Late Nineteenth-century Britain Research Articles

Making a Space for Medical Expertise: Medical Knowledge of Sexual Assault and the Construction of Boundaries between Forensic Medicine and the Law in Late Nineteenth-century England

This article looks at the boundary work performed by Victorian doctors in order to position themselves as beneficial to the court in helping to determine whether a woman had been raped. These doctors provided tangible physical evidence to support already widely-held beliefs about the nature of the rape victim. Such physical evidence could then be used to support, or undermine, the complainant’s allegation. The article concludes that the reliance upon forensic evidence, the result of such boundary construction, is one of the major factors maintaining the current international “justice gap” in rape cases.

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.

‘Garden City’ in the tropics? French Dakar in comparative perspective

The aim of this article is to examine the transmission of garden city notions into the colonial context by focussing on French Dakar, a key site of colonisation in West Africa. Although there is an abundance of literature on the diffusion of urban ideas in general and garden city notions in particular, publications about extra-European planning history, especially in the formerly colonised territories and sub-Saharan Africa, are scant. The article analyses the conception and communication of garden city schemes from late nineteenth-century Britain to early twentieth-century France in terms of cité-jardin applications within the colonial urban sphere of French West Africa. It will also be shown that in interwar Dakar, the practical and terminological usages of the cité-jardin served mainly to create a prestigious image for the designated residential quarters of administrative employees. As a result, unofficial class segregation within the expatriate society was enforced as was unofficial racial segregation between the colonisers and the colonised.

"A hideous torture on himself": madness and self-mutilation in Victorian literature.

This paper suggests that late nineteenth-century definitions of self-mutilation, a new category of psychiatric symptomatology, were heavily influenced by the use of self-injury as a rhetorical device in the novel, for the literary text held a high status in Victorian psychology. In exploring Dimmesdale’s “self-mutilation” in The Scarlet Letter in conjunction with psychiatric case histories, the paper indicates a number of common techniques and themes in literary and psychiatric texts. As well as illuminating key elements of nineteenth-century conceptions of the self, and the relation of mind and body through ideas of madness, this exploration also serves to highlight the social commentary implicit in many Victorian medical texts. Late nineteenth-century England, like mid-century New England, required the individual to help himself and, simultaneously, others; personal charity and individual philanthropy were encouraged, while state intervention was often presented as dubious. In both novel and psychiatric text, self-mutilation is thus presented as the ultimate act of selfish preoccupation, particularly in cases on the “borderlands” of insanity.

Making a Space for Medical Expertise: Medical Knowledge of Sexual Assault and the Construction of Boundaries between Forensic Medicine and the Law in late Nineteenth-century England

Making a Space for Medical Expertise: Medical Knowledge of Sexual Assault and the Construction of Boundaries between Forensic Medicine and the Law in late Nineteenth-century England

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.

Childcare Dilemmas: Religious Discourse and Services among Jewish and Christian ‘Orphanages’

This paper explores the goals of Jewish and Christian sponsored orphanages in late nineteenth and early twentieth century England and identifies ways that religious institutions served the needy, constructed their self—identify, and that of their ‘inmates’. Christian charities, especially evangelical institutions such as Barnardo's and the National Children's Homes (NCH), focused not only on the rescue of children, but their salvation. Policy at Norwood, the Jewish orphanage, reflected a combination of Jewish charitable tradition, alongside a self—consciousness about reputation and anxiety over anti—Semitism, and anti-alienism. In response, Norwood developed an extensive programme designed to raise respectable, anglicised Jews who would remain members of Britain's Jewish community.

Psychologising Jekyll, Demonising Hyde: The Strange Case of Criminal Responsibility

This paper puts the famous story of Jekyll and Hyde to work for a specific analytic purpose. The question of responsibility for crime, complicated by the divided subjectivity implicit in Mr. Hyde’s appearance, and illuminated by Robert Louis Stevenson’s grasp of contemporary psychiatric, evolutionary and medical thought as promising new technologies for effecting a distinction between criminality and innocence, is key to the interest of the story. I argue that Jekyll and Hyde serves as a powerful metaphor both for specifically late Victorian perplexities about criminality and criminal responsibility, and for more persistently troubling questions about the legitimacy of and practical basis for criminalization. A close reading of the story illustrates the complex mix of elements bearing on criminal responsibility-attribution, and—incidentally—helps to explain what is wrong with the influential argument that, by the end of the nineteenth Century, attributions of responsibility in English criminal law already rested primarily and unambiguously on factual findings about the defendant’s state of mind. Far from representing the triumph of a practice of responsibility-attribution grounded in the assessment of whether the defendant’s capacities were fully engaged, I argue that the terrain of mental derangement defences in late nineteenth Century England helps us to understand that longer-standing patterns of moral evaluation of character remained central to the criminal process. And precisely because ‘character’ remained key to the institutional effort to distinguish criminality and innocence, the ‘terror’ of Stevenson’s story resides in its questioning of whether either scientific knowledge or moral evaluation of character can provide a stable basis for attributions of responsibility. In conclusion, I will also suggest that Stevenson’s tale can help us to make sense of the resurgence of overtly ‘character-based’ practices of responsibility attribution in contemporary Britain and the United States, which themselves reflect a renewed crisis of confidence in our ability to effect a ‘dissociation’ between criminality and innocence.

‘The Dining Room Should Be the Man's Paradise, as the Drawing Room Is the Woman's’: Gender and Middle-Class Domestic Space in England, 1850-1910

In the middle-class home in late nineteenth-century England, drawing rooms, morning rooms and boudoirs became increasingly associated with women, while dining rooms, studies and smoking rooms were viewed as male spaces. Historians have linked this to the exclusion of women from social power and a male ‘flight from domesticity’. This article questions these interpretations and explores gendered space through advice manuals, inventories and sale catalogues, and autobiographies. While the notion that domestic space should be divided between men and women had considerable cultural purchase, the ways in which this should occur were subject to dispute and limited by the practical contingencies of everyday living. In homes where gendered material culture was present, it exerted a powerful influence on childhood experience and the formation of adult identities.

Moral judgements and employment policies in Birmingham (1870‐1914): multiplying the categories and treatments of the “undeserving”

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to analyse the justifying arguments of various Birmingham organisations between 1870 and 1914 in classifying and treating the unemployed. Using a capability approach, the paper will examine how employment policies in Birmingham during this period promoted or limited capabilities of work, life and voice. Finally, implications for labour market policies today will be discussed.Design/methodology/approachThe theoretical framework for this paper will draw on the capability approach to a person's well‐being, developed by Amartya Sen and on theoretical and empirical developments of the capability approach by other authors such as Bonvin and Salais. This paper is based on historical archival research and analysis.FindingsBirmingham was an exemplar of municipal social reform in late nineteenth century England, with the development of a range of public services such as education, electricity and public transport. However, the city's vision of civic reform was closely connected to the Liberal market logic of individual responsibility, and moral judgements of the unemployed served to multiply the categories and punitive treatments of the “undeserving”, separating the valid from the invalid citizen.Originality/valueThis case study of municipal employment policies in Birmingham at the turn of the twentieth century demonstrates the implications of moral judgements, classifications and treatments of the unemployed for people's capabilities in work and life, drawing connections to discourses of responsibility and citizenship today.

Certain Other Countries. Homicide, Gender and National Identity in Late Nineteenth-Century England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. By Carolyn A. Conley (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007. ix plus 255 pp. $49.95)

Certain Other Countries. Homicide, Gender and National Identity in Late Nineteenth-Century England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. By Carolyn A. Conley (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007. ix plus 255 pp. $49.95)

Social Changes and Religion in Late Nineteenth-Century England

Social Changes and Religion in Late Nineteenth-Century England

The Transformation of Urban Liberalism: Party Politics and Urban Governance in Late Nineteenth-Century England

The Transformation of Urban Liberalism: Party Politics and Urban Governance in Late Nineteenth-Century England

Indian princes, dancing girls and tigers: the Prince of Wales's tour of India and Ceylon, 1875–1876

This article examines the impact and significance of an event featuring perhaps one of the foremost celebrities in late nineteenth-century Britain, the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII, who made an eight-month-tour of India and other colonies in 1875 and 1876. The Prince of Wales was also one of the most famous people in Britain at this time. How was the tour of the Prince portrayed in the British media, and what was the significance of the tour to the British public? To what extent can the Prince of Wales be said to be a celebrity in the modern sense? What were the significances for the colonies? In this period, apart from numerous daily newspapers, weekly illustrated journals, notably The Illustrated London News and The Graphic, were preoccupied with representing the Empire, and the Prince of Wales's tour received intensive coverage in these journals, with a multitude of large images. This article examines the relationship between the Prince, the media and the public in Britain and India, situated in the framework of cultural history and postcolonial theory. The tour was significant in the re-forging of the cultural imaginary of India and Ceylon as travel destinations, and the tour was a significant moment in the historical development of modern travel and celebrity culture.

The Rise of the State as a Sympathetic Liberal Subject in Hardy's The Woodlanders

This essay argues that Thomas Hardy's The Woodlanders registers a historic shift in the political imaginary of late nineteenth-century Britain: the emergence of a fantasy of the state as a heroic actor endowed with the capacity to step in and ameliorate one's pain. While The Woodlanders seems to foster sympathy for rural folk who get caught up and reconfigured in state fantasy, it ultimately indicts sympathy and, by extension, its appropriation by the modern liberal state. With its radical doubt about the stability of the subject and its incisive critique of the politics of compassion for rural folk, The Woodlanders undermines the project of sympathy on either an individual or national scale.

Keeping Philosophy in Mind : Shadworth H. Hodgson's Articulation of the Boundaries of Philosophy and Science

INTRODUCTIONShadworth H. Hodgson's (1832-1912) contributions to Victorian intellectual discourse have faded from prominence over the past century. However, despite his current anonymity, Hodgson's case is important to an understanding of the historical split between philosophy and in late nineteenth-century Britain. In particular, his example illuminates the specific role played by developing concepts of the mind in a period of deep transition in the British intellectual community. His virtual disappearance from the record, I contend, is indicative also of the disappearance of his form of philosophy as a vital social project. His ideas, rather than being rejected, were instead largely neglected - they became lost as discussion moved elsewhere, both conceptually and institutionally. However, in the inaugural volume of Mind in 1876, Hodgson's ideas initially found a prominent place in a central dialogue over the position of philosophy with respect to science. There, and throughout his career, Hodgson engaged in the defense of an intellectual tradition he regarded as under threat from psychological science. Both his particular formulation of an ongoing role for philosophy and his own uneasy position in the intellectual environment of late Victorian Britain shed significant light on an under-examined issue of the period: the fraught relationship between philosophy and as competing enterprises engaged in the study of the human mind.Philosophy and science are easily construed as partnered intellectual complexes in modern Western society. However, closer scrutiny of the historical record shows that the two terms - whether as theoretical referents or actors' categories - have often reflected divergent priorities and that transitions from philosophical to terms have been contentious. In examining the birth of natural out of natural philosophy during the Enlightenment, the historian Andrew Cunningham has emphasized how the reordering of intellectual fields created new conflictive relationships between philosophy, science, and religion.1 He reminds us that the process of scientific secularization was but one of a set of constitutive shifts among these human activities, and that the earlier natural philosophy thus played by fundamentally different rules than its successor. A similar story can be told about the late nineteenth -century transition I am considering: in a nutshell, to borrow a phrase from Cunningham, men did not start doing mental until they stopped doing moral philosophy. However, this time, philosophy already stood in competition with existing scientific institutions, sparking a more severe contest for authority. As mental began to develop along the lines of the natural disciplines, Hodgson and others feared little would remain as a distinctive domain for philosophy as such, moral or otherwise. His efforts on the part of philosophy thus represent one front in an intellectual turf war - what recent scholars have called work, shoring up the institutional positions of different intellectual enterprises competing for authority in the world.2 Gieryn's formative analysis of boundary work was based on the contemporaneous example of John Tyndall's campaign to promote scientific over religious authority in Victorian Britain, but this was much more than a two-way struggle. The early career of Mind bears witness to a closely related, but less discussed, battle for influence between philosophy and science, in which the journal itself served as a critical object, a medium for enforcement of the distinctions between these two intellectual fields.3Thomas Dixon has recently surveyed the origins of this shift. Like Cunningham, Dixon emphasizes the constitutive differences in scope and orientation of the two intellectual enterprises, salient among them the secularization of the new human sciences.4 This process - begun tentatively by Thomas Brown and brought to fruition by Bain, Spencer, and Darwin - involved wholesale shifts in the scholarly linguistic complex, from a set of several mental categories rooted in Christian categories - affections, passions, sentiments, etc. …

Certain Other Countries: Homicide, Gender, and National Identity in Late Nineteenth-Century England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales

Certain Other Countries: Homicide, Gender, and National Identity in Late Nineteenth-Century England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales

Certain Other Countries: Homicide, Gender and National Identity in Late Nineteenth Century England, Ireland, Scotland and Walesby Carolyn A. Conley

<i>Certain Other Countries: Homicide, Gender and National Identity in Late Nineteenth Century England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales</i>by Carolyn A. Conley

&lt;i&gt;Certain Other Countries. Homicide, Gender and National Identity in Late Nineteenth-Century England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales&lt;/i&gt; (review)

&lt;i&gt;Certain Other Countries. Homicide, Gender and National Identity in Late Nineteenth-Century England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales&lt;/i&gt; (review)

ALIMENTARY: ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE AND ISABELLA BEETON

In 1893, overwhelmed by readers' insatiability for Sherlock Holmes stories, Arthur Conan Doyle killed his detective off at the height of his popularity. Writing to a friend in 1896, Doyle described how literally sick he was of the figure he had created: “I have had such an overdose of him that I feel towards him as I do towards pâté de foie gras, of which I once ate too much, so that the name of it gives me a sickly feeling to this day” (Chabon 17). Holmes's (first) literary demise was marked by his creator with a culinary simile, one which recalls that his literary debut was made under the name that, above all others, stood for the culinary in late nineteenth-century Britain: Isabella Beeton. The first Sherlock Holmes story, “A Study in Scarlet,” appeared in the 1887 edition of Beeton's Christmas Annual. Three other editors had rejected the story before the Beeton Annual accepted it. This Doyle-Beeton publishing encounter was an instance of one publishing phenomenon recognizing another one and ushering it into the limelight. When Doyle's reflections on his huge publishing success turn to a gustatory memory of overindulgence in a purposefully overdeveloped organ, it raises the following question: what were the relationships between the mass market, the culinary, and the production and adjudication of judgment and refinement in the nineteenth century?