bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
“Mercantile Monasteries”: Shops, Shop Assistants, and Shop Life in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain
Authors: Hosgood Christopher P.
Published: February 2004

It is now over twenty years since Geoffrey Crossick first urged historians to investigate the English lower middle class. On that occasion he suggested that small business interests and white-collar employees be designated the two wings of a residual lower middle class. Historians speculated that the members of this class were bound together by their marginality to the social, cultural, and economic world of the middle class and by their pathetic attempts to ape the gentility of their superiors. Such an analysis confirmed the unheroic nature of the lower-middle-classmentalitéand explains Crossick's conclusion that this group “claimed no vital social role.” Crossick's more recent work, in collaboration with Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, offers a reevaluation of this earlier position and concludes that white-collar and small business interests should not be considered to occupy the same social station. Crossick and Haupt's work is significant because both authors make it clear that they now credit the petite bourgeoisie of small business families in Europe with a greater spirit of independence than they had earlier acknowledged. They argue convincingly that the petite bourgeoisie created their own social and cultural world, centered on the interrelationship between enterprise and family life, which enabled them to react more purposefully to outside social forces and agencies.

By hiving off these small business interests from the old lower middle class, we are left with a rump of white-collar workers who collectively formed a lower middle class that shared many common experiences and hence is attractive to historians as a potentially more cohesive social body.
Social and Symbolic Fathers and Sons in Postwar Britain
Authors: Mort Frank
Published: February 2004

He didn't die alone. My mother says she never left him, and at the end I was there—the elder son. She, my mother, prayed she'd find him dead every morning when she went in. But he wasn't. When I heard her talk like that I came. I knew it was different this time, from the small, flat pitch in her voice and because I was experienced. I had seen the signs of death before from other lives and had come to know its timing. So I knew and I came, quickly. My mother opened the door, briskly, as any nurse might do. It was what she had become. The bungalow was familiar, except that there was a faint but persistent smell of stale water, pills, and antiseptic. “He's in there, if you'd like to go in and see him,” she said. I thought he must be lying dead already.

At first I took the signs of his final illness as something other. He looked neglected. His face and hair were disheveled, and I noticed that it was one of the few times I had seen him unshaved. The contrast between his own disorder and the tidy landmarks of the bedroom (hers, not his) surprised me. Afterwards my mother said he had started crying when he heard me come into the house. I had only heard him cry once before, one night when he was drunk and his marriage was in extremis. Then the tears had been showy; now there was the intermittent sobbing of an old man, his body huddled up on the bed with his face turned to the wall.
Women, Posthumous Benefaction, and Family Strategy in Pre-Conquest England
Authors: Crick Julia
Published: February 2004

In the early Middle Ages it was men who, with their resort to armed might, were the plunderers of church property, though some among them did contribute to its increase.Women, and especially widows, were more positively involved with the church, as givers rather than as receivers.

When Jack Goody put more than a thousand years into the few hundred pages of hisDevelopment of the Family and Marriage in Europe, he could be allowed a little judgmental rhetoric. The documentation from early medieval Europe, unevenly distributed across very diverse situations, may indeed yield fewer examples of female than male predation, and perhaps more examples of female than male benefaction. But, since Goody wrote, historians have been increasingly alerted to complex relationships among individuals, property, and the church, which may extend far beyond the scope of individual documents, across several generations. Goody's female “givers” take on a new complexion in an environment in which donations can be more apparent than real, where a land transfer may prove no more than a social gesture. In such circumstances, identifying the originators of grants, let alone separating male and female action, becomes a delicate process. In the following article, female involvement is considered in the context of pre-Conquest wills, a body of documents that could be interpreted as classic evidence that female “givers” literally as well as morally stood in credit with the church.

The prominence of women in pre-Conquest wills has long been noted.
The Dissidence of Despair: Rebellion and Identity in Early Modern Cornwall
Authors: Stoyle Mark
Published: February 2004

In May 1648 a group of Cornishmen who had rebelled against Parliament in the name of Charles I met with comprehensive defeat at “the Gear,” near Helford, and were then pursued back across the Lizard peninsula to the seacoast beyond. Surrender seemed inevitable, yet a number of the fugitives refused to submit. Instead they “joyned hand-in-hand” and hurled themselves bodily into the water: “a desperate expedient on that rocky coast,” as one later writer remarked. What can have driven them to such despair? No convincing answer can be given by looking at the events of 1648 alone. The rebels' despairing plunge can be understood only if it is seen as the final act in a long-running drama, a story of repeated popular protest in West Cornwall that spanned over 150 years. It is a story that has gone largely unrecognized by previous historians, most of whom have portrayed the Cornish revolts of 1497, 1548, 1549, 1642, and 1648 as isolated events rather than as part of a continuum. Yet it is a story that deserves to be told, not only because it provides a dramatic new explanation for many of the most important rebellions of the Tudor and Stuart periods, but also because it serves as an enduring monument to a forgotten people and their struggle to preserve a separate identity for themselves in the face of overwhelming odds.

A fierce sense of distinctiveness has always characterized the inhabitants of Cornwall.
Chartism Remembered: William Aitken, Liberalism, and the Politics of Memory
Authors: Hall Robert G.
Published: February 2004

Early one Sunday morning, in August 1839, “a very authoritative knock" on the door awoke the young Chartist William Aitken and his family. After a thorough search of his house for “revolutionary and seditious documents,” the chief constable and his men placed Aitken under arrest and marched him through the silent streets of Ashton-under-Lyne. Recalling his sense of distress and anguish some thirty years later, Aitken tried to find solace in the ultimate triumph of his principles, in his conviction that “the cause of liberty is eternal, and that the principles of democracy, which are now becoming universal, must be right and must in the end prevail.” This optimistic reaffirmation of his life's struggle for “bread and liberty” appeared in the fifth installment of his autobiography in theAshton News, a Liberal newspaper. Unfortunately, the tone of quiet confidence and hope that pervaded his autobiography apparently masked a growing sense of private despair and ever deepening bouts of depression. Some two weeks before the publication of this installment, his wife, Mary, had found Aitken lying on the bedroom floor, “with a fearful gash in his throat.”

That many thousands of working men and women “thronged the streets” on the day of his funeral was hardly surprising. The son of a Scottish cordwainer and later sergeant-major, Aitken came from, as theAshton Newsput it, “the people” and “knew intimately their feelings and their wishes, and could express what the many felt with fullness and point.” His own identification with the working class came through clearly in the title of his autobiography, “Remembrances and Struggles of A Working Man for Bread and Liberty.”
“The Good Ministrye of Godlye and Vertuouse Women”: The Elizabethan Martyrologists and the Female Supporters of the Marian Martyrs
Authors: Freeman Thomas
Published: February 2004

The images that the phrase “Marian Protestant” summons to mind are both dramatic and predictable. Whether they are of Cranmer holding his hand in the flame, Latimer exhorting Ridley to play the man, or more generalized images of men and women dying at the stake, we see the landscape of Marian Protestantism shrouded in the smoke from the fires of Smithfield and think of it exclusively in terms of martyrs. This unblinking fixation on the Marian martyrs is partly the result of an all too human fascination with violent death, but it is also the result of our dependence on John Foxe'sActs and Monuments(1563–83), popularly known as the “Book of Martyrs,” a sobriquet that does justice to Foxe's preoccupations when discussing the penultimate Tudor reign.

Nevertheless, to ignore the majority of Marian Protestants who did not die for the gospel is to study the steeple and believe that you have examined the entire church. Like the steeple, the martyrs are the most conspicuous group of Marian Protestants, yet like a steeple their existence depended on the support of the rest of the church. However, even this metaphor fails to do justice to those coreligionists who provided the Marian martyrs with physical, financial, moral, and emotional support. The relationships between the martyrs and their “sustainers” (to use Foxe's phrase) were profound and complex, with both parties drawing strength from each other. The relationships between male martyrs and their female sustainers are of particular interest and importance; in fact, it will be suggested in this article that these relationships had a decisive influence on the development of English Protestantism.
“Orthodoxy” and Its Discontents: Dispute Settlement and the Production of “Consensus” in the London (Puritan) “Underground”
Authors: Lake Peter , Como David
Published: February 2004

In this article we address the topic of intra-Puritan doctrinal debate and, by examining the mechanisms whereby the godly in the capital tried, if not to conclude then at least to control and ameliorate their in-house doctrinal disputes, to reconstruct some of the mechanisms—social, political, and ideological—whereby doctrinal “consensus” or “orthodoxy” was constructed, policed, and reproduced among the godly. Thus we hope to penetrate the shadowy world of what one might term the London Puritan underground. What emerges from this scrutiny is a world of interministerial dispute and rivalry, of lay activism, based on an urgent word and sermon-centered piety, that found its natural expression as much in the conventicle and the godly discussion group as in the public congregation and clerically delivered sermon or lecture. Here operated an overlapping series of networks of orally transmitted rumors and stories, of manuscript tracts and sermon notes, of conferences, conversations, and arbitrations both formal and informal. Here the reputations of the Puritan clergy were made and maintained, and the nature of orthodoxy debated and defined through mechanisms and exchanges that remain, for the most part, closed to us. This obscurity is not an accident. Only rarely did the interventions of authority or the anxiety or outragedamour propreof some wronged participant combine to leave traces, either in court records or the fulminations of the pamphlet press, of what appears to have been a very active underworld of dispute, discussion, and display.
“The Most Glorious Church in the World”: The Unity of the Godly in Boston, Massachusetts, in the 1630s
Authors: Winship Michael P.
Published: February 2004

The dominant historiographical trend in Puritan studies, started by Patrick Collinson, stresses the conservative nature of Puritanism. It notes Puritanism's strong opposition to the separatist impulses of some of the godly and the ways in which it was successfully integrated into the Church of England until the innovations of Charles I and Archbishop Laud. Far from being revolutionary, Puritanism was able to contain the disruptive energies of the Reformation within a national church structure. This picture dovetails nicely with the revisionist portrayal of an early seventeenth-century “Unrevolutionary England,” but it sits uneasily with the fratricidal cacophony of 1640s Puritanism.

The picture also sits uneasily with the Antinomian Controversy, the greatest internal dispute of pre-civil wars Puritanism. That controversy shook the infant Massachusetts Bay Colony from 1636 to 1638. Accusations of false doctrine flew back and forth, the government went into tumult, and by the time the crisis had subsided, leading colonists had voluntarily departed or had been banished. In terms of its cultural impact in England, it was probably the single most important event in seventeenth-century American colonial history; publications generated by the controversy were reprinted in England into the nineteenth century.

The Antinomian Controversy, evoking civil wars cacophony but occurring in the previous decade, offers a bridge across the current interpretive chasm between civil wars and pre-civil wars Puritanism. The crisis has generated a wide range of scholarly interpretations, but there is broad agreement that the Boston church, storm center of the crisis, was the source of its disruption.
Profane Pastimes and the Reformed Community: The Persistence of Popular Festivities in Early Modern Scotland
Authors: Todd Margo
Published: February 2004

The Reformed Kirk of Scotland has a reputation for vigorous repression of festivity hardly to be surpassed by any other Protestant church. From 1560 on, the authorities of the kirk from local session to General Assembly waged a stern and unremitting campaign against the celebration of Yule, Easter, May Day, Midsummer, and saints' days; against feasting, whether at marriages or wakes; against Sunday sports and dancing and guising—in short, against anything that might distract newly Reformed laity from the central Protestant focus on the sermon, the Bible, and the godly life of moral discipline and prayer. Their goals were both negative and positive. They were intent on quashing popish superstition in part because they were convinced that its persistence helped to explain the recurrence of plague, famine, and other divine judgments on the land. In a more positive sense, they were trying to clear the way for construction of a new vision of the good life—one that exalted word over image and discipline over ritual, and in which community cohesion was achieved by a shared Protestant identity and the common goal of a devout and orderly society. Modern observers generally credit their campaign with remarkable success; certainly the popular image of Scotland after the Reformation is grim and joyless—and with some reason. Days of fasting and humiliation under presbyterian rule came close to outnumbering the old saints' days, and they vastly outnumbered new days of thanksgiving. Official policy on the matter of festivity was exemplary for a Reformed nation.
Rape and Resistance: Women and Consent in Seventeenth-Century English Legal and Political Thought
Authors: Rudolph Julia
Published: February 2004

During the Exclusion crisis, the figure of a tyrant rapist, a ruler undone by his own lust and cruelty, briefly appeared on the London stage. Early in December 1680, Nathaniel Lee's Lucius Junius Brutus was performed by the Duke's Company in the Dorset Garden Theater. Lee's play recounted the tale of the rape of Lucretia and the subsequent actions taken by Brutus in resistance to this act of tyranny. This theatrical production was by all accounts a success, yet the play was banned from the stage after only six days; the order of the Lord Chamberlain stated objections to its “very Scandalous Expressions & Reflections upon ye Government.” Lee's Brutus was, however, soon available in print, published by Richard and Jacob Tonson in June of 1681. Like other Exclusion publications, Brutus offered a powerful argument against tyranny and arbitrary government, and the play was evidently construed as an attack on the Stuart monarchy. Many modern commentators have specifically noted the anti-Catholic overtones of Lee's drama and have read it within the context of the Popish Plot scare. Yet the central theme of Lee's play is, of course, the association between tyranny and rape: it is the tyrant's violation of woman (not of religion) that justifies resistance. In Lee's drama, just as in Livy's history, the chaste and honorable Roman matron Lucretia is raped by “the lustful bloody Sextus,” a prince of the proud and tyrannical house of Tarquin. In both stories, Lucretia's rape and her subsequent suicide set off a train of revolutionary events: Brutus seizes the bloody knife from Lucretia's twice-violated body and, holding it to his lips, vows with his fellow Romans never to suffer Tarquin “nor any other king to reign in Rome.”
Samuel Smiles and the Woman Question in Early Victorian Britain
Authors: Tyrrell Alex
Published: February 2004

When Samuel Smiles (1812–1904) looked back over his career from the vantage point of old age he saw himself as one who had labored for “the emancipation and intellectual improvement of women.” His self-description will surprise those who know him, either through his famous book, Self-Help (1859), where women make fleeting appearances as maternal influences on the achievements of great men, or through the attempts that have been made during the Thatcher years to offer him as an exemplar of a highly selective code of “Victorian Values.” Nonetheless, there is much to be said for Smiles's interpretation: not only was he a prolific author on the condition of women, but his writings on this subject from the late 1830s to the early 1850s were radical in tone and content.

By directing attention to these writings, this article makes three points about early Victorian gender relations, radicalism, and Smiles's own career. First, it challenges the lingering notion that this was a time when patriarchal values stifled debate on gender issues. For some historians who write about the women's movement, the early Victorian era has the status of something like a dark age in the history of the agitation for women's rights; this period is overshadowed on the one side by the great debates initiated by Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and on the other by the new feminist movements that developed after the 1850s. Barbara Caine, for example, has written recently that the exclusion of women from the public sphere was “absolute” in the mid-century years; few women had the financial resources necessary to set up a major journal even if they had been bold enough to do so, and the sort of man who wrote sympathetically about women was concerned primarily with his own needs.
The Little Manx Nation: Antiquarianism, Ethnic Identity, and Home Rule Politics in the Isle of Man, 1880–1918
Authors: Belchem John
Published: February 2004

As imperial pride flourished in the racial discourse of late Victorian British politics, ethnic revival and Celtic nationalism also gained purchase and resonance. These complex and seemingly competing issues of identity extended beyond the “four nations” of the United Kingdom to the Isle of Man, a crown dependency constitutionally outside the United Kingdom but at the very center of the British Isles. In this “land of home rule,” adrift in the Irish Sea, the juxtaposition of Britishness and Celticism was particularly acute, compounded by the proud persistence of Norse traditions. Manx independence within the Atlantic archipelago was symbolized by the annual Tynwald Day ceremony, a Viking “Thing” or general meeting, at which the year's new legislation was promulgated in both English and Manx Gaelic. In the late Victorian period, as Anglo-Manx business syndicates invested heavily in the “visiting industry,” transforming the island into “one large playground for the operatives of Lancashire and Yorkshire,” gentlemanly antiquarians constructed (and/or invented) the necessary traditions to safeguard Manx cultural distinctiveness and its devolved political status. Through the assertion of Celticism, a project that tended to downgrade Norse contributions to the island's past, the little Manx nation girded itself against cultural anglicization, yet remained unquestionably loyal to the British empire.

Slightly other than English, the Manx have displayed what Sir Frank Kermode has described as “mild alienation” and “qualified foreignness,” characteristics that need to be considered in the wider debate about British identity.
Defining the Limits of Britishness: The “New” British History and the Meaning of the Revolution Settlement in Ireland for Ulster's Presbyterians
Authors: Griffin Patrick
Published: February 2004

Irish historian A. T. Q. Stewart has aptly described the world inhabited by eighteenth-century Ulster Scots as one of “hidden” significance. Compared to the rise of the Ascendancy and the repression of Catholics under the penal code, the story of Ulster's Presbyterians figures as interesting, albeit less significant, marginalia. While a few studies detail the handicaps the group suffered in the years after the Williamite Settlement, their eighteenth-century experience has mainly attracted church historians interested in theological disputes, social historians charting the rise of the linen industry, and students of the '98 Rebellion exploring the ways in which a latent Presbyterian radicalism contributed to the formation of the United Irish movement. Explaining who the Ulster Scots were or how they defined themselves has not attracted much scholarly attention, an unsurprising failure given that historians have designated the eighteenth century in Ireland as the period of “penal era and golden age.”

This article argues that a new, more fully integrated approach to the study of Ireland and Britain offers possibilities for recovering the history of the Ulster Scots. Nearly twenty-five years after J. G. A. Pocock issued his “plea” for a “new British history” that would incorporate the experiences of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland within a single narrative by exploring the ways in which each “interacted so as to modify the condition of one another's existence,” scholars have finally responded. The new British history, with its focus on the development of a British state system, seeks to explore, according to a chief proponent, John Morrill, the ways in which “the political and constitutional relationship between the communities of the two islands were transformed” and the processes through which they gained “a new sense of their own identities as national communities.”
Free Trade and State Formation: The Political Economy of Fisheries Policy in Britain and the United Kingdom circa 1780–1850
Authors: Gambles Anna
Published: February 2004

It is striking that historians of the early nineteenth century have been relatively reluctant to consider relationships between economic policy and the consolidation of the British state. In today's context, the economic and political challenges posed by both European integration and resurgent nationalism have generated hotly contested controversies on the political economy of state formation. From the perspective of the United Kingdom, the prospect of political and administrative devolution has forced us to address the implications of political decentralization for regional economic development (and vice versa) and to consider in turn the impact of these dynamics on the political integrity of a multinational state. For Britain, the period between circa 1780 and 1850 was characterized by unprecedented economic growth, imperial crisis and acquisition, and political consolidation. In a metropolitan sense the most dramatic feature of this process was, of course, the creation of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in 1800. Insofar as historians of early nineteenth-century Britain have examined the relationship between “state formation” and economic policy, however, they have tended to focus on the ideas, politics, and pressures surrounding the retreat of the state from economic intervention. Thus in more general accounts it became axiomatic that the nineteenth-century state shrank progressively from social and economic intervention, liberating commerce, and resting the fiscal system on secure but modest direct taxation.

More recently, the relationship between the concept of “laissez-faire” and British state formation has been dramatically revised and refined by Philip Harling and Peter Mandler.
“Captain Burton's Oriental Muck Heap”:The Book of the Thousand Nightsand the Uses of Orientalism
Authors: Kennedy Dane
Published: February 2004

In the final decade of his remarkable life, the Victorian explorer and linguist Richard Francis Burton made a daring bid to provoke a confrontation with those forces in British society that he identified with moral intolerance and intellectual pedantry. Unlikely though it might seem, the instrument of this provocation was a work widely regarded as children's literature—the tales of the Arabian Nights. In 1885–86, Burton published a ten-volume translation of the tales,The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, followed in 1886–88 by an additional six-volumeSupplemental Nights to the Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night. The mammoth scale of the endeavor was matched by its audacity. Burton not only offered an English reading public the first frank and unexpurgated translation of the tales themselves; he also peppered the text with footnotes about esoteric aspects of Islamic culture, especially sexual customs, and closed the tenth volume with a “Terminal Essay” that included a lengthy discourse on pederasty. This quixotic enterprise thrust Burton into the middle of an intersecting network of debates about sexuality and purity, state regulation and personal freedom, the Occident and the Orient. To examine the intentions that motivated Burton's translation of theNightsand the reception it received is to explore some of the crucial elements of the late Victorian crisis of identity.

While the crumbling of a Victorian cultural consensus has long been a matter of interest, only recently has attention turned to the role that non-Western influences played in this process.
Defining Militancy: Radical Protest, the Constitutional Idiom, and Women's Suffrage in Britain, 1908–1909
Authors: Mayhall Laura E. Nym
Published: February 2004

May some definition be given of the word “militant”? (Chelsea delegate Cicely Hamilton)

Scholarship on the women's suffrage movement in Britain has reached a curious juncture. No longer content to chronicle the activities or document the contributions of single organizations, historians have begun to analyze the movement's strategies of self-advertisement and to disentangle its racial, imperial, and gendered ideologies. Perhaps the most striking development in recent scholarship on suffrage, however, has been the proliferating discourse on militancy among literary critics, a development with which few historians have engaged. Yet, while militancy has spawned a veritable subfield in literary studies, continually generating new articles and books, these accounts portray the phenomenon in similarly reductive terms. After 1903 the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), under the leadership of Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, revitalized a genteel and moribund women's suffrage movement. The WSPU introduced the use of militancy, first interrupting Liberal Party meetings and heckling political speakers, then moving to the use of street theater, such as large-scale demonstrations, and ultimately to the destruction of government and private property, including smashing windows, slashing paintings in public galleries, and setting fire to buildings and pillar-boxes. Once the Liberal government introduced forcible feeding as an antidote to the suffragette hunger strike, militants created a visual activism, dependent upon the exhibition of women's tortured bodies as spectacle. By this account, the activities of the WSPU became exemplary of what critic Barbara Green has called “performative activism” and “visibility politics” in early twentieth-century feminist praxis, creating “almost entirely feminine communities where women celebrated, suffered, spoke with, and wrote for other women,” and that “allowed women to put themselves on display for other women.”
England, Ireland, Magna Carta, and the Common Law: The Case of Connor Lord Maguire, Second Baron of Enniskillen
Authors: Orr D. Alan
Published: February 2004

The treason trial of Connor Lord Maguire, second baron of Enniskillen, in February 1645 brought into focus competing conceptions of the constitutional relationship of England and Ireland. Maguire had been implicated in the plot to seize Dublin Castle on 23 October 1641 during the Irish revolt of that year and was tried in early 1645 before a Middlesex jury. The key issue of the trial was whether Maguire, as a peer of Ireland, having committed treasonable acts in Ireland and elsewhere and being brought “into England against his will, might be lawfully tryed … in the King's Bench at Westminster by a Middlesex Jury, and outed of his tryal by Irish Peers of his condition by the statute of 35 Henry VIII c. 2.” In the earl of Stafford's trial almost four years earlier, the defense had consistently assumed a position that will be termed Irish constitutionalexceptionalism. Both Strafford and other apologists for his rule as Lord Deputy in Ireland during the 1630s adopted this constitutional stance in response to proceedings against them in both the English and Irish Parliaments during 1641. It held that while Magna Carta and the common law generally held sway in Ireland, because of circumstances unique to that particular kingdom, significant exceptions existed with regard to the legal rights and privileges these legal instruments conferred on the king's Irish subjects. In contrast, the case for Maguire rested on a view of the constitutional relationship of England and Ireland that emphasized a more closely shared heritage of legal privileges for both commoners and peers as guaranteed by Magna Carta and the common law—a position best characterized asconstitutionalist.
Contesting the Hero: The Funeral of Admiral Lord Nelson
Authors: Jenks Timothy
Published: February 2004

In the days before Christmas 1805, William Thomas Fitzgerald's Nelson's Tomb; a Poem made its appearance in London book shops. Fitzgerald was one of the foremost loyalist versifiers of his day—and had previously published an ode to Nelson after the Battle of the Nile. When he took pen in hand, Britain was mourning Nelson's recent death at Trafalgar. Nelson's Tomb then, considered the manner in which Britons would mark his passing. Nelson's funeral would be, Fitzgerald boasted, “no hireling pageant.”

Fitzgerald's words conveyed the contemporary loyalist sense that the funeral for Lord Nelson would be genuine, ordered, harmonious, and widely acceptable—that it would avoid the accusations of artificiality and the expressions of dissent that had greeted previous patriotic pageants such as the Naval Thanksgiving of 1797. At first glance, Fitzgerald's expectation would seem to accord with the recent orthodoxy concerning state spectacle in Britain during the wars of 1793–1815, an orthodoxy holding not only that the public pageants of the period were an important manifestation of the particular brand of patriotism that loyalists were interested in marketing but also that the product itself had unifying and socially cohesive effects. But Nelson's funeral—which was held on 9 January 1806 and drew crowds of between twenty and thirty thousand people—has not been widely treated as a loyalist spectacle, largely because those who have considered it have joined Linda Colley in recognizing its apparently iconoclastic nature. Colley was attentive to the state pageants of the period; they featured in her argument for the privileging of a cult of monarchy in officially consecrated expressions of British nationalism.
“The Sinn Féin of India”: Irish Nationalism and the Policing of Revolutionary Terrorism in Bengal
Authors: Silvestri Michael
Published: February 2004

A recent article in the Calcutta magazineDeshoutlined the exploits of a revolutionary fighting for “national freedom” against the British Empire. The article related how, during wartime, this revolutionary traveled secretly to secure the aid of Britain's enemies in starting a rebellion in his country. His mission failed, but this “selfless patriot” gained immortality as a nationalist hero. For an Indian—and particularly a Bengali—audience, the logical protagonist of this story would be the Bengali nationalist leader Subhas Chandra Bose. Bose, the former president of the Indian National Congress, assumed the leadership of the Indian National Army with the support of the Japanese imperial government during the Second World War in the hopes of freeing India from British rule. The subject of the story, however, was not Bose, but the United Irishmen leader Theobald Wolfe Tone and his efforts in 1796 to secure assistance for an Irish rebellion from the government of Revolutionary France. The article went on to narrate how Ireland had been held in the “grip of imperialism” for an even longer period of time than India and concluded that the Irish and Indian nationalist movements were linked by a history of rebellion against British rule.

As theDesharticle illustrates, the popular image of the relationship between Ireland and India within the British Empire has been that of two subject peoples striving for national freedom. This linkage of Irish and Indian history has had particular resonance in Bengal.
Constructing George Wyndham: Narratives of Aristocratic Masculinity in Fin-de-Siècle England
Authors: Ellenberger Nancy W.
Published: February 2004

In June 1913, on a holiday trip to Paris, George Wyndham died suddenly of a heart attack—he was not quite fifty years old. Shocked by this unexpected loss, colleagues in the Conservative Party and the House of Commons, whose inner circles he had occupied for a quarter of a century, organized the usual tributes. Obituaries laid out Wyndham's pedigree as scion of one of England's more romantic landed families, charted his meteoric rise in the 1890s under Arthur Balfour's patronage, referred briefly and discreetly to his troubled tenure as Irish secretary from 1900–1905, and applauded his versatility as a sportsman and a man of letters. Despite his truncated career, interest in Wyndham did not wane after these first homages. Working through the interruption of war, his family saw that collections of letters and essays, with the 1925 set prefaced by J. W. Mackail's “life,” reached the public. These materials prompted pen portraits and biographies that appeared at regular intervals into the 1970s.

A largely sympathetic group of authors, those who wrote about Wyndham faced the interesting challenge of presenting as inspiring and exemplary a life whose disappointments had threatened to outweigh its achievements. The solution they found was one that Wyndham would have accepted, for, indeed, he helped to shape it. In their hands, George Wyndham became a modern Siegfried, the charming, versatile, and disinterested son of an extraordinary ruling class—now, alas, eclipsed—who had guided Britain through two centuries of unprecedented grandeur and prosperity.
“When the King Goeth a Procession”: Chapel Ceremonies and Services, the Ritual Year, and Religious Reforms at the Early Tudor Court, 1485–1547
Authors: Kisby Fiona
Published: February 2004

There is general agreement now that the court of Henry VIII and his father wasthecenter of politics, patronage, and power in England. It is also well understood how access to the king—the sole font of that power—and the ability to catch “either his ear or his eye” headed, to a large extent, the agenda of any ambitious courtier. Patronage is a theme that has accordingly dominated the historiography of the Tudor royal household, and indeed this is one of the two major concerns of court historians of the early modern period in general. Ceremony is the second, and the Tudor court has been the focus of study in this respect too, as the work of Jennifer Loach and Sidney Anglo attests. Yet while the occasional ceremonies of state (funerals, coronations, royal entries) and of “spectacles” (revels, pageants, and plays) have been the subject of detailed investigation, those that took place on a regular basis exclusively within the physical confines of the royal houses have received very little attention. Consequently historians have failed to notice a fundamental fact of which all courtiers were aware: that, by the early Tudor period and quite probably well before, the weekly routine of ceremony at the English court was structured by the liturgical calendar and thus dominated by religious culture.

It is possible that this historiographical lacuna has arisen because the history of the chief organ of religious ceremonial in the royal household—the chapel royal—has largely been neglected.
Love, Honor, and Obedience: Fashionable Women and the Discourse of Marriage in the Early Eighteenth Century
Authors: Tague Ingrid H.
Published: February 2004

To speak plainly, I am very sorry for the forlorn state of Matrimony, which is as much ridicul'd by our Young Ladys as it us'd to be by young fellows; in short, both Sexes have found the Inconveniencys of it, and the Apellation of Rake is as genteel in a Woman as a Man of Quality…. You may Imagine we marry'd Women look very silly; we have nothing to excuse our selves but that twas done a great while ago and we were very young when we did it (Lady Mary Wortley Montagu to the Countess of Mar).

In this letter to her sister, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu expresses what was in the early eighteenth century a commonplace view of wedlock. Marriage, she writes, is such an object of mockery that even women have lost interest in it and married women like herself must “excuse” themselves for their unfashionable behavior. Obviously, Lady Mary's tone is light, but she expresses ideas that were being argued quite seriously in a variety of circles. Many of her contemporaries believed that marriage was deteriorating into a business contract. Rather than being respected as an institution ordained by God and necessary to social stability, the argument went, marriage was an object of mockery, used only as a cynical means of increasing wealth. Brides were being bought and sold with no regard for their future happiness or compatibility with their husbands. Most famously, perhaps, this notion was exploited in William Hogarth's series,Marriage à la Mode(1745), its very title embodying the idea that mercenary marriage was a new fashion.
The Conservative Party, Patriotism, and British Politics: The Case of the General Election of 1900
Authors: Readman Paul
Published: February 2004

Paul Rich has written that “nationalism in English society has not been a subject that has especially interested historians until comparatively recently.” This judgment could equally be applied to what Gerald Newman has described as that “mere primitive feeling of loyalty,” the less complex and far more ancient phenomenon of patriotism, which, for the purposes of the present article, will simply be taken to mean “love of country.” In the last few decades, the attention given to patriotism by British historians has grown rapidly. However, historians of party politics, particularly those interested in the late nineteenth century, have proved something of an exception to this rule. Although few would dispute Lord Blake's view that “‘patriotism’ … has usually been a valuable weapon in the Conservative armoury,” even work done on the tory party has avoided serious discussion of the subject. Most writers, particularly those of textbook studies, have found it difficult to move beyond rather general allusions to the Conservatives' transformation intotheparty of patriotism in the 1870s, with “Disraeli's speeches of 1872–3” and his “performance at Berlin in 1878” establishing once and for all “the image of the Conservative party as the champion of national honour.” This argument, of course, owes much to Hugh Cunningham's importantHistory Workshoparticle of 1981, which put forward the view that patriotism—originally an antistate and libertarian “creed of opposition”—had by the late nineteenth century passed from the hands of the radicals into the possession of the political Right.
The Imaginary Society: Women in 1381
Authors: Federico Sylvia
Published: February 2004

On June 16, in the midst of the disturbances at Cambridge during the Rising of 1381, a woman named Margery Starre was said to have tossed the ashes of burnt documents to the winds, crying as she did so, “away with the learning of clerks! away with it!” The story of this woman's violence against texts is not unknown—it has been noted several times in major studies of the revolt—but its significance as part of the much larger story of women in 1381 has been overlooked.

Instances of women's participation appear in the judicial records, chronicles, and poetry produced in the decade following the revolt. These texts depict women as independent leaders and maintainers of rebel bands, as instigators of others' violence, and as accomplices with their family members in criminal acts. They also “participated” as victims: women were assaulted, abducted, and threatened with death, and their property was frequently stolen or destroyed. Despite the evidence, and despite the recent and widespread interest of medievalists in both social history and feminist studies, women's roles in the revolt have gone largely unexamined. In this initial sense, the women constitute an imaginary component of their society: overlooked and ignored by the scholarship, their presence in 1381 is assumed to be unreal. From the absence of study comes the absence of women in history.

But we should not be so surprised to “discover” women in 1381, since earlier and later medieval collective actions feature women either in active roles or functioning as symbols of insurrection.
Alice Arden to Bill Sikes: Changing Nightmares of Intimate Violence in England, 1558–1869
Authors: Wiener Martin J.
Published: February 2004

Let us begin with two scenes of intimate violence. First, consider a man, a woman, and three male “guests” in a well-furnished locked room. Suddenly one of the men strikes the host, and another stabs him, and he falls to the floor. At this moment the woman steps forward (she had previously tried to poison him), seizes the knife, and plunges it home, crying, “Take this for hind'ring Mosby's love and mine.” Alice Arden, with the help of her new lover, a servant, and his avaricious accomplices, has murdered her landowner husband. So climaxesArden of Feversham, a powerful play (frequently attributed to Shakespeare) first performed in 1592 and based upon an actual murder that took place in 1551. This murder “assumed an almost totemic significance in early modern culture,” reappearing in a great variety of forms over the following century (even as a puppet show), with Alice, among other things, ranked with the classical uxoricides Clytemnestra and Livia.

Consider another scene, set several centuries later: this is a starker setting, only two figures in a bare and shabby room. A ragged woman is pleading with her lover for her life, and she is urging him that it is not too late for both to repent of their former lives. Her lover, a fierce and powerful man, stands over her, nostrils dilated, grasping a pistol. Fearful of being heard, he does not fire, but instead strikes her twice with the handle, then seizes a heavy club and beats her down.
“A Medley Mob of Irish-American Plotters and Irish Dupes”: The British Press and Transatlantic Fenianism
Authors: de Nie Michael
Published: February 2004

In recent years scholars have paid considerable attention to the problem of British identity and “Britishness.” Britishness and, for that matter, Englishness or Scottishness, are all, of course, impossible to quantify in any exact manner. While regional identities obviously persisted after 1707, this persistence did not preclude the construction of a national identity, a core set of “British” values that most people in Britain could agree represented them and their success as a commercial, industrial, and imperial power. In the press, popular fiction, and political dialogue, “British” was understood to stand for certain qualities, among them earnestness, prosperity, manliness, freedom, character, and civilization. These were the qualities used to contrast, compare, and find Britain superior to almost every nation and people in the world, especially Ireland and the British colonies.

This contrast has been central to scholarship on British identity, most notably Linda Colley'sBritons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837. Playing on Benedict Anderson's idea of an “imagined community,” Colley portrays Britain as an invented nation brought together primarily by confrontation with the French Catholic Other over the course of a century of near perpetual warfare. Britons came to define themselves as a single people “not because of any political or cultural consensus at home, but rather in reaction to the Other beyond their shores.” While a number of works seeking to modify, challenge, or even refute Colley have followed, most scholars concur that Englishness (or Britishness) was based above all on comparison with others, especially the Catholic French.
Activists against “Affluence”: Labour Party Culture during the “Golden Age,” circa 1950–1970
Authors: Fielding Steven
Published: February 2004

From its very foundation, most observers considered the ideas that motivated the British Labour Party to have been essentially empirical. As early as 1929 the German social democrat Egon Wertheimer famously remarked that, unlike his own party, Labour was “completely unencumbered by philosophy, theory and general views of life.” Over sixty years later, this opinion was endorsed by an academic survey of European social democracy that concluded that the party possessed a uniquely “practical brand of ideology.” Labour's apparent peculiarity is conventionally explained with reference to its historic role as the political arm of the British trade union movement and the privileged place held by members of the organized working class within party institutions. This intimate association supposedly gave rise to “Labourism,” characterized by many as a myopic preoccupation with the defense of male industrial workers' material interests. Labour's strong union link is also thought to have promoted a dominant “ethos” that directly reflected the proletarian experience of exploitation. Only in the 1970s, after many working-class members had left and been replaced by more bourgeois and marxist-inclined recruits, did scholars suppose that Labour became, albeit temporarily, more overtly doctrinaire.

In challenging this entrenched view of Labour thought, the present article focuses on the period between 1950 and 1970, which began with the lifting of the last vestiges of wartime austerity and ended just before the onset of a world recession. These years have now assumed the glow of, as Eric Hobsbawm has put it, “a sort of Golden Age.”