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In the early eighteenth century, the Duchess of Queensberry arrived at the Bath Assembly wearing a white apron, only to have it torn from her person by a Master of Ceremonies who declared that only a lady's maid would appear dressed so. This article looks at the apron as a garment worn by elite women in eighteenth-century England in order to consider some of the questions raised by this encounter. Aprons were closely linked with the labouring classes in contemporary representation, and elite women wearing them were therefore accused of imitating the dress and behaviours of their inferiors. While emulation from below has received due attention from scholars, this apparent imitation from above remains underexplored. Elite women certainly did masquerade as country girls at times; however, the apron as an item of elite dress was not as transformative as contemporaries feared. Instead, it became subject to expectations and conventions governed by the rhythms of elite everyday life. Though the Duchess of Queensberry became infamous, elite women wearing aprons were most likely to provoke censure when they defied these conventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores religious adolescents' reported experiences of secondary schools. Fifty-four qualitative interviews were conducted in places of worship in three cities in England with Christians (n=46), Jews (n=38) and Muslims (n=15). Secondary schools of a religious and non-religious character were reported as not providing a suitable environment for religious observances, nor as a place to act and behave according to participants' religious principles. Religious adolescents reported prejudice and criticism of their beliefs or religious affiliations from their peers and sometimes from teachers. They also perceived their religious traditions to be distorted, inaccurately or unfairly represented in some lessons. The focus of this paper is the identity choices religious adolescents reported in response to these challenges. Three groups of identity choices are theorised and explored: religious identity seeking, religious identity declaration and religious identity masking. The findings are discussed in view of religious identity construction theory, good practice for teachers and also the potential concerns of faith communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most studies of Irish recruitment to the British forces during the Second World War have identified a desire for adventure as one of the principal motives. While this motive has existed throughout history, this article argues that its prominence among Irish recruits was due to the image of war that was diffused in independent Ireland. The interwar market for children’s literature and cinema was dominated by British boys’ weeklies and war films, which portrayed British soldiers as glamorous heroes participating in wars that were exciting and just. For some Irish youths this influenced their perception of British military service. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the intellectual background to debates in the town planning movement in early twentieth-century Britain. The movement drew heavily on two traditions, that of the anarchists, who provided much of the theory, and that of the philanthropists. The reception of the Classical city influenced these debates through the provision of key paradigms. These paradigms were predominantly sociological rather than architectural and related to the 'ideal' societies to be generated by the new cities. The article argues that urban planning followed a path parallel to British sociology in adopting Classical ideas and forming itself around particular Classicising imaginings of society. Whereas the anarchist tradition exploited the Classical cautiously, differentiating the cities of Rome from the Classical poleis of Greece and finding in those Greek traditions the possibility of radical associative democracy, town planners in the British tradition came to engage with the Classical in a very different way. Through figures such as Patrick Geddes, the influence of Classicism served to divest British urban planning of its political radicalism and the Classical polis was used to offer a utopianism which was hierarchical and conservative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bacon belonged to a cultural milieu that, between the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, proved to be especially receptive to influences coming from such continental authors as Machiavelli, Bodin, Duplessis-Mornay, Hotman, and, through Lipsius, a particular brand of Stoicism tinged with Tacitean motifs. Within the broader question of Tacitus' influence on Tudor and Stuart culture, this article focuses on the issue of how Bacon's characteristic insistence on the powers of the imagination (fingere) and of belief (credere) in shaping human history may have influenced his view that human beings suffer from an innate tendency to self-delusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In February 1897, villagers in the small Kentish town of Eynsford celebrated their first Arbor Day by planting a row of trees in acrostic form to spell out the proverb MY SON, BE WISE. By 1910 Arbor Day had featured in the discussions of a Parliamentary Select Committee and the House of Commons, and was enjoying national press coverage as the event spread under the auspices of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and the Garden City Movement. Proponents positioned the ceremony as a prism through which to address the pressing social and economic concerns of rural depopulation, unemployment and deforestation, and by promoting the event as part of the educational experience of children, offered it up as a contribution towards the amelioration of these ills. Although the establishment of the Forestry Commission in 1919 ushered in the increasingly inflexible belief that the state rather than individuals was the only competent custodian of English woodland, Arbor Day can tell us much about how humankind's affective response to nature was conditioned, shored up and survived this increasingly scientific approach from the late nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The overseas body provided an interesting and useful site of cultural understanding in early modern England. The marked body in particular was used by observers to address important questions concerning correct bodily deportment and its connection to civility, morality, and religiosity, resulting in an integration of the discourses of foreign and domestic somatic presentation. This study traces the changing English constructions of the marked body in the public discourse of the overseas world published between 1590 and 1660, a period that witnessed important changes in attitudes towards overseas corporeality. It challenges the common assumption that the marked body was an ephemeral and fleeting subject before Cook's Endeavour voyage, illustrating the textured and changing understanding that early modern English commentators displayed when confronted with corporeal alteration in the overseas world. In particular, it explores the reflexive contemplation overseas ornamentation engendered in England during the early years of English colonial endeavor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Irish-born characters and characters whose names indicate Irish descent recur in the television and film work of Liverpool writers Jimmy McGovern and Alan Bleasdale. Their frequently troublesome dramatic presence often marks them as alien or marginal but problematic elements within British society, or suggests a troubled past and characteristic psychic dysfunction. Bleasdale's have been depicted somewhat stereotypically as economically parasitic and anachronistically maintaining outmoded religious beliefs incompatible with the material interests of the working class. By contrast, McGovern has frequently used his 'Irish' characters to engage critically with his own 'Liverpool Irish' Catholicism and as the focal point for his distinctively moral vision of British society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers a range of contrasting narratives about the Irish in Britain that are sometimes overlapping and sometimes contradictory. These narratives reflect the complexity of the Irish immigrant experience itself, from integration to alienation, and help to explain the persistence of cultural stereotypes. The contradictory nature of this experience also helps to understand the ways in which the Irish have contributed to wider popular culture in Britain, especially in the case of the second-generation Irish who came of age in the 1970s and 1980s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Religion has been increasingly reintegrated into the study of later seventeenth-century English politics. Nevertheless, historians of the later Stuart period have not displayed the same gusto for case studies of individuals’ careers as their colleagues working on the pre-civil war era. This article looks at the important role of religion within the career of Laurence Hyde, earl of Rochester (1642-1711), a very significant but under-studied politician whose long career in public life stretched from the Restoration to the latter part of Anne’s reign. It is argued that a vital dimension of Hyde’s religious beliefs can be supplied by a detailed consideration of his family life. His father’s example, his sister’s conversion, a series of early deaths, and his relationships with his brother-in-law – James II – and nieces – Mary II and Anne – all combined to define Hyde’s public status. The interplay of these factors would lead to acute crisis in the winter of 1686/7, when his position as the protestant chief minister of a catholic king became untenable, and chronic discontent thereafter until his death in 1711. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the c. 1729 book "Villas of the Ancients Illustrated," by Robert Castell, an annotated translation of two letters written by the Roman author Pliny the Younger regarding his villa gardens at Laurentinum and Tuscum in Rome. An account is presented of Castell's death while held at Fleet Prison in London, England for debts. The author explores how the patronage of Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington (1695-1753), helped to sponsor Castell's work and encouraged a fashion for classically inspired architecture and landscape design in 18th century Great Britain. Other subjects include English landscape designer William Kent, the historiography of garden design, and 18th century English accounts of Chinese gardens and landscape design.

Discusses that domestic relations in eighteenth-century Great Britain was supposed to run its `secret course.' Definition of `domestic joy' among family members; Value of household seclusion; Suppression of political realities within the family.