bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The Ethics of Unbelief in Vernon Lee and William James
Authors: Hobson Suzanne 
Published: February 2022

Abstract
Chapter 1 explores Vernon Lee’s argument for an ethics of unbelief and her struggle to practice this ethics in literature which, she feared, had an inbuilt tendency to comforting falsehoods. The first part of the chapter outlines Lee’s case against William James and Friedrich Nietzsche whose work, she felt, offered inducements to belief in spite of their protestations to the contrary. Lee shared the view of prominent Rationalists in thinking that James made it possible for his readers to believe in almost anything, except, that is, the arguments of unbelievers. Lee offered ‘responsible unbelief’—belief in the believable—as an altogether more rational, proportionate, and humble alternative to the immoderate and masculinist versions she found in her peers. The final section of this chapter explores Lee’s experimental fiction, Satan the Waster (1918), a genre-defying ‘novel’ in which Lee tests the extent to which imaginative literature can be made to serve a Rationalist agenda. The questions that Lee raises in Satan set the agenda for this book as a whole: given the ease with which language flows into necessary fictions, can literature ever accommodate or encourage unbelief in the strong ethical sense of belief only in the believable? What forms of representation, if any, might be adequate to the expression of a ‘responsible’ unbelief?
Naomi Mitchison’s Rationalist ‘Heresy’ and Speculative Humanism in Beyond This Limit
Authors: Hobson Suzanne 
Published: February 2022

Abstract
Chapter 5 examines Naomi Mitchison’s claim to be a Rationalist heretic and her attempts to reshape Rationalist priorities and values to better serve a new generation of left-leaning and feminist unbelievers such as herself. Mitchison was a life-long member of the Rationalist Press Association, though not always supportive of its aims. In articles and speeches, some of which were published in the RPA journal, she argued for a realignment of Rationalism to bring it closer to socialism, on the one hand, and, curiously, religion on the other. This was not, this chapter argues, a wholesale abandonment of Rationalist principles, especially not those concerning the limits of human knowledge. On the contrary, Mitchison re-orientates Rationalism in the direction of a speculative humanism that goes beyond the confines of scientific naturalism without sacrificing the primacy of human reason to some other, extra-human or godlike, way of knowing. This chapter turns to Beyond This Limit, the short novel Mitchison co-created with Wyndham Lewis, to explore the working out of her philosophy in fiction. Beyond This Limit posits the existence of an afterlife but in such a way as to suggest, that if this is to be a legitimate and rational form of conjecture, then the afterlife can only be imagined as an extension of the conditions of mortality—as a form of living on.
K. S. Bhat, Soma, and a Transnational Literature of Unbelief
Authors: Hobson Suzanne 
Published: February 2022

Abstract
The final chapter provides an account of Soma (1931–4), the only little magazine from the period seemingly dedicated to the production and dissemination of a transnational literature of unbelief. The editor, K. S. Bhat, had links to the Rationalist Press Association as well as to progressive literary groups in London and India and these connections are manifest in the magazine’s hybridized literary style. This chapter explores some of Soma’s sources and influences from Indian literature and folklore, to Soviet realisms, and Anglophone modernisms. As Johannes Quack suggests in relation to his own work, the point of this approach is not to impose European values on Indian cultures, but to show how new formations of unbelief emerge at the point where different traditions intersect. In Soma, these formations often overlap with those seen in the British Rationalist context; the magazine gives priority to human values and flourishing over and above religious sensitivities and sanctions. But the magazine’s close affiliation with Eastern European and Indian sources and groups also produces new and distinctive formations. This chapter focuses on the parables and fables contributed by Bhat himself as exemplary of the magazine’s unique voice and contribution. Soma is a fitting place to end this book because, in both its conception and realization, the magazine extends the reach and the remit of what has thus far been considered under the heading of a literature of unbelief.
Liberty
Authors: Highley Christopher 
Published: February 2022

Abstract
This chapter examines the Blackfriars’ status as an ex-ecclesiastical liberty independent of mayoral jurisdiction. It explains how the residents governed their own affairs and how they clung tenaciously to the liberty’s special privileges. As an “exempt place,” the Blackfriars was also free from the City’s Livery Companies and the restrictions they placed on non-native workers. This situation attracted many French and Dutch refugees who came to form a distinct sub-group of residents that was successfully integrated into the neighborhood. The liberty’s privileges helped unite its disparate residents, fostering a strong collective consciousness and attachment to place. Yet those residents, for all their claims to autonomy, still depended upon the wider economic and municipal structures of the metropolis.
Early Troubles
Authors: Highley Christopher 
Published: February 2022

Abstract
This chapter examines the successful attempt by a group of Blackfriars residents in 1596 to stop James Burbage from opening a second, larger, playhouse in the precinct. As well as identifying the petitioners and their concerns, the chapter asks why other residents may have been reluctant or unwilling to sign up. The petition was successful in the short term, but it does not represent the wishes of the entire community. The playhouse, in other words, was a divisive issue. A few years later a company of boy, rather than adult, actors took occupancy of the performance space. The chapter argues for the centrality of Ben Jonson in this new venture; his early plays for the boys established a tradition of satirical and topically “edgy” drama that would characterize the playhouse for the next decade or so.
Epilogue
Authors: Highley Christopher 
Published: February 2022

Abstract
The Epilogue examines later petitions against the Blackfriars playhouse and their possible influence on Parliament’s ultimate closure of all the playhouses in 1642. These petitions have been used to suggest that, beginning in the early seventeenth century, Blackfriars was a neighborhood in decline: wealthier residents moved out as the capital’s cultural center of gravity shifted westward to Westminster and the new west end. The chapter argues that despite undeniable changes in the residential makeup, economy, and physical fabric of Blackfriars, the area maintained its unique and vital identity, thanks in no small part to the presence of the playhouse.
Introduction
Authors: Knox Philip 
Published: February 2022

Abstract
This introductory chapter lays out the key concepts that will inform the chapters that follow. It reflects on what can be learned from histories of reading and reception studies in order to think about how fourteenth-century responses to the Rose might be situated in relation to each other, shaped but not determined by the social and cultural environments in which they unfold. It explores how the intricate intertextual networks that the Rose draws into itself from its fore- and after-history form part of how we think about its place in English literary history. Finally, it examines how increasingly sophisticated scholarship is attending to the instability of the very categories of ‘English’ and ‘French’ medieval literature, and what this means for our understanding of the Rose in England.
Conclusion
Authors: Knox Philip 
Published: February 2022

Abstract
The Romance of the Rose transformed fourteenth-century English literature by transforming ideas about what literature should be or could be. It created new ways of asserting or disputing literary value, across a range of discrete but overlapping social and cultural spheres. The apparent disjunction of the different ways in which its afterlife might be imagined is one reason why the importance of the Rose for English literature has been so difficult to describe in modern criticism. But this multiplicity, and the colliding-together of different reading practices that it produced, should be seen in fact as the source of its importance to late medieval readers.
Distrust of Institutions in Early Modern Britain and America
Authors: Levack Brian P. 
Published: February 2022

Abstract
During the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries an increasingly literate and politically conscious public in England expressed growing distrust of national political, legal, financial, commercial, and ecclesiastical institutions. The increasing size and complexity of those institutions, the lack of personal knowledge of the officials who ran or controlled them, and their periodic abuses of power fed a rising chorus of distrust, for which the philosopher John Locke provided theoretical support in his Two Treatises of Government (1689). Distrust of government resulted in two revolutions in seventeenth-century England and the revolution of thirteen North American colonies against British rule in the 1770s.The corruption of justice and conflicts between the judiciary and juries in the seventeenth century contributed to lack of confidence in law courts and the judiciary, while the unfairness of treason trials led to the reform of treason law in Britain and the United States. Distrust of the Bank of England, the stock market, and large trading corporations resulted from the largest financial scandal in British history in 1720, while the system of taxation involved a loss of trust in government in England and America. Anticlericalism lay at the core of widespread Puritan distrust of the Church of England in the 1630s and 1640s, and the persecution of dissenters after the Restoration raised ecclesiastical distrust to unprecedented levels. After subsiding significantly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, distrust of public institutions in Britain and the United States began to mount again in the 1970s, reaching a peak in the first two decades of the twenty-first century.
Introduction
Authors: Levack Brian P. 
Published: February 2022

Abstract
This brief introduction explains that the book breaks new ground on the subject of trust by providing the various historical contexts in which distrust of public institutions arose in early modern Britain and North America. The introduction establishes the geographical and chronological boundaries of the study, while brief descriptions of the individual chapters show that the book deals with the loss of trust not only in government, which is the main concern among academics and journalists today, but also legal, financial, economic, and ecclesiastical institutions. The introduction identifies the intended audience of the book to include not only scholars and students but also general readers interested in the history of England, Scotland, the North American British colonies, and the early American republic, as well as the issue of trust in contemporary society.
Distrust of Legal Institutions
Authors: Levack Brian P. 
Published: February 2022

Abstract
A lack of confidence in English law courts first arose in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries in response to the corruption of justice in outlying regions of the country. Reforms undertaken by the governments of Henry VII and Henry VIII helped to restore trust in the legal process, but distrust arose once again during the personal rule of Charles I and among law reformers in the 1640s and 1650s. Distrust of English law courts reached a peak in the late seventeenth century in reaction to the coercion of juries and the violation of defendants’ rights in trials of Whigs and religious dissenters. Other sources of judicial distrust in late seventeenth-century England and the early American republic were the procedures in treason trials, which resulted in the unfair prosecution of opponents of the government. The harshness and unfairness of punishments for all crimes also eroded faith in the entire criminal justice system in both Britain and America during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Distrust of Financial and Commercial Institutions
Authors: Levack Brian P. 
Published: February 2022

Abstract
Distrust of the Bank of England, the stock market, and the large companies engaged in overseas trade reached a peak in the South Sea Bubble of 1720. Distrust of national banks later became a recurrent source of distrust in the United States, which led to the failure of the first two such banks and prevented a third from being established until 1913. Distrust of the system of taxation in Britain focused mainly on excise taxes, which the government was in large part successful in managing by the middle of the eighteenth century, whereas excise taxes, direct taxes, and customs duties levied on American colonists became a major source of colonial distrust of the British government in the 1760s and 1770s. This chapter also deals with the formation of legal trusts, which are transfers of property from one party to another, who holds the property “in trust” for a beneficiary. The main source of distrust of this system in early modern England came from the royal government itself when landed families used trusts to avoid paying taxes in the 1530s.
Victorians and Numbers
Authors: Goldman Lawrence 
Published: February 2022

Abstract
This book examines the influence of statistics on Victorian society and culture, from the methods of natural science and the struggle against disease, to the development of social administration and conflicts between social classes. A defining feature of nineteenth-century Britain was its fascination with numbers. The processes that made Victorian society, including the growth of population and industry and the increasing competence of the state, generated profuse numerical data. Numbers were gathered in the 1830s by newly-created statistical societies in response to this ‘data revolution’. Their collection and analysis became a regular feature of government, and inspired new ways of interrogating both the natural and social worlds. William Farr used them to study cholera: Florence Nightingale deployed them in campaigns for sanitary improvement; Charles Babbage was inspired to design and build his famous calculating engines to process them; the statistics of living standards inspired working-class protest. The mid-Victorians employed statistics consistently to make the case for liberal reform. In later decades, however, the emergence of the academic discipline of mathematical statistics—statistics as we use them today—became associated with eugenics and a contrary social philosophy. Where earlier statisticians subscribed to the unity of mankind, later practitioners, following Francis Galton, emphasised variation and difference within and between groups. In chapters on learned societies, government departments, international statistical collaborations, natural scientists and intellectuals, as well as statisticians, this book traces the impact of numbers on the era, and the relationship of Victorian statistics to ‘Big Data’ in our own age.
Manchester: The Manchester Statistical Society
Authors: Goldman Lawrence 
Published: February 2022

Abstract
This chapter examines the other major statistical society created in the 1830s in Manchester. The industrial and urban context of the city is sketched as background to the institutional events. Historians have generally seen the society’s origins as responsive to purely local conditions. They have emphasized the commercial identity of the founders of the Society who have been depicted as capitalists hostile to the regulation of their factories by the state. This chapter advances different views. It is demonstrated that key figures in Manchester were involved in the events in Cambridge and London also, suggesting more of a common origin to the Statistical Movement. The bond uniting these men was affiliation to a branch of Christian non-conformity (i.e. non-Anglicanism), Unitarianism. Most were Unitarians or came from historically Unitarian families. This explains why the Manchester Statistical Society devoted much of its attention to elementary education in the 1830s, which was largely controlled by the Anglican Church, and which therefore failed to reach many English communities. In its campaign for a system of unsectarian public education in the 1830s, and its focus on free trade and the repeal of the Corn Laws in the 1840s, the Manchester Society is better conceived as a political pressure group than a learned society. The chapter argues that the famous text of 1832, The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes, by one of its founding members, James Kay-Shuttleworth, is best read as a manifesto for the Society’s ideas.
Clerkenwell
Authors: Goldman Lawrence 
Published: February 2022

Abstract
A body calling itself the London Statistical Society existed in the late 1820s and was responsible for the publication of the Statistical Illustrations of … the British Empire. Historians have largely dismissed it as unimportant, or lacking in evidence of institutional life. This chapter establishes the Society as the confluence of a national network of committees of artisans who, since 1817, had collected data and statistics to demonstrate the decline in living standards among the working classes across the early nineteenth century. The key figure was the Clerkenwell watchmaker and radical journalist, John Powell, an associate of the leading London trades’ unionist of this era, the Thames shipwright, John Gast. Powell set forth an economic philosophy based on cooperation, criticized elite corruption, and tried to show the relationships between rising crime, pauperism and poverty, and falling real wages. He mounted a critique of Ricardian economics—the doctrines and ideas of David Ricardo, which favoured laissez-faire and free trade, as set forth in his Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817), and which depended on a priori deductions rather than evidence. Powell foreshadowed other members of the Statistical Movement like Jones and Whewell, who, in the 1830s, also opposed orthodox economics. The chapter thus substantiates the existence of artisan statisticians at this time and of intellectual linkages which define the identity of the Statistical Movement as a whole. It situates working-class statistics within the different genres of working-class protest described by E. P. Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class.
Adolphe Quetelet
Authors: Goldman Lawrence 
Published: February 2022

Abstract
L. A. J. (Adolphe) Quetelet, a Belgian, was the preeminent social statistician in mid-nineteenth century Europe. Widely admired in Britain, where his influence on Florence Nightingale was profound, his friends included William Farr and Charles Babbage, and he had been tutor to Prince Albert. He was present in Cambridge in 1833 when the Statistical Movement was initiated. A mathematician and astronomer who had graduated to the study of social science, his major work Sur L’Homme et les Développement de ses Facultés: Physique Sociale, published in 1835, was a bible for many in Britain. Social Physics combined anthropometry (the study of the dimensions of the human body), demography, and statistical representation of social behaviour. Quetelet was controversial because his ideas veered towards determinism: the regularity of certain social processes led him to argue that men and women had only limited free will and that their actions were dictated by social and institutional contexts. Many Victorians believed strongly in individual moral responsibility, however. His idea of the average man (l’homme moyen) was just as confusing: at times it seemed that Quetelet was describing ideal characteristics rather than average attributes. This chapter attempts to explain his contribution to the British statistical movement, his key ideas, and his errors of reasoning and inference. It compares him to another liberal thinker of this era, the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville, who was also interested in statistics, had attended the Manchester Statistical Society, but was a more cautious and sceptical democrat than Quetelet.
The International Statistical Congress, 1851–1878
Authors: Goldman Lawrence 
Published: February 2022

Abstract
This chapter shows how the liberal internationalism of the statistical movement at mid-century was undermined by the subsequent growth of nationalism and social conservativism across Europe. It concerns the history of the International Statistical Congress which held nine meetings in major European cities, 1853–78. The ISC has not attracted much historical attention but has generally been presented as embodying the noble aim of international social collaboration as articulated at its London Congress in 1860. In reality, however, there were many international political tensions, and wars of national unification, which undermined the organization, especially after the unification of Germany in 1871. The new German state was unwilling to cooperate with the Congress and to accept its policies and standards. Eventually, in the late 1870s, the ISC collapsed, though it was followed by a more successful professional forum for statisticians, the International Statistical Institute. This case study examines the international politics of statistics and the conflict between liberal practitioners and conservative statesmen and state structures. It also counterposes the continental European model of statistical organization under the control of the state, with the independence from government enjoyed by British statisticians.
The End of the Statistical Movement
Authors: Goldman Lawrence 
Published: February 2022

Abstract
Francis Galton’s genius was responsible for the development from the 1870s of mathematical statistics, a quantum leap from descriptive statistics to sophisticated analytical techniques including correlation and regression. Under the influence of Darwinism, Galton studied variation in nature and society and emphasized the inherited differences between individuals and social groups. He led statistics away from its liberal lineage and towards the discipline of eugenics, the study of heritable qualities and conditions, and the promotion of racial ‘improvement’ by different forms of demographic control. Galton’s work and ideology are examined through three case-studies. The first compares Galton’s classification of the population by inherited intelligence to Charles Booth’s social and environmental classification of the classes in London. In the second, Galton’s assault in the late 1870s on the amateurism of statistical work in Section F of the British Association demonstrates his frustration with the old-style social statistics. In the third, his long correspondence in 1890–91 with Florence Nightingale over the establishment of a professorship of statistics in the University of Oxford, a project Galton deterred, is used to mark the end of the Statistical Movement and its supersession by mathematical statistics. Galton’s lack of judgement, his moral failings, and those of the eugenics movement more generally, are emphasized. However, despite interest in eugenics among the late-Victorian and Edwardian intellectual elites, the eugenics movement made little headway against the prevailing environmentalism among policy-makers. Galton revolutionized statistics but did not change the outlook of most statisticians.