Late Nineteenth-century London Research Articles

Making Money Amnesiac: The 1882 Making of Modern Negotiability in the United Kingdom

Drawing on microeconomic literature that highlights the convoluted links between memory, money, and information insensitive assets, this paper empirically explores the history and legal construction of modern negotiability in late nineteenth-century London. Taking a broader view, I argue that the 1882 Bill of Exchange Act (BoExA) was important in reengineering the money-memory nexus. This was achieved by reworking preexisting legal rules enabling transferability of bills of exchange around the holder in due course (HDC) doctrine. As a result of the superior legal protection of theHDC of a negotiable instrument, the need to inquire into any underlying credit risk was obviated. If the private debt claim was recognized as negotiable, the HDC was equallyrecognized as possessing the right to full recovery. This legal development complemented microstructural changes in the money market such as the emergence of the lender of last resort macropolicy in thecontext of a rising investment-oriented financial ecology.

Looking through a Different Lens: Microhistory and the Workhouse Experience in Late Nineteenth-Century London

Abstract This article uses a microhistorical approach to investigate the “workhouse experience” of a single pauper in late nineteenth-century London. Its subject is Frank Burge, a remarkably prolific (though by no means unique) correspondent who wrote several lengthy letters of complaint from the Poplar workhouse to the Local Government Board (the central poor law authority) between 1884 and 1885. It places these letters, and the official responses they stimulated, alongside other public and official documents and uses a blended methodological approach to uncover a rich narrative of hardship, struggle, and personal agency. In doing so, it argues that, in contrast to more orthodox histories of welfare, it is only through this kind of painstaking and sensitive historical reconstruction that we truly can understand the nature, and the legacy, of poverty and the “workhouse experience” on the nineteenth-century poor.

Hilarious Homicides: Satirizing Sensational Murders in Late Nineteenth-Century London

Abstract Whereas many studies consider the nineteenth-century fascination with murder as synonymous with the contemporary cultural tendency towards sensation and melodrama, this article offers a fresh perspective on the subject. Here, I deal with a corpus of humorous murder representations, which have rarely been addressed before. I examine how murder was comically represented and look at the contemporary discourse on murder, through the investigation of sources including music hall songs, cartoons, and theatrical travesties, with an emphasis on visual representations. In the context of the democratization of culture, the article examines the importance of murder in the elite claim to cultural authority versus its perception of plebian taste. It demonstrates how late nineteenth-century notions of modernity, which were crystallized through the discussion of murder, were classed and gendered. Thus, a hidden discourse is exposed, in which murder serves as a central tool in a mechanism similar to Bourdieu’s theory of distinction, where cultural and artistic ‘taste’ has a social dimension.

The spatial morphology of synagogue visibility as a measure of Jewish acculturation in late nineteenth-century London

This paper's historical focus is the latter two decades of nineteenthcentury London. During this period the established Jewish community of the city benefited from political emancipation, but this was not the case for the recently-arrived impoverished Jewish migrants from Eastern Europe. The spatial constitution of religious practice also differed across the city. A comparative study found that the more prosperous West End, other than an isolated case in the impoverished district of Soho, had purpose-built buildings fronting the street; while the poorer district of Whitechapel in the East End was dominated by smaller ad hoc arrangements – one-room or adapted premises, shtiebels – serving a wider communal and social purpose, similar to the practice of the old country. A comparative space syntax isovist analysis of the visibility of synagogue façades from surrounding streets found that while, in the West End, most synagogues had a limited public display of religious practice by this time, East End prayer houses remained visible only to their immediate, Jewish majority surroundings. This paper proposes that the amount of synagogue-street visibility corresponds to the stage of growth in both social acculturation and political confidence.

Passive Resistance in George Gissing’s <i>New Grub Street</i> and Knut Hamsun’s <i>Sult</i>

Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891) and Hamsun’s Sult (1890) depict distinctive voices of outcast young artists suffering from urban poverty, displacement and isolation, and reveal a deeper insight into wider questions on urban modernity, passive resistance and a fragmented identity. The plots and semi-autobiographical accounts of these texts locate them specifically in late-nineteenth century Kristiania (Oslo) and London by focusing on changing standards of literary culture in the 1880s and 1890s. Hamsun’s emphasis on the subjective individual and Gissing’s emphasis on representing realist social groupings offer us complementary accounts of the experience of rootlessness, the self-division of outcast emigrant writers and the difficulty of survival by sticking to their own terms in creating and presenting their works of art in the capital. A comparative reading of these texts helps us to see not only their city-specific contexts, but also a transnational understanding of the commercialisation of art and the passive resistance of the artists that spanned the national borders of England and Norway. These urban novels, I suggest, perform a critical resistance to the assimilating forces of late-nineteenth-century modernity and changing economic conditions with the aim of preserving artistic integrity and freedom.

Opiates and the adrenal: the tip of the iceberg?

Morphine-like compounds based on opium and derived from the opium poppy, Papaver somniferum, have been known for millennia, and their use recurs throughout the ages in personal reports and in world literature. For many decades their use was, if not fully condoned by society, tolerated as an effective means of ameliorating pain and indeed for ‘recreational’ purposes. The Opium Wars in the nineteenth century pitched the enthusiastic British traders in China against the local authorities who wished to control their use, with the eventual triumph of commercial capitalism and British firepower. In late nineteenth century London such opium dens were an accepted part of the Limehouse landscape, at least according to Charles Dickens, and frequented by well-connected gentlemen; indeed Coleridge’s epic poem Kubla Khan was said to be written under the influence of opium, while Thomas de Quncey immortalised the habit in his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. However, over time and especially in the twentieth century, such opium-like compounds, the opiates, increasingly became drugs of abuse in addition to their profound analgesic effects, with heroin in particular becoming a global scourge. In addition, various analogues of the opiates were synthesised, with varying potencies, hoping to emphasise the analgesic efficacy while limiting their addictive potential. Unfortunately, it has been difficult to separate these two factors, and with the active encouragement of pharmaceutical companies, drugs such as oxycodone have become a major source of addiction and distress. Thus, in addition to their widespread use as highly effective analgesic agents in medicine, opiates have moved from an illegal phenomenon as part of the global drug trade to a phenomenal prescription-agent problem in many parts of the developed world. It has been estimated that since 1999, 200 000 Americans have died from oxycodone and allied prescription opiates, while in recent years US clinicians have issued a quarter of a billion opiate prescriptions annually (1). The pharmacology of opiates has become literally of deadly interest. Thus, their pharmacology, and especially their effects on neuroendocrine axes, is of very considerable interest.

Fact, fiction and method in the early history of social research: Clementina Black and Margaret Harkness as case-studies

ABSTRACTThe development of social science research methods by women reformers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is a largely buried history. This article examines the work of Clementina Black and Margaret Harkness, two British reformers who conducted many social investigations using a wide range of research methods. They also crossed genres in writing fiction, which was an accepted method at the time for putting forward new ideas about social conditions. Black and Harness were part of a vibrant network of women activists, thinkers and writers in late nineteenth century London, who together contributed much to the growing discipline of social science and to imaginative forms of writing about social issues.

Cosmopolitan Space: Political Topographies in ‘Lord Arthur Savile's Crime’

This essay responds to Julian Wolfreys's suggestion that Oscar Wilde's London is primarily psycho-geographical by seeking to read his texts within the historical and spatial context of late nineteenth-century London. Taking as a test the short story ‘Lord Arthur Saville's Crime’, this essay deploys the critical insights of Henri Lefebvre to suggest that Wilde's city writing engages more closely with London life than has been hitherto suggested. Following Lord Arthur on his three perambulations across the city, from Hyde Park and Piccadilly to Covent Garden, through Soho, and finally from St James's to the Embankment, the article focuses particularly on the ways in which Wilde's use of what might easily be assumed to be an incidental location, namely Cleopatra's Needle, invites us to reread the text's revolutionary politics within the context of the French Revolution. Concluding with a discussion of Wilde's treatment of London's ‘cosmopolitan space’, the essay shows that the way in which seemingly stock imagery deployed in Wilde's representation of the city may in fact be read as part of a wider and complex engagement with both the politics and the aesthetics of space.

‘Global’ Identity or the (Ir)Reducible Other: The Cultural Logic of Global Identity in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Man with the Twisted Lip

Abstract After the Syrian civil war, deaths of those fleeing crisis areas have tragically become a regular news item. Not new to the world, however, such crises emerge from tensions between identity and difference as codified in international politics, whereby refugees and migrants become the Other and subject to unyielding universals, such as the law or narrow concepts of what is right. Indeed, the cultural logic of “global identities” informing the current refugee and migrant crisis seems recurrent, as exemplified in the recent cases of the Tamils from Sri Lanka and the Somalis. The cultural logic of global identity is also reflected in the popular nineteenth-century novella by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Man with the Twisted Lip, in which the main character disguises himself as a professional beggar to appeal to middle class values in order to incite their guilty consciences. Drawing on Ian Baucom, Marc Shell, and Jean-Joseph Goux, this article argues that the main character’s actions reflect and embody the cultural logic of the global politico-economy in late nineteenth century London. As such, Doyle’s novella illustrates the Derridean notion of hospitality by revealing that “identity and difference are mutually constitutive” (Baker 109) and offers insightful commentary on the current refugee and migrant crisis.

Anglican Clergy Responses to Jewish Migration in late Nineteenth-Century London

When, yearly, on Good Friday, Church of England clergymen prayed:‘Have mercy upon all Jews, Turks, Infidels and Hereticks, and take from them all ignorance, hardness of heart and contempt of thy Word: and so fetch them home blessed Lord, to thy flock, that they may be saved among the remnant of the Israelites’, 99.9 per cent of them in the late nineteenth century had little expectation of encountering a Jew, Turk or Infidel. This paper seeks to explore how the few Church of England clergy in London who in the 1890s did have a significant presence of Jews in their parishes responded as ministers of the established Church, with a charge to be responsible for the spiritual well-being of all the inhabitants of their parishes, including the call to save the Jews ‘among the remnant of the Israelites’.

The ingenious marketing of modern paintings

Purpose– This paper aims to analyze the evolution of the marketing of paintings and related visual products from its nascent stages in England around 1700 to the development of the modern art market by 1900, with a brief discussion connecting to the present.Design/methodology/approach– Sources consist of a mixture of primary and secondary sources as well as a series of econometric and statistical analyses of specifically constructed and unique data sets that list nearly more than 50,000 different sales of paintings during this period. One set records sales of paintings at various English auction houses during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the second set consists of all purchases and sales of paintings recorded in the stock books of the late nineteenth-century London art dealer, Arthur Tooth, during the years of 1870/1871. The authors interpret the data under a commoditization model first introduced by Igor Kopytoff in 1986 that posits that markets and their participants evolve toward maximizing the efficiency of their exchange process within the prevailing exchange technology.Findings– We found that artists were largely responsible for a series of innovations in the art market that replaced the prevailing direct relationship between artists and patron with a modern market for which painters produced works on speculation to be sold by enterprising middlemen to an anonymous public. In this process, artists displayed a remarkable creativity and a seemingly instinctive understanding of the principles of competitive marketing that should dispel the erroneous but persistent notion that artistic genius and business savvy are incompatible.Research limitations/implications– A similar marketing analysis could be done of the development of the art markets of other leading countries, such as France, Italy and Holland, as well as the current developments of the art market.Practical implications– The same process of the development of the art market in England is now occurring in Latin America and China. Also, the commoditization process continues in the present, now using the Internet and worldwide art dealers.Originality/value– This is the first article to trace the historical development of the marketing of art in all of its components: artists, dealers, artist organizations, museums, curators, art critics, the media and art historians.

Gang Crime and the Media in Late Nineteenth-Century London

ABSTRACTThis article will offer a fresh perspective on media attitudes towards working-class youth in late Victorian London by looking in detail at a case study of violent youth crime. It offers an analysis of gang crime in the late nineteenth-century capital and explores the use of class and stereotyping in the reporting of working-class youth. It considers the extent to which the problems of violent youth gangs were manipulated by the press to portray the capital as a ‘city out of control’. Finally, it will argue that these contemporary representations of youth helped create a fear that exaggerated the threat posed by gangs.

GASTRO-COSMOPOLITANISM AND THE RESTAURANT IN LATE VICTORIAN AND EDWARDIAN LONDON

ABSTRACTThis article argues that the restaurant offers a useful site for mapping patterns of transnational and global exchange within late Victorian and Edwardian London. The dramatic expansion of public eating in this period was met in part by foreign-born entrepreneurs, and wait and kitchen staff drawn from a genuinely international labour market. Londoners and visitors to the metropolis were exposed to a variety of new, often hybrid, culinary cultures, which call into question simplistic binaries between Britain and the world beyond. The simultaneous presence in London's restaurant scene of French menus, Indian dishes, Italian cooks, German waiters, and Chinese and American diners reveals the complexity of the relationship between populations and places. London's ‘gastro-cosmopolitan’ culture reveals not merely the extent to which Britain's imperial metropolis was exposed to transnational forces, but that these influences were genuinely global and not confined to Britain's formal empire. London's cosmopolitan dining culture suggests that historians might be advised to move beyond the tropes of danger and anxiety when discussing late nineteenth-century London, and do more to acknowledge a range of responses – attraction and pleasure included – which more accurately reflected the metropolitan experience.

When William Met Mary: The Rewriting of Mary Lamb’S and William-Henry Ireland’S Stories in Peter Ackroyd’S The Lambs Of London

Abstract Peter Ackroyd’s London novels represent a distinctive component in his project of composing a literary-historical biography of the city. Understanding London as a multilayered palimpsest of texts, Ackroyd adds to this ongoing process by rewriting the city’s history from new, imaginative perspectives. For this he employs approaches and strategies such as parody, pastiche, genre mixture, metafiction, intertextuality and an incessant mixing of the factual with the fictititious. The aim of this article is to explore the various ways in which he toys with historical reality and blurs the borderline between fiction and biography in The Lambs of London (2004), offering thus an alternative rendering of two unrelated offences connected with late eighteenth and early nineteenth century London literary circles: Mary Lamb’s matricide and William-Henry Ireland’s forgeries of the Shakespeare Papers.

‘To brighten the aspect of our streets and increase the health and enjoyment of our city’: The National Health Society and urban green space in late-nineteenth century London

Drawing upon the published annual reports of the National Health Society (established in 1871) and its intimate relationship with the Metropolitan Public Gardens and Playgrounds Association, this paper will explore the discourses expressed by the sanitarians and health professionals represented by the Society in relation to the parks movement in London in the 1870s and 1880s. By analysing this particular aspect of the Society, the connections between medical professionals, sanitarians and philanthropic members of the upper classes in relation to the urban parks movement will be explored. Notions of health as a state achieved through the dual combination of the physical environment and the behaviour of the individual will also be discussed, building on the work of recent commentators such as Nancy Tomes, H.L. Malchow, Felix Driver, Martin Gaskell and Peter Thorsheim. Finally, the inter-relationships between the temperance movement, the National Health Society, and the idea of urban green spaces as places of health will be drawn out. This approach will demonstrate the important influence of named medical practitioners, and their approaches regarding health and disease, on the design of the urban fabric in which the majority of Britons now live.

Triumph of Order: Democracy and Public Space in New York and London (review)

Reviewed by: Triumph of Order: Democracy and Public Space in New York and London Kyle G. Volk (bio) Triumph of Order: Democracy and Public Space in New York and London. By Lisa Keller. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009. Pp. 338. Cloth, $50; paper, $24.50.) Why do London and New York City stand as leading centers of global capitalism in the early twenty-first century? In Triumph of Order, historian Lisa Keller maintains that one key, underappreciated reason is each city's modern commitment to public order. During the turbulent second half of the nineteenth century, a legal and political regime developed in each city that privileged order over liberty and established conditions that promoted the stability required for economic growth. According to Keller, this regime came at the great cost of circumscribing the public culture of democracy, not least through restricting access to the parks, squares, and other public spaces where citizens might assemble to collectively express dissent. Her timely contention is sure to interest scholars of civil liberties and public space as well as urban and political historians. Following the preface and introduction, Keller provides two foundational chapters that identify the main contexts of her complementary studies of late nineteenth-century London and New York: the expansion of voting rights; urban growth and industrialization; the extent of public space in each city; the emergence of modern policing; and legal heritage. In five chapters, the book's second section tackles London. Keller moves chronologically and details events from the Chartist uprisings of the 1830s to the Black Monday and Bloody Sunday riots of 1886-87 in which mostly working-class Londoners struggled to occupy public spaces and register their discontent over public policies and socioeconomic conditions. Violence and disorder stemming from these assemblies brought law-and-order backlashes, which often resulted in restrictions on public assembly. By the end of the century, new organizations dedicated to preserving liberty in combination with bottom-up agitation countered restrictionists, leaving London with a culture in which the right to assemble existed, albeit with substantial regulation. Keller's third section, which focuses on New York, tells a fairly similar story, taking readers from the rioting of the Jacksonian era through labor unrest at the end of the nineteenth century and showing the process by which authorities worked to subdue disorder. Of particular importance [End Page 260] here are the Civil War draft riots, which Keller views as a turning point for Gotham. Formerly, the city had tolerated periodic mob activity. The brutality of 1863, however, gave rise to new public expectations for municipal officers to maintain order and to "the development of extensive regulations for daily life" (164). The 1871 Orange riots expedited this process, prompting restrictions on speech and assembly, including permit requirements and other constraints on parades and meetings in the city's few public spaces. As she often does with London, Keller sees debates arising from such events as dividing the working classes, who favored a more open public sphere, from "the authorities and propertied classes," who sided with law and order (180). One wonders whether the divisions were that neat, and more evidence revealing the social composition of involved parties might have substantiated this claim even further. Keller's book is more comparative than transnational, and the overwhelming bulk of the comparative work is done in the bookends. Keller might have explored connections between events that happened contemporaneously on both sides of the Atlantic. The London Sunday Trading Bill riots of 1855 which Keller discusses, for example, had their American counterparts in the Chicago Lager Beer Riot and Portland, Maine prohibition riot of the same year. For these types of events and others, Keller leaves us wondering to what extent any trans-Atlantic conversation about the problems of urban order developed. An investigation of how events were covered in the press on the other side of the Atlantic might have been fruitful. Furthermore, though Keller exposes important differences between New York and London, examining a city less successful in establishing a regime of order might have allowed for sharper contrasts and alternative conclusions. Keller's important contribution to urban and civil liberties histories might have been broadened by...

Gaelic Games, Irish Nationalist Politics and the Irish Diaspora in London, 1895–1915

This article makes an original contribution to the growing historiography on the role of sport, and more specifically, Gaelic games amongst Irish immigrant communities around the world. It does so by shedding light on the origins and early history of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century London. In particular, the article explores the ways in which membership of this organisation allowed sections of the city's Irish population to preserve and express their ethnic specificity and support for Irish nationalism. This reveals that Gaelic games were drawn on by a diverse range of organisations and individuals who sought to utilise these sports to galvanise support for varying shades of Irish nationalism.

Takahiro Ueyama, Health in the Marketplace: Professionalism, Therapeutic Desires, and Medical Commodification in Late-Victorian London

Historians have often asserted that the nineteenth-century relationship between medicine and commerce was one of conflict and that tensions between the two resulted from the profession's attempts to create a monopoly over medical provision. Yet, despite such claims, we have surprisingly little knowledge of the ways in which medical practitioners interacted with suppliers of medical goods and services beyond the vendors of patent medicines. In Health in the Marketplace, Takahiro Ueyama provides a much-needed reinterpretation of the relationship between medicine and commerce in late nineteenth-century London. In five chapters, Ueyama considers the motivations of, and often conflicting interactions between, medical entrepreneurs, electricians and professional organisations in order to demonstrate the emergence of a new and broader commercial medical culture. Indeed, medical practitioners were by no means alone in their attempts to carve out a medical career. Entrepreneurs, such as the practitioner-turned-businessman Herbert Tibbetts, viewed the public's burgeoning concern with their health as a profit-making opportunity and accordingly produced, promoted and sold an increasing number of medicines and devices through the establishment of pseudo-professional establishments. These seemingly widespread enterprises functioned uncomfortably alongside the services offered by medical practitioners, and, for consumers, blurred the already indistinct boundaries between medical orthodoxy and charlatanism.

Investigating Work in late Nineteenth-century London

This article considers the late nineteenth-century London manufacturing economy in Charles Booth’s Industry Series for the insight it provides into transitions in economic practice and social thought. Drawing on the mass of notes collected for the inquiries and the published volumes themselves, the article shows how Booth struggled to fit the diverse world of work recounted by contemporaries into existing categories of social description and political economy. The proliferation of small masters was particularly problematic. as it represented both the enterprising pursuit of self-interest and the deleterious effects of over-competition. Though Booth found conclusions difficult to make, his empirical study detailed the complexity of the London economy showing the relationship between production and consumption, home and work and the impact of workers’ desires for independence on work practices. The Industry Series needs to be understood as pivotal in highlighting contradictions in contemporary understandings of the workings of capitalism.

Socialism and Occultism at the Fin de Siècle : Elective Affinities

La Bus (1891), J.K. Huysmans's fictional account of occultism in France at fin de siecle, charismatic decadent des Hermies recommends that in order avoid horrors of daily life, his friend Durtal keep his eyes fixed on pavement. When do that, he explains, you see reflections of electric signs which assume all manner of shapes: alchemical symbols, armoral bearings of alchemists on raised plinths, cog-wheels, talismanic characters, bizarre pentacles with suns, hammers and anchors (2^0). As this compendium of material and immaterial images glimpsed in reflective gleam of metropolitan street suggests, for des Hermies, occult is not simply an escape from quotidian; it is indissociable from it. Materialist and spiritualist signs are inseparable. In Oscar Wilde's play LadyWindermere s Fan (1892), Lord Darlington famously declares that we are all in gutter, but some of us are looking at stars (III. 30^). Where Wilde separates supramundane from mundane, Huysmans makes them mutually implicit: des Hermies can see constellations in gutter. In a previous chapter of La Bas, des Hermies had emphasized how interrelationship of positivism and mysticism in contemporary Paris, apparently so incongruous, in fact typified the tail-ends of centuries: Magic flourishes when materialism is rife (219). In febrile atmosphere of late-nineteenth century London, too, magic flourished alongside its old frere ennemi. It is not simply that occultism was a reaction against increasingly discredited materialism of nineteenth century. Their relationship was more dialectical than that. At a collective level, it was perhaps closer to what Freud called a reaction-formation, a compensatory response that represses its complicity with phenomenon that it constitutes as its opposite (93-94). As an exoteric movement, spiritualism had for almost half a century been infatuated with problem of providing empirical evidence for afterlife. In late nineteenth century, esoteric movements such as theosophy, which self-consciously appropriated aspects of spiritualism that it sought to displace, also sought material proof of immaterial. If, therefore, fin de siecle was characterized, as Terry Eagleton