bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
“Dark Strangers” in Our Midst: Discourses of Race and Nation in Britain, 1947–1963
Authors: Waters Chris
Published: February 2004

It has been more than a decade since Benedict Anderson urged us to consider the nation a particular kind of cultural artefact and to study national communities in terms of the style in which they are imagined. Anticipating Anderson's seminal work, Enoch Powell, the Biblical scholar, Ulster Unionist M.P., and 1960s advocate of the voluntary repatriation of people of color in Britain likewise suggested that the “life of nations … is lived largely in the imagination.” He also noted that the myths on which Britain's “corporate imagination” rested had, since 1945, become severely impoverished. Amidst the rubble produced by the collapse of many of those myths scholars have begun to problematize the various components of national identity that, customarily, have been taken for granted as “real” rather than invented. They have also begun to trace the manner by which the national community has constantly been imagined and reimagined in the past. Some of their more insightful work has considered the articulation of Englishness against other nationalities in the United Kingdom, particularly the Irish. This had led Linda Colley to suggest that national identity is always contingent and relational, the product of boundaries drawn up to distinguish between the collective self and the other.

In this essay, I want to suggest that Britain's wartime sense of national unity, generated through the struggle against fascist Germany, began to crumble after 1945. This gradual erosion of national cohesion, coupled with Britain's failure to generate new narratives of national purpose through the rhetoric of the Cold War, led to a veritable crisis of national self-representation in the 1950s, a crisis compounded by domestic social dislocation and the rapid emergence of the political, military, and economic hegemony of the United States.
The Third British Empire: Transplanting the English Shire to Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and America
Authors: Noonkester Myron C.
Published: February 2004

During their hegemony in world affairs, the English exported persons, commodities, and texts to regions that they absorbed into a widening pale of influence. Discussion of these ventures has consumed a vast literature. What once seemed to be a simple matter of transporting Protestantism (or convicts) into an overseas wilderness or making distant lands safe for English farming and trade now seems a matter too complex to be captured in a metaphor or an alliterative catchphrase. Yet it remains a matter of historical fascination that a relatively small archipelago off the coast of Europe not only could become the first “modern” nation-state but could then transform itself into a vast global empire, ultimately making it seem as if the affairs of this proverbial workshop encompassed world history itself. For many years, such success seemed too evident for investigation, and scholarly attention turned toward explaining how this achievement unraveled or declined. The result has been a quest for detailed precision and microhistorical reconstruction on the part of those who have adopted an “empirical,” geopolitical approach to imperialism and an outpouring of criticism from those who, on the opposite end of the ideological spectrum, have penned polemical classics whose evocative, if not evidentiary, power envisioned revolution as historical destiny and a means of filling the intellectual and political void left by imperial evacuation. Their disagreements notwithstanding, however, both categories of imperial commentary display relative innocence of the paradox that imperial power represented: that, despite voluble criticism, it enjoyed eclipsing success for a time and produced effects whose mysteries continue to survive postcolonial deconstruction.
English Prisons, Penal Culture, and the Abatement of Imprisonment, 1895–1922
Authors: Bailey Victor
Published: February 2004

The prison method is callous, regular and monotonous and produces great mental and physical strain. The deprivation of liberty is extremely cruel and if it is attended with treatment that deadens the spiritual nature and fails to offer any stimulus to the imagination, that coarsens and humiliates, then it stands condemned. (Arthur Creech Jones, conscientious objector, Wandsworth Prison, 1916–19)

The nineteenth century was the century of the penitentiary. Public and physical punishments (from whipping to the death penalty) were gradually replaced by the less visible, less corporal sanction of imprisonment. By the start of the Victorian era, imprisonment was the predominant penalty in the system of judicial punishments. For every 1,000 offenders sentenced at higher and summary courts in 1836 for serious (or indictable) offenses, 685 were punished by imprisonment in local prisons. By midcentury, moreover, sentences of penal servitude in convict prisons were plugging the gap left by the end of transportation to Australia. The three hundred or so local prisons in the 1830s, to which offenders were sent for anywhere between one day and two years (though typically for terms of less than three months), were locally controlled until 1877 and were less than uniform in regime. The separate system of prison discipline (or cellular isolation) increasingly prevailed over the silent system (or associated, silent labor), but it was subject to considerable local modification. Convict prisons were run by central government with less variability.
Overture to an Alliance: British Propaganda at the New York World's Fair, 1939–1940
Authors: Cull Nicholas J.
Published: February 2004

On April 30, 1939, President Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed the New York World's Fair open. Moments later a flood of eager humanity surged onto the one-and-a-quarter thousand acre former municipal dump in Flushing Meadow, Queens, now home to what theNew York Herald Tribunetermed “the mightiest exposition ever conceived and built by man.” While Europe shivered on the brink of a war, the United States focused its attention on the distinctive silhouette of a seven hundred foot spire and a globe two hundred feet wide: the “Trilon” and the “Perisphere,” centerpieces and emblems of the New York World's Fair. The fair stretched around their base in a teeming sprawl of concrete and electric lights. Its precincts embraced all manner of amusements, including a vast funfair with such thematic attractions as a Cuban village, an African jungle, and a Merrie England area. While most of the visitors seemed intent on enjoying themselves, the fair was intended by its organizers to serve a serious educative purpose. Its theme was “building the world of tomorrow,” with two-thirds of the fair ground given over to exhibitions by corporations, U.S. federal agencies, and foreign governments. The fair's corporate exhibitors vied with each other for the most spectacular vision of what this world might be. General Motors offered the “Futurama” exhibit designed by Norman Bel Geddes, in which 28,000 visitors a day traveled on a conveyor belt ride through a projection of the American landscape forward twenty-five years, to a Utopia liberated by the automobile. In a similar vein, inside the Perisphere visitors could view a diorama of a future metropolis, “Democracity.” But popular acclaim lay elsewhere.
Practical Antipapistry during the Reign of Elizabeth I
Authors: Questier Michael
Published: February 2004

We are so used to the “revisionist” account of the English Reformation as a story of Protestant failure and of (relative) Catholic success that it is easy to forget how late sixteenth-century English Catholicism was once viewed by scholars not as an innocent parish pastime or a culturally conservative reaction to puritan evangelical excess. In the older narratives of the religious struggle in early modern England, historians recounted a fierce battle—the papal excommunication of Queen Elizabeth, the endless plotting to promote the dynastic claim of Mary Stuart, and foreign enterprises to invade the realm and put paid to the Tudors. Here the politics of disagreement about religion engendered a fair measure of violence on the part of the state toward some of its Catholic subjects, and this confrontation has come down to us most vividly through the martyrological narratives in which leading Catholic clerics described the sufferings of the faithful. Yet these narratives were themselves deliberately depoliticized. The context of the state's proceedings was largely cut away, and the actions and opinions of the Catholic martyrs that so irritated the regime were glossed over as part of an incisive rhetorical statement that Catholics died for their religion, not for any treasonable inclinations on their part. This was a brilliant polemical reply to the official propaganda that described Roman Catholic Englishmen as not merely ungodly but a lethal threat to the security of the state. In the regime's opinion, and in the antipopish canon that developed at this time, they were a fifth column of dissent set fair to exploit and assist foreign attempts to unseat the Tudor regime. The language of antipopery rode continually on a fear of domestic plots and schemes to meddle in the settlement of religion and the succession to the throne.
A Patriot for Whom? The Afterlives of Bolingbroke's Patriot King
Authors: Armitage David
Published: February 2004

The transformation of patriotism into nationalism has become one of the accepted grand narratives of eighteenth-century British history. From its first appearance in English in the 1720s, “patriotism” as a political slogan expressed devotion to the common good of thepatriaand hostility to sectional interests and became a staple of oppositional politics. Though it was attacked by ministerialist writers, it was a liability only for those like the elder Pitt, whose attachment to patriotism when in opposition was not matched by his behavior when in government. However, the Wilkesite agitations and the debate over the American War decisively tainted patriotism with the whiff of factious reformism, and it was in just this context, in 1775, that Dr. Samuel Johnson famously redefined patriotism as “the last refuge of a scoundrel.” In the following half century, both radicals and loyalists fought over the appropriation of patriotism: the radicals to rescue it from the contempt into which it had fallen in the 1770s, the loyalists and the government to harness its potent discourse of national duty for the cause of monarchical revivalism and aggressive anti-Gallicanism. It is now generally agreed that the conservatives won, as the oppositional language of the early and mid-eighteenth century was thereby transformed into “an officially constructed patriotism which stressed attachment to the monarchy, the importance of empire, the value of military and naval achievement, and the desirability of strong, stable government by a virtuous, able and authentically British elite.”
The Labour Party, Women, and the Problem of Gender, 1951–1966
Authors: Black Amy , Brooke Stephen
Published: February 2004

Following the 1966 General Election, the Labour Party's Home Policy Committee observed that the party had, “for the first time, obtained a majority of the female vote” and remarked, “it would be very satisfactory if we could retain it.” Two years later, the Report of the Committee of Enquiry into Party Organisation emphasized the “imperative that the Party concerns itself with how to win much more support among women.” These comments not only betrayed a serious weakness in Labour's electoral support between 1951 and 1966 but also acknowledged an important lacuna in its broader political outlook.

Given the party's electoral difficulties in the period after 1951, the first concern was particularly apposite. Beatrix Campbell, Nicky Hart, and Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska have underlined the importance of this gender gap favoring the Conservatives after 1950 (see fig. 1). In the elections of 1951 and 1955, for example, Labour's vote among women lagged twelve and thirteen percentage points behind that of the Conservatives. Only in two elections between 1945 and 1970 did Labour enjoy leads among female voters, and these were much less substantial than those held by the Conservatives in 1951, 1955, 1959, and 1964. In rough numerical terms, this difference was potentially very significant. In 1951, for instance, women made up approximately 51.9 percent of the population of England, Scotland, and Wales and roughly 53.8 percent of those of voting age. With an electorate of 28.5 million, this meant a possible political advantage for the Conservatives of 1.2 million votes in an electoral contest where there were only .2 million votes between the two parties.
Conflict Resolution and Patronage in Provincial Towns, 1590–1640
Authors: Patterson Catherine
Published: February 2004

Historians of early modern England, just like the people they study, are preoccupied with order and disorder. Particularly for the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, attention has focused on how a government and political nation whose prescriptions demanded unanimity and stability descended into civil war and revolution, the ultimate disorder. The period saw rising populations, social mobility, economic change, and religious division, all of which placed stress on the traditional order. These agents of turmoil deserve close attention. But in focusing so intently on breakdown, we tend to miss seeing how Elizabethan and early Stuart government actually worked. For most of these years, a reasonably stable and increasingly integrated royal government ruled peacefully over the English people. By shifting our attention away from breakdown, we can begin to ask critical new questions. How, precisely, did the leaders of this society work to create order in the face of difference? How did the nature of government affect the ways that people sought stability?

Evidence from urban government—provincial borough corporations—provides critical insight into these questions. Civic leaders found that the best way to maintain order and authority in their own communities was by participating in the wider governing structures of the state. London's attempts at the “pursuit of stability” have received serious treatment in recent years. Provincial towns, however, have less often been studied as a means to understand the polity as a whole. They have in the past been characterized as quite insular, either abjectly dependent on a great lord or gentleman or else “independent” and unwilling to brook outside influences; they sought stability and control by looking inward, reinforcing their own authority.
“'Tis a Misfortune to Be a Great Ladie”: Maternal Mortality in the British Aristocracy, 1558–1959
Authors: Lewis Judith
Published: February 2004

As long ago as 1981, the distinguished demographers E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield threw out a challenge to historians. “A fully satisfactory interpretation of population history,” they offered, “must embrace a wide spectrum of related topics and techniques.” Such a history would “require an alertness for opportunities to quantify historical evidence and to make effective use of statistical techniques,” they continued, but it would be “equally alive to the importance of studying the attitudes of individuals and groups wherever possible. The family,” they concluded, “is the prime institutional form in population history, and the births, marriages and deaths of its members were affected by their behavioral conventions and beliefs as well as by their social and economic circumstances.” The British aristocracy is an ideal subject for such a multifaceted, family-oriented view of population history. Thanks to T. H. Hollingsworth and other demographers, the statistical record of their population history is probably better established than that of any other social group, while thanks to their own historical importance and privileged status, their domestic experiences are richly documented. Consequently, their social mores and personal attitudes can be identified along with their demographics.

While we normally assume that privileged social groups are healthier and generally live longer than those more humble in station, commonplace expectations have for centuries been reversed when it comes to one component of population history—maternal mortality. Popular culture has insisted, at least since the time of Rousseau, that ladies of fashion paid for their pleasures by being feeble and overly delicate, too weak to withstand the rigors of childbirth.
“The Foreign Element”: Newcomers and the Rhetoric of Race, Nation, and Empire in “Oxbridge” Undergraduate Culture, 1850–1920
Authors: Deslandes Paul R.
Published: February 2004

The Oxford and Cambridge man has long inspired fascination both in Great Britain and abroad. Many have, in fact, acquired an illusory understanding of these enigmatic university students through various caricatures and representations created in literature and film. Yet, despite an apparent level of popular interest, relatively few attempts have been made to understand the culture of male undergraduates at Oxford and Cambridge in a systematic and scholarly way. With the exception of Sheldon Rothblatt's work on student life in the early nineteenth century, J. A. Mangan's skillful exploration of the cult of athleticism's impact on the ancient universities, and some select studies of individual student societies and organizations, we know very little about the ways in which undergraduates lived their lives, saw their worlds, and viewed those who were traditionally excluded from these milieus. We know even less perhaps, despite the existence of Richard Symonds's examination of the relationship between Oxford and empire, about the ways “Oxbridge” undergraduates saw themselves as Britons and leaders of an imperial and “superior” English race. The conflation of English and British is intentional here. Applying English attributes to Britons did not generally present many problems for university men, even those from Scottish, Welsh, and Anglo-Irish backgrounds. “Britishness” and “Englishness” were often applied interchangeably by Oxford and Cambridge undergraduates although, as others have observed, uses of the term “English” tended most often to refer to the admired attributes or “personal” and “communal” traits of Britons, particularly those among the elite.
Reasonable Ecstasies: Shaftesbury and the Languages of Libertinism
Authors: Cowan Brian
Published: February 2004

Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713), would have recoiled at any implication that he was a libertine. His antipathy to libertinism is obvious, and examples are plentiful in his writings. His major work, theCharacteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times(1711), consistently uses the words “libertine” and “rake” as insults; in all of his writings sensual pleasures are disparaged as base and animalistic threats to human virtue. And despite the third earl's widespread reputation as a freethinker in matters religious, he always insisted that liberty of thought did not imply a freedom from moral restraint.

Certainly Shaftesbury's early reputation was more that of a shy and unsociable recluse rather than that of a rakishmondain. In 1721, John Toland thought it necessary to defend his late friend from accusations of unsociability, not of licentiousness. He claimed that Shaftesbury's enemies “gave out that he was too bookish, because not given to play, nor assiduous at court; that he was no good companion, because not a rake nor a hard drinker, and that he was no man of the world, because not selfish nor open to bribes.” Toland also remarked how Shaftesbury frowned upon the “extravagant liberties” taken by “both sexes” even without having lived “to see masquerades, or the ancient Bacchanals revived, nor to hear of promiscuous clubs.” Indeed, Lord Ashley's own private papers reveal that he was quite uncomfortable in the polite world of England's social elite; he much preferred the pastoral tranquillity of his Dorset estate and the relaxed company of his most trusted friends.
Newspapers and the Popular Belief in Witchcraft and Magic in the Modern Period
Authors: Davies Owen
Published: February 2004

The newspaper archive is, potentially, the largest untapped source of material concerning the popular belief in witchcraft and magic for the period after the formal cessation of the witchcraft trials in 1736. Several historians have successfully exploited the newspaper archive to examine popular customs in the modern period. However, little use has been made of newspapers to examine magical beliefs in the period defined by the decline of learned belief in witchcraft during the early eighteenth century and the eventual demise of popular belief in witchcraft two centuries later. Writing some fifty years ago, L. F. Newman noted that many witchcraft cases “only appear in the local Press of each district and extensive search is necessary to trace cases.” Newman hoped that his own very brief search would act as a catalyst for more intensive studies. Unfortunately, no one has conducted such work, and our understanding of the extent and influence of witchcraft and magic in the modern period is much the poorer for it. The present discussion, which seeks to begin that task, is based on short searches through various newspapers from around the country, the following up of secondary references, and an extensive, systematic ongoing survey of Somerset newspapers.

As Gustav Henningsen has observed, the newspaper has an important advantage over the folklore record in that it “always shows us the tradition in a concrete social context” and also provides a definite chronological basis. The combined exploration of folkloric sources and newspapers provides great potential for the regional study of witchcraft and magic in defined cultural settings.
Gendered Discourses and the Making of Protective Labor Legislation in England, 1830–1914
Authors: Malone Carolyn
Published: February 2004

The crowding together of numbers of the young in both sexes in factories, is a prolific source of moral delinquency. The stimulus of the heated atmosphere, the contact of the opposite sexes, the example of the lasciviousness upon the animal passion—all have conspired to produce a very early development of sexual appetencies. (Peter Gaskell,The Manufacturing Population of England, 1833)

The prolonged absence from home of the wife and mother caused an enormous amount of infant mortality and it must cause the elder children to be more or less neglected. It deadened the sense of parental responsibility. (Thomas Maudsley, secretary of the Committee Promoting the Nine Hours Movement, 1872)

From a purely physical point of view the nation's strength is measured by its reproductive power and the high percentage of the fitness of its children …. Women's work becomes the cause of physical degeneracy and of inability on the part of women to rise to the dignity of the completed act of motherhood. (Dr. Thomas Oliver, lecture before the Eugenics Education Society, 1911)

Each of these statements was made as part of the public debate about enacting protective labor legislation in England. They were diverse manifestations of a single idea—the idea that women's work outside the home was dangerous to society and required state intervention. Between 1830 and 1914, a discourse of danger dominated the public discussion of female labor. Yet, as the opening quotations suggest, different types of danger were emphasized at various times.
Myths and Meanings of Intellectuals in Twentieth-Century British National Identity
Authors: Heyck Thomas William
Published: February 2004

As Stefan Collini remarks in a recent paper comparing twentieth-century French and British intellectuals, the sense that Britain has had no intellectuals has been a significant element in British national identity. Collini rightly observes, “Any discussion in contemporary Britain of the topic of ‘intellectuals’ is sooner or later touched by the cliché that the reality of the phenomenon, like the origins of the term, is located in Continental Europe, and that British society, whether for reasons of history, culture or national psychology, is marked by the absence of ‘intellectuals.’” One might add that a closely related assumption has been equally significant: namely, that while the British may have had some intellectuals, they have paid little attention to them. As Denis Brogan once said, in a typical observation on British culture, “We British don't take our intellectuals too seriously.”

The purpose of this article is to suggest an explanation for this feature of British national identity. As the recent literature on national identity tells us, a society's sense of national characteristics is culturally constructed; thus we should be skeptical about any assertions concerning either the absence of intellectuals or the lack of influence by intellectuals in British culture.
Civic Portraiture and Political Culture in English Provincial Towns, ca. 1560–1640
Authors: Tittler Robert
Published: February 2004

In recent years the investigation of urban political culture prior to the Civil War has benefited greatly from three historiographical initiatives, all of them suggesting in one way or another the importance of interdisciplinary approaches to the subject. Though it deals with a later period, the work of Peter Borsay and others on what he has labeled “The English Urban Renaissance” has fleshed out a wide variety of cultural forms, verbal and nonverbal, and documented their development in the urban milieu. These studies have implicitly raised the question of antecedents from the pre-Civil War period and have suggested some possible lines of development. Yet by viewing urban culture as largely developing out of the cultural and social demands of the landed classes, rather than from concerns which were indigenously urban, and by not specifically connecting culture with politics to begin with, this work remains limited in its influence on the investigation of the earlier period.

A second tradition has emphasized the importance of Protestant, and especially Puritan, ideology in urban political culture before the Civil War. Such scholars as Paul Seaver, Patrick Collinson, and David Underdown have illuminated the force of those religious and moral concerns on the governing process and have explored such cultural forms as the sermon and the lecture as part of this effort. Their approach has been more explicitly political, and—even if the objective is often to assess the role of Puritan ideology in English politics leading up to the Civil War—it has still told us a great deal about the politics and culture of towns themselves in this period.
“Cam Ye O'er Frae France?” Exile and the Mind of Scottish Jacobitism, 1716–1727
Authors: Szechi Daniel
Published: February 2004

On 14 February 1716 at Ruthven in Badenoch, the remaining officers of the Jacobite army in Scotland gathered to decide their next move. They had turned out the previous autumn in high hopes of restoring the Stuart dynasty to the throne it had lost in 1689 and forcing an end to the union with England, but their confidence and enthusiasm had long since evaporated in the face of the defeat of the English rising at Preston and failure on their own part at Sherrifmuir. Their king and his chief minister had fled the country just after the army began its retreat from Perth. Now the weather had deteriorated, and desertion had reduced their once impressive force to a shadow of its former self. Not surprisingly, given the circumstances, the officers drafted a letter to the duke of Argyll, the commander of the British army in Scotland, asking for an indemnity and ordered their men to make their own way home. Then they themselves dispersed. It was the final act in the botched complex of conspiracies and uprisings that has gone down in history as the Jacobite Rising of 1715.

Reflecting on the consequences of the Jacobites' failure, the earl of Mar, by then the Old Pretender's secretary of state, sadly remarked: “I much doubt if ever a [rising] can be established there again.” It was a percipient observation. For over a generation, it was to prove extremely difficult to persuade most of the leaders of Scottish Jacobitism even to contemplate another uprising.
Reconciling the Celt: British National Identity, Empire, and the 1911 Investiture of the Prince of Wales
Authors: Ellis John S.
Published: February 2004

With the notable exception of Scotland, Queen Victoria was never very enthusiastic about her kingdoms of the “Celtic fringe.” During the sixty-four years of her reign, Victoria spent a healthy seven years in Scotland, a mere seven weeks in Ireland, and a paltry seven nights in Wales. Although there was little overt hostility, the nonconformist Welsh often felt neglected by the monarch and embittered by the queen's position as the head of the Church of England. Her Irish visits, however, were subject to more open opposition by stalwart republicans. Her visit to Dublin in 1900 was accompanied by embarrassing incidents and coercive measures to ensure the pleasant reception and safety of the monarch.

The reign of King Edward VII was notable for its warmer attitude toward Wales and Ireland, but this transformation in the relationship between the monarchy and the nations of the “Celtic fringe” reached its most clear expression with the 1911 investiture of the Prince of Wales during the reign of his son, King George V. The press considered the ceremony to be more important than any other royal visit to the Celtic nations and publicized it widely in the United Kingdom and British Empire. The organizers of the event erected telegraph offices at the site of the ceremony, and the railways established special express trains running from Caernarfon to London that were equipped with darkrooms in order to send stories and photographs of the event directly to the newspapers of Fleet Street.
Making It New: Visual Modernism and the “Myth of the North” in Interwar England
Authors: Saler Michael
Published: February 2004

We often associate visual modernism with cosmopolitan cities on the Continent, with pride of place going to Paris, Vienna, Prague, Berlin, and Munich. English visual modernism has been studied less frequently—the very phrase “English modernism” sounds like a contradiction in terms—but it too is usually linked to the cosmopolitan center of London, as well as to the notorious postimpressionist exhibitions staged there by Roger Fry in 1910 and 1912. Fry coined the term “postimpressionism” to embrace the disparate styles of Cézanne, Van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso, and others that he introduced to a bewildered and skeptical public. Together with his Bloomsbury colleague Clive Bell, Fry defined the new art in formalist terms, arguing that works of visual art do not represent the world or depict a narrative but, rather, consist of “significant forms” that elicit “aesthetic emotions” from sensitive viewers. The two men deliberately sought to redefine art away from the moral and utilitarian aesthetic promoted by Victorian critics such as John Ruskin and William Morris. Fry and Bell intended to establish art as self-sufficient, independent from social utility or moral concerns. Fry at times expressed ambivalence about this formalist enterprise, but Bell had fewer hesitations in defining modern art as absolutely autonomous: as he stated inArt(1914), “To appreciate a work of art we need bring with us nothing from life, no knowledge of its ideas and affairs, no familiarity with its emotions.
A Moveable Feast: Saint George's Day Celebrations and Religious Change in Early Modern England
Authors: McClendon Muriel C.
Published: February 2004

Recent writing on the English Reformation has been dominated by the so-called revisionists. While not all revisionist historians have advanced an identical interpretation of the Reformation, the broad outline of their argument is neatly summarized in the opening lines of J. J. Scarisbrick'sThe Reformation and the English People: “On the whole, English men and women did not want the Reformation and most of them were slow to accept it when it came.” While earlier writers argued that the Reformation period represented a sharp break in English history with a definitive rejection of Catholicism, revisionists have asserted that there was considerable continuity in the religious life of sixteenth-century men and women. The Catholic Church was strong and vital and commanded considerable loyalty among the laity, and changes to religious doctrine and practice generated considerable hostility. The demise of the Catholic Church in England was not assured, and the success of the Protestant Reformation was the result of a long straggle fought from above that was won only during the middle years of Elizabeth's reign.

The revisionist interpretation has commanded wide attention and support. It currently stands, in many respects, as the new orthodoxy of English Reformation historiography. Most historians now concur on the profound attachment of many men and women to the doctrine and worship of the Catholic Church and their reluctance to abandon them. Nevertheless, a number of questions about the revisionists' interpretation of the Reformation and English religiosity remain.
The People, the Law, and the Constitution in Scotland and England: A Comparative Approach to the Glorious Revolution
Authors: Harris Tim
Published: February 2004

Despite the growing interest in recent years in taking a British approach to the problems of the first half of the seventeenth century, Restoration historians have been slow to follow the trend. Instead, the historiographical traditions for Charles II's and James II's three kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland have remained largely independent; rather than coming closer together, if anything they seem to be growing further apart. We see this in particular with the historiographies of the Glorious Revolution in Scotland and England, which have become curiously “out of sync.” It used to be the case that the Revolution in England was seen as a most unrevolutionary affair, a bloodless palace coup brought about as much by the Tories as the Whigs; by this account, James was not overthrown for breaking his contract with the people, but was regarded as having abdicated, and the framers of the Revolution settlement simply sought to vindicate ancient rights and liberties (as they put it in the Declaration of Rights), rather than assert any new constitutional principles. If the Revolution in England tended to be seen in a conservative, perhaps even Tory context, the radical, Whig revolution was still to be found, but north of the border, in Scotland. For it was in Scotland where the Whigs were unequivocally the architects, where James was seen as having forfeited his crown by his arbitrary and tyrannical style of government, and where a truly revolutionary settlement in church and state was established.
A Poisoning of No Substance: The Trials of Medico-Legal Proof in Mid-Victorian England
Authors: Burney Ian A.
Published: February 2004

“I am innocent of poisoning Cook by strychnine.” With these words, Dr. William Palmer went to the scaffold, convicted of having perpetrated precisely the crime he denied to the last. Palmer's twelveday trial in May 1856, among the most celebrated English murder cases of the century, had received massive press attention, and his execution was no less scrutinized. Scaffold speeches being traditional opportunities for achieving closure on a case (preferably, though not exclusively, by confession and repentance), press reports devoted a good deal of space to the concerted efforts made to convince Palmer to comply with these expectations: “From the time of his sentence to the very moment when he ascended the scaffold,” one correspondent observed, “Palmer was persuaded, entreated, implored day by day, almost hour by hour, to confess his crimes, not to God, but to man.”

Interrogated to the last, Palmer offered instead of closure a riddle, neither directly denying his guilt nor ratifying the grounds upon which his conviction rested. In doing so he seemed to take aim at the most contentious part of the trial, namely, the scientific evidence that had attributed the death of John Parsons Cook to strychnine poisoning. By disavowing strychnine as the agent of Cook's death, he at once repudiated the prosecution's fundamental contention and left open the possibility that, although he had been justly condemned as a murderer, his conviction was based on fallacious medico-legal grounds.

Palmer's dying words became the subject of widespread concern.
Love and a Female Monarch: The Case of Elizabeth Tudor
Authors: Richards Judith M.
Published: February 2004

Much of the importance of what we call “political ideas” lies precisely in their being political-operative and effective to the extent that they are deployed in actual situations, in the relationships that are characteristic and constitutive of concrete political system.

It is a commonplace of Tudor history that one distinctive feature of the reign of Elizabeth Tudor was the panache with which she wooed her English subjects. Such activity has been treated much more as an aspect of her “instinct for romantic leadership,” much less as a subject for serious historical study. This article sets out to redress that dismissive stance and argues that the language and processes of her “wooing” encapsulated an intersection of humanist beliefs and Tudor policy, with serious political purposes and significant political implications. Since the 1960s, a new orthodoxy in the study of political thought has stressed the importance of paying attention to the audiences for whom, and the contexts within which, particular political ideas were expressed, but there has been little effect of this trend on Tudor political studies. Historians have paid only passing attention to whole new genres of Tudor political discourse, let alone to the increasing Tudor range of strategies for presenting fundamental political propositions to an ever-widening audience. The introduction of print, the polemical function of Tudor homilies, Tudor royal proclamations, and court-sponsored political pamphlets all carried important messages. Such evolving forms contained within them implied redefinitions of relationships between subject and monarch. The reign of Henry VIII reflected the evolution of a qualitatively new concept of the sovereign monarch, drawing on an increasingly unqualified doctrine of allegiance.
Doing No Wrong: Law, Liberty, and the Constraint of Kings
Authors: Malcolm Joyce Lee
Published: February 2004

The challenge Charles I prepared to fling at his accusers on 22 January 1649 has conditioned the thinking of generations of historians. “No earthly power can justly call me, who am your king, in question as a delinquent,” he proclaimed. He reminded those who presumed to judge him that they had been “born his subjects and born subjects to those laws, which determined, ‘that the king can do no wrong,’” a maxim that “guards every English monarch, even the least deserving.” Indeed, there was no established legal process that could hold Charles personally accountable for his actions, even if, as charged, he meant to overthrow the rights and liberties of his people. The tenet the king can do no wrong shifted responsibility onto those who carried out royal orders. Proponents of royal supremacy had seen in that maxim proof that kings were not only legally unaccountable but actually above the law.

However, an equally venerable English maxim explained that although “the king was under no man, he was under God and the law; for the law maketh the king.” To modern historians the two maxims seem contradictory. And the dramatic failure of the law in Charles's case has induced scholars to doubt the efficacy of this second maxim, to accept Charles's interpretation of its counterpart—that the king could do no wrong—and to shrug off as fine-sounding but unrealistic the strategies early modern Englishmen relied on to control kings. Both maxims, the one Charles sheltered under and the one he rejected, were designed to control his behavior.
The Great Deer Massacre: Animals, Honor, and Communication in Early Modern England
Authors: Beaver Dan
Published: February 2004

I need not complain of the times; every traveler tells them; they are as clear to see as an Angel in the sun. (Henry Osborne, October 1642)

In early October 1642, a tract of forest and deer chase in the Severn valley, northwest of Gloucester, known as Corse Lawn, became the site of a grisly spectacle. Richard Dowdeswell, a steward of the property, described the scene in a letter to Lionel Cranfield, earl of Middlesex, the absentee owner resident in Great St. Bartholomew in London. Dowdeswell delivered terrifying news of how “a rising of neighbors about Corse Lawn” destroyed more than 600 of Middlesex's deer in a “rebellious, riotous, devilish way,” a hideous consequence of what Dowdeswell termed “this time of liberty.” Dowdeswell rode to the scene from his estate at Pull Court, a few miles from the chase, and “appeased the multitude, yet some scattering companies gave out in alehouses that they would not only destroy the remainder of deer but rifle your Lordship's house at Forthampton and pull it down to the ground and not let a tree or bush stand in all the chase.” The deer massacre became an assault on the chase, the forest, and the manor house of Forthampton, an estate close to the chase but not included in the meets and bounds of the forest. Middlesex's tenant at Forthampton Court, his brother-in-law Henry Osborne, prudently moved his household to Gloucester until Dowdeswell acquired a formal statement of protection from the earl of Essex to defend the forest, the deer left in the chase, and the house in Forthampton.
The Labour Church Movement, 1891–1902
Authors: Bevir Mark
Published: February 2004

Historians of British socialism have tended to discount the significance of religious belief. Yet the conference held in Bradford in 1893 to form the Independent Labour Party (I.L.P.) was accompanied by a Labour Church service attended by some five thousand persons. The conference took place in a disused chapel then being run as a Labour Institute by the Bradford Labour Church along with the local Labour Union and Fabian Society. The Labour Church movement, which played such an important role in the history of British socialism, was inspired by John Trevor, a Unitarian minister who resigned to found the first Labour Church in Manchester in 1891. At the new church's first service, on 4 October 1891, a string band opened the proceedings, after which Trevor led those present in prayer, the congregation listened to a reading of James Russell Lowell's poem “On the Capture of Fugitive Slaves,” and Harold Rylett, a Unitarian minister, read Isaiah 15. The choir rose to sing “England Arise,” the popular socialist hymn by Edward Carpenter:

England arise! the long, long night is over,

Faint in the east behold the dawn appear;

Out of your evil dream of toil and sorrow—

Arise, O England, for the day is here;

From your fields and hills,

Hark! the answer swells—

Arise, O England, for the day is here.

As the singing stopped, Trevor rose to give a sermon on the religious aspect of the labor movement. He argued the failure of existing churches to support labor made it necessary for workers to form a new movement to embody the religious aspect of their quest for emancipation.
White Collars, Gray Lives? The Lower Middle Class Revisited
Authors: Bailey Peter
Published: February 2004

The lower middle class has long had a bad press, for in common with other subaltern groups it has been more represented from without than within. Thus Victorian writers faced with the disquieting irruption of a new breed of petty bourgeois shop and office workers devised a parodic discourse of littleness, whose feminized tropes rendered the clerk as socially insignificant as the sequestered Victorian woman. George Grossmith's comic classic, Diary of a Nobody, pilloried the new social type in Mr. Pooter, whose smaller-than-life adventures stood for all that was ineffectual, pretentious, and banal in his class. Social commentators held the lower middle class responsible for the degeneration of civilization itself, stifled by their suburban respectability and addiction to mass culture. In Howard's End, E. M. Forster drew the clerk, Leonard Bast, with some sympathy but made him the book's major casualty, while belittling a class whose education was learned “from the outside of books.” In the interwar years the Marxist poet Christopher Caudwell likened the petty bourgeois world to “a terrible stagnant marsh, all mud and bitterness, without even the saving grace of tragedy.” George Orwell's fictional antihero from the same period, the insurance salesman George Bowling, characterizes the men of his class as “Tories, yes-men and bumsuckers.” It is still hard to hide a certain relish in repeating such charges, for putting the boot in on the lower middle class has long been the intellectual's blood sport, an exorcism, so we are told, of the guilty secret so many of us share as closet petit bourgeois denying our own class origins.
Pooterism or Partnership? Marriage and Masculine Identity in the Lower Middle Class, 1870–1920
Authors: Hammerton A. James
Published: February 2004

I spent the evening quietly with Carrie, of whose company I never tire. We had a most pleasant chat about the letters on ‘Is Marriage a Failure?’ It has been no failure in our case.

This was the confident opening passage in Charles Pooter's entry for 2 November in George Grossmith's famous satire,The Diary of a Nobody, serialized inPunchin 1888. Simultaneously it celebrated the lower-middle-class husband's eager commitment to domesticity and marital harmony and acknowledged, in its reference to an equally popular contemporaneous correspondence series running in theDaily Telegraph, avid lower-middle-class engagement with routine popular press debates on marriage and domestic issues. TheDiary's readers are invited to relish the irony in Charles's characteristic exaggeration of his domestic felicity, since they know that before long Carrie's patience will again be tried by another of his pretentious and interfering domestic schemes and ineffectual efforts to assert his household mastery. Such tensions in the Pooter marriage were emblematic of wider insecurities in the lower-middle-class identity.

For over a century Charles Pooter's transparent claim to a gentility, independence, and mastery far above his actual station of a struggling suburban bank clerk has provided the dominant metaphor for lower-middle-class pretension, weakness, and diminished masculinity. His bogus authority was exposed as much at home as at his workplace, the bank, where he paraded as the pompous chief clerk. Indeed it was that theme of false authority, both in private and public, palpable even in his dress, that satirists delighted in puncturing. Grossmith was gratified by the range of theDiary's readership, especially among upper-class personalities.