Nineteenth Century British History and Culture
'Lessons in Seeing: Art, Religion and Class in the East End of London, 1881–1898', Journal of Victorian Culture (2011) 16:3, 385-403.
In 1881 the Reverend Samuel Barnett, Anglican incumbent of St Jude's Church, Whitechapel, established the Whitechapel... more In 1881 the Reverend Samuel Barnett, Anglican incumbent of St Jude's Church, Whitechapel, established the Whitechapel Fine Art Exhibitions with his wife Henrietta. These quickly became an important part of the parochial programme ofSt Jude's. The Barnetts followed the art theories of John Ruskin and Matthew Arnold and argued that exhibiting famous and beautiful paintings would revive the spirituality of poor East Enders. In order to test this theory, they introduced the practice of ‘Voting for Your Favourite Picture’. The result, however, did not bear out straightforwardly the Barnetts' belief that paintings are ‘Windows into the other World’. The gap between the intended outcome and the actual reception of the Whitechapel Exhibitions reveals that, although they may not have adopted the Barnetts' religious aestheticism, working-class visitors were keen to engage with art on their own terms.
The German Community in Manchester, Middle-Class Culture and the Development of Mountaineering in Britain, c. 18501914
Originally published as Westaway, J. (2009) The German Community in Manchester, Middle-Class Culture and the Development of Mountaineering in Britain, c. 1850-1914. The English Historical Review, CXXIV (508). pp. 571-604.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/ehr/cep144
The German community in Manchester formed the most significant international element in the Manchester bourgeoisie... more The German community in Manchester formed the most significant international element in the Manchester bourgeoisie c.1850-1914 and contributed significantly to the city's commercial and cultural life. This study examines German models of voluntary association that linked sport and recreation, education and culture in the context of the Germanophile cultural and intellectual life of the city. Nonconformist élites within Manchester shared liberal and reformist ideals with German émigré groups, not least in the area of education. The German-Unitarian contribution to the kindergarten system, progressive education and the gymnastics movement is examined in some detail. With their emphasis on the whole child, physical education, physical culture and the balance to be achieved between mind and body, these pedagogic innovations were to have a significant influence on the nascent outdoor movement in the region. A number of important implications for the historiography of mountaineering are drawn out. The presence of a gymnastic tradition in the city is relevant to the debates on the emergence of rock climbing as a sport distinct from mountaineering in the 1880s and 1890s. Historians of British mountaineering have tended to characterize the sport as dominated by the world view of the gentlemanly upper-middle class, shot through with the chivalric codes of manliness, athleticism and the exploratory impulse and intent on satisfying nationalistic and imperial preoccupations. This paper argues that, in the context of a regional middle-class sporting and recreational culture, cosmopolitan intellectual and cultural links were just as significant as the dominant national discourse. It opens up the possibility of understanding mountaineering as not just part of an imperial discourse of conquest but also one rooted in the Enlightenment tradition of inner exploration and intellectual bildung.
Download (.pdf) The Politics of Disinterest: The Whigs and the Liberal party in the West Riding of Yorkshire, 1830-1850
by David Gent
Forthcoming in Northern History (2012)
This article explores the nature and limits of provincial political support for the Whigs during the 1830s and 40s by... more This article explores the nature and limits of provincial political support for the Whigs during the 1830s and 40s by investigating the relationship between Whigs and liberals in the West Riding. In the wake of the 1832 Reform Act, the region’s reformers came to see the Whigs (both locally and as a national governing force) as part of a broader ‘liberal party’, defined by its commitment to a reforming, disinterested style of government. Buttressed by conflict with the Conservatives, this party identity helped to sustain the alliance between Whigs and liberals until the late 1830s. Thereafter, however, frustrations with the apparent timidity of Whig government led liberals to drift away from party politics and direct their energy into extra-parliamentary movements, most notably the Anti-Corn Law League. Moreover, there were significant differences within the liberal ranks over the proper role of the state in religious life, tensions which worsened as a result of the social reform policies of Lord John Russell’s administration. In charting these developments, this study challenges the classic but now dated articles on West Riding politics by F. M. L Thompson and Derek Fraser.
‘The “Wakened Echoes” of Maxwell’s Poetic Physics’
Book chapter in interdisciplinary essay collection on physicist James Clerk Maxwell, ed. Raymond Flood, Mark McCartney, and Andrew Whitaker (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2012)
Feeding in the Workhouse: The Institution and the Ideological Functions of Food, c.1834-70
by Ian Miller
Journal of British Studies, 2013
How adequate was the mid-Victorian workhouse diet? According to an article published recently in the British Medical... more
How adequate was the mid-Victorian workhouse diet? According to an article published recently in the British Medical Journal which garnered international media attention, it was indeed adequate. Basing its argument on modern nutritional analysis of dietary tables, it concludes that the house diet fulfilled the basic nutritional needs of inmates. The article’s aim was to demolish the “medical myth” of workhouse dietary regimes that it believes to have been created by contemporaries - in particular Charles Dickens. The paucity of Oliver Twist’s diet was fictitious, it argues, because it did not correspond with dietary tables outlined in official sources. Dickens’ infamous scene where Oliver becomes so overwhelmed with hunger that he asks for more food is construed as an exaggerated rendering of the quantities of food allocated to paupers in mid-Victorian workhouses.
Within this article, I argue contrarily that efforts to impose modern nutritional techniques onto past configurations can produce misleading results, and, in turn, generate simplistic historical interpretations. Certainly, in this instance, the usage of nutritional analysis has allowed imprecise narratives of mid-Victorian workhouse practices to become widely popularised. Within such accounts, the historical, and cultural, construction of dietary regimes remains unaccounted for. Although nutritional analysis of past dietary trends indeed serve a useful function, when used alone it often resoundingly fails to encompass the meaningful, immediate and important meanings that surrounded the issue of workhouse feeding, and which permeated the heated debates sparked by the presence of the New Poor Law. This is problematic, as these debates cannot be so easily disconnected from the realities of institutional feeding practices. On the contrary, they informed and shaped dietary provisions in multifaceted ways. The cultural categories historically surrounding food demand thorough attention, and must be reconciled with modern scientific approaches. Nutritional analysis needs to be synthesised with rigorous historical scrutiny if we are to formulate more precise historiographical understandings, and, in this instance, if the boundaries between workhouse realities and mythologies are to be rendered less obscure.
Conference: British Art as International Art, 1851 to 1960
Members of the University of East Anglia’s World Art Studies and Museology Department Greg Salter, Kitty Hudson, Rosanna Eckersley and Kate Aspinall are organising the graduate symposium 'British Art as International Art, 1851 to 1960' on Friday the 20th and Saturday the 21st of April (programme available on website).
Keynote speakers:
Emma Chambers of Tate Britain, presenting “Migrations: Émigré Artists in British Art”, and Michael Hatt of the University of Warwick, presenting “From New England to Nowhere: Edward Carpenter, Fred Holland Day and the Dream of Placelessness”
Registration:
The symposium is free, but spaces are limited, so please register before 2nd April, either by emailing the organisers at britartinternational@gmail.com or on the website: http://www.uea.ac.uk/art/ events-news/event
Bawdy Songbooks of the Romantic Period, 4 vols.
Co-edited with Paul Watt; published September 2011 by Pickering & Chatto.
One of the popular metropolitan pastimes of the nineteenth century was the singing of ribald songs. These songs,... more One of the popular metropolitan pastimes of the nineteenth century was the singing of ribald songs. These songs, forced off the streets by the Society for the Suppression of Vice, were sung by professional actors and singers in theatres, music halls, gardens and other public venues. But they were also sung by amateurs in cider and coal-hole cellars, coffee-houses and gentlemen’s clubs. Because almost no songbooks survive from the first half of the nineteenth century, this species of popular entertainment has, until recently, been almost completely overlooked in favour of the rural and street ballads which were collected by respectable gentlemen-scholars.
National Art Museum Practice as Political Cartography in 19th Century Britain
in Knell S; Aronsson P; Amundsen AB; Barnes A; Burch S; Carter J; Gosselin V; Hughes S; Kirwan AM (eds), National Museums: New Studies from Around the World, Routledge 2010
This chapter will explore one of the key characteristics of nineteenth-century national museums in Britain: that of... more
This chapter will explore one of the key characteristics of nineteenth-century national museums in Britain: that of mapping the world, both geographically, epistemologically and socially. I will argue that the national museum provided an institutional technology for mapping, while in its morphology it was, literally, a multi-dimensional map which constructed knowledge spatially, connectively and divisively, to represent cultural and natural hierarchies and relations and differences between things and between people. The chapter begins with a brief exploration of the notion of the museum as map by examining the use of cartographic technology within the context of institutional collecting and display of material cultures. Then, looking at the network of national museums in mid-nineteenth-century London, the chapter will discuss the importance of geography, mobility, travel, cartography and appropriation of objects within the organising structures of curatorial practice and knowledge construction with predominant reference to the notion of art and the idea of the work of art. Within this, the paper will also look at the nature of national museum representations of the home nation. Where was Britain’s place on the map? And what were the cartographical politics of national othering and selfing? In relation to the latter the paper will also consider the national museum as a cartographic technology for social mapping through which, in a post-1832 context, the social and moral order of the new British electorate was plotted. The chapter will conclude with a account of the apparently weak expressions of nationhood in mid-century national museums, enabling a view of Britain as cultural cartographer rather than as obvious cultural territory, and opening up a way of discussing the museum as space for theorising, whether explicitly or not, the complex political relations between places, cultures and peoples past and present.
"The Lettered Paul: Remnant and Mission in Hannah More, Walter Scott, and Critical Theory"
Studies in Romanticism 50.4 (2011): 591-618, in press.
As scholars reconsider the stories of secularization that still undergird our study of nineteenth-century British... more As scholars reconsider the stories of secularization that still undergird our study of nineteenth-century British thought, this essay develops a comparison of two Romantic writers normally divided by such stories, Hannah More and Walter Scott. In both authors’ texts, in the shadow of Napoleon, the essay identifies a distinctively Pauline epistolarity at work. More and Scott turn to the Pauline letter in writings about the biblical apostle, in properly epistolary works, and elsewhere; and this article argues for the significance of that form as a vehicle, at once politico-theological and formal, by which they explore questions of empire. But if the Pauline letter is central, it is, for them and for us, plural rather than singular. Thus the present essay follows the tensions pulsing within Pauline epistolarity--competing senses of the letter that have to do, finally, with the competing possibilities of Saint Paul--out into disagreements that animate recent theoretical studies of the apostle. As in More and Scott, so too in contemporary critical theory, Paul can figure either for a universalizing force, an empire to end all empires, or for a particular remainder that, in its very critique of imperial logic, demands alternative ways of mediating the local and the global. To use the terms of this essay, the former understanding inscribes the Pauline letter, that little-discussed Romantic form, as mission, while the latter conception claims it as remnant.
'A Warning Against Quack Doctors': the Old Bailey trial of Indian oculists, 1893
Historical Research (2012): DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2281.2011.00589.x
The cataract operation is said to have been perfected by Susruta, the ‘Hippocrates of India’, some time around the... more The cataract operation is said to have been perfected by Susruta, the ‘Hippocrates of India’, some time around the sixth century B.C.E. However, at the end of the nineteenth century in Britain, India's reputation for expertise in ocular surgery was under threat and at the point of being discredited. At this time, a number of Indian oculists were working in Britain, outside the professional medical sector using itinerant methods and forms of advertising that were associated with ‘quacks’. The activities of four Indian eye-doctors came to the fore with a trial at the Old Bailey in 1893 for ‘fraud’. This article locates such Indian oculists within a tradition of ‘fringe medicine’ in Britain, and discusses, in particular, their methods of advertising and the proceedings of the aforementioned trial.
Invisible scholars: Girls learning Latin and mathematics in the elementary public schools of Scotland before 1872
by Lindy Moore
History of Education, vol. 13 (2) 1984
A Case of Identity: Contested Representations of Sherlock Holmes and the Formation of the Ideal Liberal Subject
Presented at the 2011 British Scholars Conference
In the last decade of the nineteenth century, the Liberal cult of progress was starting to lose its hold. However,... more
In the last decade of the nineteenth century, the Liberal cult of progress was starting to lose its hold. However, discourse on English identity continued to center around a sense of liberal subjectivity, as revealed by the creation and instant celebrity of the literary character Sherlock Holmes and his embodiment of the observant and deductive enfranchised subject. Through my analysis of the extraliterary uses of this figure of the detective in the popular press, a disputed construction of the modern political subject comes into focus. This paper explores the variance of political, socio‐economic and gendered takes on English identity as exposed through the alternately embraced and rejected paradigm of the rational Holmes.
Evidence from over 200 articles in periodicals ranging from radical “working men’s papers” like Reynolds's Newspaper to Conservative monthly reviews like The Academy, reveals a complex look at the uses of popular culture as a mythic proxy for disputed claims of identity. Building off of recent scholarship of James Vernon, Chris Otter, and the seminal work of Patrick Joyce, this evidence further complicates ideas of class and popular culture. Rather than the theory of mass culture as a monolithic voice of the bourgeoisie impressed on a similarly heterogeneous working class, what emerges is a picture of a contested dialogical narrative of identity.
Through these intradiscursive transactions between all levels of society, we catch a glimpse of how this polyvocal discourse of identity, beginning in 1891, was transformed into a single, enduring vision of the great detective by the time of the author’s death in 1930. The detective as we know and understand him today is a patchwork of Liberal, Unionist, and Conservative reflection on the shaping and governing of the individual subject in the twilight of Liberal England.
'A fit person to be Poet Laureate': Tennyson, In Memoriam, and the Laureateship
by Gregory Tate
published in the Tennyson Research Bulletin vol. 9, no. 3 (2009)
Through the British Looking Glass: Constructing the "Other" in the Nineteenth Century
This paper examines the uses of British travel narratives from 1800-1840 as sources of information for the British... more This paper examines the uses of British travel narratives from 1800-1840 as sources of information for the British public. The questions addressed are whether travel accounts contain different language and information when describing India or Argentina; if so, what are the social, economic, and cultural reasons for the disparate accounts; and, finally, how do the differences in rhetoric describe the British empire. Travel narratives specifically provided valuable information to their audience: they described strange indigenous people and sweeping landscapes, illustrated exotic art and architecture, and introduced new markets and investment opportunities. They made people feel as though they were part of the expansion and administration of empire without leaving the British archipelago. However, travel narratives did more than fill the imaginations of their readers; they also helped to shape the motivations and ideologies of empire. As its power expanded and its conquests multiplied in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, British rule took on dramatically different characteristics in its varied territories, exhibiting the qualities of both formal and informal empire. The duality of imperialism can be clearly identified in Britain's relations in India and Argentina: in the former, Britain exerted commercial and administrative power, and in the latter, it introduced new markets through a form of trade monopoly. Travelers to Argentina or India in the early nineteenth century wrote disparate accounts: those on Argentina tended to focus more on commerce, whereas those on India tended to highlight culture. This paper considers the characteristics of British hegemony in the two locations and explores how the differences affected the prose of travel writers. It argues that travel writing was not monolithic: writers were engaged in adapting the discourse on empire according to geography, commerce, and culture. However, this examination of popular British travelogues shows that despite the subject or region under the purview of the authors, the underlying themes were the same. Indeed, whether or not it was the authors' intention, their experiences propagated the idea of empire. Moreover, the narratives show that the discourse of empire was malleable and conformed to local geography, politics, commerce, and culture.
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Napoleon Lambelet, a composer from the East in Eduardian West-End (in Greek)
Εισήγηση στο Συνέδριο για την Επτανησιακή Όπερα στις Μουσικές Γιορτές του 2010. Εκδόθηκε πρόσφατα ηλεκτρονικά από το Τμήμα Θεατρικών Σπουδών του ΕΚΠΑ και είναι αναρτημένο στη σελίδα του Τμήματος. Αποτελεί συντομευμένη έκδοση ευρύτερης μονογραφίας για τον συνθέτη που αναμένεται να κυκλοφορήσει ως το τέλος του 2012
In 1897, two French from Smyrna, the singer Maurice Farkoa and A. Wilson Fyscher have just moved in London. The... more In 1897, two French from Smyrna, the singer Maurice Farkoa and A. Wilson Fyscher have just moved in London. The latter, in collaboration with an English businessman put on a musical in the commercial West End based on a play that Fyscher knew extremely well from homeland: Leblebidji Chorchor Agha. As musician partner they recruited a Greek from Corfu, Napoleon Lambelet, who has recently installed there and who also knew the play from Athens. The English writer and actor Seymour Hicks adapted the text with great audacity. The play has been significantly changed in compare to the original libretto. One of the main characters was the Sultan Abdul Hamid II and Hicks ridicules him at every opportunity. Thus, the Censorship Office of Lord Chamberlain marked many lines of it with its well-known blue pencil. The play under the new title Yashmak had a successful career in London, drawing attention both of Bernhard Shaw as a critic, who, despite his aesthetic contrast to the genre of musical comedy, prophesies its longevity, and James Joyce who, influenced by Orientalism, presents, in his Ulysses, Molly Bloom covered with a yashmak...
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The Seventh Earl of Carlisle and the Castle Howard Estate: Whiggery, Religion and Improvement, 1830–1864
by David Gent
Published in the Yorkshire Archaeological Journal, 82 (2010), 315-41. Originally won the Yorkshire History prize for 2009.
This article explores the role played by the early-Victorian Whig aristocrat and politician, George Howard... more
This article explores the role played by the early-Victorian Whig aristocrat and politician, George Howard (1802–1864), seventh Earl of Carlisle, in improving his estate at Castle Howard in the North Riding of Yorkshire. Carlisle instigated numerous changes in the productive landscape of the estate, and attempted to reform the social and moral condition of his tenantry through a number of projects. The article places those developments in the context of Carlisle's political and religious values. In doing so, it poses a challenge to the existing historiography on both the history of Whiggery and of the country house.
Aristocratic Whig politics in early-Victorian Yorkshire: Lord Morpeth and his world
by David Gent
This thesis explores the provincial life of George W. F. Howard (1802-64), 7th Earl of Carlisle, better known as the... more
This thesis explores the provincial life of George W. F. Howard (1802-64), 7th Earl of Carlisle, better known as the early-Victorian Whig aristocrat and politician Lord
Morpeth. It challenges accounts which have presented Whiggery as metropolitan in ethos, by demonstrating that Morpeth strongly engaged with the county of Yorkshire
as a politician, philanthropist and landlord. It provides the first dedicated account of how Whiggery operated, and was perceived, in a provincial setting.
An introduction summarises the current historiography on the Whigs, and establishes the rationale behind the study. Chapter One details the pivotal influence of Morpeth’s
Christian faith on his thought. It suggests that his religious values shaped both his nonpolitical and political actions, ensuring a correlation between them.
Chapters Two and Four are concerned with Morpeth’s career as M.P. for Yorkshire (1830-32) and the West Riding (1832-41, 1846-48). They suggest that Morpeth played a key role in building an alliance between the region’s liberals and Whiggery, based around the idea that the Whigs would offer political, economic and ecclesiastical reforms. However, they show how this alliance gradually splintered, partly owing to
differences between the Whigs and some of the region’s nonconformist liberals over issues of Church and State and the Whigs’ social reform policies.
Chapter Three details Morpeth’s activities as a philanthropist in the county. It suggests that this maintained his links to his supporters, shaped his views on social questions, and enhanced his political reputation.
Chapter Five explores his relationship with Castle Howard, his Yorkshire estate. It demonstrates his attachment to the house and integration into local society, his involvement in promoting agricultural and infrastructural improvement in the district, and his concern to improve the moral,
physical and spiritual welfare of his tenants. Both chapters show the links between Morpeth’s provincial life and his career as a statesman.