Late Nineteenth-century Britain Research Articles

George Gissing Goes Out in Style: The Syntax of Class after 1890

Abstract Literary historians often cite George Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891) as a chronicle of a waning literary scene, but his sentences offer altogether stranger demonstrations of how a threatened form of realism attempts to grasp a radically transformed and transforming social situation. Drawing on recent work on the politics of style, this essay argues that Gissing’s narrative style is best understood in terms of two motivating forces powerfully at work in late nineteenth-century Britain: an ascendant popular culture and the massive expansion of the imperial regime. By focusing less on the rumble and verve of an incipient modernism than on the creaky cadences of a realism not long for the world, we begin to discern tectonic shifts at the level of the sentence within and beyond Gissing’s late novels (and the triple-decker). Such shifts allow us to understand how the residual realism of nineteenth-century social-problem fiction attempts to map the world-system. A discussion of Gissing’s style is thus an opportunity to specify the motivating forces at work in his writing and to speculate more broadly about how novelistic prose registers working-class massification and the internationalization of British economic and social worlds in the late nineteenth century.

The Feminist Potential of Beatrice Helen Barmby’s Gísli Súrsson: A Drama

The late Victorian Britain was fascinated with the ancient North. British literary authors of the second half of the nineteenth century sought inspiration for their novels, poems, and plays in medieval Icelandic imagery. One of these authors was Beatrice Helen Barmby, author of Gísli Súrsson: A Drama. Since her authorship has largely been forgotten, this paper is an attempt to reintroduce her as one of the Victorian enthusiasts of Old Norse literature. Gísli Súrsson: A Drama (1900) is a play based on the medieval Gísla saga Súrssonar. Notably, the adaptation centres around the relationships between the main characters rather than the existential drama of the outlaw Gísli. I argue that the play can be interpreted as an invitation to consider women’s rights, or the Woman Question, a topic which excited heated debates in late nineteenth-century Britain. The play’s depiction of marriage is especially close to the early liberal feminist critique of the inferior role of women as harmful for both women and men. On the other hand, the play portrays Gísli’s wife Aud as a universally stoic and moral character, a domestically emancipated free woman. This paper thus analyses Gísli Súrsson: A Drama as a Victorian work on Old Norse-inspired themes with activist potential.

Correction: ‘Such a pleasant little sketch [...] of this irritable artist’: Julia Cartwright and the Reception of Andrea Mantegna in Late Nineteenth-Century Britain.

A correction notice for the original article: Maria Alambritis, ‘“Such a pleasant little sketch […] of this irritable artist”: Julia Cartwright and the Reception of Andrea Mantegna in Late Nineteenth-Century Britain’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 28 (2019) <https://doi.org/10.16995/ntn.825>.

Loafing, Driving, and "Messing About in Boats": Kenneth Grahame's Decadence from Pagan Papers to The Wind in the Willows

Abstract: "Loafing, Driving, and 'Messing About in Boats': Kenneth Grahame's Decadence from Pagan Papers to The Wind in the Willows " seeks to highlight the radical queerness and rejection of heteronormative mores within the classic Golden Age children's book The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame. It does so by tracing its roots within Grahame's involvement in the famously queer Decadent movement in late nineteenth century Britain. This reading challenges the much more common assumption that The Wind in the Willows is a fairly conservative text which reinforces "proper" behavior and traditional values. To develop these claims, the essay focuses on the queer relationships between characters, the rebellious behaviors of Toad, and the imagery and themes the text borrows from the Decadent movement.

Natural Selection Shadowed Forth: Aristotle’s <em>De partibus animalium</em> after Darwin

<p>Until the last years of his life, Charles Darwin had actually never read Aristotle. The sole reference he makes to his naturalist forebear in <em>On the Origin of Species</em> came in an addition to the fourth edition, published in 1866, in which he mistakenly refers to Aristotle’s summation of Empedocles’ position at <em>Physica</em> II 8, as Aristotle’s own, and notes that ‘we see here the principle of natural selection shadowed forth’ (while disputing the specific scientific point Aristotle – though actually Empedocles – was supposedly making). So when his friend William Ogle, a minor scientist and physician, and an evangelist Christian, published a translation of Aristotle’s <em>De partibus animalium</em> in 1882 and sent a copy to Darwin, he was able to declare that he felt “some self-importance in thus being a kind of formal introducer of the father of Naturalists [Aristotle] to his great modern successor [Darwin].” Ogle, who despite his religious inclinations was nevertheless a strong proponent of Darwin’s theories, did not agree with Aristotle’s scientific theories – not least because Aristotle’s teleological model of animal development, which had been adopted as a model by many post-classical Christian scientists and theologians for centuries, was dealt a serious blow by Darwin’s theory of natural selection. So it is perhaps surprising to see Ogle produce a translation of one of Aristotle’s major biological treatises. By looking at key passages of Aristotle and Ogle’s translation, this paper will examine the reasons for Ogle’s curious choice to publish his work, setting it into the wider scientific, and Darwinian, context of late-nineteenth century Britain, and explaining how Aristotle the teleologist was used by Ogle to re-enforce Darwin’s position as a modern natural historian.</p>

“Nothing More or Less than a Discharged Convict”: The Career of Dr Thomas Millerchip of Coventry, 1874–1912.

During his career, Thomas Millerchip served four prison sentences, two for attempting to procure abortion, and was removed from the register by the General Medical Council in 1885. Yet, he experienced considerable support in his hometown of Coventry and subsequently practised, intermittently, outside of the law until his death in 1912. This article examines the ways in which, as a newly qualified practitioner, he built up his practice but also identifies the pitfalls that could beset a medical career in late nineteenth-century England. It demonstrates that qualified practitioners did not have a monopoly within the medical marketplace and that the process of professionalisation was incomplete by the advent of the First World War.

The Rise of Judaic Calligraphy in the Twentieth Century

:Excluding religiously required safrut (e.g., handwritten Torah scrolls, mezuzot, tefillin, gittin), artistic aspects of Judaic calligraphy declined after moveable type was invented in the fifteenth century. Rediscovery of medieval calligraphic techniques in late nineteenth-century Britain, plus contemporaneous typographical studies in Germany, spurred revival of artistic calligraphy. The first Arts and Crafts movement, pre-World War I German research into aesthetic letterforms, and the Bezalel Academy sparked a rise of secularized Judaic calligraphy. Growth of folk arts and ethnic pride in the 1960s and accessible photocopiers in the 1970s allowed nonspecialists to become expert calligraphers.

Assortative Matching at the Top of the Distribution: Evidence from the World's Most Exclusive Marriage Market

Using novel data on peerage marriages in Britain, I find that low search costs and marriage-market segregation can generate sorting. Peers courted in the London Season, a matching technology introducing aristocratic bachelors to debutantes. When Queen Victoria went into mourning for her husband, the Season was interrupted (1861–1863), raising search costs and reducing market segregation. I exploit exogenous variation in women's probability to marry during the interruption from their age in 1861. The interruption increased peer–commoner intermarriage by 40 percent and reduced sorting along landed wealth by 30 percent. Eventually, this reduced peers' political power and affected public policy in late nineteenth-century England. (JEL C78, D83, J12, J16, N33)

Interest Rates, Sanitation Infrastructure, and Mortality Decline in Nineteenth-Century England and Wales

This paper investigates whether high borrowing costs deterred investment in sanitation infrastructure in late nineteenth-century Britain. Town Councils had to borrow to fund investment, with considerable variation in interest rates across towns and over time. Panel regressions, using annual data from more than 800 town councils, indicate that higher interest rates were associated with lower levels of infrastructure investment between 1887 and 1903. Instrumental variable regressions show that falling interest rates after 1887 stimulated investment and led to lower infant mortality. These findings suggest that Parliament could have expedited mortality decline by subsidizing loans or facilitating private borrowing.

Japanese Legends and Folklore: Samurai Tales, Ghost Stories, Legends, Fairy Tales, Myths, and Historical Accounts by A. B. Mitford, and: Japanese Folktales: Classic Stories from Japan's Enchanted Past by Yei Theodora Ozaki

Reviewed by: Japanese Legends and Folklore: Samurai Tales, Ghost Stories, Legends, Fairy Tales, Myths, and Historical Accounts by A. B. Mitford, and: Japanese Folktales: Classic Stories from Japan's Enchanted Past by Yei Theodora Ozaki Mayako Murai (bio) Japanese Legends and Folklore: Samurai Tales, Ghost Stories, Legends, Fairy Tales, Myths, and Historical Accounts. By A. B. Mitford. With a new foreword by Michael Dylan Foster, Tuttle, 2019, 320 pp. Japanese Folktales: Classic Stories from Japan's Enchanted Past. Compiled by Yei Theodora Ozaki. With a new foreword by Lucy Fraser, Tuttle, 2018, 253 pp. Originally published in 1871, Algernon Bertram Mitford's Japanese Legends and Folklore: Samurai Tales, Ghost Stories, Legends, Fairy Tales, Myths, and Historical Accounts remains an important collection of traditional narratives and historical records of Japan. Mitford was a British diplomat who was sent to Japan in 1866, when Japan was going through a radical political, economic, and cultural transformation under pressure from Western powers. As the subtitle of the book indicates, it is a miscellaneous collection of literary texts for adults: folktales, legends, myths, and his own eyewitness accounts of traditional customs. As Michael Dylan Foster states in the new foreword, Mitford's collection, which opens with the still popular historical Samurai vendetta "The Forty-Seven Rōnins," as Mitford calls it, and closes with appendixes that include his detailed description of an instance of the Samurai practice of ritual disembowelment that he witnessed, is "chock full of swordplay and other forms of violence" that he "is guilty of romanticizing" (7). To those interested in fairy-tale studies, the significance of this collection lies in its inclusion of tales and legends about yōkai monsters and shape-shifting animals, such as "The Vampire Cat of Nabēshima," "The Grateful Foxes," and "The Accomplished and Lucky Tea-Kettle," that he first introduced to Western readers and that continue to capture the imaginations of children and adults across cultures. As Forster points out, Mitford's emphasis on folklore was in line with the rising scholarly interest in oral narrative tradition in late nineteenth-century Britain and heralded the later work of such Western writers and scholars as Lafcadio Hearn and Basil Hall Chamberlain that came to overshadow Mitford's collection of Japanese tales. As Forster rightly claims, this book is still relevant today "not only because of the stories it tells of old Japan but also because of what it reveals of old England" (8). I would add that it is valuable because "what it reveals of old England" still at least partly applies to the orientalizing gaze often cast on Japanese culture today, as exemplified by the romanticized images of Samurai and hara-kiri that continue to be reimagined in various fields such as film, gaming, and travel marketing. Although there is some overlap in their selections of tales, including "The Tongue-Cut Sparrow," "The Adventures of Little Peach Boy," and "The Story of the Old Man Who Made Withered Trees to Blossom," Yei Theodora Ozaki's Japanese Fairy Tales: Classic Stories from Japan's Enchanted Past, which consists of twenty-two fairy tales and sixty-six illustrations, contrasts with Mitford's collection in several important ways. Originally published in 1903, Ozaki's [End Page 328] collection became immediately popular in Britain and North America. Ozaki was born in London in 1870 to a Japanese baron and an English woman who taught him English while he was studying in London. Ozaki moved to Japan to live with her father at the age of seventeen and, after finishing school, made her living as an English teacher and a secretary. Ozaki states in the preface that the fairy tales in this collection were translated mostly from the modern literary fairy-tale collection published by Sazanami Iwaya (she refers to him by one of his pennames, Sazanami Sanjin, mis-transliterated by her as Sadanami Sanjin), which was the most influential collection in Japan at the time. As Lucy Fraser points out in the foreword, Iwaya is often regarded as the founder of modern children's literature in Japan and was also one of the first translators of the fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen. Iwaya's...

“Manners Before Morals”: Wilde’s New Woman in Lady Windermere’s Fan

This essay contextualizes the significance of Oscar Wilde’s social comedy Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892) in the formation of “New Woman” towards the end of the Victorian age. Set in the late nineteenth-century England in which women were rarely visible in public space, the comedy portrays “New Woman” as one who is willing to subvert traditional conception of morality and femininity. Mrs. Erlynne in particular fashions herself as an unconventional type of woman who dares to deviate from accepted cultural norms of the society. The new woman is positioned as the main force of social transformation through the course of action in the play. By exploring how New Woman has been hardly treated equitably but they try to make their voices heard in the suppressed society, Wilde challenges the social and cultural stereotype of a good woman in the Victorian era. To examine the implication of New Woman proposed in the play, I focus on how Wilde presents his female characters as genuinely new and thereby promotes the qualities of New Woman such as autonomy, self-liberation, and feminine alliance. In so doing, this essay argues that the play exemplifies how Wilde creates a unique position in the course of his struggle for gender equality. That is why the play deserves to draw more scrupulous critical attention, especially because the issues addressed here stay relevant to our society as well as to Wilde’s contemporary audience.

“Monster, give me my child”: how the myth of the paedophile as a monstrous stranger took shape in emerging discourses on child sexual abuse in late nineteenth-century Britain

In the late-nineteenth century, a set of intersecting medical and legal theories concerning the notion of sexual harm to children coalesced to produce what would become the modern concept of child ...

Governing Conjugality: Social Hygiene and The Doctrine of Restitution of Conjugal Rights in England and India in the Nineteenth Century

This article focuses on the doctrine of restitution of conjugal rights (RCR) as a colonial legal transplant and examines how ideas of social and moral hygiene manifested in the debates around the doctrine in late-nineteenth century England and India. Originating in ecclesiastical law, the doctrine of RCR provides remedies and sanctions for the deserted spouse when one party has violated the obligation to cohabit as husband and wife. Through a critical examination of the history and application of the doctrine, the article traces the specific ways in which such suits developed and became rooted in Hindu, Parsi and Muslim marital law in India, while simultaneously falling out of favour in England. It places the doctrine in the context of changing ideas of marriage and argues that social hygiene became the tool through which the doctrine was both resisted in England and lauded in colonial India.

The Queen’s Loyal ‘Others’ –the Metropolitan Jewish and Catholic Hierarchies, the Communal Press and the Diamond Jubilee of 1897

ABSTRACT This article examines the Jewish and Catholic experience of acceptance, rejection and discrimination in late nineteenth-century Britain through the lens of the celebrations of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in the summer of 1897. Arguing that the Anglo-Jewish and English Catholic hierarchical discourses created at the time of the Jubilee reveal the continuing profound insecurities felt by the minority leaderships, the article will dissect the various ‘stories’ created around the events of the Jubilee, particularly in London. It will consider in turn how narratives were created stressing Victoria’s personal role of liberator; how a premium was placed by the hierarchies on the different demographic strands of the minority communities behaving in aropriate ‘English’ class roles; and how this narrative was complicated – first by Irish nationalism and migrant Jewish radicalism, and secondly by the prejudices of the wider British establishment. Ultimately it will contend that the events of the Jubilee revealed a continued exclusion of Jewish and Catholic groups from the British ruling class, and that anti-Catholic sectarianism and antisemitism was not solely a matter of economic discrimination and physical violence against working-class communities, but also subtler forms of prejudice against more prosperous Jews and Catholics.

Consultancy as a Career in Late Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Britain

This paper examines the continuing role of consultants within the profession of chemistry in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Consultants were a prominent part of the profession in the late nineteenth century, but were overtaken in numerical terms by chemists working in academia, government and industry in the first half of the twentieth century. The paper demonstrates, however, that numbers later stabilised and then goes on to examine the characteristics of those chemists who worked as consultants as compared to the wider chemical community. It argues that the survival of consultancy is best explained in terms of a number of differing models of consultancy work. Whilst for some chemists, consultancy was their main occupation, for others it was a phase in their careers or a secondary occupation alongside another post. The continuing value of consultancy work was related to its very versatility.

Household Living Arrangements and Old Age Pauperism in Late-Victorian England

The fortunes of older people in late nineteenth-century England varied considerably. At the two extremes were a comfortable retirement and complete reliance on the New Poor Law, but most older people got by on some combination of part-time work, familial support, and transfer payments from the New Poor Law. This paper considers the extent to which access to resources during working age affected the risk of becoming pauperised (that is, dependent on transfer payments from the New Poor Law) in old age. We hypothesised that access to resources was an important determinant of old age pauperisation and that such access was associated with household living arrangements in earlier life. The analysis was conducted at both aggregate and individual levels and was based on a sample of small areas in England. We linked census data to New Poor Law records to assess the extent to which individuals relied on payments from the New Poor Law in their old age. We distinguished between those who, in their old age, received transfer payments while living in their own homes and those who were institutionalised through admission to the workhouse. The main finding is that people who, in earlier adult life, lived in households containing extended family members were less likely to have recourse to the New Poor Law in their old age than those who, in earlier adult life, lived with only their spouse and offspring. The results also support previous work that has found that females were more likely than males to be supported by the New Poor Law, but that males were more likely than females to enter workhouses.

Insomnia and the late nineteenth-century insomniac: the case of Albert Kimball.

This article explores the emergence, in late nineteenth-century Britain and the USA, of the 'insomniac' as a distinct pathological and social archetype. Sleeplessness has of course been a human problem for millennia, but only since the late-Victorian period has there been a specific diagnostic name for the individual who suffers chronically from insufficient sleep. The introductory section of the article, which notes the current panic about sleep problems, offers a brief sketch of the history of sleeplessness, acknowledging the transhistorical nature of this condition but also pointing to the appearance, during the period of the Enlightenment, of the term 'insomnia' itself. The second section makes more specific historical claims about the rise of insomnia in the accelerating conditions of everyday life in urban society at the end of the nineteenth century. It traces the rise of the insomniac as such, especially in the context of medical debates about 'neurasthenia', as someone whose identity is constitutively defined by their inability to sleep. The third section, tightening the focus of the article, goes on to reconstruct the biography of one exemplary late nineteenth-century insomniac, the American dentist Albert Kimball, in order to illustrate the claim that insomnia was one of the pre-eminent symptoms of a certain crisis in industrial and metropolitan modernity as this social condition was lived by individuals at the fin de siècle.

“Precocious Girls”: Age of Consent, Class and Family in Late Nineteenth-Century England

A fixed legal age of consent is used to determine when a person has the capacity to consent to sex yet in the late Victorian period the idea became a vehicle through which to address varied social concerns, from child prostitution and child sexual abuse to chastity and marriageability of working-class girls. This article argues that the Criminal Law Amendment Act (CLAA) 1885, the Act that raised the age of consent from thirteen to sixteen, and its application were driven by constructions of gender in conjunction with those of social class and working class family. The article firstly argues that CLAA 1885 and related campaigns reinforced class boundaries, and largely framed the working class family as absent, thereby, requiring the law to step in as a surrogate parent to protect the girl child. Secondly, the paper focuses on narratives emerging from the archives and argues that while narratives of capacity and protection in particular were key concepts behind reforms, the courts showed limited understanding of these terms. Instead, the courts focused on notions resistance, consent, and untrustworthiness of the victim, even when these concepts were not relevant to the proceedings due to victims' young age.

Fin-de-Siècle British Socialism and a Prelude to the Melville Revival

This article reassesses the nature and scope of the Melville revival movement in late nineteenth-century Britain and redeems British socialism’s role in the reception of Herman Melville on both sides of the Atlantic. In its nascent stage, British socialism sought alternatives to middle-class ideologies, enlarging its scope to encompass not only socio-economic but also humanitarian projects with a belief in the ethical transformation for the individual as a viable force of social change. These socialists, mostly with Fabian connections, such as Robert Buchanan and Henry Salt, were deeply interested in American Romanticism, particularly writers who were unjustly reviewed in their home country, namely Whitman and Thoreau. Melville was also being incorporated into this agenda. Aiming to reach a working-class readership, socialists planned to publish his work under the Walter Scott Publishing Company’s Camelot Series. The failure of this project precluded the possibility of their Melville revival reaching fruition, but Melville’s distinguished American quality, born out of Young America’s antagonistic feelings toward British tradition, provided them with both a means to think outside British middle-class ideologies and a vision of a transatlantic and potentially anti-colonialist literary collaboration.

\u2018I Can Do It\u2019 Becomes \u2018We Do It\u2019: Kimberley (Australia) and Still Bay (South Africa) Points Through a Socio-technical Framework Lens

Building on the body of work regarding the concepts of invention and innovation in lithic technology, we further explore the give-and-take relationship between people and their technologies in two different stone point knapping traditions. From the socio-technical framework perspective, which is one amongst many ways to look at technological trends, the acceptance and stabilisation of a tool-making tradition is not only dictated by its technology-specific properties, such as its ingenuity or usefulness. Instead, it also depends on the social conventions and practices of its spatiotemporal context, which can be explored through the notions of introduction, closure, stabilisation, destabilisation and copying. We explain the theory behind the socio-technical framework with modern examples, such as bicycle use in late nineteenth century England and electrical guitar trends in the last half of the twentieth century. Turning our attention to stone point knapping, we use Australian Kimberley point production during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries to bridge into how the socio-technical framework reflects in the dynamics that might be involved in lithic traditions. Using this theoretical framework to think about aspects of deep-time point production, such as that recorded from the Still Bay techno-complex during the Middle Stone Age in southern Africa, becomes trickier though. Instead of reliable ethno-historical accounts or dense archaeological context, we have to rely on coarse-grained data sets about distribution, age, environment and population, making inferences more speculative and less testable. In the context of this special volume, we suggest, however, that a socio-technical framework approach may be a useful tool to enhance our thinking about dynamics in ancient techno-behaviours and that more work is necessary to flesh out its potential in this respect.