bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
How Did Poor People Emigrate from the British Isles to Australia in the Nineteenth Century?
Authors: Richards Eric
Published: February 2004

One of the great themes of modern history is the movement of poor people across the face of the earth. For individuals and families the economic and psychological costs of these transoceanic migrations were severe. But they did not prevent millions of agriculturalists and proletarians from Europe reaching the new worlds in both the Atlantic and the Pacific basins in the nineteenth century. These people, in their myriad voyages, shifted the demographic balance of the continents and created new economies and societies wherever they went. The means by which these emigrations were achieved are little explored.

Most emigrants directed themselves to the cheapest destinations. The Irish, for instance, migrated primarily to England, Scotland, and North America. The general account of British and European emigration in the nineteenth century demonstrates that the poor were not well placed to raise the costs of emigration or to insert themselves into the elaborate arrangements required for intercontinental migration. Usually the poor came last in the sequence of emigration.

The passage to Australasia was the longest and the most expensive of these migrations. From its foundation as a penal colony in 1788, New South Wales depended almost entirely on convict labor during its first four decades. Unambiguous government sanction for free immigration emerged only at the end of the 1820s, when new plans were devised to encourage certain categories of emigrants from the British population. As each of the new Australian colonies was developed so the dependence on convict labor diminished.
“A Just and Profitable Commerce”: Moral Economy and the Middle Classes in Eighteenth-Century London
Authors: Brown Susan E.
Published: February 2004

It has been twenty years since E. P. Thompson introduced the term “moral economy” into the historian's vocabulary. Since then it has exerted a paradigmatic force in explanations of the motivations for, and responses to, various forms of popular action. Pitted against this has been the notion of political economy, most often presented as a subsequent (and eventually triumphant) ideological development that was necessarily antithetical to a moral economy. Together these two models have served as fundamental reference points around which accounts of popular protest and public policy have been constructed. Recent explorations into past assumptions regarding the proper functioning of the marketplace have served to open this conventional schematization to debate. Thompson himself has once again entered the fray with a further refinement and restatement of his original arguments and a spirited riposte to his critics. The purpose of the following essay is to focus and further develop this debate in light of the author's ongoing research into the City of London in the late eighteenth century.

In seeking to loosen the constructs through which past economic relations and ideologies have been characterized, this essay will concentrate on two main areas of enquiry. The first follows the work of other historians in attempting to probe more deeply into the diverse and often conflicting understandings of the marketplace articulated in this period, thus revealing alternate possibilities in the interstices of moral economy and political economy. The second as yet remains relatively unexplored and concerns a series of assumptions as to who might be expected to advocate these various conceptions of market relations and why.
Racism, Imperialism, and the Traveler's Gaze in Eighteenth-Century England
Authors: Hunt Margaret
Published: February 2004

These creative acts compose, within a historical period, a specific community: a community visible in the structure of feeling and demonstrable, above all, in fundamental choices of form.

I had become convinced … that the most penetrating analysis would always be of forms, specifically literary forms, where changes of viewpoint, changes of known and knowable relationships, changes of possible and actual resolutions, could be directly demonstrated, as forms of literary organization, and then, just because they involved more than individual solutions, could be reasonably related to a real social history. [Raymond Williams]

In the waning years of the seventeenth century Sir William Petty, F.R.S., a talented statistician, champion of trade and commerce, and “projector” of schemes for national betterment, drew up a plan to cope with what he, at least, saw as a major problem. Petty had observed that there were large numbers of English youth from respectable families who had not the leisure, money, nor opportunity to travel to foreign countries. He was concerned that these worthy young men would miss the chance to develop the expansive faculty of mind and commercial acumen that foreign travel provided and national progress demanded. The crux of his scheme was that these youths would repair to London, where they would encounter businessmen around the Royal Exchange “who have fresh concerne & correspondance with all parts of the knowne world & with all the Commodityes growing or made within the same.”
The Masonic Moment; Or, Ritual, Replica, and Credit: John Wilkes, the Macaroni Parson, and the Making of the Middle-Class Mind
Authors: Money John
Published: February 2004

On June 27, 1777, the Reverend William Dodd, “the Macaroni Parson,” Master of Arts and Doctor of Laws in the University of Cambridge; first Grand Chaplain of Modern English Freemasonry and sometime Chaplain-in-Ordinary to His Majesty; Chaplain of Magdalen House, a “Public Place of Reception for Penitent Prostitutes”; proprietor of the Charlotte Street Chapel, and a principal instigator of such other charities as the Society for the Release of Debtors and the Humane Society for the Resuscitation of the Apparently Drowned, was hanged at Tyburn for forging the signature of his patron and former pupil, Philip Stanhope, fifth earl of Chesterfield, on a bond for £4,200. Dodd's story, culminating in his trial, condemnation, and execution, despite massive efforts to procure a mitigation of the law's severity, survives best in the literary history and biography of the period. On the other hand, historians, whether political, social, or cultural, have had little or nothing to say about his predicament and suffering except as either the deserved nemesis of a swindler or an early cause celebre in the raising of public concern about the state of the criminal law. The probable reason for this neglect is that, for all the sentimental frisson which it aroused, Dodd's case was a middle-class melodrama which lacked plebeian dimension and appeal.
“Middle-Class” Domesticity Goes Public: Gender, Class, and Politics from Queen Caroline to Queen Victoria
Authors: Wahrman Dror
Published: February 2004

In early 1831, the novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton contributed a comparative essay to theEdinburgh Reviewon “the spirit of society” in England and France. A key issue for discussion, of course, was that of fashion. “Our fashion,” stated Bulwer-Lytton, “may indeed be considered the aggregate of the opinions of our women.” The fundamental dichotomy which ran through these pages was that between public and private: “the proper sphere of woman,” Bulwer-Lytton continued, “is private life, and the proper limit to her virtues, the private affections.” And in antithesis to the aggregate opinions of “the domestic class of women”—in his view, the only virtuous kind of women—which constituted fashion, stood “public opinion”; that exclusive masculine realm, that should remain free of “feminine influence.”

Some two years later, in his two-volumeEngland and the English, Bulwer-Lytton restated the antithesis between fashion and public opinion, both repeating his earlier formulation and at the same time significantly modifying it. By 1833, his definitions of fashion and opinion ran as follows: “The middle classes interest themselves in grave matters: the aggregate of their sentiments is called OPINION. The great interest themselves in frivolities, and the aggregate oftheirsentiments is termed FASHION.” Here, Bulwer-Lytton no longer designated fashion as the aggregate of the opinions of women but, instead, as the aggregate of the opinions of the upper classes; and public opinion was no longer the domain of men but, instead, the aggregate of the opinions of the “middle class.”
Good Advice and Little Medicine: The Professional Authority of Early Modern English Physicians
Authors: Cook Harold J.
Published: February 2004

Henry:Then you perceive the body of our kingdom, How foul it is;What rank diseases grow, and with what danger, near the heart of it.Warwick:It is but body, yet distempered, Which to his formerStrength may be restored with good advise and little medicine.[Shakespeare,Henry IV]

Shakespeare's words remind us that in the learned traditions of Renaissance Europe, good advice remained more important than potent medicines for restoring both physical and political states to their previous strengths. As the lord advised the king, so a physician advised his patient, or lawyer his client, or minister his flock: preventing troubles was worth far more than cure, and the best remedy even when matters went wrong was good advice on how to return to a state of harmony. Still, plenty of quacks in politics and medicine, law and church, advocated strong measures, not helping people to live in accordance with their world but attempting to alter the conditions under which they lived. Bad advice and powerful remedies seemed to be everywhere, trampling good council and temperate behavior. The connections between learning and authority that lay behind claims to authority in general are especially well illuminated by the ways in which the physicians argued for possessing, maintaining, and extending their professional privileges.

Among all the number and variety of medical practitioners in early modern England, one small group self-consciously considered itself to be professional: the physicians. As one of the three learned professions surviving from the Middle Ages, the “medical profession” has been a crucial test case for various definitions of what a profession is or was.
Laborers of the Nineteenth-Century Theater: The Economies of Gender and Industrial Organization
Authors: Davis Tracy C.
Published: February 2004

In the purview of theater history, as on the theatrical stage itself, performers' and writers' command on attention is almost complete. Ancient Greek gave a word to its mask builders (skeuopoio), but apart from distinct vocabulary, history leaves few traces of theatrical laborers. A glance through any number of theatrical books, periodicals, bibliographies, biographical guides, and encyclopedias reveals the predominance of performers in the public eye, though managers, directors, designers, and critics occasionally attract scholarly studies. Even among novels, journalism, and theatrical guidebooks—genres that venture behind the scenes—the personnel that dress, light, paint, and build shows are rarely present. Their identity and labor is marginalized in the annals because it is marginalized in the conceptualization of what is important in theater production. Susan Todd takes unusual measures to challenge this tradition by documenting the experience of women stage managers in the contemporary theater, but in the historical realm this has not been attempted. Writers devote attention to how the stage actually worked (how stage effects were achieved and how the creative chain of command functioned), but to date no one has examined the structures and traditions of backstage labor by asking basic questions about the sociopolitical organization of the work.

Only in highly esoteric treatises or the lightest of literature do theatrica jewelers, armorers, weavers, hosiers, basket makers, shoemakers, furnishers, cosmeticians, perruquiers, costumiers, seamsters, dressers, property makers, carpenters, gas fitters, printers, or ticket takers usually appear. These are all specialized trades and occupations indispensable to the building and running of nineteenth-century theatrical entertainment.
The Construction of Racial Difference in Twentieth-Century Britain: The Special Restriction (Coloured Alien Seamen) Order, 1925
Authors: Tabili Laura
Published: February 2004

In the course of the past several decades, scholars have exposed Black people's long history of life and work in Britain, but their approaches to racial conflict have slighted the historical contingency of racial difference itself. Black workers have been presented as logical, visible scapegoats in an otherwise homogeneous working class, and interracial hostility as an ineluctable product of economic or sexual competition between two mutually exclusive and naturally antagonistic groups of working men. Scholars examining Black people's experience in Britain under the rubric “immigrants and minorities” have placed particular emphasis on racial conflicts, xenophobia, and prejudice, which they see as evidence of “traditions of intolerance” widespread in British society. Such interpretations leave unchallenged the assumption that racial or ethnic hostility is latent in social relations, resurfacing in any crisis. Whatever the intentions of their authors, such assumptions can all too easily be used to justify rather than to combat conflict and exclusion.

Intolerance, bigotry, prejudice, moreover, are not explanations for racial or ethnic conflict: in themselves they require explanation. In focusing on “attitudes,” and behaviors, these works neglect to examine the structural underpinnings of popular racism and xenophobia—in particular the ways that Black and white working people were positioned in relation to each other within a system also riven by class, gender, skill, and other power dynamics. What many scholars have taken for granted, indeed, is the objective or fixed quality of racial difference itself and its inexorably divisive effects.
Did Ministers Matter? War and Religion in England, 1642–1649
Authors: Donagan Barbara
Published: February 2004

When the Scots advanced on England in August 1640, reports of their formidable progress quickly reached London. Their march was

very solemn and sad much after the heavy form shewed in funerals. In the first place do march after the trumpets (which carry mourning ribbons & c.) a hundred ministers, whereof one in the middle carrieth the Bible covered with a mourning cover. There follow a great number of old men with petitions in their hands, and then the lords that are commanders wearing black ribbons or some sign of mourning, and in the last place the soldiers trailing their pikes with black ribbons on them, and the drums beating a sad march, such as they say is used in the funerals of officers of war.

It would be hard to find a more vivid example of the integration of war and religion, of assent by military laymen to clerical authority, or of manipulation of ritual to impart a message: the presence of ministers and the Bible even more than the sobriety of the troops asserted that this army was the agent of God, to the comfort of its soldiers and the terror of its enemies.

Could England achieve comparable godliness, order, and confidence in execution of divine purpose in the conduct of its own war? Parliamentary clergy lived in hope of similar recognition and achievement. Yet at best ritual must be distinguished from accompanying practice, as the conduct of Scottish soldiers in Newcastle and its environs was to demonstrate; at worst the clerical message was derided and ignored.
Palmerston and Radicalism, 1847–1865
Authors: Taylor Antony
Published: February 2004

Lord Palmerston's constituency of support within the nineteenth-century Liberal party has received relatively little attention from historians. In many ways, however, his strong plebeian following provided the major popular current within Liberalism prior to the emergence of the cult of Gladstone in the mid-1860s. Even after Palmerston's death in 1865, his legacy continued to exercise a powerful influence, and William Ewart Gladstone, Viscount Hartington, Lord Rosebery, and others vied with one another for possession of his mantle and the role as his successor.

Historians have shown themselves baffled by this phenomenon of Palmerston's popular appeal. Conservative historians have sought to annex Palmerston for the Tory interest. Themes like “the nation,” the sanctity of British citizenship, and defense of British interests abroad they see as presaging the appeal of Benjamin Disraeli's “imperialism.” Most have combined in portraying Palmerston as a profoundly “illiberal” figure, more Tory than the Tories, whose views sat uneasily alongside such canons of Liberalism as free-trade noninterventionism and Gladstone's graduated program of parliamentary and civil-service reforms. His contribution to the midcentury Liberal consensus was, however, a major one, and must be seen as carrying equal weight with that of such figures as Richard Cobden, John Bright, and J. S. Mill.

Recent reappraisals of Liberalism have challenged the notion of a uniform, popular Liberalism in the 1850s and 1860s. In their research Patrick Joyce and James Vernon have emphasized the degree to which Liberalism at a popular level was a fusion of older and newer political forms, incorporating long-standing radical memories of the mass platform, traditional styles of leadership, and established methods of political communication.
Post-Anti-Colonial Histories: Representing the Other in Imperial Britain
Authors: Barkan Elazar
Published: February 2004

New Aliens. By not being Others we define ourselves. We have always done so. In bad times the barbarians were at our gates; on more fortunate occasions we were at theirs. As we changed, so did our alter ego. A hundred-plus years ago in England, “we” were the upper classes, perhaps the middling lot aspiring upward. Primarily men. The Others populated the Empire, the East End of London, and even many social and geographic quarters closer to home. And if we were not men, we mostly pretended we wished we were. We wrote our history, as well as theirs. In time, growing familiarity transformed many strange aliens into us, an acquaintancy which led to multiculturalism, gender assertiveness, and subjectivism. In the process we found new aliens—the DWEM (dead white European males).

Some of us have maintained our moral righteousness throughout, whereas others have been skeptical all along. Having gone through a generation of a strong antipatriarchal/anticolonial writing, writers of different persuasions have come to reevaluate and pose challenges to the new edifice. Suspended between conflicting incredulous postmodernist sensibilities and a pragmatic sense that communication is maintained despite its announced demise, it seems an opportune moment to examine the new attitudes to writing (imperial) history in light of such questions as the role of agency within and against a dominant discourse, the place of morality in the writing of history, and the process of alienation mediated among competing victimizations.
The Political Culture and Political Rhetoric of County Feasts and Feast Sermons, 1654–1714
Authors: Key Newton E.
Published: February 2004

In December 1655, four stewards for the Worcestershire feast wrote to the eminent divine Richard Baxter regarding possible worthy charities for money collected at their recent London feast. Baxter, elated by their offer, suggested that they set up a public lecture in a dark corner of their native county. He later recalled how well the charitable concerns of this first Worcestershire feast tied in with his concurrent actions to establish a clerical association in the county. Almost thirty years later, in 1682, Roger L'Estrange noted the same phenomenon of annual county feasts in London. Like Baxter, L'Estrange defended what he termed the “innocent county feasts,” and hisObservatoradvertised both tickets and published sermons for more than a dozen county or city feasts during its brief run between 1681 and 1687. Such common cause between Baxter and L'Estrange is remarkable. Moreover, the “innocent” county feasts, which flourished for fifty years from the late 1650s, were often controversial and were the setting for feast sermons which often heaped vitriol on “parties,” whether religious or political. This article examines the rise of the county feasts in the 1650s and their peak in the 1680s in order to assess their significance in the development of late Stuart society, culture, and politics.

The county feast was in fact an urban phenomenon: natives of a county met annually, usually in London, for a sermon, dinner, and a subscription to a charity. The phenomenon has long been noted, though rarely analyzed.
Civilizing Punishment: The End of the Public Execution in England
Authors: McGowen Randall
Published: February 2004

On August 14, 1868, Thomas Wells was executed behind prison walls in Maidstone. According to the The Times, the event passed off so quietly that the public perhaps failed to note the significance of the occasion. With his death the drama of the public execution came to an end. “It is,” the newspaper explained, “emphatically one of those reforms which are hard to realize before they are made, but which, once made, seem so simple and unobjectionable that they are treated almost as a matter of course.” On the face of it, this passage seems to capture the salient features of the episode. In the decades leading up to abolition, opinion was deeply divided about the value of the death penalty and the wisdom of public executions. The Times itself, almost to the last moment, resisted the change. But once the issue was resolved in favor of privacy, no voice demanded their return. There were no demonstrations protesting the reform. Even the arguments once used to defend the publicity of punishment disappeared from view.

But The Times meant something more by the phrase “one of those reforms.” It indicated a belief that the abolition belonged to a special category of measures, those that contributed to the progress of civilization in England. The idea that civilization demanded the end of the public execution figured prominently in reform arguments, and occupied just as important a place in later interpretations of the change. A liberal member of Parliament, John Hibbert, in pointing to an execution in 1866, explained that “no one anxious to promote civilization could wish to see the recurrence of a scene of that kind.”
The Unloved State: Twentieth-Century Politics in the Writing of Nineteenth-Century History
Authors: Wiener Martin J.
Published: February 2004

“Who loves the state these days?” Frances Cairncross rhetorically asked inThe Times Literary Supplementat the height of the Thatcher era. “People have become more cynical,” she went on, “about the central tenet of socialism: the concept of a wise and beneficent State, representing the best interests of the community at large.” The skepticism about the state as a provider of national well-being which Cairncross was referring to was of course not confined to Britain. Nor was it, in Britain, simply to be identified with “Thatcherism.” Rather, such disillusion developed over a period of several decades and across the political spectrum. As significant in this development as the thunderings of Thatcherites were the reconsiderations of those further left; David Marquand spoke for many when he declared his own tradition of Croslandite social democracy virtually bankrupt, flawed to the root by its statism, through which “civil society was seen, all too often, not as an agent, but as a patient.” The deep shift of opinion embodied in such observations has made its mark in a variety of realms, one of which is the subject of this essay: an alteration in the interpretation of British history, in particular of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the era in which this newly problematical state began to grow into its modern form.

It has become something of a truism that historical writing is a part of the wider field of social discourse.
Gentry and Community in Medieval England
Authors: Carpenter Christine
Published: February 2004

There is now a strong case for banning the word “community” from all academic writing and an even stronger one for banning it from the vocabulary of politics. As one early modern historian has put it, the word is becoming a “shibboleth.” It is employed where “group” or “society,” for example, would be more appropriate, and, worst of all, its use is often not just a matter of slack thought but expresses an implicit hankering for some mythical past when there were “communities.” The increasing overworking of the word by politicians and other public figures can be related to an uneasy feeling that the sense of belonging and of mutual obligation implicit in the idea of “community” are disappearing. Accordingly, if they call things “communities” often enough, that will somehow create them. This prelapsarian attitude to communities is, as we shall see, quite as fundamental to historical use of the term. It is the purpose of this article to examine critically how the word has been applied in relation to the medieval English gentry, to ask whether there can be any legitimate use in this context, and to look at the types of identity, whether communitarian or not, that may have obtained among this important group within medieval society.

Historiographically, the “gentry community,” as is well-known, first appeared in the seventeenth century, specifically in the work of Alan Everitt.
Social Welfare and Mutual Aid in the Medieval Countryside
Authors: Clark Elaine
Published: February 2004

Almost every social problem that troubles the conscience of a community has a history. Poverty, hunger, homelessness, the consequences of crime and epidemic disease—all are familiar topics of contemporary discourse that also mattered in the medieval past. Then, as now, questions about social welfare provoked debate and thoughtful comment in courts, churches, and political councils. The parameters of discussion naturally shifted with the ebb and flow of economic circumstance, but seldom more so than in the fourteenth century, when famine, recurrent plague, and labor unrest disrupted English society. In the villages and little market towns of the countryside, where most of the population lived, the threat of economic insecurity raised ethical and legal dilemmas about begging, vagrancy, and alms for the poor. All posed hard questions for people living in small groups, for they understood, better than solitary folk, how the ideals and practices of social welfare were grounded in communal life. Its conventions and norms reflected the shared values of neighbors and kin, as well as the social boundaries and inequalities of medieval society. How, then, did people who lived by the labor of their hands view the poor and disabled? Were the aged, the unemployed, the infirm, and chronically ill a part of the community, or did disability and want set them apart?

These questions pose the problem of how social cohesion and a sense of belonging were maintained by people of diverse sorts and conditions in the medieval countryside. To ignore or hurriedly dismiss their interest in the subject of community life would be a mistake.
The English Medieval Village Community and Its Decline
Authors: Dyer Christopher
Published: February 2004

The village community has a shadowy existence in historical writing about the English Middle Ages. With a few honorable exceptions, scholars have been reluctant to assign to the village any central place in their account of medieval society. In some cases it is ignored or given such small emphasis as to imply that it was of little importance, and it is still necessary to provide evidence for the existence of the community and its organization.

This essay is concerned first with questions of definition and locating the village community's role in society and government. Second, the problem of the community's decline will be investigated, examining the relationships between villagers, mainly in the peak period of social and economic development around 1300, and then exploring the evidence for deterioration in the unity of the village after 1350. This is intended to reexamine the subject in the light of recent work and in particular to consider the skepticism about the collective nature of peasant society. Attention will also be given to the idea that late medieval villages were as divided in their social structure and as collusive with outside authorities as were their successors in the early modern period.
Going to the Fraternity Feast: Commensality and Social Relations in Late Medieval England
Authors: Rosser Gervase
Published: February 2004

In the history of medieval ideas about community, a prominent place must be accorded to the fraternity, or guild. This type of voluntary association, found throughout medieval Europe, frequently applied to itself the name of communitas. The community of the guild was not, however, a simple phenomenon; it invites closer analysis than it has yet received. As religious clubs of mostly lay men and (often) women, the fraternities of medieval Christendom have lately been a favored subject among students of spirituality. Less interest, however, has recently been shown in the social aspects of the guilds. One reason for this neglect may be precisely the communitarian emphasis in the normative records of these societies, which most late twentieth-century historians find unrealistic and, perhaps, faintly embarrassing. But allowing, as it must be allowed, that medieval society was not the Edenic commune evoked in fraternity statutes, the social historian is left with some substantial questions concerning these organizations, whose number alone commands attention: fifteenth-century England probably contained 30,000 guilds. Why were so many people eager to pay subscriptions—which, though usually modest, were not insignificant—to be admitted as “brothers” and “sisters” of one or more fraternities? Who attended guild meetings, and what did they hope to achieve by doing so? What social realities gave rise to the common language of equal brotherhood? This essay is intended to shed some light on these questions by focusing on what for every guild was the event which above all gave it visible definition: the annual celebration of the patronal feast day.
Punishment, Discipline, and Power: The Social Meanings of Violence in Early Modern England
Authors: Amussen Susan Dwyer
Published: February 2004

In recent years, historians have conducted an extended debate on the nature and level of violence in early modern English society. This debate has come to focus on the murder rate as an index of violence and to turn on highly specialized points of statistical analysis. In some ways it can be characterized as a debate between optimistic and pessimistic historians. Lawrence Stone, representing the “pessimists,” paints a portrait of early modern society as violent, unloving, and uncaring until civilized by the eighteenth century; J. A. Sharpe, representing the “optimists,” emphasizes the problems of the data used by Stone and argues, like Alan Macfarlane, that English society in the early modern period was little different from that of today. J. S. Cockburn, the latest entrant into the fray, leans toward the optimists but has expressed some hesitation about the debate itself: he notes not only the serious problems with the data involved but also the difficulties of defining what constitutes a violent society, as “it is not at all clear that homicide rates are a reliable measure of the overall level of violent behavior in a particular society.” This caution suggests that we should take an entirely different approach to the problem of violence, to look for “the social meaning of violence.” We must move beyond the statistical data (important though they be) to a broader context for thinking about violence.

The way historians think about violence has been deeply influenced by the work of Max Weber and his assertion that “legal coercion by violence is the monopoly of the state”; it is often forgotten that the first word of that sentence is “Today.”
Friendly Societies and the Discourse of Respectability in Britain, 1825–1875
Authors: Cordery Simon
Published: February 2004

In nineteenth-century Britain, friendly societies (working-class mutual benefit clubs) and ruling elites contested definitions of respectability and independence in a struggle to delineate relations between societies and the state. This process was an important part of an ongoing set of negotiations by which working-class organizations influenced middle-class attitudes toward collective action. Pressure from friendly societies forced members of Parliament and bureaucrats to accept their claim to respectability and, with it, to independence from state control, changing the discourse of respectability in three stages. During the first quarter of the century, clergymen and landowners equated respectability with middle-class patronage and independence from the Poor Law. Around midcentury, the societies appropriated the discourse of respectability and, with qualified elite approval, used it to redefine independence as freedom from middle-class supervision. By the 1870s, however, friendly society leaders requested government assistance to limit the independence of rank-and-file members, whose autonomy they claimed was a threat to the societies' respectability.

Friendly societies wanted, as one member wrote, “to do what is ‘respectable.’” This meant redefining respectability in a collective, working-class context. While middle-class definitions rested on the premise that individualism and self-help were the twin foundations of respectability, friendly societies gained access to the social power of respectability by offering an alternative definition based on collective self-help and independence from external control. Friendly societies were democratically managed insurance clubs offering sickness and burial coverage and sociable activities in return for regular payments. They often met in public houses, which they identified as respectable, contradicting middle-class attitudes.
The Origins of British Nuclear Culture, 1895–1939
Authors: Willis Kirk
Published: February 2004

The images are familiar and ineradicable: cities scorched by blasts of tremendous heat, with thousands of civilians vaporized, thousands of others burned and disfigured, landscapes rendered desolate and uninhabitable by radiation; submarines, automobiles, luxury liners, and airplanes powered by clumps of uranium the size of a human fist; homes heated and cooled by limitless supplies of cheap energy drawn from secure reactors; land-based particle beam weapons capable of destroying airborne missiles and thus of providing a protective shield for civilian populations; eccentric physicists with thick central European accents, unkempt hair, ill-fitting clothes, and a crazed gleam of unearthly mischief in their eyes; politicians, civil servants, joint chiefs blinkered by hatred and ambition, ignorant of even the first principles of science and technology, careless of civilians, reckless in brinksmanship, and arrogant in assessments of military capability.

Such images, indeed, are part of the consciousness of all citizens of the atomic age: we who have stared at the newsreels of Nagasaki and Chernobyl, sat riveted with John Hersey's unforgettableHiroshima, laughed over the absurdities ofDr. Strangelove(1964), winced at the smiling publicity of atomic energy authorities or the local power company's plans for a new reactor, trembled at the apprarently inexorable proliferation of nuclear technologies into the Third and Fourth Worlds, or grown angry at the exaggerations—both budgetary and practical—of yet the latest “generation” of weapons systems. And yet the images of obliterated cities, atomic-powered ships, and particle beam weapons—images which have come to define so much of the anxiety as well as opportunity of the postwar world—all existed in the popular consciousness in Britain and America long before August 1945, before, indeed, December 1941 or even September 1939.
The Iron Quadrilateral: Political Obstacles to Economic Reform under the Attlee Government
Authors: Tomlinson J. D.
Published: February 2004

The 1945 Labour government came to power with a clearly formulated economic program relating to nationalization and the continuation of wartime planning and controls to smooth the transition to a peacetime economy. The first of these components, at least, was largely carried out according to plan over the next six years. The transition to a peacetime economy was much less smooth, and Labour's policies here underwent a major shift. While controls remained an important part of the policy regime down to 1951, they increasingly gave way to the instruments of fiscal policy. In large part this reflected the buffeting of the economy by balance-of-payments problems. But while the compelling force of economic circumstance must be given its due, it is clear that the increasing dependence on demand management was a political and ideological defeat for Labour, in the sense that it had previously based its distinctive appeal so much on microeconomic policies usually summed up in that ambiguous term, “economic planning.” In that sense the reliance on demand management represented a retreat for Labour from its policy position of 1945: “Socialist planning was a notable, if unlikely casualty of Labour government after the Second World War.”

On one influential view, Labour's conversion to macroeconomic management may be considered a success; eventually, as Alec Cairncross records, that management delivered balance-of-payments equilibrium without sacrificing the goal of full employment. But it is increasingly recognized that Labour's agenda involved issues beyond these macroeconomic goals, important as they undoubtedly were.
A Poem on the Archbishop's Hearse: Puritanism, Libel, and Sedition after the Hampton Court Conference
Authors: Bellany Alastair
Published: February 2004

Late in March 1604, as his biographer John Strype records, Archbishop John Whitgift's “Corps was carried to Croydon … and there honourably interred in the Parish-Church … with a decent Solemnity.” Sir George Paule concurred, noting that the “Funerall was very honourably (as befitted his place) solemnized.” The funeral's honor, decency, and solemnity were somewhat marred, however, for among those laudatory elegies and epitaphs traditionally placed upon hearses, some audacious soul had contrived to pin a far from complimentary piece of doggerel. Entitled “The Lamentation of Dickie for the Death of his Brother Jockie”—Jockie being Whitgift and Dickie his successor as archbishop, Richard Bancroft—the poem was a vicious tirade against the late archbishop and his policies. The fullest extant copy survives in a collection of political papers once owned by the Kentishman Sir Peter Manwood:

The prelats pope, the canonists hope,The Cortyers oracle, virginities spectacle,Reformers hinderer, trew pastors slanderer,The papists broker, the Atheists ClokerThe ceremonyes procter, the latyn docterThe dumb doggs patron, non resid[e]ns championA well a daye is dead & gone,and Jockey hath left dumb dickye alone.Prelats relent, Cortyers lamentPapiste bee sadd, Athiests runn maddGrone formalists, mone pluralistsfrowne ye docters, mourne yee ProctersBegge Registers, starve paratorsscowle ye summoners, howle yee songstersYour great Patron is dead & gone,& Jockey hath left dumb dickye alone.Popishe Ambition[,] vaine superstition,coulured conformity[,] canckared envye,Cunninge hipocrisie[,] faigned simplicity,masked ympiety, servile flatterye,Goe all daunce about his hearse,& for his dirge chant this verseOur great patron is dead and gone,& Jhockey hath left dumb dickey alone.Yf store of mourners yet there lackelett Croyden coull[i]ers bee more blackeAnd for a Cophin take a sackebearing the corpes upon their backedickye more blacke then any oneas chief mourner may marche aloneSinginge this requiem Jhocky is gone,& dickye hopes to play Jhocky aloneholla dickye bee not so bould,to woulve yt in Cheif Jhesis fouldas yf to hell thy Soule weare sould,lest as Jhocky was oft foretouldIf thou a persecutor stand,God likewise strike thee wth his hand:A-rankinge thee in the bloudy bandof ravening cleargie woolves in the land.
John Wilkes, Debt, and Patriotism
Authors: Sainsbury John
Published: February 2004

The career of John Wilkes was full of paradoxes. John Brewer's description of him as “a mercurial elusive rake” is apt in two senses: Wilkes eluded those who sought to crush him, and, posthumously, he continues to frustrate those who seek to understand him. He was a libertine who was lauded for political virtue; an aspiring aristocrat who rose to prominence as the self-proclaimed champion of those he dubbed the “middling and inferior class of people.” He would succeed in achieving a remarkable rapport with his plebeian followers, yet all the while preserving an ironic detachment from them. The judgment of one of his contemporaries still contains solace for the historian: “It is … not altogether unpardonable if a writer should err in the portrait of a character so equivocal.”

Understandably, one response to the problematic issues of Wilkes's personality and conduct has been to steer clear of them, treating them as irrelevant to the supposedly larger questions of those movements conducted in his name or in response to his persecution. From this kind of perspective, his presence on the political scene is construed as merely the occasion and not in any significant sense the cause of campaigns assumed to have separate, deep-seated origins. Such an approach offers some advantages that have been realized in distinguished studies of the crusades with which Wilkes was associated. But it is also limiting in that it forecloses the possibility that the nature of the movements that swirled around him was influenced by the idiosyncracies of his character and behavior.
A Mother's Role, a Daughter's Duty: Lady Blanche Balfour, Eleanor Sidgwick, and Feminist Perspectives
Authors: Oppenheim Janet
Published: February 2004

Addressing the Women's Institute in London on November 23, 1897, Eleanor Sidgwick, principal of Newnham College, Cambridge, observed that

There will always be gaps in domestic life which can best be filled by the unmarried girls and women of the family; help wanted in the care of old people and children and invalids, or in making the work of other members of the family go smoothly, to which a woman may well devote herself at some sacrifice of her own future—a sacrifice she will not regret. This kind of work can best be done by women, not only because they are generally better adapted to it, but because the sacrifice is not so clear nor so great in their case as it would generally be in that of a man. Only let the cost be counted and compared with the gain, and do not let us ask women to give up their chance of filling a more useful place in the world for the sake of employing them in trivial social duties from which they might be spared with little loss to anyone.

With these remarks, Mrs. Sidgwick joined the extended debate over the rights and duties of spinster daughters that the Victorian women's movement pursued for decades. For many participants, it was the preeminent issue that women had to confront if they were significantly to improve the condition of their lives.
“British Subjects” and “British Stock”: Labour's Postwar Imperialism
Authors: Paul Kathleen
Published: February 2004

If Conservative Party leader Winston Churchill fought World War II determined not to be the prime minister who lost the Empire, Clement Attlee, Ernest Bevin, and Herbert Morrison, who as Labour members of the Coalition government served with him, were equally determined to hold on to Empire once peace was won. The Empire/Commonwealth offered both political and economic benefits to Labour. Politically, the Commonwealth provided substance for Britain's pretensions to a world power role equal in stature to the new superpowers of the United States and the Soviet Union. For this claim to be effective, however, the Commonwealth needed to be demographically strong and firmly united under British leadership. Economically, imperial preferences and the sterling area offered a financial buffer against Britain's true plight of accumulated wartime debts and major infrastructural damage and neglect. Receiving over 40 percent of British exports and providing substantial, and in the case of Australia and New Zealand, dollar-free imports of meat, wheat, timber, and dairy produce, the Commonwealth seemed a logical body on which the United Kingdom could draw for financial support. In short, postwar policy makers believed preservation of the Empire/Commonwealth to be a necessary first step in domestic and foreign reconstruction.

Yet in 1945, a variety of circumstances combined to make the task of imperial preservation one of reconstitution rather than simple maintenance. First, it seemed that, just at the moment when Britain needed them most, some of the strongest and oldest members of the Commonwealth appeared to be moving away.
Albert Smith, the Alpine Club, and the Invention of Mountaineering in Mid-Victorian Britain
Authors: Hansen Peter H.
Published: February 2004

On August 12,1851, Albert Smith, a middle-aged journalist and entertainer, reached the summit of Mont Blanc with three Oxford students and sixteen guides. Smith and his companions were not the first people to climb Mont Blanc, the highest peak in the Alps. In 1786, two Chamonix natives climbed the peak, but over the next sixty-seven years the ascent of Mont Blanc was repeated only forty-five times. Yet after Albert Smith's dramatic account of this ascent made mountain climbing popular among the middle classes of Victorian England, Mont Blanc was climbed eighty-eight times in a five-year span. In 1852, John Murray'sHandbook for Travellers in Switzerland, the bible for English tourists abroad, noted that the ascent “of Albert Smith, in 1851, has effectually popularized the enterprise.” While this could be construed as praise of Smith, it sounded very faint indeed when Murray asserted, “it is a somewhat remarkable fact that a large proportion of those who have made this ascent have been persons of unsound mind.” By 1858, however, Murray mentioned that twenty or thirty people now made the ascent each year, thanked Albert Smith for his help with the text, and purged all references to the mental health of mountaineers.

Over the next decade, Murray'sHandbookrecorded numerous first ascents in the Alps during what later became known as the “Golden Age” of mountaineering. This article attempts to explain why mountaineering became popular during these years and to suggest the broader significance of mountaineering to the construction of new middle class and imperial cultures.
Raising Lilies: Ruskin and Women
Authors: Lloyd Jennifer M.
Published: February 2004

John Ruskin, art and social critic, master of English prose, is one of the most infuriating yet attractive Victorian figures. In the last twenty years, a revival of interest in his work after years of neglect has stimulated a considerable body of scholarly analysis and several biographies. As Ruskin himself would have hoped, historians have been most interested in his trenchant attacks on the assumptions and effects of nineteenth-century political economy, but paradoxically he appears in women's history only as the author of “Of Queens' Gardens,” promoting a fundamental Victorian paradigm, the ideology of pure womanhood. Yet the anthologized excerpts which are all most people read of Ruskin do not do justice even to “Of Queens' Gardens,” an admittedly cloying piece, and although biographers have analyzed his tortured relationships with Effie Gray and Rose La Touche almost to the point of tedium, there is no extended general study of his many relationships with women and the expectations he had of them. An adequate analysis of Ruskin's view of women requires familiarity with all his works, an understanding of his fears for the state of England, and a greater knowledge of his relationships with women than provided by the lurid details of his failed marriage and predilection for adolescent girls. The following is an attempt to sketch an outline of such an account.