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The figure of Christopher Columbus was a key trope in the programming for the BBC's Latin American Service (LAS) and West Indian Service during the Second World War. This paper analyzes four dramas and one feature program from the 1940s that not only dramatize events from Columbus's life but also reflect the contemporary broadcast context by promoting British war interests and showcasing Latin American and Caribbean histories and geographies. These commemorative programs are broadly hagiographic, but they also reveal the BBC's awareness of how Latin American and West Indian audiences might variously respond to portrayals of Columbus and European colonization. Using radiogenic strategies including immersive aurality, the interplay of different historical narratives, and multivocality, these programs reveal the relationships between the BBC's institutional aims in overseas broadcasting and Latin American and West Indian program creators' literary and political goals. The portrayals of Columbus in the 1940s served an allegorical and ultimately propagandistic purpose, demonstrating the role of faith and perseverance amid turbulence and conflict, and inducing, by analogy, sympathy for Britain's war effort. The authors commissioned to write, produce, and deliver these dramas were not simply responding to propaganda guidelines; they were responding to the demands of the corporation and the war effort while also pursuing their own commitments and literary ambition. Ultimately, the scripts produced by the BBC for broadcast to the Americas reveal Columbus and his voyages as polysemic symbols of the regions' relationship to their past and their relationships to Europe in the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first edition of the Daily Mail on May 4, 1896, included an advertisement for the "latest scientific marvel," the Lumiere Cinematograph. While historians have acknowledged the concurrent rise of film and the popular press, this article explores the varied and often-innovative ways in which British newspapers produced film and visual media. From the use of Daily Mail screens to relay election results, to the production and promotion of the newspaper's own film in 1910, these early interactions allow us to understand better the emergence, evolution, and endurance of Britain's modern media system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"The Great Famine in Ireland and Britain's Financial Crisis" by Charles Read and "Dublin and the Great Irish Famine" edited by Emily Mark-Fitzgerald, Ciarán McCabe, and Ciarán Reilly are two books that explore the Great Famine in Ireland. The Famine, also known as An Gorta Mór or the Irish potato famine, occurred between 1845 and the early 1850s and resulted in the loss of around two million lives and a significant decline in Ireland's population. The books examine the economic and political factors that contributed to the Famine, including the British government's response and the impact on Dublin. They also discuss the cultural memory and legacy of the Famine. These books provide valuable insights into this devastating event and its lasting effects on Ireland. [Extracted from the article]

After World War II, British jazz fans and critics looking to better understand the genre stimulated a demand for blues records; this market expanded further as first Trad jazz, then skiffle and British R&B launched a British blues revival. Major labels like Decca and Pye offered major US urban blues and soul artists, but the specialty market, dominated by connoisseurs interested in a wider variety of artists and eras, was underserved by the major labels. Thus, committed blues lovers took matters into their own hands. This paper will survey the turbulent independent blues record scene in Britain from the late 1940s to the early 1970s, an ever-changing kaleidoscope of labels with colorful names, shadowy origins, lofty goals, and often surprising founders. Dozens of British musicians, critics, and collectors founded labels, licensing (or bootlegging) materials for reissue, importing 45s from the United States and reselling them in Britain, or recording new material for exclusive release. Many of these small concerns, reissuing rarities and recordings by artists outside the commercial mainstream, were labors of love rather than serious commercial enterprises. Their limited-edition discs were marketed directly to their target audience, and label owners rarely did more than break even. Most only issued a handful of recordings, though in the process they revived the stalled careers of US blues singers, provided much-needed income and support to older artists, and introduced Britain to a wider variety of blues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"State Surveillance, Political Policing and Counter-Terrorism in Britain, 1880–1914" by Vlad Solomon is a comprehensive study of high policing in Britain during the late Victorian, Edwardian, and pre-First World War periods. The book examines how the British state dealt with threats from Fenian bombing campaigns, working-class strikers, continental anarchists, and militant suffragettes. Solomon analyzes official records, newspapers, memoirs, and other sources to provide a detailed account of the violent acts and the actions of the police. The book also explores the personal intrigues and rivalries that shaped the development of surveillance organizations like the Special Branch and MI5. Solomon argues that the lack of cooperation with continental police forces and the expansion of extra-legal policing were influenced by British exceptionalism and political factors. However, the reviewer suggests that structural factors and social conditions may have played a role as well. The reviewer also questions the lumping together of working-class radicalism with violent campaigns and raises concerns about the language used to describe strikes in South Wales. Overall, the book offers valuable insights into the development of British policing during this period. [Extracted from the article]

This paper reconstructs levels of cinemagoing in Britain over the two decades preceding the first accepted estimates of the national audience, which were produced in 1934. It uses the receipts from the tax on entertainments, levied by British governments starting in 1916, to examine the impact of broader developments, from war to major economic downturns, and radical changes within the industry itself with the introduction of sound technology. A significant discontinuity is identified in the emergence of the talking picture, which worked to broaden and deepen support for the cinema, confirming it as the dominant mass entertainment form of the period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the exhibition and reception of Kinemacolor in Russia from 1910 to 1916. Kinemacolor was a British method of filming and projecting in natural color invented by George Albert Smith and financed by Charles Urban, a US-born entrepreneur; film historians generally regard it as the most commercially viable color process before the outbreak of war in 1914. The article investigates Urban's interest in Russia as a potential market for Kinemacolor and as a source of interesting filmic material. In addition to identifying the extent of Kinemacolor's exhibition and distribution in Russia between 1910 and 1916, it also examines the Russian subjects filmed by Urban's companies in black and white and color, and identifies two occasions (1909 and 1913) on which Tsar Nikolai II and Tsarina Aleksandra Fedorovna were filmed in Kinemacolor. The article argues that the reception of Kinemacolor was widespread and diverse, and included members of the Russian imperial family and the Bolshevik leader, Vladimir Lenin. It references the specialist film-trade press in Britain, Russia, Europe, and North America; theater listings in Britain and Russia; and contemporary reports on Kinemacolor exhibitions in the British and Russian media. The article also draws upon the extensive archive of Urban's private papers, which is currently preserved in Bradford's National Science and Media Museum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the history, membership, and rules of the Heath Book Club operating near Wakefield, Yorkshire, in the 1850s in order to gain insight into the lives of readers during the Victorian period. Members included several wealthy landowners, clergymen, and other prominent residents, as well as a few professionals and one tradesman. As members of a book club, readers had access to otherwise hard-to-attain books. As a social network, the book club may have provided additional economic, social, or political returns to the members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the contingent and affective dimensions of genre in Victorian criticism on the ballad. Aesthetic judgments comprise an important part of the historical meta-discourse surrounding literary genres, yet these categories occupy only a marginal position in our present theories of genre. The terms of aesthetic judgment tend to fall out when we tally historical genres' discursive conventions and map their formal and thematic contours. In contrast, Victorian literary criticism's dependence on the language of feeling, not only in describing individual works but also in shaping generic taxonomies, provides an opportunity to consider the ways in which the seemingly irreducible particularities of aesthetic experience meet the generalizing force of genre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the height of the Indian uprising in 1857, two rival London newspapers published portraits on the same day of the man who had become known in Britain as the primary villain of the conflicts: Nana Sahib. These were clearly portraits of two different men. This essay explores why Victorian image-making processes meant that such portraits were presumed accurate, and it traces multiple leads in identifying the men pictured within them. Considering "the villain" as a category steeped in conventions of melodrama, the essay argues that the portraits' conflict with one another did not matter to the British public because such images worked to create certainty amid chaotic reportage of uprising events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses George Henry Lewes's study of living matter in The Physiology of Common Life (1859-60). Despite the physiological materiality of its subject, Lewes's text often discusses states of life that defy clear-cut classification. The process of human aging is a particularly confounding example of life and death's indeterminacy because, as Lewes describes, older age invokes both the physiological and aesthetic intermingling of animal life with stone, petrifaction, and minerality. I argue that Lewes's discussion of aging in Chapter XIII draws directly from the earlier geological research of Charles Lyell and, with brief reference to illustrative examples elsewhere in Victorian writing, I show the ways in which the Lewesian understanding of aging as a state of suspension between animality and minerality is reliant upon and a spur for the nineteenth-century literary imagination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This commentary introduces the "Cinema Programmes" of the British Public Relations Office in Bahrain from 1944 to 1948. In addition to propaganda-based newsreels and information films, the programs included Hollywood feature films that were borrowed from Bahrain Petroleum Company (BAPCO). BAPCO rented the films from distributors in India for screening in its employees-only cinema in Awali. Following screenings in the company cinema, the films were exhibited in a range of nontheatrical venues and for different audiences. These programs, which were collected and archived in the India Office Records, provide us with one of the few sources to track the formative years of film culture in the Gulf. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

English-architecture company law describes the distinct and diverse group of company or corporate law used in more than sixty jurisdictions worldwide. English-architecture company law provides a robust platform for innovation and development due to its permissive structure, opportunity for choice of law in an entity's internal governance, and scalability permitting variation for small and large entities. It is the dominant form among International Financial Centers (IFCs), many of which have legal systems with a British connection. This body of law responds to competition and maintains dynamism by engaging its practice community through "learning by doing" and "frictioneering." An architectural approach permits a broader review of developments in company law that more closely captures the reality of global law practice. The IFC experience of climbing the value chain from tax arbitrage to provide solutions for entities or structures left out in the corporate law of larger jurisdictions provides a useful global governance model to maintain normative, jurisprudential, and regulatory coherence even as it responds to more specialized and unanticipated needs. This Article explores what makes English-architecture company law so successful and how IFCs use it to compete in the global law market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This systematic review of literature evaluates evidence about effective and inclusive care management strategies for learners with type 1 diabetes in UK primary schools. Approximately 29,000 children in the UK are currently living with special health care needs of type 1 diabetes (Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, 2021a), and governing policies indicate an inconsistent approach to learner care, highlighting the need for improved school services. Findings included clear identification of key stakeholder roles, collaborative working, provision of adequate school staff training, enabling student self-management, and delivery of individual healthcare plans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses three articles in this special issue arising from the 14th annual November 2016 conference of the North American Victorian Studies Association entitled "Social Victorians" in Phoenix, Arizona, on topics including art galleries, a provincial book club, and reviews of ballads.

Insofar as the field of Anthropocene studies would seem to invite (if not necessitate) large-scale or sweeping approaches like Reno's, Ross's I Charlotte Brontë at the Anthropocene i is counterintuitive inasmuch as it zooms in on the life and works of one Victorian woman. Exploring how "Charlotte Brontë wrote the Anthropocene at the scale of a lifetime", Ross demonstrates beautifully how the Anthropocene as ideational concept and material condition might be generatively evinced by and through small-scale, localized, materially situated methods of inquiry (5). Charlotte Brontë at the Anthropocene, by Shawna Ross; pp. vii + 326. [Extracted from the article]

Victorian Britons were interested in encounters between humans and fish for many reasons: fishing for sport as opposed to food gathering was expanding rapidly in popularity; fishing was practiced by many different people in many ways around the world; and fish populations were visibly suffering from pollution, overfishing, and terrain modification. This article analyzes the changing meanings of these encounters through addressing the beliefs about fish pain held by Victorian anglers. These beliefs were intertwined with ideas about race, food, civilization, and class. Elite British anglers increasingly understood their relationship with fish and their own capacity to feel pain (and to judge others' pain) as a justification of their place as the managers and stewards of all fisheries, not just those in Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"The Emergence of Bicycling and Automobility in Britain" by Craig Horner explores the history of cycling and motoring in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain. Horner examines the pioneers who transitioned from cycling to becoming motorists and motor industry entrepreneurs, and documents how motorized vehicles began to gain popularity by 1905. The book highlights the challenges faced by these entrepreneurs, such as legal restrictions, inadequate road infrastructure, and societal hostility towards motorists. It also discusses the shift in the motoring industry after 1905, with the emergence of a new breed of upper- and middle-class consumers. Overall, the book offers a comprehensive analysis of the role of cycling and motoring in shaping British mobility during this period. [Extracted from the article]

In this evaluation of provincial Jewish communities, Levene challenges a prevailing view of industrialism: that it severed cherished family ties and replaced them with mere communities of circumstance. Jews in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Charity, Community and Religion, 1830-1880, by Alysa Levene; pp. vi + 248. In it, Levene examines maps, statistics, census data, and communal records to understand social, geographical, and transpatial notions of community among provincial Jews. [Extracted from the article]

"Beyond the Law": The Politics of Ending the Death Penalty for Sodomy in Britain by Charles Upchurch explores the history of the abolition of the death penalty for sodomy in Britain. Upchurch challenges the notion that the period between the eighteenth and late nineteenth centuries was a sparsely documented gray zone in queer history. He examines the political maneuvering and debates surrounding the decriminalization of sodomy in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1861, shedding light on the motivations of key politicians involved. Upchurch also explores the connections between influential thinkers, authors, and politicians in advocating for reform. While some of his connections are speculative, the book provides valuable insights into this neglected period of queer history. [Extracted from the article]

Workers, Unions and Payment in Kind: The Fight for Real Wages in Britain, 1820-1914 Finally, Frank explores the work of the factory inspectors, especially the women, many of whom saw themselves as campaigners for the rights of women workers rather than neutral administrators of state policy. Workers, Unions and Payment in Kind: The Fight for Real Wages in Britain, 1820-1914, by Christopher Frank; pp. xii + 293. [Extracted from the article]

Brexit, i.e., the United Kingdom's departure from membership in the European Union, has posed particular problems for communities in the borderlands of Northern Ireland since the referendum which began the process. With reference to initial scholarly assessments of Brexit effects in the UK and in other parts of Europe, the article explores the possible impact of Brexit on European borderlands. This article summarizes some of these problems in Northern Ireland in order to ask questions which may prove relevant at borders elsewhere in Europe, particularly in regard to issues of political, economic, social and cultural integration and differentiation in national and transnational contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the welfare services that settled Jews in Britain and the United States provided for the large diaspora of east European Jews between 1880 and the Great Depression. It highlights gender relations, both as proposed for the immigrants and among the welfare workers themselves. How immigrants experienced the services provided for them is seen here through the lens of divergent views of tzedakah—God's commandment to practice charity and social justice in a way that respects the dignity of the recipient. Using evidence from London and Glasgow for Britain, and from New York and Boston for the United States, it explores three overlapping phases of welfare work: scientific Jewish charity organization (1870–1914); new Liberal and Progressive Jewish social welfare (1890–1930); and professional Jewish social services (from 1890 on). The overall story tells of the increasing intention of the welfare providers to bring more understanding and respect to their work, but also of continuing tension with the recipients of their concern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although it is generally considered that there was relatively little interest in the First World War throughout the 1970s and 1980s in Britain, these decades constitute a key moment in time when the embodied memories of the war transitioned into the cultural memory we are familiar with today. This article examines the transmission of memories of the First World War from veterans and their families to museums. It uses the Durham Light Infantry Museum, a small regimental museum in the northeast of England, as a case study to examine who donated war-related objects and their reasons for doing so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the late nineteenth century, the British government in India attempted to quell anti-colonial critique by criminalizing negative affect. This essay explores the relationship between “disaffection” and critique in this period by comparing the trial of the Bangavasi in 1891 (the first attempt to prosecute a newspaper using the law against disaffection) and the trials of Oscar Wilde four years later; it demonstrates how and why both were centrally concerned with sexuality, excessive affect, and the insincerity of affectation, and shows how the key terms operating in each trial circulated between Britain and India in the Anglophone press. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special section explores the intersections of queer pedagogy and the teaching of religion-in and partly beyond the fields of religious studies and theology-in higher-education settings. The various contributions present reflections based on innovative teaching and transformative curriculum practices in religion courses and programs, specifically in South Africa and the United Kingdom but-we believe-with wider relevance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that George Jacob Holyoake quoted George Eliot as part of a particular political strategy, one designed to bring together readers and writers of different classes, religious beliefs, and political affiliations. Holyoake, a lifelong political activist, worked tirelessly to build consensus among diverse and distinct groups, an effort that is reflected in his recirculation of passages by Eliot. Thanks to Holyoake's careful framing, Eliot herself emerges as a dedicated supporter of working-class political movements. By quoting her, Holyoake worked to convince his largely working-class audience that this famous middle-class author was on their side. As quotations traveled across class lines, they helped knit together the political projects of different groups, otherwise divided by class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay responds to current scholarship as it explains the poor person's horror of dissection in the Victorian period as part of a long and complex process of deprivation. Working with the Anatomy Act (1832) and the New Poor Law (1834) as its backdrop, this essay examines three anxieties that were inseparable from the pauper's existence: the social embarrassment attendant on the loss of personal belongings, especially clothes; the humiliation forced upon workhouse inmates by the New Poor Law diet; and the existential foreboding triggered by the prospect of postmortem dissection. It culminates in a consideration of the early works of Charles Dickens, who found in fiction a set of strategies that allowed early Victorians simultaneously to register and to compensate for these anxieties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay analyzes the Kelmscott editions of William Morris's late prose romances in reference to late-nineteenth-century typographical discourses. It identifies on the surface of the Kelmscott works a previously undisclosed record of print craftsmanship: a coordinated effort by Morris and his print workers to prevent textually encoded forms of distraction from accruing on the printed page. In so doing, it engages with past scholarship that has traced the politics of the Kelmscott book to its utopian methods of print production or to its idealized, textually implicit modes of aesthetic perception. Offering a new way of appreciating this politics, it considers the books' coordinated efforts to eliminate distractions as an organized resistance to the misguided technoprogressive logic informing modern print practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This section reprints two rare early texts about the craft of film coloring, dating from 1898 and 1908, by Duncan Mitchell in Britain and Elizabeth Martine in the United States. Mitchell and Martine each describe the meticulous nature of their work as colorists and discuss specific techniques and aesthetic issues that they believe are important in the process of coloring films by hand. The accompanying overview article by Stephen Bottomore summarizes and analyzes the points made by this pair of colorists and compares their accounts with what existing sources tell us about early film coloring. Brief biographies of Mitchell and Martine are also included. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Nobody, Somebody, and Everybody" argues that the convergence of the Crimean War, liberal political ideology, and statistical thought created a crisis of accountability in the public sphere in mid-Victorian England, a crisis to which Dickens responded in his journalism by elaborating a rhetoric of indefiniteness through the use of the pronoun "somebody." Statistics produced an abstract order of behavior that described humans en masse, whereas moral traditions framed questions of accountability according to observed behaviors of individual men. This accountability crisis is explored through a reading of Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade" (1854), while Dickens's writing in Household Words is understood as an aspirational solution to this crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay calls attention to the philosophical parallels between British aestheticism--the "art for art's sake" movement founded by Walter Pater in the late 1860s--and a contemporary strain of optimistic evolutionism popularized by iconoclastic mathematician W. K. Clifford in the 1870s. Although evolutionism and aestheticism appear unrelated at first glance, Clifford's and Pater's bodies of work reveal common concerns about the influence of scientific materialism on culture and the place of the individual within the evolutionary process. By tracing these commonalities through the work of Clifford, Pater, and aesthetic poet Mathilde Blind, this essay posits a richer account of the interdependent formation of both aesthetic and evolutionary thought in the late nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how secondary school pupils in England are integrated into the First World War centenary practices of remembrance with a particular focus on education. It discusses which narratives of the war are included in and excluded from secondary-level classroom history teaching and raises important concerns relating to the "memory messages" that are being communicated via history teaching of the First World War and the consequences of such narratives regarding the replication of power relations, a continued inability to deal with Britain's colonial legacy, and an uncritical normalizing of the military in the minds of young people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author responds to three essays published within this issue: "Surround, Background, and the Overlooked," by Kate Flint; "Cartomania: Sensation, Celebrity, and the Democratized Portrait," by Rachel Teukolsky; and "Champagne in the Shrubbery: Sex, Science, and Space in James Tissot's London Conservatory," by Samantha Burton. Topics include late-nineteenth century visual culture, the use of foreground and backgrounds in art and photography, and technological innovations and popular culture.

William Morris's literary and political writings offer a prescient eco-socialist analysis of extraction capitalism and coal combustion, suggesting a geocritical dimension to what I will call his aesthetics of surface. An early adopter of the position that capitalism is fundamentally incompatible with Earth's ecological balance, Morris was attuned not only to the way that the idea of free exchange obscures the market's remainder of surplus value, but also to the way that the idea of unregulated natural balance denies environmental remainders such as pollution and waste. Morris's aesthetics favor surface and exteriority over depth, registering a value shift away from excavated underground commodities and toward surface resources such as sunlight and air. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers the first comprehensive examination of the cinema train in Britain, arguing that the history of the movie coach expands our understanding of exhibition and distribution networks in twentieth-century Britain, particularly with regard to news consumption. Using contemporary press reports, archived documents, and the newsreels shown in the carriages, this article also articulates how narratives about the nation's empire and self-projected modernity influenced the cinema train's construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]