Search

This thesis will demonstrate ways in which late Victorian social and cultural attitudes influenced the development and work of the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company, and the early professional production and performance of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas. The underlying enquiry concerns the extent to which the D’Oyly Carte Opera organisation and its work relate to an ideology, or collective mentalité, maintained and advocated by the Victorian middle-classes. The thesis will argue that a need to reflect bourgeois notions of respectability, status and gender influenced the practices of a theatrical organisation whose success depended on making large-scale musical theatre palatable to ‘respectable’ Victorians. It will examine ways in which managerial regulation of employees was imposed to contribute to both a brand image and a commercial product which matched the ethical values and tastes of the target audience. The establishment of a company performance style will be shown to have evolved from behavioural practices derived from the absorption and representation of shared cultural outlooks. The working lives and professional preoccupations of authors, managers and performers will be investigated to demonstrate how the attitudes and working lives of Savoy personnel exemplified concerns typical to many West End theatre practitioners of the period, such as the drive towards social acceptability and the recognition of theatre work as a valid professional pursuit, particularly for women. The notion of a ‘circularity of influence’, in which cultural production is regarded as both a result and a reinforcement of ideology, will be proposed to explain the cultural ubiquity of the Savoy Operas in the middle-class consciousness, during and after their initial West End success.

This thesis examines in depth the six borough and county asylums of Hampshire and Sussex between 1845 and 1930. The research is of an interdisciplinary nature and offers a synthesis of archaeological, historical, and sociological methodologies. The primary focus is on the standing asylum buildings. Fieldwork has been used to establish a permanent record of the building complexes prior to their imminent destruction and redevelopment and has provided a basis upon which to examine the quality of these buildings as places of treatment and cure. This fieldwork has then been coupled with extensive documentary research in order to repopulate the asylum with the patients and staff that lived and worked within them. The key themes of this study are designed to provide a three dimensional analysis of the buildings in order to assess their quality and effectiveness. These themes include: reading gender, status and control from the building complexes; understanding the epidemiology of the asylum populations; establishing the effectiveness of the asylums as hospitals in view of asylum borne disease; and charting the asylum building genre evolution over a period of eighty years as a design response to providing better treatment and care. In order to do this over 6,000 separate patient transactions have been incorporated. Asylum buildings have received little attention from archaeologists or historians. No asylum building to date has been rigorously researched. This study takes six asylum buildings, extensively examines them, repopulates them, and evaluates their effectiveness. This is done within the context of the original purpose of the asylum commissioners, the epidemiological facts, and the current historiographical debate.

This thesis combines a landscape archaeology and artefact-based study, synthesising a range of evidence; sites, settlements and artefacts, but with a central focus on multi-period lithic scatter assemblages. It includes a primary analysis of previously unstudied private collections and museum collections, together with the lithics recovered as part of the Somerset Levels Project and the Shapwick Project totalling c.20,000 stone tools and waste. This is analysed alongside pottery assemblages, some from primary analyses and bronze and stone artefacts. These artefacts provide the basis for a landscape synthesis enabling the reconstruction of a socially constructed landscape in central Somerset. The time-frame for the study covers the Mesolithic to later Bronze Age and processes of settlement, c.4300 to c.700 cal. BC. The author has identified four themes that also extend backwards in time representing the unique character of the archaeological record in the study area. These themes are linked to the specific regional nature and social identity of communities in the study area.

The thesis considers primary, contemporaneous documents and secondary sources concerning Florence Nightingale, her motives and experiences with the profession of midwifery. The thesis sets Nightingale within her family context and that of mid Victorian England, drawing on previous biographies, an autobiographical account (Cassandra), historical evidence and literature. The main events investigated take place following her return from the Crimean War and are focused on the work of Nightingale in relation to the profession of midwifery, childbirth, infection and maternal mortality, placing Nightingale in the English and European nineteenth century midwifery context and investigating the rationale for the commissioning of the Nightingale School for Midwives at King's College Hospital, London in 1862 followed by its subsequent closure five years later and the publication of Notes on Lying-in Institutions in 1871. The two events are linked, although the focus of the research is an investigation of evidence to substantiate Nightingale's reason for commissioning a training school for midwives. Evidence is ascertained through life documents including biographies, letters and other contemporaneous documents written by and to her or pertaining to the work, in particular, of the Nightingale Fund. These are reviewed using the biographical method and Nightingale's rationale is finally exposed within a complex web of personal and organisational inter-relationships.

This thesis analyses and contextualises the performances of Shakespearean and other plays at the reconstructed Globe theatre in London between 1996 and 2000. It contends that these performances raise compelling issues, both for dramatic production and in relation to broader social and cultural concerns because of the Globe's founding commitment to authenticity, which has been expressed most obviously by the meticulous reconstruction of the new Globe building, and through reconstructed authentic performance practices. Further, it is the argument of this thesis that this commitment to authenticity expresses urgent concerns of the new Globe's contemporary placing and role. Thus, the first three chapters of the thesis refer to the actual performances only briefly as various contexts of authenticity are explored. In these chapters the Globe is positioned within debates about historical, personal and individual authenticity, within the discourse of Shakespeare's supposed universalism, and within the concept of 'authentic performance'. Each of these contextual enquiries is tied to a central concern of this thesis, the articulation and constitution of identity and subjectivity. The focal points of the second half of the thesis are the Globe productions and performances themselves. The first of these chapters concentrates on productions of reconstructed authenticity and explores some of the ideological positions encoded in their representations. The remaining two chapters analyse productions that could be described as non-authentic; productions of non-Shakespeare plays, and visiting productions from other countries. An argument is developed (one which is anticipated by the theoretical underpinning of the first half of the thesis) that, in general, the 'authentic' productions are more likely to represent conservative ideologies and to perpetuate hegemonic identity positions. This thesis contributes to the emerging field of studies of Shakespeare in performance by applying a complex web of interdisciplinary perspectives to its consideration of new Globe theatre practice. It analyses many of the productions staged at the new Globe between 1996 and 2000, and evaluates some of the key critical debates as they relate to authentic performance practice.

The census enumerators' books (CEBs) of Winchester between 1841 and 1891 are the focus of this thesis. They are examined, in association with other records like trade directories, share contracts and visual evidence of photographs, maps and plans, to track aspects of the economic, social and topographical development of Winchester, with specific reference to the effect of the railways in the later nineteenth century. Surviving rail company records of passengers and freight for this period are scarce and so the census is used to indicate a tangible yet difficult to quantify effect: the impact of the railways upon a city that was neither a railway town nor an industrial centre. The census provides evidence of the structure of the de facto population on census night every ten years, and the CEBs show this detail at the level of the individual. It therefore provides a revealing picture of change and continuity in the city at a time when it experienced its most momentous demographic change since medieval times. As such, the analysis contained within is of relevance to people studying both nineteenth century history and the post-medieval history of Winchester. The methodology employed in this work, a sourceoriented KAE1CD database, is a product of the techniques employed by those working in historical computation. The study uses almost 2 million pieces of information in a database covering a continuous run of 50 years of censuses, allowing both a broad and detailed analysis of the data to take place. Using evidence from CEBs as well as concomitant local sources, this thesis questions the extent to which the railway did affect the city. It finds that despite the redistribution of a larger population throughout the city and many changes in the economic and topographical structure of the city, it is rarely possible to expose a quantifiable influence of rail transport.

Winchester probate inventories produced between 1650 and 1710 are the focus of this thesis. They are examined, in conjunction with a number of accompanying wills. records of town government and also taxation records, in order to demonstrate change and continuity in the form of domestic space and to analyse the nature of the relationship between the built domestic environment and the people who lived within it. The investigation brings the analysis of inventory evidence of domestic space into the mainstream of contemporary studies of the meanings of consumption. The study is principally based on documentary evidence but reference is made to some of the archaeological evidence also. Particular attention is paid to standing remains in the . cathedral close as outstanding examples of new forms of domestic architecture in the restoration period. Winchester inventories are evidence of the physical environment of the city in a period of considerable social. economic and political change. The examination of these sources is of relevance to people other than those interested in the history of England's former royal capital. The methodology of inventory analysis employed here. using as it does the source-oriented database management software kaeiw, offers a paradigm for future students of this source material. This is one of the first studies in this country to employ such a methodology. As such it affords the opportunity to evaluate the usefulness of techniques available in the new and growing field of historical computation. Inventories contribute to our understanding of continuity and change in areas other than house form and room use. These documents cast light upon the social structure of post-medieval Winchester and provide an indication of the ways in which the city was adapting to changed circumstances in a period after the terminal decline of its staple industries. This study also offers the first attempt to integrate an investigation of the relationships between appraisers and inventoried testators into a wider examination of the consumption of domestic space in this period.