Late Victorian England Research Articles

Intellectual property and national security: the case of the hardcastle superheater, 1905–1927

ABSTRACTThis article explores the complex and changing relationship between technological development, intellectual property, and national security in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Its specific case study concerns an important invention developed by a naval officer. Technological innovations not only were vital to British security but also embodied commercially valuable intellectual property. The state’s interest in acquiring control of the intellectual property to maintain Britain’s naval supremacy was not automatically aligned with the interests of inventors. The alignment was especially fraught in the case of service inventors—that is, inventors in government service, rather than in the private sector. Service inventors, who played a crucial role in maintaining Britain’s naval-technological edge, were governed by special regulations, and they invariably utilized state resources for their inventive work. Exploring these issues sheds important light on the attitude of the British state toward innovation and technological development from the 1850s through the 1920s.

Towns in Victorian England and Wales: a new classification

ABSTRACT:This article describes the creation of a new urban classification based on the 1891 census of England and Wales. It is the first attempt to use the recently available electronic version of the census (I-CeM) to classify all large towns in late Victorian England and Wales on their economic structure. Where previous scholars were restricted by the form of occupation data contained in the published census reports, I-CeM allows manipulation of the data in order to aggregate urban units and examine their occupational structures in great detail. The classification is then used to compare key socio-economic characteristics of different towns.

Anne R. Hanley, Medicine, Knowledge and Venereal Diseases in England, 1886–1916

Knowledge has always been a central theme in the history of venereal diseases. Who should know about such diseases, to what extent, and in what circumstances, are questions that have long elicited strong opinion. In late Victorian Britain these debates were particularly marked, in part due to growing concerns about how to provide knowledge without destabilising morality. The need to tread delicately when sharing knowledge about disease, for example with modest women or innocent young children, was one factor that fuelled a gradual shift in relation to who ‘owned’ this knowledge: sex became increasingly a medical issue. By the turn of the century, deviant sexual behaviour was being pathologised and sex education began to emerge as a public health issue. While disease had always fallen within the medical sphere, for diagnosis and treatment, this period was undoubtedly one of significance. Not only did medical practitioners have the power to disseminate knowledge about sex to the public, they were also producing it at an unprecedented rate due to advances in bacteriology.

William Stillman: championing Crispi in late Victorian Britain

Christopher Duggan made extensive use of the correspondence of the AmericanTimesjournalist William James Stillman in writing his important biography of Francesco Crispi. This article focuses on Stillman’s published works that deal with the Italian statesman, principally his 1898 history of Italy since 1815, the first and only English-language biography of Crispi until Duggan’s, and the journalist’s own autobiography. It argues that, despite Stillman’s much vaunted love for Italy, he in fact despised most Italians, and saw in Crispi’s virtues a rejection of typical Italian conduct. While Stillman was extreme but not altogether unusual among British and American commentators on Italy in his passionate support for Crispi, his contempt for Italians was surprisingly widespread among late Victorian observers of the new nation.

In between mental evolution and unconscious memory: Lamarckism, Darwinism, and professionalism in late Victorian Britain.

In 1884 Samuel Butler published a collection of essays entitled Remarks on George Romanes' Mental Evolution, where he attempted to show how Romanes' idea of mental evolution presented similarities with his theory of unconscious memory. By looking at Romanes' work through Butler's writing, this article will reevaluate some aspects of their works regarding the complex debate about memory, heredity, and instinct. This paper will explore the main differences and similarities between Romanes' science and Butler's writing on science both in terms of their ideas and contents. It will then look into their different professional relationships with Darwin and how this determined the professional and public reception of their theories.

The Language of Imperialism in British Electoral Politics, 1880–1910

ABSTRACTThis article asks us to reconsider the impact of the issue of imperialism in electoral politics in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Using a corpus of around five million words of digitised campaign speeches from the years 1880–1910, it examines the language of the nine General Elections held in this period through computerised text-mining. This ‘big data’ analysis produces three conclusions, which in some cases nuance existing interpretations and in others directly challenge them. The first questions the prevailing consensus that elections in the high age of empire featured imperialism as a consistently central issue. The article argues that this interpretation relies too heavily on evidence from a minority of elections—especially the famous ‘khaki’ struggle of 1900—and that in the majority of campaigns in this period, imperialism was relatively unimportant as an election issue, including in the Unionist landslide of 1895. The second argument questions historians’ preoccupation with the ‘contested’ nature of discourses of imperialism and patriotism at elections, and contends that—insofar as the empire was an important campaign issue at all—the Conservatives were considerably more likely to champion it and connect it to politically charged and emotive appeals than were their Liberal opponents. Finally, the article maintains that the languages of imperialism and patriotism have often been unhelpfully conflated by historians, and argues that they could become politically synonymous only in the very specific circumstance of a ‘khaki’ election. In other contests, they could diverge, as is demonstrated by a case study of the campaign of 1906 when patriotism was reclaimed by the Liberals from a domestic, rather than imperial platform.

Risk, success, and failure: female entrepreneurship in late Victorian and Edwardian England

This article analyses female entrepreneurship in late Victorian and Edwardian England. Traditional views on female entrepreneurship in nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century England point towards a decline in the number and relevance of women as business owners in comparison to the eighteenth century, and their retreat into a ‘separate sphere’ away from the world of trade and production. Recent studies, however, have deeply challenged this view, suggesting that women still played an important role as entrepreneurs during industrialization and beyond. Nevertheless, a number of questions remain unanswered with regard to the features of female entrepreneurship during these phases of British history, and issues such as scale of operation, attitude to risk, credit structure, and managerial styles are still widely debated. Using original sources, this article provides a novel view on these issues, analysing female entrepreneurship from the perspective of bankruptcy. Analysing statistics on women's bankruptcy derived from Board of Trade reports, as well as a sample of archival cases, this article argues that overall female business owners traded in ways similar to their male counterparts in terms of business size, risk‐taking, and, eventually, success.

Vision and Self-Consciousness in The Picture of Dorian Gray

Critics have read Dorian Gray in the context of late nineteenth-century theories of the material nature of the mind, especially the empirical and positivist approaches that dominated late Victorian thought. In this paper, I shall argue for the importance of examining Wilde’s conception of self-consciousness rather than consciousness per se.... self-consciousness...depends on both sensory feelings and reflexive evaluation as performative agents of cognition.... Wilde’s position should help us map out historically some of the challenges that European philosophy faced in late Victorian England, as metaphysical interests interacted with a distinctly material and positivist ethos, particularly concerning theories of the mind.

The Production and Consumption of Lawn-Tennis Shoes in Late-Victorian Britain

AbstractThe lawn-tennis shoe was a popular, widely available commodity in late-Victorian Britain. Associated with new forms of sporting practice and consumption, this type of footwear was mass-produced in modern factories, promoted in the popular leisure press, and sold to both men and women in a variety of retail environments. This article analyzes processes of product innovation, production, and sale, and it situates the shoes within a wider context of sport, commerce, fashion, and class and gender relations. Like other late-Victorian sporting and recreational practices, lawn tennis combined material objects, physical activity, and the stylized display of gender and class ideals. Footwear was valued for symbolic and physically practical reasons. Ideas of intended use determined its design and material form. Sportswear created and communicated new masculine ideals. As lawn-tennis shoes moved from the court into everyday usage, the meanings attached to them accommodated a broader range of practices and contexts.

WHINNEY AND WATERHOUSE'S GOVERNMENT ASSIGNMENT 1887–1888: A STUDY OF ITS SIGNIFICANCE

The episode narrated in this paper is situated in late-Victorian Britain when leading chartered accountants, Frederick Whinney and Edwin Waterhouse, were engaged by a British parliamentary committee to examine the costing and accountability practices of the government's military manufacturing establishments (GMMEs). The contributions of this study to accounting's historiography are two-fold. First, the significance of Whinney and Waterhouse's appointment for the status of chartered accountants in late-Victorian Britain is assessed. Second, Whinney and Waterhouse's criticisms of existing accounting routines are examined and evaluated as is the impact of their findings on the subsequent course of accounting practices within GMMEs.

'I am not very well I feel nearly mad when I think of you': Male Jealousy, Murder and Broadmoor in Late-Victorian Britain.

This article compares the representations of jealousy in popular culture, medical and legal literature, and in the trials and diagnoses of men who murdered or attempted to murder their wives or sweethearts before being found insane and committed into Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum between 1864 and 1900. It is shown that jealousy was entrenched in Victorian culture, but marginalised in medical and legal discourse and in the courtroom until the end of the period, and was seemingly cast aside at Broadmoor. As well as providing a detailed examination of varied representations of male jealousy in late-Victorian Britain, the article contributes to understandings of the emotional lives of the working-class, and the causes and representations of working-class male madness.

Interpreting business partnerships in late Victorian Britain†

This article gives the first large‐scale assessment of business partnerships in England and Wales using business records within the population census for 1881. It seeks to understand the variety of ways that ‘partnership’ was used: explicit partnership, ‘de facto’ partnership, ‘joint’ activity, and asset ownership together. The article confirms that partnerships were chiefly between two people. Complexity and transaction costs largely precluded larger size and squeezed the partnership into a ‘middle ground’ between the sole proprietor and the corporation. The main size contrast was between farms with small employee numbers, and larger non‐farm business partnerships. Generally differences in the gender of business owners have greater salience than sectors. Few female business partnerships employed more than four people (mean 3.4), while male partnerships ranged up to several thousand employees (mean 33.6), and 18.6 for mixed gender. While many women were involved in businesses, their opportunities remained restricted, and most were in partnership with male partners. Family structures were important, with three‐quarters of all identifiable partnerships having some form of family relationship, with a strong preponderance of single women in female‐only partnerships, married men in male‐only partnerships, and widows in mixed gender businesses.

A British International Humanitarianism? Humanitarian Interventions in Eastern Europe (1875–1906)

This article contributes to the growing literature on the history of humanitarian intervention and the politics of humanitarianism in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. It discusses the writings of three British thinkers: the prominent scholar James Bryce, the archaeologist Arthur Evans, and the radical journalist H.N. Brailsford. All three have been credited with discovering and transmitting news about the sufferings of Christians in the Ottoman Empire during times of war and conflict. The article showcases the rise in the demand for knowledge about the region brought about by the late-nineteenth-century Eastern Crisis and its early-twentieth-century afterlife. It fills a gap in the literature on British attitudes toward Eastern Europe by offering a comparative reading of long-held Orientalist and Balkanist stereotypes, as well as nationalist visions of international and regional order articulated in a humanitarian language.

Review: Popular Literature, Authorship and the Occult in Late Victorian Britain by Andrew McCann

Review: Popular Literature, Authorship and the Occult in Late Victorian Britain by Andrew McCann

Andrew McCann,Popular Literature, Authorship and the Occult in Late Victorian Britain.

Andrew McCann,<i>Popular Literature, Authorship and the Occult in Late Victorian Britain.</i>

Lois S. Bibbings: Binding Men: Stories About Violence and Law in Late Victorian England

Lois S. Bibbings: Binding Men: Stories About Violence and Law in Late Victorian England

An Apocalyptic yet Abject “Jubilee” Narrative in George Robert Gissing’s In the Year of Jubilee: Mobility, Restoration, and Materiality

George Robert Gissing’s In the Year of Jubilee (1894) brings together complex, contradictory and ultimately subversive views of late Victorian society, where social mobility and class, property, women’s rights, marriage, education, commerce, and advertising are problematized. Further, with the dramatic rate of social, economic, and political change that resulted from the Industrial Revolution, new banking and sources of capital, old ways of being and thinking simply cannot keep pace, resulting in the emergence of apocalyptic narratives on many fronts. Needless to say, the idea of "jubilee" is more or less antithetical to the idea of apocalypse, but ironically, Gissing's work is more informed by apocalypse and apocalyptic narratives than "jubilee" whether the concept of jubilee refers to liberation or an affirmation of monarchal reign. Gissing's "jubilee" juxtaposes self-congratulatory rhetoric (Victorian senses of self-actualization) with an underlying nihilism, particularly for women and those of lower classes. The fact that some of the women are able to break free and reinvent their worlds by means of education and a reinvented sense of self further reinforces the notion of apocalypse, particularly in the destruction of the “known” world and the emergence of a new one, essentially a “new heaven and earth.” The goal of this analysis is to conduct an analysis of Gissing’s In the Year of Jubilee and to demonstrate how the core narratives in the text contain elements of the apocalyptic narrative. In doing so, one object is to gain an understanding of how Gissing uses the abject jubilee (or apocalyptic) narrative in order to explore the social relationships and psychological states of the characters, and to use them to make certain observations and commentaries on the state of English society, the impact of industrialization, new technologies and urban sprawl, and the realities of social class and mobility (or lack of upward mobility) in late Victorian England.

Ethical shopping in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the significance and limitations of ethical shopping in Britain in the period between the 1880s and 1914 and, in particular, the use of white lists as a means of encouraging consumers only to buy goods produced in satisfactory working conditions. Design/methodology/approach – A brief survey of earlier examples of ethical shopping provides the context for a discussion of the published prospectus of the “Consumers” League’. Unpublished records of the Christian Social Union (CSU), supplemented by newspaper reports, are used to examine the rationale for white lists, their creation and effectiveness. Findings – The paper demonstrates that, contrary to what has generally been thought, consumers’ leagues originated in Britain not the USA. The CSU was not ineffective but provided an ethical and religious rationale for consumer activism. It was also responsible for the creation of white lists in several towns and cities in Britain and promoted the concept of preferential buying. CSU activity helped shape public opinion, but sustained improvements to working conditions also required effective trade unions and government intervention. Research limitations/implications – Relatively few CSU branch records survive and this precludes a comprehensive survey of its role in ethical shopping. Originality/value – The British consumer movement in this period has been little studied and often dismissed. By making use of archives, particularly CSU branch records, that have generally been ignored, the paper demonstrates that ethical shopping mattered and deserves more attention. It also highlights the importance of setting this in a wider context, particularly trade unionism and co-operation.

No Mere Dream: Material Culture and Electrical Imagination in Late Victorian Britain

In 1892 the English natural philosopher and chemist William Crookes speculated about ‘Some Possibilities of Electricity’ in the pages of the Fortnightly Review. Crookes discussed the nature of electricity and its relationship to the ether. He talked about the prospect of wireless communication, of electrical telepathy and controlling the weather. Crookes's article is only one instance of a trend towards constructing imagined electrical futures towards the end of the 19th century. These sorts of speculations played with the boundaries of the real but they were built around a solid material culture. In this paper I want to look at how these sorts of speculative accounts of electrical futures were put together. In particular, I want to look at the ways in which electrical speculation was grounded in material and practical experimental culture and how these sorts of speculations around the boundaries of the real played back into late Victorian electrical experimentation.

Popular Literature, Authorship and the Occult in Late Victorian Britain

Since the 1960s at least, Chris Partridge argues in his recent essay ‘Occulture is Ordinary’, occultism has increasingly abandoned the associations with secrecy and elitism that once seemed to be i...