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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]

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.

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

"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]

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]

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]

Coal was crucial to the growth of several South American states between 1850 and 1913, being used for their expanding railway networks, to generate power for their emerging industries, and by the steamships in which much of their overseas trade was conducted. Lacking indigenous sources of sufficiently high quality, Argentina and Brazil in particular came to rely heavily on Welsh coal for their energy needs. While playing a crucial role in the economic development of such countries, Welsh coal and its distribution network of coaling stations also helped in protecting the trade between Britain and South America, allowing the Royal Navy to have access to the most suitable coal for its purposes at distances varying from almost 4000 to 10,000 miles from its point of origin. This paper explores various aspects of the development of this trade and argues that, in discussions of the development of the informal empire, the significance of (Welsh) coal should not be overlooked, as has tended to be the case in some modern works. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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 paper investigates the origins of Anglican Anglo-Catholic missions, through the missionary theology and practice of the founder of the Society of St John the Evangelist, Fr Richard Benson, and an exploration of its initial missionary endeavours: the Twelve-Day Mission to London in 1869, and two missions in India from 1874. The Indian missions comprised an institutional mission at Bombay and Pune, and a unique ascetic enculturated mission at Indore by Fr Samuel Wilberforce O'Neill ssje. It is argued that Benson was a major figure in the inauguration of Anglo-Catholic missions; that his ritualist moderation was instrumental in the initial public success of Anglo-Catholic domestic mission; and that in overseas missions he had a clear theological preference for disconnecting evangelism from Europeanising. Benson's approach, more radical than was normal in the second half of the nineteenth century, was a consequence of envisaging mission's being undertaken by a religious order, an entirely new phenomenon for Anglican missions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Despite his ambitions to be considered among the greatest actors in the world, Richard Mansfield only appeared as a starring performer outside of North America in one tour. Drawing on Pascale Casanova's notion of the 'world republic of literature', this paper analyses his London residency of 1888-89 and its financial and critical failure, characterising these as evidence of a transatlantic cultural system by which late-Victorian acting was accorded aesthetic value based on the judgment of professional critics in metropolitan centres like London. Mansfield's choices of repertoire are seen as part of his conscious desire to emulate, and compete with, Henry Irving, then the English world's most prominent actor. Ultimately, failure in London made Mansfield, a British citizen by birth, choose to embrace an identity as a distinctly American actor-manager. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this paper is to correct a widespread misconception about the work of Robert Leslie Ellis and John Venn, namely that it can be considered as the ‘British empiricist’ reaction against the traditional theory of probability. It is argued, instead, that there was no unified ‘British school’ of frequentism during the nineteenth century. Where Ellis arrived at frequentism from a metaphysical idealist transformation of probability theory’s mathematical calculations, Venn did so on the basis of an empiricist critique of its ‘inverse application’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article explores the relationship between the Chartist movement for parliamentary reform in Great Britain and the Irish autonomy movement for repeal of the 1800 Act of Union led by legislator Daniel O'Connell. Emphasis is given to topics such as the role of Irish migrants in Chartism, the development of Chartism in Ireland, and the expelling of Chartists from Repeal Associations.

An essay is presented examining how Victorian British foreign policy was impacted by the Dilessi murders, the 1870 murder of British travellers in Greece by brigands. It looks at the relationship between foreign policy and domestic party politics to discuss Liberal political attitudes of the era. Particular attention is given to the views of prime ministers Lord Palmerston and William Ewart Gladstone, and statesman Richard Cobden.

In the new technology of the steamship, London was by far the most dominant port in the UK. The Thames was where the steamship was more visible, and more visible in all its forms, than in any other location. Using a parliamentary return of 1851 this article analyses the characteristics and the ownership of the London steam fleet. Owners ranged from giants like General Steam Navigation Company and Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company to humble owners of single small vessels and steamship services embraced river ferries, tugboats and coastal, continental and oceanic routes. All contributed to change dramatically the nature of the capital’s commerce and city transport. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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

In the 19. century, slave markets in the Ottoman Empire appeared as a social reality, in the meantime, they embellished Western imagination. Particularly the influence of the texts related to captivity of the Greek women and children and their sale to slave markets by the Turks during the Greek struggle for independence (1821-1829) was striking in the Western world. The issue of captivity of the Greeks, beyond providing support to philhellenism, was also used to supply a discursive equipment by abolitionists against slavery in Britain and the United States. This paper aims to analyse specifically with the approach that the meaning of a phenomenon is context-determined in which it is interpreted. First, it will try to evaluate texts related to the Ottoman slave markets, and then, show how the Greek slavery in slave markets was perceived by the abolitionists and its using by them for discursive construction of abolitionism in Britain and the United States at the following decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

John Snow has become a legendary figure partly for his use of spatial data to support his once controversial theory that cholera is a water-borne disease. For his study of London south of the Thames, Snow used data compiled by William Farr for the Registrar General during the 1853-4 epidemic. Using a larger data set compiled by William Farr in 1868, we use geographical information system-based software ArcGIS to spatially illustrate the cholera mortality rate in London subdistricts during the Asiatic cholera epidemics of 1848-9, 1853-4, and 1866. We then map the waterfields of London's eight water companies allowing us to highlight the connection John Snow saw between the rate of cholera mortality within a subdistrict and which water company operated within that particular subdistrict. Our maps also show the connection between the rate of cholera mortality in each subdistrict and average subdistrict elevation, a variable which Farr initially believed was more significant than water source. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Economic History Research / Investigaciones de Historia Económica is the property of Asociacion Espanola de Historia Economica 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.)

Between 1800 and 1850 the British newspapers published over 1,000 newspaper articles concerned with Irish abduction, offering a stark contrast to the little attention devoted to English cases during the same period. This article examines representations of Irish abduction in the British press and considers how this form of sexual spectacle contributed to British perceptions of Ireland during this period. Analysis of a number of particularly heinous abduction cases from the early nineteenth century demonstrates how images of vulnerable and often violated women encouraged unfavourable contrasts between Irish and British masculinity in ways that served to heighten anxieties about the nature of civilisation in Ireland. In so doing, this newspaper coverage of Irish abduction helped to assuage concerns about ‘the Irish question’ and, this article argues, to justify the coercive nature of Britain's imperial presence there. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the role of the prize system instituted by the 1807 Slave Trade Act of Great Britain, in which the party that had captured a slave ship could receive the full value of the ship and its cargo, in British abolitionism during the early 19th century. Particular focus is given to anti-slavery activity in the British colony of Sierra Leone. According to the author, slaves captured under the 1807 legislation were freed from legal ownership but coerced into labor by the state.

Background: There is no widespread agreement over what form healthcare professional regulation should take, and the evidence base concerning the effectiveness and fairness of regulatory systems and practices is limited. Those urging policy change argue there is a need to modernize; however, there is much we can learn from reviewing the history of healthcare professional regulation.Main Body: An overview of the history of regulation in Canada, with consideration of the United States of America and the United Kingdom, is provided. Self-regulating professions emerged in the nineteenth century, influenced by a variety of stakeholders responding to local concerns for healthcare quality, access and professional training. Regulatory practices changed over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in response to changing stakeholders and shifting interests.Conclusions: Reviewing the history of healthcare professional regulation reveals lessons to inform policy in a range of settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Tikrit University for Humanities is the property of Republic of Iraq Ministry of Higher Education & Scientific Research (MOHESR) 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.)

Private and local investors provided much of the capital to improve England's infrastructure during its industrialization. This study investigates the financial returns to investors in turnpike road trusts. It draws on parliamentary reports which provide comprehensive data on finances, including payments to bondholders. One key finding is that turnpike trusts paid their bondholders a return above the yield on government bonds before 1850. Afterwards turnpike interest payments declined, yet they still yielded competitive returns. Another key finding is that the risks were modest. Returns to holding individual turnpike bonds varied, with most paying 4 to 5 per cent and some paying zero. The latter were not the majority and in many cases interest payments resumed within a few years. Diversified portfolios of turnpike bonds enjoyed lower risks, and outperformed portfolios with railway and canal securities traded on the London exchange before 1850. Overall, the results contribute to a better understanding of the risks and returns associated with investing in early public works. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout the period 1860–1914, British Quaker women sought to negotiate the incorporation of fashionable attire into their wardrobes to varying degrees, after the religion's hierarchy made prescriptive religious 'Plain' dress optional in 1860. After centuries of restrictive Advices, which used Scripture alongside peer pressure to encourage female Friends to dress ascetically, Quaker women began to interpret their new sartorial freedoms in diverse ways. Through the presentation of three female case studies from across the period, this article will suggest three newly identified distinct stances that Quaker women enacted in responding to the new Advice and adapting to fashionable ensembles, up until the devastating events of the First World War. These three stances were non-adaptive, semi-adaptive and fully adaptive. Based on empirical research conducted in dress collections across Britain, this article will describe and present the garments worn by these women, to illustrate and introduce these distinct sartorial stances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The nineteenth‐century archive of the Public Works Loan Board (PWLB) has been overlooked by economic historians. Yet the archive reveals how the PWLB came to play a major part in the financing of new schools, water supplies and sewers in the 1870s. Ten thousand loan applications have been analysed to highlight the changing patterns of the PWLB's lending, while the 60 volumes of minutes indicate why the pattern changed. The analysis shows that in the 1870s there was a large rise in local infrastructure investment caused by the switch from permissive to compulsory public health and education legislation. At the same time, the PWLB became predominantly a low‐cost, rather than a market rate, lender. This change shows how MPs’ views developed as they became more sensitive to the impact of the local costs of parliamentary legislation. Overall, the activities of the PWLB illustrate the legislative and institutional changes that contributed significantly to the growth in the role and spending of the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This article examines the liquidity of the London capital markets in the decades following the liberalization of UK incorporation law. Using comprehensive stock and bond data, we calculate a measure of market liquidity for the period 1825–70. We find that stock market liquidity trended upwards but bond market liquidity did not increase over the sample period. Stock market liquidity during our sample period was partially influenced by the bond market, rather than fluctuations in economic output. In our analysis of the cross‐sectional determinants of individual stock liquidity, we find that firm size and the number of issued shares were important determinants of liquidity.  Finally, we find little evidence of an illiquidity premium, which is consistent with the view that investors did not price liquidity in this nascent market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1893, Prime Minister Gladstone introduced the second Irish home rule bill in parliament. The bill broke with tradition in Britain and the empire, as it included provisions from the bill of rights of the United States. Its significance was clear at the time: it was debated for nine days in the committee stage and, with one minor amendment, it remained part of the bill that passed the Commons. However, the bill was defeated in the Lords and, at least in the United Kingdom, bills of rights were dismissed as unnecessary or detrimental to sound governance until well after the second world war. This article therefore tries to understand how this early bill of rights was regarded at the time. Who suggested, or demanded, its inclusion? How did they expect it to be applied? And how did the debate reflect and influence thinking about constitutional law in Britain and the empire? [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]

Throughout the twentieth century, historians debated what happened to the living standards of ordinary men, women, and children during the British industrial revolution. But where this historical question once attracted attention from across the methodological spectrum, the past two decades have seen cultural and qualitative approaches eclipsed by statistical accounts written by economic historians. In this article, I will argue that the marginalisation of social and cultural approaches to historical living standards has been to the detriment of our understanding. Through an analysis of two discrete sources of evidence – nineteenth-century budget data and working-class autobiography – this article sheds new light on the diets and living standards of the labouring poor. It rejects the optimism/pessimism dichotomy that continues to frame quantitative analyses and presents a more nuanced account that examines how experiences varied according to region, gender and age. The article concludes that it is not only that it is possible to incorporate cultural change into our analyses of living standards, but that it is necessary to do so in order to grasp this period in all its complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the work of the Charity Organisation Society (COS) in assessing applications for children's admission to care in the late nineteenth‐century. It is based on an archive study of records kept by the ‘Waifs and Strays’ Society in England and Wales between 1882 and 1899, in particular 270 family assessments conducted by the COS. The focus was on parental behaviour rather than children's needs, with a strong narrative of taking children away to relieve parents of a burden. The research illuminates contested assumptions about childhood in the period, with resonance for current issues in policy and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Using a new weekly blue‐chip index, this article investigates the causes of stock price movements on the London market between 1823 and 1870. We find that economic fundamentals explain about 15 per cent of weekly and 34 per cent of monthly variation in share prices. Contemporary press reporting from the London Stock Exchange is used to ascertain what market participants thought was causing the largest movements on the market. The vast majority of large movements were attributed by the press to geopolitical, monetary, railway‐sector, and financial‐crisis news. Investigating the stock price changes on an independent list of events reaffirms these findings, suggesting that the most important specific events that moved markets were wars involving European powers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses the life of former slave Lewis Asa-Asa as described by British abolitionist George Stephen. She mentions Asa-Asa's rescue from the slave trade, the publication of his slave narrative, and Stephen's relationship with Asa-Asa.

The author discusses the sale of the books of English author and illustrator William Blake. He mentions the book selling firm founded by Edward Evans that bought many of Blake's works, the prices that Evans paid Blake, and presents the catalogs in which these books appeared for resale.

The story of The Cenci’s first production is intriguing, since the play, based on the true story of a sixteenth-century Roman family and revolving around the theme of parricide, was published in 1819 but was denied a licence for many years. The Shelley Society finally presented it in 1886, although it was vetoed by the Lord Chamberlain, and to avoid censorship it had to be proclaimed as a private event. This article examines the political and social context of the production, especially the reception of actress’s Alma Murray’s rendition of Beatrice, the parricide, thus probing the ways in which The Cenci question was reframed, and placed in the public sphere, despite censorship. The staging of the play became the site of a political debate and the performance – an act of defiance against institutionalised power, but also an act of defiance against the alleged tyranny of mass culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article profiles Antoinette Emily Dyce, who was known as Mrs. Danford who discovered the Xiphion danfordiae also known as Iris danfordiae in 1876. Topics discussed include the traditional form of address for a married woman in Victorian times, Dyce's marriage to barrister-at-law Charles G. Danford who made significant contributions to the botanical and horticultural history and Dyce's making of herbarium specimens.

The authors discuss the career of U.S. satirist and lecturer Artemus Ward and his program on the Mormons. They mention Ward's visit to Utah and interactions with Mormons, there, his subsequent lecture series in the U.S. and Great Britain on the Mormons, and how the lectures influenced the opinion of Mormons.

The article discusses foreign lending to China by British, German, French, and Russian banks following the 1894-1895 Sino-Japanese War. Topics include the role of the British bank Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC) in offering a loan to China, rivalries between Russian banks and an Anglo-German group of banks in offering loans to China, and the relation of bank loan offers to economic diplomacy by European nations in China.

The role of charity as a provider of relief was notably little discussed in the comprehensive English Poor Law Report of 1834. By contrast, however, the debate at the time in Ireland over whether any kind of Poor Law at all was desirable ranged much more broadly, with the respective roles of statutory and voluntary provision hotly contested. In fact, beyond the confines of the English Report itself, the topic of the place of charity in relief was exercising plenty of minds on both shores of the Irish Sea. This article examines aspects of the intellectual importance accorded to the role of individual charity and wider voluntary action in welfare provision across the British Isles by some of the central figures in the English and Irish Poor Law debates in the 1830s. It is a study of how justifications were forged to underpin charitable activity and specific policy proposals as advanced by the main proponents of Christian political economy from the late 18th to the early 19th centuries, including William Paley, Thomas Robert Malthus, John Bird Sumner, Edward Copleston, James Ebenezer Bicheno, Thomas Chalmers and Richard Whately. The discussions of Irish circumstances and problems furnish new insights into the substance and reach of a 'philosophy of charity' which was firmly in place by the 1830s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses U.S. nationalism in relation to the civil rights of American sailors and prisoners of war in British prisons during the War of 1812, and it mentions national identity and loyalty to the U.S. The treatment of captured Americans at the Dartmoor Depot prison in England is examined, along with the impact of disease, poor food, and overcrowding on American prisoners in Great Britain. Reuben Beasley, the American Agent for Prisoners of War in England, is assessed.