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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]

By 1865 British Imperial governments had accepted that colonial courts had the authority to invalidate colonial statutes which contravened the relevant colony's constitution. This situation arose notwithstanding the lack of any express grant of such jurisdiction to colonial courts in Imperial or colonial legislation. This paper evaluates the first instance of a colonial court asserting that jurisdiction, during the Dog Act crisis in Van Diemen's Land (Tasmania) in the 1840s. Part one of the paper charts the background to, conduct of and judgment in the relevant litigation. The second part, which will appear in a future issue of this journal, explores the consequential attempts of the colony's Governor to remove the judges from office and to re-enact the invalidated colonial law. The suggestion made is that the Dog Act controversy provides considerable insight into how, despite the absence of any explicit statutory grant of such jurisdiction, the power of judicial review of colonial legislation by colonial courts became established as an orthodox element of British colonial constitutional law in the latter nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Local newspapers such as the Sheffield Guardian provide valuable insight into the development of the Labour Party and the wider left-wing press in early twentieth-century Britain. The Guardian's ten-year history between 1906 and 1916 reflects how Labour's political identity evolved in Sheffield, progressing through struggles to preserve Labour's independence and commitment to socialist principles against co-operation with rival parties, to a more pragmatic and less idealistic attitude that more adequately recognized the everyday concerns of potential working-class supporters. This tussle eventually centred on the Guardian itself as Attercliffe MP Joseph Pointer sought to transform the paper from its status as a niche publication that had previously acted as a polemical platform for old editor and initial creator, Alfred Barton. Consistent interaction with national figures in the Labour Party, particularly Ramsay MacDonald, also reveals the often problematic relationship between the local movement and national policy. Furthermore, changes to the style, content and management of the Guardian were indicative of the wider state of the left-wing press as Labour hesitated to ameliorate its focus on propaganda by recognizing the continuing commercialization of print media in British society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the establishment of the first Protestant church in midnineteenth-century Jerusalem, under Ottoman rule, relying mainly on British Foreign Office archives. It begins with an introduction to the geopolitical context for the spread of Protestantism in Greater Syria, with particular focus on Palestine, including Britain's initial diplomatic efforts to achieve this goal and the challenges it faced on different fronts. The discussion situates these challenges and the ways Britain overcame them within the context of Ottoman imperial regulations, which recurringly stalled or halted construction efforts. As a result, Britain's hopes of establishing a Protestant church in Jerusalem, and the Ottoman sultan's frequent obstruction of these efforts, reflect the layered British-Ottoman relations in the nineteenth century. The paper ends with an examination of the ways the British government managed to secure an Ottoman permit (firman) issued by the sultan, that allowed the completion of the church's construction in 1849. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this second paper in a series of four, we examine how the era of sustained economic growth also gave rise to recurring economic crises. Assessing the economic turbulence of the late 19th century and the early 20th century, and three prominent crises of the 20th and early 21st centuries: the period following the Second World War, the 1980–1981 Recession and the 2008 Financial Crisis, we survey how the economy and policy have reacted historically to shocks to growth, how crises have restructured industry and work, altering productivity and impacting future growth potential, and how the long-run growth trend persists despite periods of decline or stagnation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 100th anniversary of the Liverpool Tidal Institute (LTI) was celebrated during 2019. One aspect of tidal science for which the LTI acquired a worldwide reputation was the development and use of tide prediction machines (TPMs). The TPM was invented in the late 19th century, but most of them were made in the first half of the 20th century, up until the time that the advent of digital computers consigned them to museums. This paper describes the basic principles of a TPM, reviews how many were constructed around the world and discusses the method devised by Arthur Doodson at the LTI for the determination of harmonic tidal constants from tide gauge data. These constants were required in order to set up the TPMs for predicting the heights and times of the tides. Although only 3 of the 30-odd TPMs constructed were employed in operational tidal prediction at the LTI, Doodson was responsible for the design and oversight of the manufacture of several others. The paper demonstrates how the UK, and the LTI and Doodson in particular, played a central role in this area of tidal science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In addition to the regular Schwabe cycles of approximately 11 y, "prolonged solar activity minima" have been identified through the direct observation of sunspots and aurorae, as well as proxy data of cosmogenic isotopes. Some of these prolonged minima have been regarded as grand solar minima, which are arguably associated with the special state of the solar dynamo and have attracted significant scientific interest. In this paper, we review how these prolonged solar activity minima have been identified. In particular, we focus on the Dalton Minimum, which is named after John Dalton. We review Dalton's scientific achievements, particularly in geophysics. Special emphasis is placed on his lifelong observations of auroral displays over approximately five decades in Great Britain. Dalton's observations for the auroral frequency allowed him to notice the scarcity of auroral displays in the early 19th century. We analyze temporal variations in the annual frequency of such displays from a modern perspective. The contemporary geomagnetic positions of Dalton's observational site make his dataset extremely valuable because his site is located in the sub-auroral zone and is relatively sensitive to minor enhancements in solar eruptions and solar wind streams. His data indicate clear solar cycles in the early 19th century and their significant depression from 1798 to 1824. Additionally, his data reveal a significant spike in auroral frequency in 1797, which chronologically coincides with the "lost cycle" that is arguably located at the late Solar Cycle 4. Therefore, John Dalton's achievements can still benefit modern science and help us improve our understanding of the Dalton Minimum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early in the nineteenth century, members in the UK Parliament (MPs) hardly ever debated education. When they did, it was nearly always in the context of aid for the religious instruction of the poor. Indeed, even by 1850, nearly two decades after the first Great Reform Act (1832), the Prime Minister Lord John Russell made the case that a system of compulsory state schooling would be immoral and un-British. Yet, by the '80s, MPs debating in Westminster routinely drew connections between schooling and the most critical social issues of the day: social-class mobility and equity, child welfare, national development, emigration, and the civil service, among others. What explains the expanding, and expansive, political uses that elite policymakers put to schooling? How did schooling and education take on such an aggrandized role in society for British statesmen? To address these questions, this paper combines natural language processing techniques, semantic network, discourse, and regression analyses to read and interpret the ∼1.1 million political speeches given in the UK Houses of Parliament during the long nineteenth century (1804–1913). In contrast to explanations emphasizing the direct role that economic, social, and political development as well as conflict played in the UK state's historic expansion, this piece demonstrates how social scientization, the sweeping international epistemic movement that institutionalized and diffused functionalist social theory, created the context that made it possible for political elites to see and promote schooling as an effective policy instrument of greater cultural rationalization supporting the development of capitalist industrial society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The story of carriage cleaners has been sadly neglected in the history of railway workers. The work has low pay, it is sometimes unpleasant, and it is also physically tough. This panorama paper explores some of the literature surrounding the history of carriage cleaners from the earliest records in the nineteenth century, through the two world wars, up to the early days of privatisation. The focus is on female carriage cleaners, exploring the reasons why their work has been hidden from history and putting forward an argument as to why more attention should be drawn to it. Despite its low pay and poor working conditions, cleaning work is found at an important nexus of the railway economy, ensuring that the spaces of railway travel remain sanitary and functional. Given their importance for the operation of the railway transport system, it is surprising that cleaners remain largely invisible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the opening up of parliamentary proceedings to greater public scrutiny in the two decades after the 1832 Reform Act. It examines developments in the publication of parliamentary debates, considering why proposals for an official parliamentary record were rejected in the 1830s. It also discusses two less well-studied but equally vital means of publicising parliamentary activity: the publication of official division lists and the sale to the public of parliamentary papers. It argues that the 1830s was a critical decade of change, influenced by shifting perceptions of the relationship between the reformed house of commons and those it sought to represent. This was driven, in particular, by liberal notions of the importance of parliamentary accountability to public opinion: MPs were increasingly aware of the need to keep constituents informed of their parliamentary activities, whether in the chamber, committee room or division lobby. This article also highlights the extent to which the Commons' approach to publicising its activities was constrained not only by the fact that it remained a breach of parliamentary privilege to publish reports of debates, but also by the physical space that the Commons occupied. The destruction of much of the old Palace of Westminster by fire in 1834 provided an important opportunity to remodel existing arrangements, notably with the addition of a second division lobby and the construction of a reporters' gallery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, historians of English psychiatry have shifted their major concerns away from asylums and psychiatrists in the nineteenth century. This is also seen in the studies of twentieth-century psychiatry where historians have debated the rise of psychology, eugenics and community care. This shift in interest, however, does not indicate that English psychiatrists became passive and unimportant actors in the last century. In fact, they promoted Lunacy Law reform for a less asylum-dependent mode of psychiatry, with a strong emphasis on professional development. This paper illustrates the historical dynamics around the professional development of English psychiatry by employing Andrew Abbott’s concept of professional development. Abbott redefines professional development as arising from both abstraction of professional knowledge and competition regarding professional jurisdiction. A profession, he suggests, develops through continuous re-formation of its occupational structure, mode of practice and political language in competing with other professional and non-professional forces. In early twentieth-century England, psychiatrists promoted professional development by framing political discourse, conducting a daily trade and promoting new legislation to defend their professional jurisdiction. This professional development story began with the Lunacy Act of 1890, which caused a professional crisis in psychiatry and led to inter-professional competition with non-psychiatric medical service providers. To this end, psychiatrists devised a new political rhetoric, ‘early treatment of mental disorder’, in their professional interests and succeeded in enacting the Mental Treatment Act of 1930, which re-instated psychiatrists as masters of English psychiatry. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper investigates whether high borrowing costs deterred investment in sanitation infrastructure in late nineteenth-century Britain. Town Councils had to borrow to fund investment, with considerable variation in interest rates across towns and over time. Panel regressions, using annual data from more than 800 town councils, indicate that higher interest rates were associated with lower levels of infrastructure investment between 1887 and 1903. Instrumental variable regressions show that falling interest rates after 1887 stimulated investment and led to lower infant mortality. These findings suggest that Parliament could have expedited mortality decline by subsidizing loans or facilitating private borrowing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the physicist John Tyndall's journal writing in the mid-nineteenth century and focuses on how Tyndall used his journal during a series of transitions that occurred when he was a young man: when he went from being a surveyor to a public school instructor and then from a Ph.D. student and budding experimenter in Germany to Professor of Natural Philosophy at the Royal Institution in London. As well as providing insight into these various transitions, the journal more importantly shows how Tyndall developed a particular ethical conception of self, based on his readings of Carlyle, Emerson, and Fichte, and how that sense of self shaped—and was shaped by—his early experimental practices. Thus, the article is a case study in the development of a particular scientific self that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century, whose novel claim to authority was based on a particular fusion of the ethical and the epistemological. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that food adulteration is constitutive of capitalist food production. Through an analysis of the plasticity of legal reasoning on food regulations during the second half of the 19th century in Britain, the paper demonstrates the key role of the state in enforcing the distinction between legal and illegal forms of food adulteration, which is essential to understand contemporary dynamics in food production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses how gluten was discussed by chemists in the nineteenth century in Great Britain and France as a proxy for both nutritive and baking quality. It examines the role of gluten in the broader quest to measure and render the quality of wheat and flour through a set of objective and quantifiable criteria. The paper also shows how measuring quality proved to be an extremely complex task, and how chemistry was, by itself, unable to reduce the complexity of the wheat grain, and the various demands made upon it, to a simple numerical indicator. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite a wealth of academic research focusing on the origins and development of association football in Britain during the nineteenth century, academics have failed to reach a consensus regarding the early history of the game with the emergence of contrasting ‘orthodox’ and ‘revisionist’ interpretations. Much of the current research has focused on tackling the subject on a national level and this has resulted in many towns, cities and regions across the country being overlooked when sports historians discuss the origins of modern football. One such region is North Staffordshire, more commonly referred to as The Potteries, which, despite having played a key role in the formation of the Football League, possessing one of the oldest professional football clubs in the country and an early county football association, has never been the subject of an in-depth academic study. Using a range of archival sources this paper provides an overview of the origins and early development of association football across The Potteries from the 1850 to 1870s, emphasizing the influence of Stoke City Football Club and provides a fact based resolution to the debate surrounding the club’s origin and formation. The wider development of the game in The Potteries is also explored, tracing the early informal football activities taking place at fairs, fetes and the wakes holidays to the establishment of a football culture in the 1870s following the formation of organized football clubs and the Staffordshire Football Association. This paper concludes that neither the orthodox nor the revisionist interpretations of the game’s origins can fully explain the region’s football development and that further research into the region is required to understand the significance of The Potteries in relation to the national picture. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Timber has been a versatile material for centuries. During the start of the Railway Age in the nineteenth century it was in considerable demand, particularly for bridge building. Timber is still in service and widely used throughout the UK network. The resilience and favourable strength to weight ratio and its relative ease of fabrication make it an attractive material. Longitudinal wheeltimbers are used extensively to carry track in situations where it is desirable to reduce the weight of bridges and in locations where the depth of the structure prevents the use of ballasted track. Most wheeltimbers in the UK comprise creosoted Douglas fir and to a lesser extent, naturally durable tropical hardwoods. Concerns about the effects of fungal decay and non-standardised inspection regimes are problematic. Managing the network is complex and imposes high and often conflicting demands on infrastructure asset managers. Effective asset management within a safety critical sector is an essential discipline. It is the variable nature of timber that presents significant management challenges. This paper summarises a strategy to improve the examination of wheeltimbers and assesses the feasibility of extending service life. This approach may deliver more effective asset management of timber assets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article continues research into social mobility in England in the nineteenth century by examining the links with different occupational structures, socio-economic and industry/occupation, for a specific location. This allows an examination of the impact of the characteristics of these structures on occupational and thence on social mobility. Occupational mobility has long been recognised as a major determinant of social mobility and has been the subject of a number of papers, usually to determine how much a specific variable affects the level and type of mobility observed. Rarely do these analyses consider the location’s occupational structure, and its changes, as a determinant of the level of mobility. This paper finds that much of the variability of occupational mobility of a locality is determined by the characteristics of the different industries and occupations in that location. Industries and occupations provide a context within which other factors, such as literacy, operate. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Issues associated with school absenteeism have attracted considerable attention and have long been one of the focal points of government strategies for school improvement. Pupil non-attendance is not a new phenomenon and featured prominently in Her Majesty’s Inspectors’ reports from 1839. This paper outlines the patterns of and influences on elementary education in early Victorian industrial Monmouthshire during the period 1839–1865. The twin problems of irregular attendance and early withdrawal of pupils are discussed together with the limitations and unreliability of contemporary statistics. An examination of the reasons for absence is then discussed together with the remedies proposed to alleviate the problem with particular reference to the contribution of the Prize Schemes. The paper illustrates the disadvantages of basing an educational system on voluntary endeavour and enlightened self-interest and highlights the paradox that, despite the introduction of mandatory attendance, the problem is still persistent and protracted and finding definitive solutions still remains elusive. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Painting with oil over photographs on canvas was a widespread practice in the nineteenth century, mainly for the production of portraits and copies of oil paintings. It flourished in a context where both photographers and traditional painters were trying to innovate and adjust to new technological advances and demands of their time. However, despite the popularity of oil-painted photographs, they have not been the subject of substantial technical and historical study, which resulted in most of these photo-paintings not having been properly identified. Therefore, this research looks at the photographic processes used for printing on canvas in the UK between 1850 and 1890, knowledge of which is necessary for the identification of photo-paintings. It also looks at how the practice of the Austrian painter and photographer Georg Koberwein (1820–1876) fits within this context, including the examination of four paintings by the artist in the Royal Collection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focused on several aspects of life in Great Britain. I wanted to concentrate chiefly on two important points. Firstly, I tried to find and compare the differences in lifestyle and related entertainment in the country villages, towns and cities in the early years of the nineteenth century which I perceived as largely dominated by deeply rooted traditions and strict social norms. As the basic source for my research I selected some of Jane Austen's novels as they serve as real social chronicles of her times. Secondly, I did a similar analysis and comparison of the same aspects at the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as they were reflected in Helen Fielding's novel Bridget Jones' Diary. I thoroughly analysed and compared the aspects of life, the habits, norms, rules and views, class affiliations, the snobbery, vanity and conceit of middle and upper classes in Britain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The findings, based mostly on the strictly observed and applied rules of socializing showed that no matter what century we live in now, nothing much has changed between Austen's and present times when speaking of social rules, norms, class distinctions and equally importantly - position of women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The article discusses the condition of American communities in Great Britain, particulary in London and Liverpool, England, to recast U.S. foreign relations as expatriate foreign relations during the Civil War in 1861-1865 and to extend historians' knowledge of the war's transnational dimensions. It examines the transnational origins of Civil War diplomacy through a case study of the U.S. Sanitary Commission's (USSC) London branch. It also exlores how these communities maintained the networks of trade, migration and investment that structured U.S. foreign relations.

In this paper, we present the results of an original research study that was based on the analysis of British charts of the Adriatic produced during and immediately after military operations undertaken by British forces and their allies against Napoleon in the Adriatic. We analyse the creation and production of British charts of the Adriatic from the first charting campaign of the Hydrographic Office of 1800-1801 to charts produced in the period of British rule over the island of Lissa of 1811-1815 to the first systematic hydrographic surveying of the Adriatic of 1817-1819 under the leadership of William Henry Smyth that resulted in the first hydrographic atlas and pilot book of the Adriatic. At the same time, the paper evaluates the British contribution to the creation of some of the first reliable nautical charts of the Adriatic and to the development of the nautical cartography of the Adriatic in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a critical reappraisal of an interpretation about men and domesticity which has been current in nineteenth-century British historiography since the 1990s. Domesticity was the Victorian shorthand for how the ties of gender and generation should be ordered in family life. The ‘flight from domesticity’ – especially the growing trend of postponing marriage – signalled men’s growing impatience with these ties in the late nineteenth century. Recent scholarship has questioned both the validity of ‘flight’ and the equation of domesticity with familial relations. These debates are here reviewed, focusing in turn on the emotional economy of the bourgeois family, the homosocial conditioning of boarding education, the changing representation of women in public and the occupational choices of middle-class men. The paper concludes that ‘flight’ only fully works in relation to a restricted segment of the upper middle class, but the social and cultural prominence of that segment endowed its ambivalence about domesticity with a disproportionate significance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the late nineteenth century British culture, politics and history were customary topics in Polish newspapers, and Shakespeare's dramas were the most often performed classic texts on the Warsaw theatre stage. However, in this paper focusing on Warsaw seasons 1814/1815–1900/1901 I demonstrate that surprisingly one can hardly talk about any form of cultural transfer between the British and Polish popular theatre and drama in that period. The analysis of the Warsaw repertoire, travel recollections to the United Kingdom and press articles, reveal that even though the Polish nation treated the UK as a point of reference, it consistently rejected the British theatre at large and theatre entertainment in particular, and considered it 'crude' and in bad taste. I claim that the geopolitical situation of Poland cannot alone account for this puzzle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the method andfirst results of using the 1881 England and Wales Census Enumerators ' Books (CEBs) to identify and extract employer records using occupational information. Over 230,000 employers are identified, of which aboutfour fifth s employ others. Important sub-groups are also identified of the own account selfemployed, company proprietors, directors and partnerships. The article demonstrates the feasibility of the method and uses the example of the building industry to illustrate firm-si-ye distribution atparish level across England and Wales. The paper indicates the applicability of the extraction method to other censuses, which is now possible using the recently released I-CeM database. The paper also demonstrates some difficulties in the database fo r 1881, including data keying and coding errors, ranging from 0.5 to 5.5 percent of entries fo r larger businesses. Gender miscoding appears to be a systematic error of about 0.7 per 1,000 people. The analysis suggests that where small or atypical sample groups are involved, users of the census database should make detailed checks with manuscript CEBs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the contribution made by the mechanics’ institute movement in Britain just prior to, and following, the opening of the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London. It argues that far from making little contribution to education, as often portrayed by historians, the movement was ideally positioned to respond to the findings of the Exhibition, which were that foreign goods on display were often more advanced than those produced in Britain. The paper highlights, through a regional study, how well suited mechanics’ institutes were in organising their own exhibitions, providing the idea of this first international exhibition. Subsequently, many offered nationally recognised technical subject examinations through relevant education as well as informing government commissions, prior to the passing of the Technical Instruction Acts in 1889 and the Local Taxation Act of 1890. These acts effectively put mechanics’ institutes into state ownership as the first step in developing further education for all in Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As soon as the corpse became central to medical education, and as a growing number of private medical schools opened throughout Great Britain, involving the rise of the demand for dead bodies, the literary field played a significant part in the popularisation of medical knowledge, offering insights into the debates around medical practice and education. As this paper will show, the literary field dealt with medical practitioners' treatment of the corpse through playing upon a Gothic rhetoric, dramatizing the tension between the cutting up, preservation and exhibition of human remains in medical collections and the objectification of the patient on the one hand, and the central part played by anatomy in medical knowledge and the therapeutic applications of dissection, on the other. Through exploring how literary texts capitalizing on the Gothic paraphernalia recorded cultural responses to medical practice in the long nineteenth century, this paper will ultimately underline the role that nineteenth-century literature played, not merely in the dissemination of medical knowledge but also in the public engagement of medicine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between the foundation of the Anti-Slavery Society in 1823 and the passage of the Slave Emancipation Act in 1833, the British West India interest mounted a pervasive and influential campaign in defence of colonial slavery. This article gives the fullest account yet of the strength and activities of the West India interest during that decade of debate and argument. Moreover, this article demonstrates that the West Indians—far from a reactionary political rump—successfully created a broader pro-slavery lobby. First, the West Indians cultivated the support of numerous leading conservative periodicals such as Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, the Quarterly Review, and Fraser's Magazine. Secondly, the West Indians courted the political favour of several leading Tories of the day, among them Canning, Huskisson, Peel and Wellington. Consequently, this article shows that pro-slavery sympathies were prevalent and influential with British print and political culture until 1833. It concludes that, for many Britons and especially British conservatives, colonial slavery—as much as the monarchy, the aristocracy and the Established Church—was an essential element of national life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper makes a further contribution to the ‘Origins of Football’ debate, seeking to defend the so-called ‘revisionist’ position in that debate by calling into question the reclassification, by some historians, of reports of football played outside of the public schools in the early and mid-nineteenth century. It does not, however, argue that the ‘revisionist’ position should be seen in direct opposition to the ‘traditionalist’ account of football’s origins but in addition to it, bipolar conceptual schemata not being useful in understanding the development and diffusion of the game. In that respect, more evidence is provided from the early 1860s of football playing outside of public school or public schoolboy influence arguing that this evidence ought to be added to other revisionist evidence, and some traditional evidence, to build a further refined, yet fluid, account of the history of football in the nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper undertakes to explore the manifestation of the new feminist ideal in British society towards the end of the nineteenth century, the New Woman, in Henry James's novella Daisy Miller. The aim of this study is to ascertain that the author faithfully reflects some of the current social circumstances with reference to women's rights and their position in British, as well as other European societies. Thus, it is expected to contribute to our realistic understanding of gender roles in the late nineteenth century, which can later be used for picturing the historical dimension of women's discrimination. As far as literary contribution is concerned, this study is expected to contribute to the overall theoretical and critical analysis of the novella in question. The main research methods employed in this paper are textual analysis and compilation. A couple of literary concepts and theories interpreted from a feminist perspective are used as main methodological tools for conducting the analysis of the novella. Among them are: the angel in the house, the theory of the abject, the theory of marginalization, and androcentrism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As part of a series of demands for political reform in Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Jeremy Bentham famously made a case for use of the secret ballot in elections. The advocacy of Bentham and his disciples on this issue fed into broader and at times robust public debate, particularly in the 1830s. On the opposite side of this debate was another leading political theorist, John Stuart Mill, who opposed secret ballot reform. This paper re-examines the contours of this debate, making the case that it has important implications for contemporary political theory and debates about democracy. Firstly, and in terms of making sense of the debate itself, it points to the need to make a distinction between the 'voter intimidation' argument and the Benthamite preference aggregation argument. Secondly, it suggests that distinguishing between vote-buying and voter's dependence provides support for defenders of the secret ballot. Thirdly, it demonstrates the potential application of the idea of voting held in 'trust' to the so-called boundary problem in democratic theory. Finally, it points to the potentially wide but overlooked application of the Chartist idea of open voting (allowing the oppressed to identify their allies) in contemporary political theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The new Irish and English poor laws of the nineteenth century were based on ideologies prevalent during the period of Improvement. The workhouse was the central instrument of these new Acts. Through an archival and archaeological methodology, this paper investigates the physical manifestations of the governing ideologies of reform and improvement and the manifestations of resistance to this reform in one type of institution, Ulster's nineteenth-century workhouses (a province that spans Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland). It also reflects on how these once despised institutions are now used, through community efforts, as recreational and 'reform' centers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historically an exclusive, upper-class entertainment, private theatricals became a widespread, primarily middle-class pastime in the course of the nineteenth century. To the emerging bourgeoisie, play-acting represented an important way to negotiate class identity by emulating the habits of social elites. The foremost raw materials for private stagings of drama were the acting editions of plays published most prolifically in the second half of the century by T. H. Lacy and Samuel French, consecutively. This paper examines Lacy’s and French’s publication and marketing strategies by placing side by side guide literature and play series issued by them, to illuminate the impact these strategies had on the dramatic marketplace, and the way that Lacy, in particular, engaged social anxieties about the theatre in establishing his business concept. It then traces the changing composition of Lacy’s and French’s Acting Editions to highlight a significant increase in plays by women from the 1880s onwards. I argue that this increase expresses the evolution of amateur theatricals into a distinctly middle-class social practice because the female dramatists that French’s favoured, produced work congruent with bourgeois interest in morally sound, domestic topics and educational value, and recommended themselves through the respectable public personas they created for themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Afghanistan is the country in the world with the most SALW (small arms and light weapons). Contrary to what is usually assumed, the proliferation of modern firearms in the country did not start in the 1980s, but at the end of the 19th century, when Pashtun tribes acquired modern rifles and ammunition through a variety of means, mostly through smuggling. The paper investigates the illegal arms trade from the Gulf to the north-western Indian Frontier, an area of crucial importance for British imperial strategists and the Government of India, at a time of great power rivalry and a relative decline of Britain's global influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Black people's contributions to print ventures have been constant and manifold across the Atlantic world during the past centuries. If enslavement and forced labor dictated their involvement in many instances, Black people from early on also adopted the roles of authors, contributors, subscribers, and, notably, editors of different print materials. This collection of essays pays respect to different embodiments of Black editors in the Atlantic world, highlighting that from North to South America to Great Britain they occupied and promoted multifaceted roles, agendas, and poieses during a transformative period in the Atlantic world, the long nineteenth century. [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]

"Spreading the News: The Illustrated Press," focuses on the new concept of the illustrated universal survey periodical that appeared early in the 1830s, first in England, then in France. It was enabled by technological advances such as the steam press, cheaper paper, wood engraving and stereotypes, as well as greater literacy among the citizenry. The earliest illustrated periodicals were published by social reformers in both countries who were attempting to raise the status of the working classes, but the medium soon attracted wealthier, more educated strata as well; within decades the illustrated press had spread throughout the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Puerperal insanity has been described as a nineteenth-century diagnosis, entrenched in contemporary expectations of proper womanly behaviour. Drawing on detailed study of establishment registers and patient case notes, this paper examines the puerperal insanity diagnosis at Dundee Lunatic Asylum between 1820 and 1860. In particular, the study aims to consider whether the class or social status of the patients had a bearing on how their conditions were perceived and rationalized, and how far the puerperal insanity diagnosis, coloured by the values assigned to it by the medical officers, may have been reserved for some women and not for others. This examination of the diagnosis in a Scottish community, suggesting a contrast in the way that middle-class and working-class women were diagnosed at Dundee, engages with and expands on work on puerperal insanity elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The separation of examining from teaching, pushed furthest in the ‘examining university’ of which London University, founded in 1836, was the model, was a much-debated principle in nineteenth-century Britain. This separation was generally rejected in Scotland, but only after complex controversies that illustrate how Scots defined their university tradition in comparative terms, and how Scottish developments interacted with those in England and Ireland. Among the issues involved were proposals for a National University or central examining board, and claims that graduates should have a right to give ‘extramural’ teaching in competition with professors. The paper traces this aspect of university reform in Scotland from the 1820s to the 1890s, and argues that the professorial model and the integration of teaching and examining were successfully consolidated and defended. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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The period between 1880 and 1900 was rich with discussions of the role of both journalists and journalism in Britain. Not only did the period witness the intensification and systematization of technologies associated with the gathering and dissemination of news but it was also a time when journalists were beginning to identify themselves collectively and professionally. The technological developments and corresponding professional reassessment provided the periodicals of the time with a rich source of debate, disagreement and delineation regarding the function of journalism. While considering contemporary discussions of the social and political purposes of journalism, we should be aware that definitional problems have beset the practice for well over a hundred years and across very different technological and cultural regimes. This paper explores a range of periodical discussion with the intention of highlighting key points in the debate from the late nineteenth century and asserts the continuing relevance of defining the roles of journalism in the present day. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that political considerations, economic theory, attitudes toward public finance, and concerns about regional development all influenced contemporary responses to the Galway packet-boat contract of 1859-64. Though historians have conventionally depicted the dispute over the contract as an episode in Victorian high politics, it maintains that the controversy surrounding the agreement between the Galway Company and the state cannot be understood solely in terms of party manoeuvre at Westminster. In the context of the Union between Britain and Ireland, the Galway contract raised important questions about the role of the British government in fostering Irish economic development through public expenditure. Politicians and opinion-makers adopted a variety of ideologically informed positions when addressing this issue, resulting in diverse approaches to state intervention, often across party lines. While political calculation and pressure from interest groups certainly affected policy, the substantive debate on the contract helped to shape the late Victorian Irish policy of both British parties by clarifying contemporary ideas about the economic functions appropriate to the Union state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Cartographica is the property of University of Toronto Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article documents the stark differences in the legal regulation of corporations in the United States compared to Britain and other Western European countries in the nineteenth century. The lack of alternative ways of obtaining ‘corporate’ advantages in common-law countries made the corporate form much more politically fraught than in civil-law countries. In the United States, general incorporation laws came after the attainment of universal white manhood suffrage and were part of a broader egalitarian movement to ensure that elites did not have advantages over everyone else. As a result, they were highly prescriptive, limiting corporations’ size and duration and also mandating specific governance rules. In Great Britain, by contrast, general incorporation laws were passed in a context where only a small fraction of the population could vote. Because the interests at stake in the legislation were those of the business and financial elite, British company law (like the less politically controversial statutes enacted on the European continent) left the rules governing corporations largely to the contracting parties themselves. This paper also argues that understanding the patterns in general incorporation laws requires scholars to move beyond cross-country regressions to study the political economic processes that unfolded in these different settings. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

English painter Barbara Bodichon received a dynamic home education, consisting of engaging lessons, reading sessions, family discussions, sketching excursions, and trips at home and abroad. As an adult, Bodichon led a nomadic life, living between Algeria and England and travelling across Europe and America. Seeking to unpack travelling and travel letters as sources of learning, this paper studies Bodichon’s correspondence as epistolary articulations of herBildung(self-cultivation). It argues that, conforming toBildung’s idea of forging one’s individuality in interaction with the world, her travelling provided her with a variety of settings through which she extended towards the unknown and incorporated it into her sense of being. In turn, letters functioned as forums where she made sense of encountering the difference through which she individualised her subjectivity. Notwithstanding, a revised reading ofBildungpermits teasing out to what extent Bodichon’s self-cultivation was developed at the expense of certain social categories. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]