include leisure facilities, economy, public amenities and architecture. The examination implies that a transformation was occurring in the nature of provincial urban culture, also known as urban renaissance.

The common law offence of conspiracy to corrupt public morals has a long though controversial history in English law. It was a charge mainly employed against obscenity, procuring prostitution, keeping a disorderly house, public indecency and public mischief. These could be interpreted by the courts as facets of a single offence known as conspiracy to corrupt public morals. The charge was used intermittently in the twentieth century, mainly against the arrangement of prostitution and ‘disorderly houses’ used by homosexual men. It was applied again in 1960 in theLadies Directorycase and was subsequently used against gay men who advertised for friends and partners in the underground magazineInternational Times(IT). The prosecution ofITwas based on the legal principle that certain forms of ‘outrageously immoral’ conduct were in themselves corrupting of public morals, whether such conduct was legal or not. This principle placed male homosexuality in the legal category of ‘unlawful’ or ‘wrongful’ acts. In that sense, even after the decriminalization of homosexuality between men in 1967, it still had an uncertain legal status. Conspiracy to corrupt public morals cast a shadow over early attempts to create a gay civil society that was partly based on magazines and personal advertising. For conservative critics of the 1967 Act, conspiracy charges had the useful effect of curtailing public expressions of homosexuality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of the Victorian 'beard movement' of the 1850s have demonstrated the close connections between facial hair and shifting ideas of, and concerns about, masculinity, gender, sexuality and modernity. The 'beard movement' is generally seen as the return of facial hair after 150 years of beardlessness. The turn of the nineteenth century, however, witnessed a new and previously overlooked fashion for side-whiskers among young British men, one that initially caused controversy and ridicule, but which gradually became acceptable as a male accoutrement, and spurred a market for cosmetic products. What might be termed the 'whiskers movement' of the early 1800s offers a new and earlier perspective on facial hair as a form of embodied masculinity, and its place in contemporary debates about manliness, male fashion and appearance, sexuality and effeminacy, and political and revolutionary affiliations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the vagrant removals in Middlesex County, England during the late 18th century, including the role that the vagrant contractor Henry Adams' sending of vagrants to correctional institutions known as houses of corrections. An overview of the social conditions of poor people in Middlesex County, including in regard to poor laws, poor relief and their placement in workhouses, is provided.

Presents information on a campaign launched by trade unions during the 1930s in Britain, against the establishment of operations by multinationals. How multinationals were perceived; Details on how organization is perceived in Britain; Reference to the support rendered to the campaign launched by the trade unions.

The author comments on the paper of Adrian Randall about labour, capital and discourse in relation to the 1806 parliamentary enquiry into the woollen industry in Great Britain. He states that Randall in correct to raise the question of new languages or old. He believes that discourse is a relatively new concept for historians, and its needs refining. He stresses that historians need to evaluate new forms of analysis to see if they can explain historical processes more convincingly. He thinks that the theory of discourse does this when applied to the 1806 parliamentary enquiry into the woollen industry.

New conventions in economic and social history have played down the extent of transformation in the classic period of Britain's Industrial Revolution. The history of nineteenth-century political economy has undergone a similar move to stress the pessimism of the classical economists and the politicians and economic policy-makers who relied on their judgements. Boyd Hilton's remarkable The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought 1785-1865 (Oxford, 1988) takes up the pessimism not of the theorists, but of another level of political economy: the normative economics espoused by politicians, policy-makers and churchmen of mainly evangelical religious values. He discusses the economic attitudes of a section of the English middle and upper classes which was at the centre of political power for the first half of the nineteenth century. Politicians feared the consequences of industrialization, and preferred a return to the stability of agrarian society. Hilton traces the impact of evangelical religious beliefs in providence, punishment and redemption on key economic policies in the early nineteenth century': free trade, monetary policy, the Poor Laws and limited liability. A key exponent of this normative Christian economics was Thomas Chalmers, and Hilton invests him with great political and social significance. Hilton's book, while a powerful evocation of the thinking of the established political and economic elite, does, however, neglect other important counter-tendencies in political economy and middle-class opinion. One of these was the impact of the central political economists themselves; the other was that of the opinion of the provincial and industrial middle classes. The paper explores the significance of these alternative views which celebrated and reacted to economic growth, science and technological progress. Hilton believes the evangelical economics he uncovers to be central to national political power, and therefore to be the dominant economic ideology of the period. But his book is set within the framework of high political history, and cannot explain the relationship between political power and the pattern of social and intellectual change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article looks at the aspect of terror, which is the prosecutions for sedition, during the 1790s in Great Britain. The political trials during the decade involved prosecutions due to publication of seditious libels or utterances of seditious words. Addresses issued by radical clubs were also considered seditious libels such as the "Address of the Society for Political Information in Derby, by the County Association Movement. The blunt criticisms by James Raith at the Durham Quarter Sessions were directed against the family of the King and Queen of France. The Libel Act of 1792 was later introduced to facilitate the prosecutions for sedition. The Seditious Meetings Act and the Treasonable Practices Act extended the powers of magistrates to address such cases.

At the heart of this article stand three questions that we believe are crucial to an understanding of the character of the poor law and its role in the lives of the poor who had to navigate its rules. First, what was actually 'new' about the central administrative structures and processes required to make the New Poor Law function? Second, how did those processes change over time and, in particular, how far did the central authority itself engage with the poor directly? Third, did the processes and structures of the central authority afford a space in which the poor could learn to better navigate the New Poor Law and exercise their own agency? Using a sample of letters written directly to 'the Centre' by paupers in the English midlands, and the subsequent epistolary responses of the central authorities, we trace a situation in which the Centre was duty bound to respond to poor letter writers much as they did to everyone else. Rights to contest local welfare regimes remained strong in the post-1834 period, and the central authorities, through their responses, afforded a space of agency that came to be well known. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses census data for England and Wales covering the period 1851-1911 to provide new insights into patterns of migration to London. It examines several related themes including the role migration played in London's growth during this period, age and gender differentials and distance travelled. Calculating net migration rates, the article demonstrates that after age 30, of those born outside of London, more left the Capital than came, yet over time an increasing proportion of the migrant population was retained. The proportion of family migrants fluctuated over the period, yet compared to others tended to travel shorter distances, a feature which increased over time with suburbanization. Turning to the geographical origins of migrants, London drew migrants from across the entirety of England and Wales. However, the data suggest that the migrant sex ratio became more homogeneous over time, with distinct pockets of male dominated migration that were visible in 1851 disappearing by 1911. Lastly, the article investigates migration from the perspective of place of departure rather than destination, as is traditionally the case. This reveals a distinct regional geography, suggesting that the present-day north-south divide was already evident in 1851, and became increasingly distinct over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article demonstrates the utility of a new source, prison registers, for the history of literacy and education in nineteenth-century England. It focuses on two sets of prison registers from the two county gaols in Suffolk, located at Ipswich and Bury St Edmunds, which contain personal information on 16,690 individuals over the period 1840 to 1878. First, the article examines the context in which personal information about prisoners was recorded and tests the data against benchmarks from other sources to prove its reliability. Second, the article employs two methods, statistical analysis and digital mapping, to study in depth the rich data on prisoners' literacy and schooling. Finally, the article shows how the results of this analysis significantly revise our understanding of the prevalence of schooling among the labouring poor, the use of different types of schools, the role of the partially literate in the drive towards mass literacy, and the importance of life-long learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses the politics of time to explore the making of the industrial middle class. It argues that anxieties about the decline of industry and the future of liberalism at the end of the nineteenth century fuelled a small explosion in life writing, prosopography and popular history. Accounts combined anecdotes about everyday life and reminiscences of the great civic age in a network of texts that attempted to recreate the associational life of the industrial middle class and present it as the foundation of national progress. However, slips in time between retrospection, nostalgia, memory and history reveal the complexity of late-Victorian anti-industrialism and the tensions in liberalism between a political culture that was inclusive and open and a social world that was not. The article combines a deep reading of the autobiography of the cotton magnate and liberal politician Samuel Smith alongside popular local history and collective biography. In so doing it shows how life stories were consciously composed as history, intent on shaping the provincial middle class as a historical force at a time of uncertainty about the future of industry and of liberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The amateur appraisers who prepared probate inventories were commentators on social and economic change in early modern England. This article considers the form these sources took, to illuminate the thinking of appraisers and the social context of appraising. Although historians recognise the limitations of inventories, they have paid little attention to them as records of the act of appraisal. Through a case study of one seventeenth-century town – Thame in Oxfordshire – individual styles of appraising are explored. Inventories were representations, based on conscious reflection about how to arrange these ordered lists. Appraising had its own history, and approaches changed over time in response to the growing number of household goods and spaces. Broad participation supported a culture of appraisal, but a small number of mostly better-off individuals were often able to control the process, using specialist skills. The study of appraisal brings to life the cooper Andrew Parslow, the town’s dominant appraiser in the late seventeenth century, who devised an entirely new ‘summary’ format, and whose standing in society depended upon his role as an appraiser. Parslow’s practice is significant in demonstrating how appraisers devised new ways of representing material culture during the century, as their understandings of possessions changed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines an important, but hitherto largely overlooked, licensing system which operated in the UK between the late 1920s and late 1980s and limited the amount of recorded music that broadcasters could use in radio progammes. Known as ‘needletime’ the system was formalized in the 1930s when the BBC reached a collective agreement with the UK’s record companies – here acting via the copyright licensing society Phonographic Performance Limited (PPL) – about the amount of records that it could play. Drawing on previously unused materials, the article provides a revisionist account of the development of needletime, focusing on the actions of a third party, the Musicians’ Union (MU). As is shown, the MU was able to exercise influence on both camps and thus to have a profound impact on the development of music radio and the wider music industries in the UK. Previous accounts of needletime are critiqued and it is suggested that, while it was accused of operating ‘restrictive practices’, the MU’s role can be seen more as an attempt to ensure that the suitably remunerated employment of musicians was as widespread as possible. Needletime emerges as perhaps the key agreement thus far within the UK’s music industries’ industrial relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The early twentieth century has been regarded as a crucial period in the development of planning in Britain during which the key elements of the modern profession were put in place. At the time, planners represented their practice as a progressive answer to the environmental legacies of the Victorian era, capable of contributing decisively to the social and political reform of British society. Existing histories dealing with the subject uniformly locate planning within a historical trajectory that emphasizes its links with philanthropic experiment, reformism and the growth of the welfare state. This article scrutinizes such key propositions in order to show some of the ways that planning can be located within an alternative historical trajectory in which questions of orderliness, expert knowledge and government emerge to take priority. It examines the presence of rivalry among early professionals, the methodological commitment to civic surveying and the way planners sought to make use of the interconnections between space and social life to wield power over the environment and the private lives of urban dwellers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the First World War, disabled British veterans returned home to an uncertain future of work. In addition to voluntary efforts, the government’s response to the national employment crisis – the National Scheme for Disabled Ex-Servicemen (commonly known as the King’s Roll) – was established in 1919 to encourage employers to hire a five per cent quota of disabled ex-servicemen. Historians have recently revisited the scheme, noting that in many cases the process was slow and fraught, with many disabled veterans facing the prospect of unemployment, yet few have paid attention to soldiers’ pre-war working backgrounds and the specific requests of British industries. This article focuses on British coalminers returning from war. What role was there in this national situation for an industry known for its own high rate of accident and injury? Although the King’s Roll made some attempt to find veterans specifically targeted jobs above and below ground according to their impairments, it proved unable to incorporate coalmining. Instead, many disabled ex-servicemen returned to the workplace and utilized their existing identities as miners to navigate the process. With the industry beginning to decline, many faced potential regression in job status, exploitation or unemployment. By shifting to an industry-specific focus, this case study explores the contested nature of work for disabled people after the First World War, and highlights the interrelation and importance of workplace identity for the returning disabled veteran. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The consumption practices of the elite have received a great deal of attention from historians over the years. The role of women (and gender) is mostly considered in the context of married couples, and therefore at a particular stage in the life cycle, with emphasis placed on the complementary role of husband and wife in the household economy. We know less about the consumption behaviour of single women, especially the ways in which this developed over their life course, singleness being seen as a passing stage rather than a long-term condition for many elite women. This article takes a case-study approach to explore in detail how consumption and shopping behaviour were shaped by gender, status and family, and how the relative importance of these changed over the life course of the individual. It focuses in particular on what was bought from whom and the factors shaping the choice of supplier, and argues that single status gave women freedom to act, but that this was framed by the obligations of status and the constraints of family. Landownership, of course, brought responsibilities as well as opportunities that shaped spending; but family as lineage was especially important in shaping patterns and geographies of spending. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Frederick Porter Wensley was one of Scotland Yard's ‘Big Four’ detectives, head of the Metropolitan Police Criminal Investigation Department and responsible for establishing the Flying Squad. On his retirement in 1929, he used the two bound scrapbooks of press clippings and photographs he had collated to document his personal life and career to inform his 1931 autobiographyDetective Daysand serialized press articles. Through examining the interaction of material between scrapbooks and autobiographical writings, this article explores how Wensley constructed his post-retirement persona as ‘celebrity detective’ from a canny understanding of what had made him a commercial subject for the press. It argues that Wensley recast his life to promote his own successes at the expense of a narrative of police unity, providing a vehicle for him to suggest further changes to the structure of the police force without official sanction. By juxtaposing this against tightening legislation on police communication with journalists during the inter-war period under the Official Secrets Acts, this article demonstrates how the ‘celebrity’ that Wensley sought to occupy was increasingly regarded as irreconcilable with police ability to effect ‘impartial’ regulation, anticipating the concerns raised by the 2012 Leveson Inquiry into the Culture, Practice and Ethics of the Press. The article thus charts a turning point in defining the relationship between police and press. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses social classes in Great Britain throughout the 20th century, including the role they play in understanding experiences and British social history during this period. An overview of Great Britain's historiography of social classes, including of the country's working class and class relations, is provided.

The article discusses Great Britain's multicultural policies from circa 1900 through 1945, including its policies on race and the cultural diversity among ethnic groups in the country. The cosmopolitan nature of Great Britain during the early 20th century, including the concept of the other, cross-cultural differences and subaltern cosmopolitanism, is discussed.

The article looks at the history of police-community relations in Great Britain, focusing on Leeds, England, in the late 19th century. It presents information from police occurrence books, or log books, to trace trends in public opinions and behaviors toward the police. Topics include popular culture and social conditions in 19th-century England, popular hostility toward certain forms of policing, and violence against policemen.

The article looks at the history of medicine in Great Britain, focusing on the 19th century. It traces changes in the social and cultural character of the medical profession through primary sources, particularly the medical journal "The Lancet." Topics include the relation between efforts to reform the medical profession and overall political reform, surgeon and politician Thomas Wakley, and Wakley's trial for libel.

The nineteenth-century ‘revolution in government’, from which a dramatically altered relationship between central and local government emerged, is of central concern to social historians. This article uses the work of Pierre Bourdieu to analyse the struggles between the magistracy in Cheshire and the Home Office over the centralization of prisons and policing between the 1820s and 1840s. During this period legislative enactments increased the role of central government in monitoring and overseeing administrative management in both areas and this produced both direct and indirect conflict. The article argues that Bourdieu’s concepts of ‘field’, ‘capital’ and ‘habitus’ provide a framework for analysing the changing relationship between central and local government which makes evident the effects of divisions between and within social classes and enables the varying nature of the course and outcome of conflicts to be understood. Overall, the analysis demonstrates the potential of the approach to be used more widely to explore the changing relationship between central and local government in other areas of social policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article applies theories of self, of life history narration and specifically the ‘epiphanic moment’ and the ‘coherence system’ to explore the facility demonstrated by women in the oral history interview to display a cathartic reconstruction of the self as they recount their maturation in the years following the Second World War. It draws upon a series of life history interviews with a cohort of the post-war generation of British women for whom the educational and professional outlook was bright, enabling them to construct a lifestyle and outlook very different from that of their mothers. They founded lives upon a liberationist practice, but rarely upon liberationist ideology and movements. The article makes two key points. First, it reveals how individuals articulate selfhood within the framework of what has been described as the ‘late modern project of the self’. Second, it develops the theory of narrative coherence by exploring the strategies used by female interviewees to narrate a self in the context of a period of personal and societal change. Ultimately, it shows that this generation of women came to embrace a new model of autonomous womanhood predicated upon ‘self-worth, entitlement, self-propulsion and independence’, which set them free from the material and discursive constraints that had hobbled their mothers’ generation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the basis of archives in more than forty British local government units, metropolitan and extra-metropolitan, this article examines the activities of the first generation of English nuisances inspectors in the four decades after the sanitary revolution in the 1840s and before full professionalization of sanitary inspection at the end of the century. It considers their work in three contexts: the history of public health, the history of state growth and the history of urban policing. The study finds that the inspectors enjoyed considerable independence in setting community standards and mediating conflict over the use of urban public space and, sometimes, public behaviour, but also that their agendas were often shaped by peculiar local concerns. It finds too that their determinations were rarely contested. The long heritage of nuisance in English common law, together with long traditions of nuisance-policing municipal authorities and reliance on amateur officials, probably accounts for their remarkable authority. The article concludes by suggesting the ongoing impact of Victorian nuisances inspections in perceptions of the urban environment and in the creation of a complaint-friendly culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the first half of the nineteenth century in England, sanitary reformers applied themselves to the task of defining the ideal grave that would be capable of minimizing the supposedly deleterious public health consequences of dangerous miasmas from decomposing remains. Following the lead of Edwin Chadwick, officials at the General Board of Health drew up scientific guidelines for vestries that had established cemeteries under the new Burial Acts. These guidelines required the placing of each grave in a defined plot, and envisaged their re-use: rapid decomposition would be effected by attention to drainage and soil type and by placing just one body in each grave. This recommendation ran counter to a wider cultural preference for familial burial ‘in perpetuity’, which had been recognized and encouraged by new cemetery companies. A third type of grave was also in evidence in this period. Under the ‘common grave system’ multiple interments of unrelated individuals took place in exceptionally deep graves, running counter to both scientific and cultural preference. Regulation was largely permissive. Attention to actual grave management practice provokes re-evaluation of the Victorian cemetery. This space was not necessarily defined by scientific theory and the bodies of the poor were not invariably marginalized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The thirty years after 1980 witnessed significant global changes in labour markets, marked by a decline in ongoing employment and corresponding growth in temporary work, subcontracting and self-employment. Associated with this change has been mounting evidence of adverse health effects associated with insecure and flexible work arrangements that have been termed precarious employment. What most observers fail to note is that precarious employment is not a new phenomenon. Viewed in a broader timeframe, precarious employment was the norm prior to the long post-war boom. Examining the case of merchant seamen this article demonstrates that in the earlier period there was clear evidence that precarious employment contributed to health and safety hazards encountered by seamen. Further, contemporary observers, including policymakers, unions and medical researchers, were aware of the connection. Not only are there parallels with the merchant marine today, but also understanding of how and why precarious employment damages health would be enhanced by adopting a broader historical perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses violence among workmen and employers in the light metal trades in Sheffield, England, during the 1850s and 1860s known as the "Sheffield Outrages." The article also examines manifestations of the violence resulting in petty violence, theft, and vandalism that were called "rattenings." The article also discusses relations between social classes in Sheffield during the 1850s and 1860s and the relationship between class relations and escalating violence. The article discusses the concept of the moral economy, social protest, and the labor movement during the Victorian era.

The article discusses the expansion of the automobility and social change in urban areas of Great Britain between 1955 and 1970. It examines what the author calls the motor revolution in Great Britain during the 1950s, particularly the development of urban motorways and the sharp increase in the number of motor vehicles in Great Britain, and the expansion of automobile ownership. The article discusses the impact of automobiles on social mobility, the political significance of the expansion of automobility, and the socioeconomic aspects of car ownership.

The article discusses the policing of nightclubs in London, England, and what the author terms the nightclub campaigns during the interwar period. It examines the roles of London nightclub owner Kate Evelyn Nason Meyrick, former London Metropolitan Police sergeant George Goddard, and London police commissioner Sir William Thomas Francis Horwood in the London nightclub scene and law enforcement. It also discusses the campaign against nightclubs led by former British Home Secretary William Joynson-Hicks. The article also discusses scholarship concerning the nightclub campaigns, legislation concerning the licensing of nightclubs, and Meyrick's incarceration.

The article discusses the Fifth Monarchists political movement and the radical Thomas Venner's position within the movement in the mid 17th century England. The article often references and critiques the book "The Fifth Monarchy Men: A Study in Seventeenth Century Millenarianism," by Bernard Capp. An overview of Venner's role in leading rebellions against English ruler Oliver Cromwell and English King Charles II is presented. Particular focus is given to the debate among historians over whether Venner and his violent tactics represented the Fifth Monarchists' mainstream movement.

The article discusses the public discourse concerning juvenile delinquency in 20th century England. Particular focus is given to how crime statistics influence public perception and the government's understanding of juvenile delinquency. An overview is presented contrasting England's local and national press's reporting on youth crime. An overview of crime in the working class East End of London, England, including victimization, property claims and theft, is provided. The author contends that youth crime in mid-20th century England was not a result of fundamental behavioral change of the youth and that the fear of juvenile delinquency should be treated as a historical phenomenon in its own right.

The article considers the 20th century biographies of people of Great Britain's working class, often associated with communists. Some of the subjects considered include upward mobility, social classes, left-wing political activism, group identity, the Great Depression, and political parties of the interwar period such as the Communist Party of Great Britain and the Young Communist League. Some of the works considered include the book "Men in the Pits" by Ferdynand Zweig, and interviews with cartoonist James Friell and civil servant Dave Marshall. A historiography of British working classes is presented.

The essay provides a historiography of contemporary writings on subjects of British labor and working-class history. Some of the topics considered include the histories of collective action, environment and human ecology, and gender issues. Works by historians including James Epstein, Malcolm Chase, and Peter Jones are discussed.

In March 1910, after two years of sustained surveillance by the colonial government, a young Indian revolutionary nationalist, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883-1966), was arrested in London and extradited to India for trial. Among the charges he faced was the curious one of sedition. Using Savarkar as the starting point - and concluding with Gandhi's own encounter with sedition - this essay argues that sedition law had a critical, and extended, life in the colonial context, allowing the use of what were seen as dangerous words to be evidence of conspiracy long after the metropole had abandoned the practice. The colonial state's response to revolutionary nationalism gave rise to two principal colonial weapons against anti-colonial nationalism (whether manifested in Savarkar's call for armed rebellion or Gandhian nonviolent noncooperation). The first weapon was surveillance, a developing technology of state control that placed an increasingly large number of young 'revolutionaries' under systematic monitoring. They were placed under surveillance to monitor not just what they were doing, but also what they were thinking, writing, and speaking. The second and perhaps more important weapon of the colonial state in India was sedition law. While sedition had a long history in Britain, the modern history of sedition was in fact inextricably linked to colonial rule. The history of colonial surveillance and the development of sedition law strongly suggests that the real danger posed by all nationalists, revolutionary and otherwise, lay in a violence that was far more rhetorical and symbolic than physical, for what was really at stake was the fundamental legitimacy of colonial rule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the urban ideology of justice developed by English civic authorities in the period from c. 1350 to c. 1500, using evidence from the custumals and court records of provincial towns. It considers how contemporary images of just rule were adapted by town leaders for the urban setting and how religious rhetoric influenced their decisions when presiding in the local courts. Discussion focuses particularly on the sanctions used to enforce urban by-laws, analysing the use of fines, mutilation, imprisonment and shame rituals in the borough setting. Incarceration, it is argued, had a definite punitive purpose in late medieval towns; it was not simply used for holding suspects prior to trial. This was particularly evident in cases involving high-status offenders and the article examines how the treatment of wrongdoers was affected not only by the nature of their misconduct but also by their social standing within the community. Finally, the article highlights the methods used by the civic authorities to reintegrate at least some offenders into the urban community and provides discussion of the use of ritualized submission and public displays of mercy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an analysis based on the British Academy research regarding the norms of masculinity in landed gentry society during the 1600-1800. It states that surviving studies of the aristocrats in showing life-stage as a matter of control of obstinate youth rather than as one in which the autonomy and independence of the sons were considered as a positive male virtue, and a parental obligation. Moreover, a study of F. Heal and C. Holmes mentions the long-standing parental concerns regarding moral risks and a son's entry to the world, suggesting that children born in upper classes were often sent away to gain knowledge from school to acquire worldly culture. However, in J. Cannon's study the growing assistance of public, rather than private is emphasized.

The article presents social history research into the "moral economy" and social relations of rural Britons in the nineteenth century. The concept of "moral economy" is the sole tool for understanding aspects of crowd behavior and authoritarian responses to it during the years between 1795 and 1834. Moral economy continued to inform the concept of legitimation that underpinned the actions of the crowds. A labor movement in defense of customary rights had strong foundations in the expectations and practices of rural communities in England.

The article presents social history research into Victorian Era Britons' public opinion and stereotypes regarding the British colony of India, the East Indians, and the South Asians in the nineteenth century. Ambivalent representations of East Indian juggling emerged over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The argument is presented that these representations constituted part of the British debate about spiritualism. The image of India as a mysterious and mystical place is a precursor to the establishment of the occultist organization Theosophical Society.