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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]

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]

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]

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]

Food markets were a vital element in the economic life of Britain over many centuries, and the arrival of railways into urban spaces during the nineteenth century provided unprecedented opportunities for them to expand the range and volume of good that they sold. This article examines the impact of railways on these markets during the decades following the arrival of trains into London through a case study of Borough Market. This important London fruit and vegetable market is examined through the prism of its financial records. Detailed analysis of the Market's income produces a timeline for growth, while the records for the goods ported through the Market help to explain the change. The case study also highlights developments in trading techniques at Borough Market that enabled it to prosper during the second half of the nineteenth century, despite limitations placed on its expansion created by the impact of railways on the urban physical environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the first half of the nineteenth century the Cornish economy was thriving, dominated by the metal mining industry. When the economy was thriving Cornish wrestling was at the height of its popularity when a large number of wrestlers entered numerous tournaments for lucrative prizes and witnessed by large crowds. It was also the time when the sport flourished in London. The leading wrestler during this period was Tom Gundry, who in a relatively short career won many of the tournaments in Cornwall, Devon and London and consequently was able to amass a significant sum in prize money. Despite his prominence he occasionally resorted to match-fixing or 'faggoting' with his opponents. During the second half of the nineteenth century, however, there was a collapse of the economy which had a deleterious effect upon Cornish wrestling with decreases in numbers of wrestlers, tournaments, prize money and spectators. The sport also disappeared from London. The common thread running throughout the nineteenth century is a 'persistence of difference'. Cornwall's historical experience was different from the rest of Britain and that difference has persisted over time and has led to a unique identity. Cornish wrestling contributed to the construction of that identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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

Medical interest in the knee-jerk reflex began in about 1875 with simultaneous and independent publications by Wilhelm Heinrich Erb (1840–1921) and Carl Friedrich Otto Westphal (1833–1890) contending that the knee jerk was absent (and the ankle clonus was present) in all clear cases of locomotor ataxia (tabes dorsalis). Physicians in the medical communities of Europe, Great Britain, and North America responded with case and large group studies that tested this contention. These studies revealed the usefulness of the knee jerk and other myotatic reflexes, but also unexpected characteristics. The knee jerk, apparently so simple, proved to be a complex phenomenon depending the strength of the strike on the patella, induced muscle tension, and inhibition from the brain. Was it a reflex with afferent and efferent nerves and an intervening process in the spinal cord, or was it a local phenomenon confined to the muscle itself? Experimental studies directed at the reflex issue investigated latencies from patella strike to leg extension or muscle contraction and compared them with latencies from direct muscle strikes and theoretical calculations based on reflex components. Such studies were unable to resolve the reflex issue during the nineteenth century. The physicians were shown to be limited, like all scientific explorers of the unknown, by their knowledge, methodology, and technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Happiness economics theorizes that economic growth is only tenuously connected to happiness. This article tests this theory on historical evidence by quantifying the trend in emotional well-being (EWB) of British men during the period of rapid industrialization between 1800 and 1900, using a digitized corpus of 19,682 pamphlets published in Britain during this period and held by JSTOR. EWB is measured between these years using a sentiment analysis method of quantifying the frequency over time of a set of positive-valence ("happy") word groups relative to negative-valence ("sad") word groups in the corpus, finding that it remains trendless throughout. This method thereby also provides insight into the quality of life of men during the Industrial Revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea of 'Greater Britain' has been associated with the later Victorian era, but it was anticipated in most important particulars. This article examines perhaps the most ambitious single text on the British empire produced during the first half of the nineteenth century: Robert Montgomery Martin's five-volume, 3,000 page History of the British Colonies. Published in 1834-5, in the midst of seminal debates over imperial administrative and commercial policy, Martin's opus offered the first comprehensive account of Britain's overseas possessions. Read in context, the History emerges as a political clarion call. It sought not only to awaken the British to the worth and unity of their allegedly undervalued foreign dependencies, but also to intervene in specific controversies about the workings of imperial government, and to reveal the Divine purpose that lay behind Britain's ascent to global power. Martin's History, it is suggested, was a monumental and in some ways path-breaking attempt to fuse religion and statistics with arguments about the future of the empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]