Early Twentieth-century Britain Research Articles

Organized patriotism and the crucible of war: popular imperialism in Britain, 1914-1932

Patriotic organizations in pre-war Britain are often blamed for the public's enthusiastic response to the outbreak of the First World War. The wartime experience of these same organizations is insufficiently understood. In Organized Patriotism and the Crucible of War, Matthew Hendley examines how the stresses and strains of the Great War radically reshaped popular patriotism and imperialism in Britain after 1918. Using insights from gender history and recent accounts of associational life in early twentieth-century Britain, Hendley compares the wartime and post-war histories of three major patriotic organizations founded between 1901 and 1902 - the National Service League, the League of the Empire, and the Victoria League. He shows how the National Service League, strongly masculinist and supportive of militaristic aims, floundered in wartime. Conversely, the League of the Empire and the Victoria League, with strong female memberships, goals related to education and hospitality, and a language emphasizing metaphors of family, home, and kinship prospered in wartime and beyond into the 1920s. Organized Patriotism and the Crucible of War is a richly detailed study of women's roles in Britain during the height of popular imperialism, as well as a major contribution to our understanding of the continuities in Britain before and after the First World War.

‘‘Isn't it time you were finishing?’’: Women's Labor Force Participation and Childbearing in England, 1860–1920

This contribution examines the relationship between women's labor force participation (LFP) and fertility in three industrial towns of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century England from a feminist economic perspective. The study augments existing statistical approaches to demographic history by discussing women's motivations. Women's LFP influenced their likelihood of family limitation (via effects on both age at marriage and marital fertility). Where women were most likely to be in paid work, they were most likely to limit family size. It is further argued that the diversity of LFP patterns is the principal explanation for the varied patterns of fertility decline in different parts of Britain.

Sport, Class, and Place: Gerald Howard-Smith and Early Twentieth- Century Wolverhampton

The aim of this article is to explore the relationship between the gentleman amateur, the middle class, and the working class in early twentieth-century England. It does so by examining the ways in which one man, upper middle-class solicitor Gerald Howard-Smith, was able to engage in, and benefit from, elite sociability in a quintessentially working-class town such as Wolverhampton. The conclusion is that, primarily because of his sporting interests, it was possible, and probably easy, for him to isolate himself from most traces of the town in which he worked, near to which he lived, and on the fringes of which he spent so much of his leisure time.

Class cities: Classics, utopianism and urban planning in early twentieth-century Britain

This article examines the intellectual background to debates in the town planning movement in early twentieth-century Britain. The movement drew heavily on two traditions, that of the anarchists, who provided much of the theory, and that of the philanthropists. The reception of the Classical city influenced these debates through the provision of key paradigms. These paradigms were predominantly sociological rather than architectural and related to the ‘ideal’ societies to be generated by the new cities. The article argues that urban planning followed a path parallel to British sociology in adopting Classical ideas and forming itself around particular Classicising imaginings of society. Whereas the anarchist tradition exploited the Classical cautiously, differentiating the cities of Rome from the Classical poleis of Greece and finding in those Greek traditions the possibility of radical associative democracy, town planners in the British tradition came to engage with the Classical in a very different way. Through figures such as Patrick Geddes, the influence of Classicism served to divest British urban planning of its political radicalism and the Classical polis was used to offer a utopianism which was hierarchical and conservative.

Teaching nature study on the blackboard in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century England

England's Education Acts in the late nineteenth century made school free and mandatory for all children, filling schools with more and younger students. Visual teaching methods such as blackboard drawing were used to catch young students’ eyes and engage their interest. At the same time, there was high public engagement with natural history and popular science lectures, which built the perception of science as accessible, interesting and useful for people of all social classes. This “science for all” trend along with the new universal education paved the way for nature study, a new school subject based on experiential learning through observation of plants and animals, similar to the popular nineteenth-century pedagogy of object lessons. The many manuals about nature study that were published for teachers in England in the early twentieth century reveal the content, pedagogy, and portrayal of science communicated to young students. Analysis of one manual, Nature teaching on the blackboard (1910), sheds light on typical nature study lessons, including suggested images for teachers to draw on the blackboard. Visual methods of teaching science were not limited to schoolchildren: university lecturers as well as popularizers of science used object lessons and blackboard drawing to educate and entertain their adult audiences. Comparing blackboard teaching of nature study with other educational images and audiences for science explores how multisensory learning and the blackboard brought information about the natural world and engagement with science to the public.

Teaching manuals and the blackboard: accessing historical classroom practices

The blackboard, a useful teaching tool in nineteenth-century England, was transformed into a teaching necessity in the decades follwing 1870, when the Education Acts made school free and mandatory for all children. The resulting huge population of schoolchildren inspired the development of teaching techniques appropriate for large-group learning. Many of these techniques relied on the blackboard as a reusable demonstration space visible to the entire class at once, unlike a book or slate. To share these new practices among teachers, particularly the novice teachers recruited to serve the increased school population, dozens of teaching manuals were published around the turn of the twentieth century. These manuals’ instructions for how to teach reading, writing, arithmetic and nature study to elementary school students offer historians a rare glimpse into teachers’ and students’ school experiences by suggesting how the blackboard shaped classroom practices in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century England.

In Full Possession of Her Powers: Researching and Rethinking Menopause in early Twentieth-century England and Scotland

This essay examines the attempts by the Medical Women's Federation, founded in 1917, to challenge a medical narrative of menopausal malaise. A survey begun in 1926 of 1,000 women's menopausal experience concluded that, contrary to dominant paradigms of menopause as a dangerous or critical time, the common symptoms of menopause did not interfere with women's lives or general well-being to any significant degree. Despite numerous references to the survey in the critical literature on women's health as evidence of a shift in medical paradigms of menopause, little analysis of the research questions, conclusions or its context exists. This essay examines the survey, the context in which it was conducted and the desire of its authors to use healthy women's experiences of physiological changes for political and cultural ends.

Democracy, Monism and the Common Good: Rethinking William Clarke's Political Religion

Summary This article re-examines the political thought of the neglected Fabian essayist and radical journalist William Clarke. Historians have differed over the relative importance of socialism and liberalism in Clarke's political thought. The argument is made here that the key to Clarke's thought lies in his moralised conception of democracy, rooted in his monist ontology. The further deepening of democracy was threatened for Clarke by developments in monopolistic capitalism and the related emergence of a new imperialism. Clarke's understanding of democracy, rather than more overtly economic considerations, lies at the heart of his political religion, and links his views on domestic and foreign affairs. As befits a philosophical monist, his political thought reveals the limitations of established dichotomies for grasping the character of progressivism in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Britain.

Ezra Pound's new order of artists: ‘The New Sculpture’ and the critical formation of a sculptural avant-garde in early twentieth-century Britain

Ezra Pound's essay ‘The New Sculpture’, published in The Egoist in 1914, was a pugnacious, eccentric and forthright contribution to sculptural criticism in Britain at the beginning of the twentieth century. Central to Pound's art criticism was the work of two young sculptors, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1891-1915) and Jacob Epstein (1880-1959) who, like him, had chosen to launch their careers in London at the start of the twentieth century, but who were not British by birth. Drawing on what Pound describes as their ‘wild sculpture’, his essay registers a desire for a new kind of artistic community; what he describes as a new ‘order’ of artists. This paper takes ‘The New Sculpture’ essay of 1914 as a starting point for exploring the emergence of alternative identities for the modern sculptor and the formation of a sculptural avant-garde in the years leading up to the First World War. Through the example of sculptural practice, Pound envisaged a new kind of modern artist, and a different set of relations between...

Crime, Criminal Mobility and Serial Offenders in Early Twentieth-Century Britain

This article examines the criminal records of 427 convicts present in Dartmoor Prison during a large-scale riot on 24 January 1932. The structure of this notorious convict population is outlined and the significant proportion of relatively minor crimes on their records is highlighted. The geographical mobility of these offenders is considered along with the diverse reasons why these men, and others like them, travelled. The idea of mobility, the excitement of crime, the motor car and dangerous offenders were all important factors in the way in which a small minority of offenders achieved a high level of public attention and became part of inter-war culture. Heightened fears about crime focused in particular on the motor bandit, who was perceived as a new kind of criminal at war with society.

BURGLARY INSURANCE AND THE CULTURE OF FEAR IN BRITAIN, c. 1889–1939

ABSTRACTThis article explores the representations of burglary and burglars created by the burglary insurance sector in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain. Two lines of argument are developed: first, that the marketing strategy of the burglary insurance sector exacerbated existing fears about the nature and prevalence of burglary in a calculated bid to attract custom; and secondly, that the depictions of crime and criminal used in marketing this form of insurance were subsequently revised in the contracts issued to customers as part of the industry's commercial transactions, thereby securing against supposed ‘negligence’ by homeowners as well as malicious attempts to defraud insurers. As the self-styled commercial ‘protection’ against burglary, burglary insurance became an ordinary household investment. Its prosperity therefore enables us to identify certain ideas about crime and criminal then current. Crucially, this research highlights the intersection of media, state, and market discourse about crime in weaving a specific version of burglary into the very fabric of everyday life, uniting three domains that historians of crime have traditionally treated separately.

The rise and fall of the healthy factory: the politics of industrial health in Britain, 1914-60

The factory was an iconic symbol of modernity in early twentieth-century Britain. Epitomising the triumph of rationalisation and technological innovation, factories were lambasted by critics as hazardous and dehumanising environments which robbed work of meaning and destroyed workers' health. The Rise and Fall of the Healthy Factory reveals how the interwar health movement, modernist architecture and new forms of advertising attempted to refashoin factories into sites of health improvement, and investigates why these plans never came to fruition. Focussing on the role of the Trades Union Congress, it analyses the politics of industrial health, studying the negotiations which took place between the government, the unions, employers and the medical profession as efforts were made to actualise the vision of the healthy factory and implement a national occupational health service. This book makes a major contribution to debates on health education, the NHS, industrial illness and injury, industrial relations and British politics.

Rosa Newmarch and Russian Music in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century England. By Philip Ross Bullock.

Rosa Newmarch and Russian Music in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century England. By Philip Ross Bullock.

Popular Images Derived from Tennyson's Arthurian Poems

Imagery based on Tennyson's Arthurian poems appeared frequently in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain and America. Because of the popularity of Tennyson's verse and the perception that he was not only a great poet but also a moral one, this imagery was widely disseminated both through illustrated editions of his works and through its infusion into popular culture and daily life.

Trevor Harris (ed.), Art, Politics and Society in Britain (1880–1914): Aspects of Modernity and Modernism

Trevor Harris makes the point in his preface to this collection of essays on the interconnections between art, politics and society in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain that the significance of “modernity” and “modernism” “can only be usefully explored if one admits and explores the contradictions, and even paradoxes that they generate” (viii). The eight essays in this collection, which grew out of a conference on the same theme held at the University of Tours in 2008, provi...

Ethel Ayres Purdie: Critical practitioner and suffragist

The pursuit of critical accounting practice is explored through the life of Ethel Ayres Purdie (1874–1923), certified accountant and militant suffragist. Drawing on an array of primary and secondary sources the study explores the arenas in which Ayres Purdie sought progressive change, particularly in relation to the taxation of married women and the exclusionary policies of the accounting establishment. The diverse structures and media vehicles which she utilised to disseminate competing discourses are examined. Further, this biographical study reveals that the construction of a clientele by early women accountants relied substantially on sisterhood – female solidarity borne of common experience in patriarchal society and a determination to challenge its institutions. The injustices suffered by women clients provided case data which a critical practitioner such as Ethel Ayres Purdie could use to dispute official narratives. The paper illustrates how the professional services which women accountants offered to feminist organisations represented an important, if largely unexplored, contribution to the suffrage movement in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Britain.

<em>Rosa Newmarch and Russian Music in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century England</em>, by Philip Ross Bullock

<em>Rosa Newmarch and Russian Music in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century England</em>, by Philip Ross Bullock

‘The Solution to his Own Enigma’: Connecting the Life of Montague David Eder (1865–1936), Socialist, Psychoanalyst, Zionist and Modern Saint

This article examines the career of pioneer British psychoanalyst David Eder (1865-1936). Credited by Freud as the first practising psychoanalyst in England, active in early British socialism and then a significant figure in Zionism in post-war Palestine, and in between an adventurer in South America, a pioneer in the field of school medicine, and a writer on shell-shock, Eder is a strangely neglected figure in existing historiography. The connections between his interest in medicine, psychoanalysis, socialism and Zionism are also explored. In doing so, this article contributes to our developing understanding of the psychoanalytic culture of early twentieth-century Britain, pointing to its shifting relationship to broader ideology and the practical social and political challenges of the period. The article also reflects on the challenges for both Eder's contemporaries and his biographers in making sense of such a life.

Sociological knowledge and colonial power in Bombay around the First World War

By the turn of the twentieth century a distinct 'social domain'--along with its constituent parts, problems and internal dynamics-was turned into a political entity, and a concern for state bureaucracies existed across the industrializing world. Specific motivations for this trend may have varied from location to location, but included arguments for higher industrial productivity and less political discontent, often intertwined with a humanitarian impulse in calls for better housing, expanded public health or improved working conditions. As has been well documented, the politicization of the social domain in early twentieth-century Britain owes much to the consolidation of British sociology as a distinct discipline. Yet while the link between the rise of social politics and sociology has been established with regard to Britain, little has been said about the occurrence of this coupling elsewhere in the twentieth-century British Empire. This article aims to rectify that omission by showing the interplay between newly raised social concerns of the colonial administration in the Bombay Presidency, Western British India, and the establishing of sociological research within the borders of the Presidency around the time of the First World War. The article will explore how the colonial administration in Bombay planned to meet new demands for sociological knowledge in colonial state policy, how sociology was subsequently introduced into the Presidency as a research subject, and how new sociological methods were applied in actual colonial government.

Science for All: The Popularization of Science in Early Twentieth-Century Britain - by Peter J. Bowler

CentaurusVolume 52, Issue 4 p. 355-356 Science for All: The Popularization of Science in Early Twentieth-Century Britain - by Peter J. Bowler Melanie Keene, Corresponding Author Melanie Keene Homerton College, Cambridge[email protected]Search for more papers by this author Melanie Keene, Corresponding Author Melanie Keene Homerton College, Cambridge[email protected]Search for more papers by this author First published: 21 October 2010 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1600-0498.2010.00198.xRead the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL No abstract is available for this article. Volume52, Issue4November 2010Pages 355-356 RelatedInformation