Showing papers in "Journal of British Studies in 2012"

Labor, law and training in early modern London: apprenticeship and the city’s institutions

Abstract: Successful apprenticeship is often explained by effective contract enforcement. But what happened when enforcement was weak? This paper reveals that within early modern London, England’s dominant centre for training, the city’s court provided apprentices with near automatic exits from their indentures, and allowed them to recover a share of their premium, reflecting faults and time served. Between 3 and 8 percent of apprentices received court discharges. Easy dissolution was a response to unstable contracts. By supplying a straightforward mechanism to cut legal ties, the city reduced the risks surrounding apprenticeship and facilitated London’s rapid expansion.

“Little Rock” in Britain: Jim Crow's Transatlantic Topographies

Abstract: O n 25 August 1958, the lead story in London’s Daily Express reported that bottles, knives, razors, and sticks had been drawn in a “pitched battle” on the streets of Nottingham, England, involving “Englishmen, West Indians, Pakistanis and Africans” and described as “one of the ugliest race riots ever known in Britain.” During the following week, details about similar incidents of racial violence in London surfaced. For four consecutive nights, numerous media reports emerged recounting violent clashes between “gangs of white and coloured youths” in West London as “Negro-baiting” white mobs were heard shouting threatening racial epithets including, “We’ll kill the black bastards!” “Deport all Niggers,” and “Let’s lynch the niggers!” amid cries to “Keep Britain White!” In the early morning hours of 1 September 1958, Scotland Yard dispatched eleven police cars to Notting Hill Gate in an effort to disband a “jeering crowd,” estimated at over four hundred, that had gathered in a fracas that pitted white against black with broken bottles, iron railings, knives, fists, and angry shouts serving as weapons of choice. Later that same day, Seymour Manning, described by one newspaper as “a young West African student,” screamed “Help me. For God’s sake help me. They are going to kill me,” as he dashed into a local grocery

Greece and Rome in the British Empire: Contrasting Role Models

Abstract: D avid Hume, in his essay “Of the Study of History” (1741), saw history as “a most improving part of knowledge,” noting among other things how it helped us “to remark the rise, progress, declension, and final extinction of the most flourishing empires: The virtues which contributed to their greatness, and the vices, which drew on their ruin.” He thought it in general “an unpardonable ignorance in persons of whatever sex or condition, not to be acquainted with the history of their own country, together with the histories of ancient GREECE and ROME.” Hume here struck a note to be heard throughout the eighteenth-century British, and indeed European, Enlightenment. The fate of empires, the causes of their rise and fall, was an engrossing preoccupation of some of the most important writers of fact and fiction, history and poetry—a good example being Constantin-François Volney’s highly influential Les Ruines, ou Méditations sur les revolutions des empires (1791). Of particular fascination was the story of Rome, its rise from modest origins to become the greatest empire in the world and the tragic tale of its long drawn-out decline and fall. How and why did that happen? What lessons did the epic of Rome have for contemporary thinkers and statesmen? That was the theme, of course, of one of the greatest products of the British Enlightenment, Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88). It was also a central concern of several other major works of the Enlightenment, such as the Baron de Montesquieu’s Considerations on the Causes of the Grandeur and

“The Live Dynamic Whole of Feeling and Behavior”: Capital Punishment and the Politics of Emotion, 1945–1957

Abstract: E arly on the morning of 16 October 1946, a crowd gathered outside Pentonville Prison where the double murderer, Neville Heath, was to be hanged. Sixteen young girls from a local paint factory formed part of the unfolding drama. The girls were hoping for a speedy execution as their forewoman had warned that she would fetch them should they be late for work. Huddled together in a state of nervous excitement, they exchanged views and scraps of information:

Print, Censorship, and Ideological Escalation in the English Civil War

Abstract: H istorians continue to be captivated by the English civil wars. The period has stimulated enduring fascination because, whatever scholars may think about the causes, conduct, and consequences of the wars, any sober assessment of the seventeenth century cannot fail to reckon with the sheer disruptiveness of the conflict and the ways in which it devoured lives and shattered the seemingly solid bedrock of English social and political existence. And while this upheaval was traumatic for large numbers of people, it also undeniably forced upon many of its victims a necessary recalibration of ideas, values, and religious assumptions, resulting in considerable ideological ferment and change on all sides of the political divide. Although many royalists (and the nonaligned) partook of this vertiginous process of ideological change, the effects of the disruption are most obvious among committed parliamentarians, for whom the relatively conservative rhetoric of loyalty to the king, measured godly reformation, and enmity to evil council, so apparent in 1640 and 1641, quickly gave way to all manner of religious and political fragmentation. This fragmentation was accompanied in some circles by parallel processes of radicalization, ultimately allowing for a bloody regicidal denouement and a constitutional upheaval that would have been unthinkable for most English subjects in 1640. Knowing that such radicalization took place, however, is quite different from charting it, still less explaining it. In part because of the sheer weight of material generated during the civil wars and interregnum, and the dizzying and accelerating pace of changing circumstance that confronts any would-be historian of the period, it has proved

Queer(y)ing the “Modern Homosexual”

Abstract: W hat do we mean when we speak of “British queer history”? Are we concerned with a history of same-sex desire, in all its complexities, or of specific sexual formations and cultures? Is it a history of attitudes toward homosexualiy, and perhaps also of gender nonconformity, or should its focus be the evolution of lesbian and gay and transgender subjectivity? Is it a history of the structuring binarism between heterosexuality and homosexuality or of sexual diversity? Are we speaking of a history of regulation and control or of transgression, resistance, and agency? Should it embrace the whole history of the various state formations that have occupied the North Atlantic isles over the past couple of millennia, or is it a product of modernity? And how do we locate British queer history in the history of British overseas expansion and global entanglements? Is queer history about content or approach, empirical detail or theory, a past that is irredeemably other or a living history at the heart of current politics? Some of these questions were nagging away at the birth of the serious study of what was then called lesbian and gay history in the mid-1970s. Others have risen as new preoccupations and theoretical shifts have propelled research forward in the years since. Some self-defined queer historians see their practice as a break with lesbian and gay history; others see strong lines of continuity. What is clear is that such questions have rarely troubled the calm waters of mainstream history. I vividly recall my own acute sense of intellectual and professional isolation when I began my own first forays into homosexual/lesbian and gay/queer history in the early 1970s. I was no longer the only gay in the village, but I felt as if I were the only openly gay historian in the profession. That feeling of academic isolation lingered in Britain for a surprisingly long time—I found a warmer

“All Together and All Distinct”: Public Sociability and Social Exclusivity in London's Pleasure Gardens, ca. 1740–1800

Abstract: I n January 1765, Yorkshire landowner Godfrey Bosville was staying in London for business and pleasure. With money, time, and inclination enough to participate in the capital’s social world, Bosville made regular sojourns from his Yorkshire home, Gunthwaite Hall, to London to sample all manner of urban pleasures: sipping coffee in the coffeehouses, sauntering in the pleasure gardens, dancing at masquerades, and appraising actors and singers on the stage. A prosperous squire enjoying the metropolis, Bosville appears typical of the untitled yet urbane gentlemen who reputedly characterized the century’s newly polite and commercial society and its expansive middling sorts. He was an enthusiastic participant in public leisure, capitalizing on the commercialization of high culture that famously distinguished the eighteenth-century town. Yet, despite the diversity of new entertainments available, Bosville was left dissatisfied with his social adventures. As he bemoaned to his rural neighbor, John Spencer of Cannon Hall near Barnsley: “We go here to Public places but though we do it is but a public life in appearance, for everybodys conversation is in a manner confined within the compass of a few particular acquaintance. The Nobility hold themselves uncontaminated with the Commons. You seldom see a Lord and private Gentleman together. . . . An American that saw a Regiment of Footmen drawn up might think the officers and soldiers mighty sociable. Just so is the company [here], all together and all distinct.”

Trilingualism in the Medieval English Bureaucracy: The Use—and Disuse—of Languages in the Fifteenth-Century Privy Seal Office

Abstract: I n spite of their great volume, the records of central government have not been fully recognized or exploited as a resource for the study of language choice and linguistic change in late medieval England. Their neglect stems in part from the reluctance of historians to question how and why particular languages were used within the workaday bureaucratic systems of royal government, but also in part because the majority of work on language in the later Middle Ages has been conducted within literary or sociolinguistic spheres, where the focus has been on other types of writing. The relatively dry, formulaic, and “automated” nature of many of the documents produced within the writing offices of the central administration, in any case, appears, at first sight, to offer little by way of understanding how language was used and what informed the individual linguistic choices of the clerks charged to do the writing. In recent years, the study of language in later medieval England has expanded to consider some specialized local administrative contexts, but the rules and customs that guided the choice

The Homosexual as a Social Being in Britain, 1945–1968

Abstract: I Britain in the two decades after the end of the Second World War, the social world of the male homosexual achieved a visibility it hitherto had not enjoyed, for the first time becoming the object of social scientific investigation. This essay is concerned with the various professional practices through which that world was rendered increasingly legible between 1945 and 1968. It will address a series of questions pertaining to a crucial shift in focus that took place in these years, a shift from what many increasingly believed to be a narrow interest in the psychological anatomy of the individual to a much broader interest in the social dynamics of the group and in the larger social world the homosexual inhabited. When, exactly, did homosexuality first come to be viewed as a broad social phenomenon, and how did this help to undermine—or at least supplement—older understandings of homosexuality as an individual, psychosexual pathology? When, and why, did British doctors, psychiatrists, sexologists, social commentators, and social scientists come explicitly to observe an important social dimension to homosexuality and begin to write about homosexuality as a social problem, amenable to social solutions? In this respect, how and when did the homosexual become the object of new practices of social management? How did the homosexual subsequently also come to be conceptualized not only as a “social problem” but as a member of a “minority,” enjoying a distinctive “way of life” that could now be dissected and mapped with some precision? More generally, how can we understand the trans-

Careless talk : tensions within British domestic propaganda during the Second World War.

Abstract: S ome of the most enduring propaganda images and slogans of the Second World War emerged from the so-called careless talk campaigns in Britain. Catchphrases such as “Careless Talk Costs Lives” have entered the common lexicon, while Fougasse’s famous posters of Hitler and Goering eavesdropping on the unwise gossip of two female shoppers have been the subject of numerous pastiches by cartoonists on modern political crises, including the recent conflict in Iraq. The longevity of these phrases and images is explained not just because they were textually and visually striking but also because they were unusual in character. They simultaneously evoke notions of British resilience and sacrifice and an enduring anxiety provoked by the threat of Nazism. This tension stems from the fact that while national wartime propaganda tended to promote a positive, united “world view,” the careless talk initiatives had a quite different impetus. As campaigns concerned with the internal security aims of eliminating opportunities for damaging rumors to spread and with identifying potential “fifth columnists,” these campaigns encouraged a “closing of the ranks” and a suspicion toward others. As such, they ran the risk of disrupting the wartime master narrative of the “People’s War.” The careless talk campaigns have received relatively little scholarly attention. They are barely mentioned in wider studies of Britain during the Second World War. Works that do consider the campaigns either confine them to a specific

Male Prostitution and the London GPO: Telegraph Boys’ “Immorality” from Nationalization to the Cleveland Street Scandal

Abstract: T he “Cleveland Street” or “West End” Scandal is familiar territory for historians of sexuality. Throughout the fall of 1889 and into the spring of 1890, the newspaper-reading British public followed a series of accusations, counteraccusations, and trials involving the sexual liaisons of aristocrats and Post Office telegraph messengers at 19 Cleveland Street, a house of assignation just off Tottenham Court Road. The scandal has been the subject of two monographs, and its revelations form the substance of numerous case studies. The telegraph boys’ roles in the affair tends to be overshadowed by those of its more glamorous and notorious participants, yet telegraph boys were literally at the bottom of Cleveland Street’s revelations: an internal Post Office investigation at the Central Telegraph Office brought the Cleveland Street brothel to light, and while the scandal ultimately involved peers, politicians, and journalists, the initial discoveries made by London Post Office officials uncovered a small but effective network of telegraph boy rent emanating from within the department’s head office. Cleveland Street ensured telegraph messengers’ inclusion in scholarly discussions of urban male prostitution, but their specific relationship to London’s sexual subcultures remains largely unexplored.

Sex Education and the Great War Soldier: A Queer Analysis of the Practice of “Hetero” Sex

Abstract: I n 1917 Joseph Best, a former Pathé newsreel editor, was released from the army to make a sex education film about venereal disease (VD) for the British War Office, entitled “Whatsoever a Man Soweth.” With a running time of thirty-eight minutes, this “social document” of “exceptional value” opens with a sequence that tracks the leisurely stroll of a young Canadian soldier named Dick on leave in London, a crowded city abuzz with excitement. Starting in the West End, the impromptu itinerary of this innocent abroad includes several major tourist attractions: the Victoria Monument in front of Buckingham Palace, Piccadilly Circus, and Trafalgar Square. These sights, however, afford little pleasure or delight because the poor soldier is persistently accosted by women interested

Business and pleasure : middle-class women’s work and the professionalization of farming in England, 1890-1939

Abstract: I n January 1935, the leading weekly farming magazine in England, Farmer and Stockbreeder, began publication of a new series showcasing the work of “Successful Women Farmers.” The opening page claimed that “it is generally not realised how many women are engaged in farming on their own account and making a success of it.” The series ran for eighteen months and was the culmination of a process that had seen farming promoted as a suitable career for women in England over the previous four decades. This was succinctly summed up by the farmer featured in March 1935, Miss Dillon. Asked for her view on farming as a profession for women, she remarked, “It’s the finest life in the world.” Miss Dillon personified a new type of woman farmer in the 1930s. Educated and articulate, she ran an Oxfordshire farm with her friend Miss Corbett, producing milk for the wholesale trade. Farmer and Stockbreeder did not doubt that farmers such as Misses Dillon and Corbett encapsulated “the valuable work which women are doing throughout the country for the advancement of agriculture.” Historians have been more reticent. Women’s work has emerged as a central research theme in the new English rural historiography in recent years, but female farmers—those who owned or rented land for cultivation—remain conspicuous by their absence. Nor has farming been considered in relation to the opening up of professions for women in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This article shows that debates about gender, class, and professionalization intersected in a unique way around farming. It will explore why farming came to be seen as a viable occupation for middle-class women in England and how the discourse was framed in such a

'Enoch Powell, Ulster Unionism, and the British Nation'

Abstract: terms: “It simply is not within the range of political reality that a democratic nation state could sever off a part of itself where the majority of the inhabitants manifest repeatedly, under all manner of testing and despite all manner of pressure, their determination to remain part of the state.” In the years that followed, Powell developed his position. He held that allegiance to the Crownin-Parliament was demonstrated through the act of election by which “the people gave in advance the pledge of their acceptance” of its sovereignty, constituting 133 Green, Ideologies of Conservatism, 281–85. For Powell, see Stapleton, Political Intellectuals, 179. 134 See Heffer, Like the Roman, 212, for Powell’s engagement with Oakeshott’s work in the late 1940s and 1950s. 135 Heffer, Like the Roman, 758. There is no copy of the speech among the Powell speeches held at PRONI. 136 “Row over Powell,” Belfast Newsletter, 7 July 1975; “Powell Talking Nonsense: Paisley,” Belfast Telegraph, 7 July 1975; “Loyalist Attack on Powell,” Irish Times, 7 July 1975. 137 Belfast Telegraph, 10 July 1975. 138 Powell, speech at Ballynahinch, 8 October 1974, PRONI, D3107/1/3. ENOCH POWELL, ULSTER UNIONISM, AND THE BRITISH NATION 991 the “consent of the nation.” In 1981 he explicitly contended that electing MPs to Westminster guaranteed Northern Ireland’s status as part of the United Kingdom because this made it “impossible” for the House of Commons to “reject a part of itself.” This, of course, swiftly became a provocative argument as the PIRA hunger striker, Bobby Sands, won a Westminster seat in April 1981 as part of a wider campaign for Republican inmates to be treated as political prisoners that, in turn, paved the way for the emergence of Sinn Féin as a political force, contesting, but not taking up, seats in the House of Commons. Powell’s position also provoked a backlash from the devolutionist wing of the OUP. Edgar Graham, a rising figure in the party and a law lecturer at Queen’s University Belfast, articulated a long-standing distrust of Westminster parties and politicians, arguing that if “the union had to depend on the House of Commons for its defence, it would be a very fragile union indeed.” Powell’s argument also contained some latent contradictions. It was seemingly underpinned by his belief in the overriding sovereignty of the Crown-in-Parliament to make or break any laws whatsoever. Accordingly, he distinguished it from the contention that Northern Ireland’s constitutional position was secured as a result of any particular piece of legislation, including the 1973 Northern Ireland Act, which stated that it would remain part of the United Kingdom so long as this was the wish of a majority of its population. Yet, at the same time, Powell attributed significant power to the people going—in undefined ways—beyond that of election. Indeed, he stated on one occasion that “it is the people of Northern Ireland themselves, and they alone, who have it in their power to destroy the Union with Great Britain.” This mirrored arguments Powell had made about EEC membership when—even before reluctantly endorsing a referendum on the issue—he had obliquely contended that the “power is still the people’s if they have the will to use it.” Powell’s position was in line with the later twentieth-century trend toward various forms of popular sovereignty, including (but not limited to) referenda. Even so, there were particular tensions within Powell’s thinking about the relationship between parliamentary and popular sovereignty which, in the Northern Irish context, centred on the question of who was able to sever the union—with knock-on implications for allegiance. Powell’s acceptance of some degree of popular sovereignty had slowly become apparent in his discussion of the types of behavior that put the union in jeopardy. In a widely circulated speech in 1976, which showed very clearly his civil association reasoning, Powell identified a particular danger from Loyalist paramilitary activity: “the nationalist, the rebel, the seceder—these are the people who can, and frequently do, obtain their aims by lawlessness and force. You can get out of an association or a society or a nation by breaking its laws and by turning your back 139 Powell, speech at Holywood, 5 May 1978, PRONI, D3107/1/83. 140 Powell, speech at Brookeborough Hall, Belfast, 8 January 1981, PRONI, D3107/1/160. 141 Edgar Graham, Devolution: Maintaining the Union (Belfast, 1982), 5–7. 142 Powell, speech at Brookeborough Hall, Belfast, 8 January 1981, PRONI, D3107/1/160. 143 Powell, speech at Helen’s Bay, 6 January 1982, PRONI, D3107/1/181. 144 Powell, speech at Chester-le-Street, 29 January 1972, in Ritchie, Nation or No Nation?, 36–40, quotation at 40. 145 Brigid Hadfield, “The United Kingdom as a Territorial State,” in The British Constitution in the Twentieth Century, ed. Vernon Bogdanor (Oxford, 2003), 585–630, esp. 621–22.

Pennies from Heaven and Earth in Mass Observation's Blackpool

Abstract: S uperstition is infinitely adaptable,” proclaimed Mass Observation’s leaders in January 1937 in a manifesto intended as a “preliminary statement” of the organization’s visions and agenda. Many long-standing superstitious beliefs and practices were recognizable, while others “assumed modern disguises.” Occult practices of divination and diagnoses—such as “crystal-gazing,” “tea-cup reading,” and press astrology—were co-opted into new forms of commercial culture. To Mass Observation, their rising twentieth-century influence reflected “the failure of the religious (Christian) idea which centres round FAITH, i.e. apparently getting nothing for your money.” At a time of spreading fascism and renewed “racial superstition” in Nazi Germany, irrational fears and mythologies were apparently flourishing in Britain. Mass Observation’s founders hoped to examine people’s subconscious yearnings, including their manipulation by public officials, media, and mass culture. This kind of interpretation of collective symbols, as practiced in developing fields of social science, was the “first step” toward social change. From around Easter 1937, shortly after these objectives were laid out,

Publicity and Popery on the Restoration Stage: Elkanah Settle’s The Empress of Morocco in Context

Abstract: V olumes of literary criticism attest to the intimate relationship between politics and drama in Restoration England. Yet historians have paid little attention to either the Restoration theater or the scholarship devoted to it. I argue here that the Restoration stage merits serious attention as a site of public politics. Critics have long been aware that many Restoration plays were political interventions, but they understandably remain more interested in the role of politics in drama than in the role of drama in politics. These interventions need to be studied with precise attention to their contexts and mechanics if drama is to become an integral part of political history. In particular, the playhouse ought to be considered a crucial venue for the emergence of an increasingly permanent political public sphere in the wake of the English Revolution.

Public Worship and Political Participation in Elizabethan England

Abstract: O n 4 October 1562 the first of six thousand English troops arrived in Normandy to support the Huguenots, who had suffered successive defeats by the royalist forces commanded by the Duke of Guise and his brother, the Duke of Aumale. Five days later orders were issued in England for a special prayer in support of the military campaign, to be read at services three days a week in all parish churches. A prayer for the present estate (1562) called on God as “the only geuer of all victories” to support the English troops and Huguenots to “withstande the crueltie of those which be common ennemies as well to the trueth of thy eternal worde, as to theyr owne naturall Prince and countrie, & manifestly to this crowne and Realme of Englande.” After one such service at Donhead St. Mary in Wiltshire, Giles Fezard, from a prominent local yeomanry family, complained that the prayer was “vngodly,” “vncharitable,” “not to be suffyrd,” and “meter to sett princes together by the eares.” He argued that “the Duke of Guyes is a godly man and no tyrant or cruell person but a favourer and seker of godes glorye/and suche a man as wolde be oure frende.” He added that “the Queenes Maiestie that nowe is had gon

Class Trips and the Meaning of British Citizenship: Travel, Educational Reform, and the Regent Street Polytechnic at Home and Abroad, 1871–1903

Abstract: A t the launch of the tourist season in the spring of 1895, John Cook, the director of Britain’s largest commercial travel agency, Thomas Cook & Son, sent a series of missives to the Education Department demanding redress. In the letters, Cook accused Quintin Hogg, the founder of the London Regent Street Polytechnic and Young Men’s Christian Institute (YMCI), of using—perhaps even misappropriating—government educational grants to fund the Polytechnic Touring Association (P.T.A.) and its “educational and co-operative tours.” “Pray do not misunderstand me,” Cook advised in one communiqué, “I am willing to admit that travelling is an important feature of education, but at the same time, I maintain that Thos. Cook & Son have done, and are doing more toward that particular line of education than anybody else in the Kingdom.” Thus, Cook reasoned, “if the Polytechnic is entitled to a Government allowance, then I must ask, what is Thomas Cook & Son entitled to?” Had the Polytechnic, in fact, been misappropriating government grants to fund its own travel agency, Cook would have had a legitimate complaint. The Polytechnic originally developed educational tours for its students and members: young artisans, mechanics, and clerks. But, according to Cook, when the Polytechnic extended its travel services to the general public at bargain prices, it used the same

Opposition to Anti-Popery in Restoration England

Abstract: W hat caused the political crises of the 1670s and 1680s in England? From one perspective, these crises were caused by resurgent Counter-Reformation Catholicism, as embodied in the political and military agendas of Louis XIV, Charles II, and James II. Repeated acts of aggression by Catholic or crypto-Catholic rulers led English Protestants to fear that their embattled faith was about to be overwhelmed by what they called “popery.” Along with popery came high-handed government, as the English royal brothers sought to expand their powers at the expense of parliament. The result was a series of political crises, from the parliamentary outcry in 1673 over Charles II’s Declaration of Indulgence, to the Restoration crisis of 1678–83, to the Revolution of 1688–89. This problem of “popery and arbitrary government” was resolved in 1689 when resurgent Catholicism was rebuffed, a Protestant king and queen were installed on the thrones of England and Scotland, and England went to war with France. This interpretation of the 1670s and 1680s is associated especially with the work of Jonathan Scott, who has provided several authoritative investigations of the period. It would be equally possible to argue, however, that the political crises of the

“Suppressed Grief”: Mourning the Death of British Children and the Memory of the 1857 Indian Rebellion

Abstract: K atherine Bartrum, a twenty-three-year-old woman from Somerset, had been living in India for less than a year with her husband Robert, an assistant surgeon, when the Indian Rebellion began in May of 1857. In June, Bartrum and her infant son joined other British women and children in leaving the military station at Gonda for the Residency buildings in Lucknow. She remained there during what became known as the siege of Lucknow. In the following months, she suffered the death of her husband in combat and nursed her son through cholera. When the siege ended in November 1857, Bartrum traveled with other British survivors to Calcutta, where her son Bobbie died days before she set sail alone for England. For Bartrum and many other British participants in the Great Rebellion, the deaths of family members, particularly children, revealed not only the violence at the heart of the imperial project but also the ultimate instability of British domestic life and identity within the imperial context. During the worst moments of the conflict, the frequency of child death

“Speed the Mahdi!” The Irish Press and Empire during the Sudan Conflict of 1883–1885

Abstract: T he writing of empire into the history of Ireland has produced a vibrant debate. For some years this debate focused primarily on the colonial status of the island. Always interesting and sometimes provocative, this particular discussion has perhaps run its course, and a consensus that Ireland’s relationship with Britain shared at least some features with those of the dominions and colonies has settled in across the disciplines of Irish studies. We have now entered the second wave of Irish imperial studies. Mainly concerned with Irish nationalists, these works reveal that different strands of nationalism engaged intellectually and politically with empire in a variety of complex ways. Scholars in this field have demonstrated that Irish engagements with empire were more extensive and vigorous than some have allowed and that they were frequently central to the elaboration of Irish nationalist understandings of Ireland’s place in the wider world. The result is a convincing and nuanced portrayal of anti-imperialism as a central thread of Irish nationalism from the 1840s through the 1880s. For example, Niamh Lynch demonstrates that a “coherent and ultimately revolutionary form

“Now the great Man in the Parliament House is dead, we shall have a big Loaf!” Responses to the Assassination of Spencer Perceval

Abstract: A fairly unreflective historical consensus surrounds the assassination of Spencer Perceval, the prime minister, in the lobby of the House of Commons in May 1812. It was the act of a deranged bankrupt acting on the basis of private grievances. While the event might have given rise to some slight flutters in the breasts of the governing elite, it was a sideshow to the main concerns of that busy year: turbulent Westminster politics, a fragile wartime economy, Luddite disturbances, and, of course, the winning of the war. Assassins themselves and their motivations for acting are apt to be marginalized by historians, and the assessment of Simon Maccoby in his synoptic history of radicalism can stand proxy for the consensus on John Bellingham’s murder of Perceval: “Nobody pretended, or desired to pretend, that there was the slightest political significance in the assassination, which was the work of one who had long brooded over imagined private grievances.” In addition to a reasonably detailed account of the assassination in Perceval’s modern biography, there have been two useful narratives of the event itself, but these were less interested in the wider contexts for the murder and its reception than in the drama of the assassination and Bellingham’s trial. More specialized work has examined what the affair can reveal about legal

“Our Iberian Forefathers”: The Deep Past and Racial Stratification of British Civilization, 1850–1914

Abstract: O n 18 January 1879, Professor William Boyd Dawkins of Owen’s College, Manchester, delivered a public lecture in the city’s Science Lectures for the People series on “Our Earliest Ancestors.” These were not, as may have been expected, the Germanic Anglo-Saxons or even the pre-Roman Celtic Britons. They were, instead, a much older and stranger people recently unveiled through the new field of prehistory: the pre-Celtic populations of Neolithic Britain. The positivistic methods of racial anthropometry had classed them as long-skulled, short-statured, dark-complexioned, akin to the Basques of the Iberian Peninsula, and archaeological studies of their crude stone artifacts and fortified hut settlements showed them as having lived as farmers and herders engaged in constant conflict with one another. However, they were not merely a historical curiosity or a ghoulish example of primeval savagery. Dawkins was quite adamant that their descendants could still be found in certain regions of the country and that they had played an important—even crucial—part in the nation’s development:

Spectacular Speech: Performing Language in the Late Eighteenth Century

Abstract: I n papers posthumously published in 1641, Ben Jonson likens language to a mirror. “Speak, that I may see thee,” he commands, for in his metaphor, language is capable of externalizing the internal contours of the hidden mind. By focusing on how language discloses a person’s unique mental “form or likeness,” Jonson prefigures his eighteenth-century intellectual descendants who, agreeing that language was an essential part of self-presentation, fixated on the things that language revealed about a speaker’s social conditions. As figures like Thomas Sheridan, John Walker, and others claimed in the second half of the eighteenth century, language was a public spectacle that immediately identified one’s class origins, vocational potential, and social standing, not to mention one’s national, regional, and ethnic derivation. Spoken language, they argued, was a profoundly evocative social signifier, one that articulated a great deal about a person irrespective of what the speaker was actually saying. Dismayed by nonstandard language’s ability to forestall occupational and social advancement, these writers popularized the discipline of elocution, which was framed as an educational regiment that would allow speakers to hide linguistic traits wrongly associated with ignorance, ill-breeding, and even criminality.

Print, publicity and popularity: the projecting of Sir Balthazar Gerbier, 1642-1662

Abstract: O n 18 July 1649, the London bookseller George Thomason received a handwritten note inviting him to the grand opening of an academy at Bethnal Green, outside London’s eastern walls, which was to be held on 19 July and where he was promised “good company and a hearty reception.” A few weeks later, the reformer Samuel Hartlib received a similar invitation to bring his family to another grand event at the new institution. The invitations were sent by the academy’s founder, Sir Balthazar Gerbier, and his short-lived venture might be regarded as a rather odd footnote to the history of education during the early modern period and be thought to deserve the minimal amount of scholarly attention it received since its collapse twelve months later. Nevertheless, the interest shown in its operation by Thomason and Hartlib indicates that this scheme represented more than merely an attempt to copy European academies or to emulate Sir Francis Kynaston’s Musaeum Minerva of the 1630s by means of a private facility to educate the elite in the arts of nobility and warfare. It was, in other words, something other than just a display of Gerbier’s credentials as a child of the Renaissance. Gerbier was addressing men

Domestic passions: unpacking the homes of Charles Shannon and Charles Ricketts

Abstract: In 1924, Country Life magazine featured a home made in the Keep of Chilham Castle in Kent. Such unusual landmark properties were standard fare in this and similar publications from the late nineteenth century onwards. 1 They detailed domestic histories and interiors that seemed to perfectly frame and reflect the character and distinction of the inhabitants — in this case, the artist couple Charles Shannon (1863–1937) and Charles Ricketts (1866–1931). The author of the piece, historian of domestic architecture Christopher Hussey, waxed lyrical about the ‘two painters [who] now imitate the way of Montaigne and dwell in a tower: two painters whose long and productive friendship is scarcely less “perfect, inviolate and entire” than that of Michel de Montaigne and Etienne de la Boetie’.2 The pair had preserved and ‘beautified’ ‘one of the most ancient habitations in Britain’, and in these surroundings, were to be ‘left in their tower overlooking the fat meadows of the Stour, among the peacock bowers and ilex [holly tree] shade of their field, at peace to raise castles of canvas and weave tapestries in paint’.3

Fashioning Fetishism from the Pages of London Life

Abstract: T hough largely forgotten by historians, a magazine called London Life flourished in interwar Britain. This magazine became a site for queer and kinky pleasures, as its readers attested in surprisingly frank ways. In 1930, for example, one reader calling herself “Betty” wrote to that magazine’s popular correspondence column about the diversity of thrills that could be found in its pages: “This interesting business of thrills—what queer ways people get them. Some by wearing super tight corsets, some by tying themselves up in all sorts of positions of discomfort, some by covering their legs in silk.” A columnist wrote about the prevalence of kinks. According to her, “If kinks were a definite sign of insanity, then a surprising number of people would have to be classed as insane. For almost everyone has a kink of some kind, although few will readily

Genealogy of an Execution: The Sodomite, the Bishop, and the Anomaly of 1726

Abstract: O n 9 May 1726, a milkman by the name of Gabriel Laurence (sometimes spelled “Lawrence”) was hanged at Tyburn after being prosecuted for committing the crime of sodomy. Laurence was one of forty men arrested when the authorities raided Mother Clapp’s molly house in the Holborn district of London; of these forty, three were executed, including Laurence, who was the first to be sentenced. Many came forward to attest to his character, among them his father-in-law and the man who supplied him with milk. “Several others deposd,” the Old Bailey noted, “that he was a very sober Man, and that they had often been in his Company when he was drunk; but never found him inclinable to such Practices. Guilty. Death.” He was hanged alongside two other men present that night at Mother Clapp’s molly house: William Griffin and Thomas Wright.

Force or Fraud: British Seduction Stories and the Problem of Resistance, 1660-1760, by Toni Bowers. (Review)

Abstract: Follow this and additional works at: http://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/cleng_facpub Part of the Literature in English, British Isles Commons Publisher's Statement This work remains under copyright © 2014 Journal of British Studies, Cambridge University Press, doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/663813, http://journals.cambridge.org/action/ displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=8738633&fileId=S0021937100002811