British Social History Research Articles

The Irish and the Preston Lock-Out, 1853–1854

The Irish have long featured as a central element in British social and labour history, but an idea still prevails that it was as strike breakers rather than strike makers that they influenced British industrial relations. The great Preston strike of 1853–1854 appears to have had a crucial role in cementing that idea and the role of Irish ‘knobsticks’ became a central, as well as a very visual component, of that dispute. The story of the ‘half alive and half dead’ impoverished Irish who arrived in Preston in March 1854 seems ideally suited to the famous images produced of the lock-out and knobstick figures, but they obscure as much as they illustrate. This paper examines the role of the Irish in broader perspective between the years of the Lune Street massacre of 1842 and the close of the strike in 1854 as a series of disputes in which people from Ireland featured on both sides, and where attitudes towards the strike, strikers and strike breakers were complex, dynamic and left enduring legacies. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0/

Changing Britain through the frame of snooker

This paper considers snooker’s rise to popularity, and its relative decline, through the frame of recent British social history. The paper situates an ostensible decline in snooker spectatorship and a demonstrable decline in participation across the UK, against a backdrop of shifts in economic activity, class structure, cultures of masculinity and urban space. Drawing on theories of gender, class, subculture, media and critical urbanism, the paper argues that a sociological frame lends a lot to understanding snooker in the UK. At the same time, it argues that the frame of snooker might also lend a lot to a sociological understanding of industrial, and later, post-industrial Britain.

The political alignment of presidents of the early Royal Society of London

PurposeThis study aims to identify the political alignment and political activity of the 11 Presidents of Britain’s most important scientific organisation, the Royal Society of London, in its early years 1662–1703, to determine whether or not the institution was politically aligned.Design/methodology/approachThere is almost no information addressing the political alignment of the Royal Society or its Presidents available in the institution’s archives, or in the writings of historians specialising in its administration. Even reliable biographical sources, such as the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography provide very limited information. However, as 10 Presidents were elected Member of Parliament (MP), The History of Parliament: British Political, Social and Local History provides a wealth of accurate, in-depth data, revealing the alignment of both.FindingsAll Presidents held senior government offices, the first was a Royalist aristocrat; of the remaining 10, 8 were Royalist or Tory MPs, 2 of whom were falsely imprisoned by the House of Commons, 2 were Whig MPs, while 4 were elevated to the Lords. The institution was Royalist aligned 1662–1680, Tory aligned 1680–1695 and Whig aligned 1695–1703, which reflects changes in Parliament and State.Originality/valueThis study establishes that the early Royal Society was not an apolitical institution and that the political alignment of Presidents and institution continued in later eras. Furthermore, it demonstrates how the election or appointment of an organisation’s most senior officer can be used to signal its political alignment with government and other organisations to serve various ends.

Social Workers and Compassion, Stewart Collins

In 1979, that stalwart of social policy, Pinker, suggested that compassion was an integral feature of the human condition and a core driver of social policy. This is something that I myself have developed in my analysis of British social welfare history (Parker, 2023). So, it is particularly meaningful to have the honour of reviewing Collins’s latest book explicitly linking social workers and compassion across a range of directions and levels. Collins outlines his approach to social work employing Voltaire’s Candide, who, himself, draws on the optimism of his teacher Pangloss as an example of possibility through adversity. This sits alongside Collins’s familial history of his grandfather tending to his garden in an unsympathetic or harsh landscape. Collins’s adopted style reflects the culmination of years of social work practice, research and scholarship in which he has honed his compassionate, and passionate, understanding of social work and social workers’ conception of it. The seven chapters of this book build on evidence and excavation through research and Collins’s long experience in the discipline, setting the context before critiquing compassion in social work. The individual format, in which each chapter can be read as a self-contained unit, is helpful in lending itself to practical application for busy practitioners or students.

Rethinking British sport history for a decolonising present: confronting thingification and redaction

ABSTRACT The Empire’s subaltern peoples and its justification in coloniality are strangely absent from British sport history, despite a key strand of the field being grounded in links between Empire, masculinity and sport: in this the subject reflects gaps and silences in British social history more generally. This paper that is both theoretical and historiographical explores this absence and considers ways that it might be addressed. It first sketches the coloniality of sport history as epistemology and ontology through an exploration of the field’s methodological national whiteness as redacting the agency and voice (past and present) of Indigenous and colonial subaltern peoples and implicating sport history in a continuing Imperial Archive. Although necessarily broad brush the paper concludes by examining aspects of the field that disrupt methodological nationalism and methodological whiteness to suggest ways of rethinking and recasting historians’ practice to suggest decolonial methods for British sport history that rupture in analyses of sport the constraints of the nation as anachronism and Whiteness as a fundamental characteristic of British history.

Soldiers as Citizens: Popular Politics and the Nineteenth Century British Military

Soldiers as Citizens: Popular Politics and the Nineteenth Century British Military

Siena, Kevin. Rotten Bodies: Class & Contagion in Eighteenth-Century Britain.

Siena, Kevin. <i>Rotten Bodies: Class &amp; Contagion in Eighteenth-Century Britain</i>.

Darshan Kumar Suri

Darshan Kumar Suri arrived at London’s Heathrow airport on 14 October 1969 with only three pounds in his pocket. The British government were recruiting doctors from the Commonwealth and Darshan...

A atuação da Lumber Company no Planalto Norte Catarinense e seu impacto sobre o desenvolvimento regional

Dentre os capítulos já contados da história do Contestado, é central e recorrente o papel da Southern Brazil Lumber and Colonization Company, na determinação dos caminhos e da vida daquela distinta região. Inicialmente como grande empresa colonizadora através da exploração madeireira e a instalação ferroviária figura como a responsável por implementar e possibilitar o desenvolvimento social, tecnológico e financeiro para o local. Entretanto no desenrolar da história desde o momento em que se instala naquele território, até seu vexatório fim foi grande causadora de injustiças, que refletiram nos habitantes, no mercado estadual e com significativa parcela na economia nacional, deixando resquícios incorrigíveis no tocante a violação de direitos e na estagnação econômica. O presente artigo pretende contribuir para o já vasto campo das pesquisas sobre o Contestado, através das sugestões teórico-metodológicas inseridas pelas perspectivas da História Social Inglesa, sob a luz das noções sugeridas por Thompson valorizando assim os efeitos dos acontecimentos históricos nas grandes massas verdadeiramente impotentes diante do poder do capital e das decisões impostas pelo estado. Os fatos que justificam o presente trabalho são baseados nas decisões políticas, que amiúde beneficiaram interesses particulares, concessões e favorecimentos que desde a instalação da Lumber Company em 1910 impactaram de forma negativa no desenvolvimento regional, deixando um legado evidenciado pela devastação, a violação de direitos, a paralização de importantes setores econômicos, e o abandono de perspectivas coletivas para a manutenção do poder e o enriquecimento pessoal. Palavras-chave: Contestado. Política. “Lumber Company”.

Peterloo

Peterloo Thomas Prasch Peterloo 2019 Written and directed by Mike Leigh Distributed by Amazon Studios, in association with BFI, Film 4, and LipSync. www.amazon.com 154 minutes Peterloo opens on a different -loo altogether than the one its title enshrines: the battlefield of Waterloo in 1815, the closing act of the long revolutionary and Napoleonic wars that enmeshed Britain and France for over two decades after France's revolutionary regime beheaded its king. Amid the confused carnage and wreckage of the battle's closing moments, we watch a dazed and confused young British bugler blink and bumble about the ravaged landscape, occasionally tooting out a feeble bugle call. Over the course of the film's opening exposition, sandwiched amid scenes of Parliament commemorating the Duke of Wellington's triumph (with a hefty stipend of ₤750,000), of the workaday life of Manchester's working class, and of cabinet officials and military brass worrying about seditious tendencies in the North, we then follow the bugler's long trudge back home to Manchester, where he arrives in a weepy, war-stunned near catatonia (and where we finally learn at least his first name: Joseph). He dons his redcoat uniform—by then rather the worse for wear—near the film's end as he joins his family and thousands of other reform-demanding workers as they gathered in St. Peter's Field to hear radical Henry Hunt ("Orator Hunt," as he was popularly known; played by Rory Kinnear), a peaceful demonstration violently dispersed by sword-wielding cavalry and bayonet-bearing infantry (estimates place the number killed at some dozen or more dead, including women and children, with 500-600 injured), earning its sobriquet Peterloo. Even for film viewers who have adjusted to Mike Leigh's late-career leap from darkly-limned and darkly comic) kitchen-sink-realist portraits of contemporary working-class lives (think High Hopes [1988] or Naked [1993], for example) to films about historical subjects (bringing us backstage with Gilbert and Sullivan in Topsy-Turvy [1999]; portraying an abortionist in the 1950s, before the procedure was legal, in Vera Drake [2004]; tangling to understand the visual splendor of late J. M. W. Turner paintings in Mr. Turner [2014]), Peterloo seems a surprising departure: working with the biggest budget in his career ($18 million, still awfully low by Hollywood standards, but a lot for Leigh) to create a serious, even somber epic memorialization of a dramatic tragedy in British working-class history. In interviews, Leigh has insisted that his making of Peterloo—its release timed to match the bicentennial of the massacre—intended to draw attention to a moment in working-class British history too little remembered or too quickly passed over (see, for example, Vulture, 4 April 2019, or World Socialist Web Site, 5 April 2019). The assertion will somewhat surprise historians who well recall E. P. Thompson's assertion that the event was "without question a formative experience in British political and social history" (The Making of the English Working Class [1963], 687; boldface in original), or who know Robert Reid's carefully researched Peterloo Massacre (1989). To be fair, however, Leigh's perspective coincides with the slowness with which official Manchester marked the historical ground (it was only in 2007 that a plaque marked the square with a properly complete account). A. O. Scott, in his review of the film, aptly notes that "Peterloo has the sweep of Tolstoy and the bustle of Dickens" (New York Times, 4 April 2019). The Tolstoy shows in sweep and range, the leaps from dirty streets and factory floors to royal suites and halls of Parliament, and as well in the masses of the film, the deep range of characters (some four dozen named characters in the cast list, a rich mix of fictional creations and actual historical figures) and the massed crowds of extras. But Scott continues: "It's crowded with noble, villainous and comical characters: police spies and magistrates; radical firebrands and anxious liberals; pompous officials and plain-spoken workers; servants, tradesman, gossips, thugs and children. … Everyone carries a spark of individuality. Every voice and face is something to remember." In such details, the more dominant Dickens side shows. Indeed...

Matthew's Legs and Thomas's Hand: Watching Downton Abbey as a First World War Historian

From its first series in 2010, the ITV television drama Downton Abbey laid claim to representing early twentieth-century British society with great historical accuracy while being lambasted by critics for presenting a sanitised version of modern British social history. This article looks at how the programme was drawn, over the course of its broadcast between 2010 and 2015, into a wider discussion of the representation and commemoration of the First World War and debates about accuracy and authenticity in fictional depictions of the war which date back at least to 1915. Locating the discussion in the historiography of the cultural commemoration of the war in Britain, it will examine three particular military medical storylines – Matthew's paralysis, Thomas's self-mutilation of his hand, and the servants' reactions to Archie's psychological trauma – to examine how the drama reflects both the historic reality of the war's impact and the myths of war experience which have developed within British culture over the past century. In doing so, it will argue that Downton demonstrates both the advantages and drawbacks of invoking historical accuracy and authenticity to locate representations within historic narratives of the First World War in Britain.

Scotland, Scottishness, British Integration and the Royal Navy, 1793–1815

With few exceptions, existing research in British social and maritime history has never focused on the presence and role of Scotsmen in the Royal Navy of the French Wars era (1793–1815), on their identification and self-presentation within this institution, and on attitudes towards naval warfare in Scotland more generally. Situating the problem within current debates on ‘four nations’ history and the development of British identity, this article aims to fill this gap. It will consider, in turn, the Navy's institutional language and practices, individual experiences, and, chiefly employing as a case study the 1797 victory of Camperdown, achieved by the Scottish Admiral Duncan, public representations in the Scottish press. This will help to illustrate the often ambiguous relationship that Scots in the Navy—and particularly on the quarterdeck—could have with their homeland, and the powerful attraction, reinforced by the naval environment and administrative structures, which Englishness exerted on them. More broadly, it will be shown how the late Hanoverian Navy, as a markedly Anglocentric institution, acted as a key instrument of cultural, social and political assimilation of Scots into Britain, thus offering a valuable case study for an investigation of patterns of British integration.

Comments &amp; Queries

Comments & Queries Andrew Muldoon Comments & Queries are welcome via email. Our address is ,victstu@indiana.edu. On The Cover is "Spiritualism Made Useful" from Punch (1 Jan. 1877). Courtesy of the George J. Mitchell Department of Special Collections & Archives, Bowdoin College Library, Brunswick, Maine. Changes at VS: This winter, we have had the privilege of working with two excellent undergraduate interns. Madeline Klein is a second-year undergraduate student majoring in English and Comparative Literature. She is grateful for her experiences at Victorian Studies, as they have helped her refine the interests she wishes to pursue in graduate school. She would especially like to thank the graduate staff for an office with too many copies of books and just enough laughs about pop culture and politics. No matter where she ends up, she will be sure to keep in touch with the women who gave her such a great semester at VS. Luke Uhl is an undergraduate pursuing a B. A. in English, a B. S. in Biology, and a minor in Chemistry. He anticipates graduating in the spring of 2019. He would like to thank Victorian Studies for the opportunity to work with an esteemed academic journal. He has enjoyed learning about the publication process through this experience. After graduation, he plans to attend dental school. As always, Victorian Studies thanks the Indiana University Honors College, without whose generous support our internship program would not be possible. Announcement: The Judith R. Walkowitz Article Prize A leading scholar of British social and cultural history, particularly in relation to issues of gender and sexuality, Professor Judith R. Walkowitz has played a significant role in shaping the field of British Studies and the community of scholars who participate in the endeavor. To honor her contribution, the NACBS is raising money for an article prize in her name. The Judith R. Walkowitz Article Prize will be awarded annually for the best published article on issues relating to gender and sexuality in British culture. The prize will be open to scholars resident in North America working in any time period and any discipline within British Studies. Along with numerous articles and essays, Judith R. Walkowitz has published three field-transforming monographs: Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class and the State (Cambridge University Press, 1980); City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (University of Chicago Press, 1992); and Nights Out: Life in Cosmopolitan London (Yale 2012). With Judith Newton and Mary Ryan, she also co-edited Sex and Class in Women's History: Essays from Feminist Studies (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983). Her work has been supported by numerous fellowships, among them, the ACLS, the NEH, and the Guggenheim. [End Page 374] An institutional pioneer and a groundbreaking historian of rare quality, Judith R. Walkowitz has also been an unusually committed mentor of students and colleagues working in British history and related fields. She has trained sizeable cohorts of graduate students at Rutgers University and at The Johns Hopkins University and has inspired numerous undergraduates. Additionally, she has been a generous colleague and critic in her continued advocacy of peers and students, whether at her own institution or elsewhere. A dedicated reader and editor, she invites practitioners of history at all levels to refine their interventions, enrich their narratives, and elevate their work. Please consider supporting this effort on the part of the NACBS to recognize Judith R. Walkowitz and her contributions to the scholarship and communities of British Studies. Donations towards the article prize can be sent as a cheque made out to "North American Conference on British Studies." Please indicate on the cheque itself that your donation is towards the Walkowitz Prize and mail to: [End Page 375] Andrew Muldoon Department of History Metropolitan State University of Denver P.O. Box 173362 Campus Box 27 Denver CO 80217-3362 USA Copyright © 2017 The Trustees of Indiana University

Byron, Gandhi and the Thompsons: the Making of British Social History and Unmaking of Indian History

Byron, Gandhi and the Thompsons: the Making of British Social History and Unmaking of Indian History

Truth and Tales: Cultural Mobility and Medieval Media ed. by Fiona Somerset, Nicholas Watson

Reviewed by: Truth and Tales: Cultural Mobility and Medieval Media ed. by Fiona Somerset, Nicholas Watson Eric Weiskott Fiona Somerset and Nicholas Watson, eds., Truth and Tales: Cultural Mobility and Medieval Media. Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Pp. xiv, 294. isbn: 978–0–8142–1271–4. $69.95. This collection, dedicated to Richard Firth Green, grew out of the fourth annual meeting of the Canada Chaucer Seminar (Toronto, April 2012). The volume’s fourteen essays move across and between the large topics of popular culture, orality and literacy, and media studies, with a primary focus on medieval English literature and culture. The contributions are organized into three central sections: ‘Repetition and Continuity: The Claims of History’ (Thomas Hahn, Stephen Yeager, M. J. Toswell, and Fiona Somerset), ‘Cultural Divides and Their Common Ground’ (Alastair Minnis, Michael Johnston, Lisa J. Kiser, and Barbara A. Hanawalt), and ‘New Media and the Literate Laity’ (Nicholas Watson, Robyn Malo, Kathleen E. Kennedy, and Michael Van Dussen). These are bookended by two single-essay sections entitled ‘The Truth of Tales 1’ (Green) and ‘The Truth of Tales 2’ (Andrew Taylor). Intersecting the editors’ chronological/methodological groupings, one can discover various subconversations about, e.g., vernacular theology (Toswell, Minnis, Watson, and Malo), merchants and their books (Johnston, Malo, and Kennedy), the way in which literature encodes human-animal relations (Somerset and Kiser), and London law (Hanawalt and Kennedy). In the Introduction, Somerset situates the contributions in relation to new developments in media studies and orality and literacy as these pertain to medieval English social and literary history. In ‘“The Vanishing Leper” and “The Murmuring Monk”: Two Medieval Urban Legends,’ Green traces two medieval tales across languages, discursive fields, and social contexts, arguing that the rubric of ‘contemporary legend’ offers a way to understand the social functions of some [End Page 152] promiscuous medieval texts. In ‘Don’t Cry for Me, Augustinus: Dido and the Dangers of Empathy,’ Hahn reads the uses of Dido in Chaucer’s House of Fame and Legend of Good Women against earlier and later depictions, contending that Chaucer has his two narrators enact a schoolboy cathexis on Dido in the course of founding ‘a new vernacular poetics’ (48). In ‘The New Plow and the Old: Law, Orality, and the Figure of Piers the Plowman in B 19,’ Yeager historicizes the figure of Piers Plowman in terms of fourteenth-century appropriations of Anglo-Saxon legal and homiletic documentary forms, concluding that Piers Plowman B 19 ‘is highly concerned with administrative transparency’ (75). In ‘The Exegesis of Tears in Lambeth Homily 17,’ Toswell discusses a short English homily on the exegesis of tears, found in two late twelfth- or early thirteenth-century manuscript collections, as paradigmatic of ‘a changing attitude to the vernacular in the second half of the twelfth century’ (95). In ‘Mingling with the English in Laʒamon’s Brut,’ Somerset uses the keywords leode ‘people; land’ and leoden ‘language’ to trace the poetics and politics of national belonging in the Brut. In ‘Unquiet Graves: Pearl and the Hope of Reunion,’ Minnis compares the Pearl poet’s representation of postmortem community to that of earlier, contemporary, and later texts, revealing that ‘Pearl offers a quite robust response to that desire for the postmortem persistence of family ties that has been such an abiding component of popular narrative and theological speculation alike’ (134). In ‘Mercantile Gentility in Cambridge, University Library MS Ff.2.38,’ Johnston reads an understudied Middle English poem alongside other literary treatments of the question of gentility within and beyond CUL MS Ff.2.38, uncovering literary reactions to ‘the ongoing interpenetration of the landed and urban spheres in late-medieval England’ (149). In ‘Resident Aliens: The Literary Ecology of Medieval Mice,’ Kiser canvasses the mice of late medieval fables for evidence of medieval attitudes toward real mice, focusing on habitat, diet, species terminology, and relationships to human life. In ‘Toward the Common Good: Punishing Fraud among the Victualers of Medieval London,’ Hanawalt introduces the written regulations and public punishments governing the manufacture and sale of bread, meat pies, and wines in late medieval London, with glances at mentions of millers, bakers, and...

Modern Spanish History in North America

In 2004, the British journal Social History published a special issue on modern Spain. This was, to my knowledge, an unprecedented event. My contribution was a short report entitled «Spanish historians and the English-speaking world» in which I looked at the place of modern Spain in European history, primarily in North America, and the role of historians from Spain. I started the piece by referring to a «cuarenta principales» song from the 1970s, «I never been to Spain», to make the underlyin...

Challenging the Whiteness of Britishness: Co-Creating British Social History in the Blogosphere

Blogs are a valuable medium for preserving cultural memory, reflecting the various dimensions of human life (O’Sullivan, 2005) and allowing ordinary individuals and marginalised groups the opportunity to contribute to the ‘dialogue of history’ (Cohen, 2005:10). The diverse perspectives to be found in the blogosphere can help deepen understanding of historical moments. Such examples include 9/11 (Cohen, 2005), the London bombings in 2005 (Allan, 2006) and Hurricane Katrina (Brock, 2009). Using critical race theory (CRT) as a theoretical framework and cultural democracy as the conceptual framework, this study examines the symbolic power of counter-storytelling through the blogosphere. The findings reveal that in relation to coverage of the UK ‘riots’ in 2011 and the Stephen Lawrence verdict in 2012, African Caribbean bloggers advanced alternative perspectives of the events and appropriated blogs as a medium for self-representation through their own constructions of Black identity. In so doing they performed a vital role as co-creators of British social history.

THE EVOLUTION OF A NORTHERN CORN MARKET: DONCASTER, 1843–1873

The English market was a physical space where production and consumption converged and the relationship between town and country was mediated. As Colin Stephen Smith argued, ‘Markets and marketing lie at the heart of English economic and social history’.1 Corn halls were economic powerhouses of the Victorian era, and as such were a physical embodiment of the corn trade. Despite the integral role of the corn market and corn halls at the heart of trade in arable areas during the nineteenth century, they remain underrepresented entities in accounts of nineteenthcentury agriculture. Yet corn halls are important portals to the history of agricultural trade and the relationship between town and country. This article examines how and why the corn market in Doncaster evolved in the mid nineteenth century. It explores responses to the growth of the corn trade, commercial and civic motivations, and perceptions of town and country. It contributes a northern perspective to the understanding of corn halls in the nineteenth century.

A social history of tennis in Britain

Winner of the Lord Aberdare Literary Prize 2015- from the British Society for Sports History. From its advent in the mid-late nineteenth century as a garden-party pastime to its development into a highly commercialised and professionalised high-performance sport, the history of tennis in Britain reflects important themes in Britain’s social history. In the first comprehensive and critical account of the history of tennis in Britain, Robert Lake explains how the game’s historical roots have shaped its contemporary structure, and how the history of tennis can tell us much about the history of wider British society. Since its emergence as a spare-time diversion for landed elites, the dominant culture in British tennis has been one of amateurism and exclusion, with tennis sitting alongside cricket and golf as a vehicle for the reproduction of middle-class values throughout wider British society in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Consequently, the Lawn Tennis Association has been accused of a failure to promote inclusion or widen participation, despite steadfast efforts to develop talent and improve coaching practices and structures. Robert Lake examines these themes in the context of the global development of tennis and important processes of commercialisation and professional and social development that have shaped both tennis and wider society. The social history of tennis in Britain is a microcosm of late-nineteenth and twentieth-century British social history: sustained class power and class conflict; struggles for female emancipation and racial integration; the decline of empire; and, Britain’s shifting relationship with America, continental Europe, and Commonwealth nations. This book is important and fascinating reading for anybody with an interest in the history of sport or British social history.

Legacies of British slave-ownership: colonial slavery and the formation of Victorian Britain

© Catherine Hall, Nicholas Draper, Keith McClelland, Katie Donington and Rachel Lang 2014. This book re-examines the relationship between Britain and colonial slavery in a crucial period in the birth of modern Britain. Drawing on a comprehensive analysis of British slave-owners and mortgagees who received compensation from the state for the end of slavery, and tracing their trajectories in British life, the volume explores the commercial, political, cultural, social, intellectual, physical and imperial legacies of slave-ownership. It transcends conventional divisions in history-writing to provide an integrated account of one powerful way in which Empire came home to Victorian Britain, and to reassess narratives of West Indian 'decline'. It will be of value to scholars not only of British economic and social history, but also of the histories of the Atlantic world, of the Caribbean and of slavery, as well as to those concerned with the evolution of ideas of race and difference and with the relationship between past and present.