Edwardian Research Articles

On British travelers in Albania from the Georgian era to Edwardian era: Studies and travelogue

This paper is a summary of the tradition of British travelers in Albania during the 19th century until the First World War. Referring to British history and British cultural traditions, these travelers are classified between two periods: from Georgian era to Edwardian era. British travelers began to visit Albania frequently, especially from the time of the rule of Ali Pasha Tepelena, through whose pasha’s territory traveled many British agents, missionaries, and adventurers, including the eminent poet Gordon Byron and his friend John C. Hobhouse, and Dr. Henry Holland. The first part of the paper deals with the main studies for travelogue literature, listing the authors and their studies according to the order and study approaches. As there are hundreds of books with travel notes from British travelers on Albania and Albanians, the second part of the article focuses only on some of the most famous British travelers, such as Edward Lear, Arthur Evans, Edith Durham, Henry N. Brailsford and Aubrey Herbert. The purpose of this paper is to make a chronological history of British travelers in Albania and historical literature on this literature genre of British travelers who traveled and describes Albania of late modernity.

Bird Cottage

Bird Cottage

Through the Prism of Science: Exploring the Fictional World of H. G. Wells

The closing phase of the Victorian age, especially the nineties, witnessed radical changes in its massive literary output. As a reflection of collective taste and stable order of reality, the novelwas slowly getting marginalized by other genres that wouldhave far-reaching repercussions even in the early twentieth century. This was the period dominated by G. B. Shaw and the Fabians, H. G. Wells, Henry James, Thomas Hardy, Oscar Wilde, Thompson, Kipling, Henley, the early Yeats, Housman and Davidson. Due toseveral socio-political and economic factors,the unquestioned authoritarianism of the Victorian age was coming to an end, though the sunlight years of the Edwardian era would continue to exude warmth for some more time for the British public. Among thesewriters,Wells, with his scientific humanism, and Shaw, with his Socialist philosophy, represent new attitudes to society by incorporating radical ideas in their writings.

The Origin and Significance of the Korean Boy Scout Movement during the Japanese Occupation

In the early twentieth century, the Boy Scout Movement gained prominence as a worldwide boys’ movement. The movement, which was created during the Edwardian era to defend and maintain the British Empire, spread internationally in accordance with each nation’s disparate political and social needs. From this perspective, the Joseon (Korea’s national name during the Japanese colonial period) Boy Scout Movement emerged rapidly as a base for practical anti-imperialist resistance. Within the colonial space of Japanese rule, the boys of Joseon were able to foster physical fitness and masculinity through the Boy Scout Movement, thereby fostering a national consciousness and thus growing as autonomous agents capable of resisting the Japanese Empire. The educational activities of the Boy Scouts functioned as a channel for the proliferation and development of modern physical education and sports culture in Korea.

Imperial preference before the Ottawa Agreements: Evidence from New Zealand's Preferential and Reciprocal Trade Act of 1903

AbstractIn the Edwardian era, the British Dominions adopted policies of imperial preference amid a period of rising imports from the United States and industrial continental Europe. Hitherto, there has been no econometric assessment of whether these policies diverted the Dominions’ imports towards the Empire, as was intended. This article focuses on New Zealand's initial policy of imperial preference, codified in the Preferential and Reciprocal Trade Act of 1903. New Zealand's policy was unique insofar as it extended preference to only certain commodities and not others. Using propensity score matching, this study exploits the cross‐commodity variation in the extension of preference and finds that, on the whole, the Preferential and Reciprocal Trade Act did not divert New Zealand's imports towards the Empire. However, for those few commodities receiving very high absolute margins of preference (20 per cent ad valorem), a statistically significant effect of the preferential policy is found. Altogether, this case study of New Zealand reveals a contrast between the Edwardian system of imperial preference and the trade‐diverting system of imperial preference that resulted from the Ottawa Agreements of the interwar era.

Musical Devotions for Mixed Audiences: Printed Metrical Song in the Edwardian Reformation

ABSTRACT While scholarship on the Edwardian Reformation often stresses reformers’ critiques of liturgical music as evidence for their disdain of religious music more broadly, this article posits that the numerous volumes of English-texted, verse scripture printed at this time demonstrate the central strategic importance of vernacular devotional song for reformers from a variety of backgrounds. Focusing on William Baldwin’s The Canticles or balades of Salomon (1549), William Samuel’s The abridgemente of goddess statutes (1551), and Christopher Tye’s The Actes of the Apostles (1553), this article re-centers the early collections of metrical psalms and other biblical verse paraphrases printed in Edwardian England as musical texts, demonstrating that reformers in mid-Tudor England embraced music as a means for England’s inhabitants to acquaint themselves with the theology and practices of the reformed Church of England. In doing so, they employed singing to confessionalize a public with diverse religious beliefs.

Banking for Jesus: Financial Services, Charity, and an Ethical Economy in Late Victorian and Edwardian Britain

Banking for Jesus: Financial Services, Charity, and an Ethical Economy in Late Victorian and Edwardian Britain

Marian Literary Culture: Lydgate, his Heirs, and the End of Tragedy

Marian Literary Culture: Lydgate, his Heirs, and the End of Tragedy

The Forgotten Liberal Social Reform? Marriage with a Deceased Wife’s Sister, Political Nonconformity and the New Liberalism in Edwardian Britain

Abstract This article examines why Victorian Britain’s longest-running political controversy—the sixty-four-year campaign to legalise marriage between a widower and his deceased wife’s sister—was finally resolved in 1907. It explores why the Liberal government decided to support reform, what strategies it adopted and how it was able to force a deceased wife’s sister bill through an intransigent House of Lords that had, for more than half a century, succeeded in blocking similar bills. The article recognises that a multitude of factors—social, theological, imperial and legal—shaped opinion on the issue. Nonetheless, it argues that the Liberal government’s backing for marriage with a deceased wife’s sister (MDWS) should be viewed, in terms of its hegemonic public presentation, as the forgotten Liberal social reform. In keeping with the emerging New Liberalism, MDWS was packaged primarily as a social relief measure that spoke to the Liberal Party’s growing interest in the poor, child welfare, social justice, women’s rights and state support for workers. The commitment to easing the plight of those affected by the existing prohibition was real, but behind the public rhetoric lay a desire to stem nonconformist discontent among the Liberal Party’s electoral base, and an evolving constitutional crisis between the houses of parliament which gave the issue greater symbolic significance. For many peers, reform had become more than just palatable or desirable. It was necessary in the light of a change in colonial marriage law that had sought to address colonial grievances, promote imperial unity and better safeguard inherited wealth and social status.

Irish Women and the Great War by Fionnuala Walsh

Practioners of Irish history have often been criticized for ignoring or lagging behind wider historiographical trends and developments. Happily, this perception does not apply to Walsh’s new monograph on Irish women’s experience of World War I. Her work engages with international scholarship relating to cultural, comparative, and gender history and challenges the insularity and partisanship that continue to dog the historiography of Ireland’s revolutionary period (1913–1923). Walsh describes her book as focusing “on the nation-state through a transnational framework.” She argues persuasively that public interest in World War I and its impact on Ireland has grown steadily since the 1980s. The once pervasive “amnesia” and “aphasia” in relation to Irish involvement in the British war effort has seriously diminished. In line with increasing numbers of Irish historians, Walsh characterizes World War I as an integral part of the Irish experience in the Edwardian period and a crucial context for understanding the political upheavals that took place.This impressive study, grounded in extensive archival research, is primarily concerned with exploring the “everyday life” of Irish women of all classes and backgrounds across the island. Each of the monograph’s six chapters deal with a different theme— mobilization; family, welfare, and domestic life; social morality; and politicization and demobilization. Walsh employs traditional primary sources, contemporary journals, newspapers, statistics, and census material in combination with “ego documents” like diaries, memoirs, letters, and contemporary fiction (written mainly by middle- and upper-class women). This strategy allows her to analyze and document overall characteristics and patterns of behavior as well as private, personal, subjective experience. Walsh explores the conflict’s contradictory impact on the lives of Irish women and paints a nuanced picture of their involvement in the war effort.In both Britain and Ireland, the war provided new opportunities for women to engage in public life and paid employment. Greater state intervention in the form of price controls, allowances, and relief efforts was accompanied by widespread surveillance of, and concern about, their public conduct. Women’s lives were changed irrevocably by their experiences, but the conflict ultimately reinforced dominant gender norms relegating them to the domestic sphere. Walsh’s research shows that Irish women were afforded comparatively fewer “ancillary benefits” associated with active support for the British war effort while still experiencing much of the war’s hardship. Nonetheless, popular support in Ireland was remarkably high, involving more women than either the suffrage or radical nationalist campaigns. It continued throughout the conflict despite the worsening political situation after the 1916 Rising in Dublin, a short-lived, unsuccessful revolt by radical nationalists. Ultimately, however, John Redmond’s and other Irish constitutional nationalists’ support for Britain in the war did not achieve its goal of uniting the unionists and nationalists. The conflict further entrenched, rather than bridged, existing divides between Protestants and Catholics and between Ulster and southern unionists. The government paid “separation allowances” to the wives of men serving in the British military during the War. These working-class “separation” women and radical nationalists were also at odds.Walsh’s analysis does not cross wider interdisciplinary boundaries, but it does draw freely from a range of approaches within the discipline of history. It is firmly rooted in the deeply empirical “new” Irish history engendered by the opening of archives in the 1970s and 1980s. At the same time, her focus on subjective, individual experience engages with the cultural and linguistic turns in international historiography. Her wide-ranging, careful research is a welcome addition to the growing canon of Irish studies of World War I. Overall, her book confirms Igger’s recent, hopeful conclusions regarding twentieth-century historiography in the twenty-first century: “There is no dominant model of historical studies today, and that is good.”1

Violent Women: Changes in Magisterial Attitudes to Female Acts of Assault in Cheltenham and Exeter (England), 1880-1909

Recent scholarship has indicated that judges and magistrates became increasingly stringent in their treatment of male violence during the Victorian and Edwardian period. Yet it has been argued that female acts of violence were regarded as trivial and thus more readily overlooked. This article presents an alternative perspective on the judicial treatment of violent women by examining female assault prosecutions held at Exeter and Cheltenham magistrates’ courts in the years 1880-1910. By analysing patterns in the verdicts and sentences issued to defendants, it argues that magistrates adopted harsher policies towards violent women as the period progressed. The study further examines a number of circumstantial, demographic and procedural factors which may have impacted shifts in magisterial decision-making processes.

The Ghost Club, 1882–1936

AbstractThe Ghost Club was founded to discuss matters spiritual, psychic and occult in 1882 by Spiritualist William Stainton Moses and mystic Alfred Alaric Watts. It was intended as a club ruled by a gentleman’s code of honour—with all matters discussed kept strictly confidential. While maintaining secrecy, it also obsessively minuted and documented its discussions, leaving behind thousands of pages of records that have yet to be properly investigated, owing to conditions around their use. This essay is an attempt to examine the importance of the Club, and how it might readjust our understanding of the networks of the London occult in the late-Victorian and Edwardian eras.

Instagram as an exhibition space: reflections on digital remediation in the time of COVID-19

ABSTRACT This paper explores the impact of COVID-19 on a planned physical exhibition – Prize Books and Politics: Rethinking Working-Class Life in Edwardian Britain – and the experience of transforming it into a digital exhibition through the platform of Instagram. Using feedback from visitors in the form of likes, comments and surveys, I reflect on the exhibition in terms of its scope, content, visitor experience and overall success. I also outline the various potentials, constraints and opportunities of Instagram as an exhibition space and put forward recommendations on how it can be used to best advantage not as a replacement for physical exhibitions, but rather as a complement that can attract new audiences, capture real-time feedback and, thus, add multiple voices and stories to museum objects.

‘A great traffic was going on, as usual, in Whitehall’: Public Places and Secret Spaces in Sherlock Holmes’s London

Arthur Conan Doyle is rarely considered a master of spy fiction, but several Sherlock Holmes stories were highly influential in the development of this genre in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. This paper examines three of these stories – ‘The Naval Treaty’, ‘The Second Stain’, and ‘The Bruce-Partington Plans’ – and shows how they use the topography of London to explore themes of secrecy, concealment, and political power. Holmes investigates place and space in two ways: he discovers what happens behind the closed doors of government buildings like the Foreign Office in Whitehall and the Woolwich Arsenal, and he reads public spaces (like the London Underground and the streets of Westminster) to detect relationships not apparent to those lacking his criminological skills. These stories inspired contemporary and later authors of espionage fiction as they exemplify some of the purposes and pleasures of the genre – the romanticisation of bureaucracy and insights into secret history.

The Electric Pleasure District: The West End of London in the Age of Empire, 1880–1914*

This study examines the cultural work of the West End of London in the long Edwardian period (1880–1914). It argues that the pleasure district was changed in a number of ways in which electricity was one thread. The coming of electricity affected the character of the area, not only transforming theatre lighting but also introducing new forms of street advertising, notably on Piccadilly Circus. The West End was physically changed by the construction of Shaftesbury Avenue and Charing Cross, which then became sites of a wave of theatre building (all of which showed off their modernity by adopting electricity). These theatres, especially the Palace Theatre of Varieties, are examined in terms of the entertainments they offered but also the ways in which they produced forms of cultural capital for spectators. Finally, the study considers another electric medium, the cinema. The West End became known for upscale cinemas that emulated the theatres nearby and sought to make film-going attractive to wealthier customers who, a few years earlier, disdained it. By 1914, the West End had, to a large extent, taken on its modern form.

Introducing Social Workers: Their Roles and Training

Abstract During the late Victorian and early Edwardian period references to ‘social work’ in the UK emerged in the context of the movement for social reform. Using a wide variety of contemporary literature, archival sources and Internet searches this article finds that, alongside charitable and philanthropic work, the term ‘social work’ referred to a particularly wide range of social, health, educational, industrial welfare and recreation activity. Few attempts were made to attribute an explicit meaning to the term and it was not used as frequently as is sometimes implied by commentaries about the period. However, voluntary and paid workers were increasingly referred to collectively as ‘social workers’ and became the subject of increasing discussion about their roles and need for training. This article traces the developments in references to social work and social workers in the literature and highlights the early debate that took place in the UK and USA about the relative importance of practical work and study of the social sciences, introducing the tension which characterised social workers’ subsequent difficulties in establishing a professional identity.

Irony in communicative behaviour of Elite in Edwardian Britain

The article is devoted to the analysis of little-studied specific in functioning of irony in the speech of English social elite. The aim of the study is to conduct sociolinguistic analysis of Julian Fellowes’s TV series script "Downton Abbey" to identify the language markers of irony, used by English aristocrats in the early XXth century, describe tactics and types of speech acts attached to irony, its impact on communicants. The main methods used in the study include sociolinguistic analysis of character's speech by means of sociolinguistic categories. Analysis of the contexts, where irony is used, allowed us to come to conclusion that the information plan of the ironic statement is expressed implicitly, includes methods of labeling, devaluation of interlocutor’s merits, humiliation, and mockery by means of hyperbolic metaphor, ironic pejorative, allusion and antithesis. The data, obtained in the process of research, can be used in the course of intercultural communication, stylistics, translation and semiotics.

Old Prejudices and New Prejudices: State Surveillance and Harassment of Irish and Jewish Communities in London – 1800-1930

ABSTRACT This article examines the relationship between the ‘othering’ of Irish and Jewish communities in London up to the end of the 1920s, and punitive action and harassment against these minorities on the part of the British state. Beginning by looking at early articulations of antisemitic and anti-Irish prejudice, it will consider how the associations of both groups with radical politics and transgressive behaviour led to the negative involvement of the Metropolitan Police in the lives of Jewish and Irish Londoners on a day-to-day level at the end of the Victorian era and into the Edwardian period. The situation was then exacerbated through the experience of war, and the revolutionary events in Dublin in 1916 and Petrograd in 1917. Irish and Jewish communities, as transnational diasporas, were associated with international subversion, and militant action in London itself. The article will discuss the campaign waged by the state in its various manifestations between 1918 and 1922, including arrest and imprisonment without trial and deportation to Ireland and Eastern Europe. It will conclude by identifying how the actions of the state against Irish and Jewish communities anticipated action against other minorities over the course of the twentieth century.

Cross-Dressing in the City: Olive Malvery’s The Speculator

Abstract Despite a growing body of scholarship on finance and fiction, Malvery’s The Speculator has not yet received the critical attention it deserves. In this article, I undertake the first detailed analysis of Malvery’s fictional foray into the world of finance, centred on the story of a female stockbroker operating in disguise in the City of London. The first section of the article focuses on late nineteenth-century and early Edwardian novels of finance, chiefly concerned with deploring the cunning ruses of company promoters, and provides a brief overview of their representations of the ‘popular investor’. I then analyse how the cross-dressing masquerade is orchestrated and tested in The Speculator, culminating in a scene of violence that takes place at the Stock Exchange and exposes the threat of physical force underpinning discriminatory regulation. The final section argues that the swerve towards the spy thriller, a popular genre in Edwardian England, allows Malvery to contain and disperse the fear of violence, the crude underside of the cross-dressing act, and to go on envisioning for her intrepid heroine ever more incredible adventures with geopolitical implications. By attending closely to the novel’s hybrid formal structure, my reading suggests that a good deal of fictionalizing was necessary to imagine the protagonism of women in the money market, at a time when their role as investors was no longer exceptional, but their inclusion into the circle of active financial players was still a matter of dispute.

Infant Mortality in England, 1538-2000: Stability and the Beginnings of Change, 1837-1910

This paper, the third of four, discusses infant mortality during the Victorian and Edwardian periods, 1837-1910. It mainly uses sources generated by the civil registration of vital events, which was established in 1837, to identify trends and patterns, and more importantly, it discusses the beginnings of the secular decline in infant mortality that occurred during this period. The paper also includes examples of how research into this important topic can be carried out and it ends with suggestions for future research.