mid-Victorian Britain Research Articles

Introduction to the Special Issue Commemorating the 170th Anniversary of the 1853–1854 Preston Lock-Out

This introduction to the special issue commemorating the 170th anniversary of the Preston strike and lock-out of 1853–1854 explains the significance of one of the most famous industrial disputes of the nineteenth century, updates its historiography since the publication of H.I. Dutton and J.E. King’s 1981 study, ‘Ten Per Cent and No Surrender’: The Preston Strike, 1853–1854 , provides context and a chronology, and summarises the eight articles of new research presented here. The articles examine women’s impact on the dispute and its impact on them, the role of Irish workers, the question of intimidation and conflict between workers, cultural and literary expressions of the dispute, its significance and legacy, and one creative interpretation of it, using animation. The editors argue that the Preston strike and lock-out had a wide impact, was widely reported, and had a strong cultural resonance, making it a microcosmic episode of mid-Victorian Britain. This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Issue Notes

The following papers were presented to the Canadian Society of Church History in 2012, but were not made available for publication: Ian Hesketh, “‘Vomited from the Jaws of Hell’: The Controversy of Ecce Homo in Mid-Victorian Britain”; Geoff Read, “Echoes of 1905-Secular Conflict in Interwar France, 1919-40”; Amy Von Heyking, “‘It is a privilege to have a Christian Government’: William Aberhart and the Place of Religion in Alberta’s Public Schools”; Lucille Marr, “Church Women, the Home Front, and the Great War”; Gordon Heath, “Whatever Happened to the British Empire? A Canadian Baptist Case Study”; Melissa Davidson, “Enduing the Cause with Righteousness: Canadian Anglican Views of the Great War, 1914-18”; James T. Robertson, “Anglican and Presbyterian Churches and a Loyalist Theology During the War of 1812”; Scott McLaren, “Rekindling the Canadian Fire: Print Culture and the Reconstruction of Upper Canadian Methodism After the War of 1812”; Denis McKim, “Contesting Christian Loyalty: Religion and Meanings of Britishness in Upper Canada”; Robynne Rogers Healey, “Reconciling Approaches to Non-Violence and Apartheid: Pacifist Conflict among Friends in the 1970s and 1980s”; Indre Cuplinskas, “Doing it Rite: Catholic Action and Liturgical Renewal in Quebec”; Christo Aivalis, “In Service of the Lowly Nazarene: The Canadian Labour Press and a Case for Radical Christianity, 1926-39”; Andrew M. Eason, “Missions, Race and Representation: The Salvation Army’s Portrayal of Africa and India in Victorian Britain”; Bruce Douville, “The Via Media and the Evangelical Road: The Attitudes of Anglican Church Newspapers in Canada West Towards American Slavery and Related Issues, 1837-65”; Nathan Dirks, “An Unknown Legacy: Canadian Mennonite Enlistments During the Second World War”; James Enns, “From Heartland of the Reformation to Post-Christian Mission Field: North American Conservative Protestants and the Mission to West Germany, 1945-74.”

Robert Warington and Heinrich Will: Friendship and Co-operation in Chemistry in Nineteenth Century Britain and Germany

This paper discusses fourteen letters that Heinrich Will (1812–1890), Justus Liebig’s (1803–1873) successor at the University of Giessen, sent to Robert Warington (1807–1867), the chemical operator at Apothecaries’ Hall in London, between 1842 and 1854. The correspondence illuminates a range of topics related to the development of the British chemical community in mid-Victorian Britain – its organisations, networks, and commercial opportunities, as well as offering insights into the importance of family, friendship, and collegiality in sustaining scientific careers. Studying such an exchange of material and textual knowledge helps to further understand how science was organised and ideas disseminated in a key period for institutional development in chemistry.

The Strangers’ Home for Asiatics, Africans and South Sea Islanders: Inaugurating a Hospitable World Order in Mid-Victorian Britain

This essay examines the Strangers’ Home for Asiatics, Africans and South Sea Islanders, in London, as a case study on nationalist mythmaking driven by anxieties over immigration. At this institution’s 1856 inaugural ceremony, Prince Albert encouraged Britons to behave like globally conscientious citizens vis-à-vis destitute migrants: the lascars or Asian seamen whose exploited labour fuelled east-west shipping from the seventeenth to mid-twentieth centuries. Discriminatory legislation barred them from permanent residency in Britain, forcing them into poverty despite their right to lawful settlement as British subjects. To expedite their repatriation, the Home’s missionary founders used pageantry and newsprint to promote patriotic narratives about Christian hospitality toward strangers. Their anti-immigrant philanthropy benefited an Indian Ocean recruitment system dependent on lascars’ redeployment, an indentured servitude that Evangelicals compared to transatlantic slavery. Consequently, global abolitionism functioned as a rhetorical device for distinguishing citizens from noncitizens in racialized terms before these categories were legally codified.

John Leech and "Punch" - Tattooing the Story of an Age in a 'Newspaperized World'

As tattoos are both drawing and text that imprint the epidermis in inky arabesques of Delphic symbolism, Punch or The London Charivari acted, for more than one-hundred and sixty-one years (1841-2002) as the sharply witty, bitterly satirical chronicle of its own time. With a weekly circulation of approximately 50,000 – 60,000 issues in the mid-Victorian period, Punch became one of the most influential journalistic witnesses in mid-Victorian Britain, renowned for its unique sense of humour, audacious approach to current social and political matters and, most of all, for an unprecedented mastery of caustic illustrations, in a fresh approach to capture and caricaturise the spirit of the epoch, equally unprecedented in its dynamism and expansion. Although throughout the 1840s the magazine built its popularity more on political analysis than on satirical drawing, ”Punch's Pencillings” would turn the magazine into a vivid fresco, whose inimitable touch and magnetism have come to be osmotically associated with John Leech (1817-1864). With his undeniably remarkable artistic touch he managed not only to define the overall architecture of the magazine, but also to create a new understanding of humorous drawings, introducing the world to the concept of 'cartoon' as we all know it today. This article examines a selection of his three-thousand drawings published in Punch, in an attempt to recompose, through curved charcoal lines, the jigsaw of what Henry James coined as “newspaperized world,” at times when, as Lucy Brown argues, Britain was forging the modern concept of news. It is not only the social, cultural and political milieu that interests us, but also the extratextual implications of a visual appearance and narrative that pervaded the literary scene, as nineteenth-century journalism shared its boundaries with the realm of literary fiction.

Stonewall Jackson, Beresford Hope, and the Meaning of the American Civil War in Britain by Michael J. Turner

Reviewed by: Stonewall Jackson, Beresford Hope, and the Meaning of the American Civil War in Britain by Michael J. Turner Robert Cook Stonewall Jackson, Beresford Hope, and the Meaning of the American Civil War in Britain. By Michael J. Turner. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020. Pp. xii, 334. $50.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-7108-0.) Not everyone in mid-Victorian Britain supported the breakaway Confederacy. Progressive academics like Francis W. Newman and ex-Radicals such as John Bright sided with the North, as did many unheralded middle- and working-class people who came to associate the imperiled Union with the ongoing struggle for domestic suffrage reform. However, most well-to-do Conservatives (and some prominent Liberals) articulated strong support for the southern cause. Among them was Alexander James Beresford Hope, a High Anglican, quondam Tory member of Parliament and newspaper owner who [End Page 728] championed the South in the pages of his Saturday Review and worked actively alongside Confederate agents in Britain to promote southern independence. As Michael J. Turner explains in this well-researched study, Hope also played a leading role in an ultimately successful project to build a statue of Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson, which was unveiled in Richmond, Virginia, in 1875. Basing his findings on an impressive number of British newspapers and Hope’s published writings, Turner broadly confirms the Confederacy’s appeal to Englishmen committed to social hierarchy, the protection of property rights, and white supremacy and opposed to the putatively leveling democracy of the American North. Hope insisted that “our brethren of the South” were fighting for the quintessentially Anglo-Saxon values of liberty and self-determination and, in the process, were “trying to raise up a new English nation” (pp. 55, 56). Aware that slavery was hardly the Confederacy’s main selling point in Britain, he depicted the southern variant as benign and derided the Emancipation Proclamation as unenforceable. His considerable efforts to promote the southern cause at home were thwarted by the Palmerston government’s decision in late 1862 to put the national interest above the ruling class’s affective attachment to the Confederacy and by the decisive Union military successes in the second half of the Civil War. Turner’s analysis of the Richmond statue is rich in detail. He convincingly roots the statue’s genesis in the fact that Stonewall Jackson attained celebrity status in Britain during the war. For many Britons, Jackson exemplified the manly courage and devotion to high principle that they associated with the Confederacy. Ordinary folk as well as elite Tories like Hope thrilled to press reports of how the southern hero repeatedly outwitted hapless Yankee commanders in the Shenandoah Valley, and they admired his religious faith, self-discipline, and apparent affection for England and Scotland after his transatlantic trip in 1856. Manifestations of Jackson’s popularity included his name affixed to a race-horse, a boat at the Glasgow royal regatta, and a factory engine in Blackburn. E. M. Grace, brother of the more famous W. G. Grace, was applauded as “the Stonewall Jackson of the cricket field” after enjoying an exemplary cricket season in 1862 (p. 165). Jackson’s death did nothing to stem many Britons’ admiration for the general. Hope was the prime mover in a concerted campaign to raise money for a monument that would not only express its funders’ admiration for the general and his cause but also legitimate their support for the Confederacy. A brief Republican interregnum in postwar Virginia delayed matters, but defeated ex-Confederates quickly restored their political power in the state. They were predictably eager to accept a tangible testimony of well-to-do Englishmen’s admiration for one of the wartime South’s leading men. Although the author’s judgments are generally sound, there is good reason to question his assertion that into the twentieth century Stonewall Jackson’s “name and fame had abiding relevance in Britain” (p. 261). Few Britons today have any knowledge of either Jackson or the American Civil War. More abiding by far is the affinity of leading English Tories—illustrated by their fawning embrace of Donald J. Trump—for American opponents of democracy and racial equality. [End Page...

THE HISTORICAL MANUSCRIPTS COMMISSION: AN ARCHIVAL EVOLUTION

The creation of the Royal Historical Manuscripts Commission formed part of a wider movement of institutional renewal and reform in mid-Victorian Britain, including growing professionalisation of both public administration and the academic study of history, particularly from the 1850s. Two features of the commission’s work continued to influence its development and The National Archives’ engagement with the archives sector today: first, the need to respect the legitimate rights and interests of both individuals and organisations, and second, the relationships by necessity based on collaboration with many partners. This has led to the evolution of a distinctive British mixed economy embracing public and private archives. This article considers the Commission’s evolution from surveying and publishing reports on the contents and locations of private collections to becoming the central advisory body on all issues related to archives and manuscripts not covered by the 1958 Public Records Act. The social and technological changes over this time have had a profound influence on the commission’s professional practices. In addition, the range and rights of stakeholders have evolved, presenting new challenges. Meeting all the demands and possibilities of the commission’s delivery needs to be seen in the context of frequently operating with significant resource constraints.

Mechanics and mathematicians: George Biddell Airy and the social tensions in constructing time at Parliament, 1845-1860.

In mid-Victorian Britain, reconciling elite mathematical expertise with practical mechanical experience presented both engineering and social challenges. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the construction of the Westminster Clock at Britain's Houses of Parliament. Realizing this scheme engendered the collaboration between Cambridge mathematicians George Biddell Airy and Edmund Beckett Denison, and the clockmaker Edward John Dent. Transforming theoretical mathematical drawings into physical apparatus challenged existing relations between conveyors of privileged scientific knowledge and those with practical experience of what was, and what was not, mechanically possible. My article demonstrates how, within this project, physical models and devices provided material solutions to ambiguities over authority and social disorder in Victorian Britain.

Russia and the Russians in the mid-Victorian Britain Publicism (J. Bright, Th. Carlyle)

Russia and the Russians in the mid-Victorian Britain Publicism (J. Bright, Th. Carlyle)

Regional differences in the mid-Victorian diet and their impact on health.

SummaryThe aim of this study was to examine the impact of regional diets on the health of the poor in mid-Victorian Britain. Contemporary surveys of regional diets and living condition were reviewed. This information was compared with mortality data from Britain over the same period. Although there was an overall improvement in life expectancy during the latter part of the 19th century, there were large regional differences in lifestyle, diet and mortality rates. Dietary surveys showed that the poor labouring population in isolated rural areas of England, in the mainland and islands of Scotland and in the west of Ireland enjoyed the most nutritious diets. These regions also showed the lowest mortality rates in Britain. This was not simply the result of better sanitation and less mortality from food and waterborne infections but also fewer deaths from pulmonary tuberculosis, which is typically associated with better nutrition. These more isolated regions where a peasant-style culture provided abundant locally produced cheap foodstuffs such as potatoes, vegetables, whole grains, and milk and fish, were in the process of disappearing in the face of increasing urbanisation. This was to the detriment of many rural poor during the latter half of the century. Conversely, increasing urbanisation, with its improved transport links, brought greater availability and diversity of foods to many others. It was this that that led to an improved nutrition and life expectancy for the majority in urbanising Britain, despite the detrimental effects of increasing food refinement.

'James Hunt on the Quest for Awakening Robert Knox’S Ideas and Reterritorialization of His Racial Theories into the Mainstream Scientific Discourse in Mid-Victorian Britain.'

This paper aims to explore James Hunt's role in the rehabilitation of Dr Robert Knox's diminished reputation by a careful choice of Knox's original theories from his Races of Men (1860) to establish an ideological underpinning for political agenda of Anthropological Society of London (1863-1871). Yet, at the same time, Hunt had become empowered with the reliable tool to oppose Thomas Huxley, and his fellow Darwinists' efforts to homogenise mid-Victorian Anthropology under the banner of Darwinism. That said, Hunt had to pay the steep price for such accomplishment since he had to de-radicalise core elements of Knox's racialist vision. In doing so, Hunt's orchestrated resurrection of a modified version of Knox's writings helped him to smuggle a cunningly significant number of both Knox's original and recontextualised racialist elements into a discipline of Social Darwinism. Hence, the legacy of James Hunt should not be underestimated and dismissed as a marginal contribution to further development of racism in following two decades after his death. Additionally, the purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how James Hunt managed to disseminate and bring into the foreground the racial theories pioneered by Robert Knox. The central goal of this paper is to analyse the process of Hunt’s intentional manipulation with original ideas developed by Robert Knox to shape them for Hunt's political purposes and consequent popularisation of an expanded corpus of racialist theory. We shall begin with a brief introduction to Robert Knox, who indeed inspired James Hunt to popularise racist views in mid-Victorian society, though Hunt later modified Knoxian racial doctrine rather unfaithfully to the original theory. In this way, this work analyses Hunt’s transition from Knox’s admirer to a populariser of broader racist doctrine including not only Knox's views but elements of racial theories of Paul Broca, George Gliddon, Samuel Morton and Josiah Nott as well. In this context, the final part of the paper follows Hunt's shift from the populariser of virulent racist ideas to a wily political manipulator, who shaped his condensed racist beliefs and methods in accordance with tightening British colonial policy to pass down an ultimate racist underpinning for an emerging wave of a new ideology characterised by an uncompromising imperialism.

John Baxter Langley: radicalism, espionage and the Confederate Navy in mid-Victorian Britain

ABSTRACTThe article deals with the attempts by the Confederate military to utilize the shipbuilding facilities of Britain for the construction of warships, commerce raiders and blockade-runners. It also details Federal strategies to prevent these endeavors. In particular, it examines the actions of John Baxter Langley a British radical or ‘advanced Liberal’ who, motivated by an innate opposition to slavery, became involved in the American conflict. Langley represented a group of politically educated, working- and middle-class activists who generated a constant stream of pro Northern propaganda, newspaper editorials, meetings and demonstrations. In doing so they linked the poverty inflicted by the Northern cotton embargo with the similar, and greater suffering endured by the enslaved workers of the Southern states. Langley is perhaps unique in the fact that he became directly involved in the clandestine contest to create, or to uncover, foreign-built ships of war involved in the American Civil War.

Introduction

Introduction Eileen Boris (bio) Judith R. Walkowitz. Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980. vii + 347 pp. ISBN 978-0-5212-7064-9 (pb). Echoing Karl Marx, evoking Michel Foucault, and channeling early radical and 1970s socialist feminism, Judy Walkowitz in Prostitution and Victorian Society looked anew at the Contagious Diseases Acts (CDA) of mid-Victorian Britain, the experts and reformers who debated them, and the prostitutes who sought to earn a living in their shadow. It is not only that Prostitution and Victorian Society showed how to "study class and gender relations" together or that Walkowitz drew upon Foucault to chart governmentality, biopower, and sexual regulation through discourses, particularly those of medicine (vii). She also concretely explored "how sexual and social ideology became embedded in laws, institutions, and social policy" (5). The lock hospital embodied bodily regulation, with the dreaded speculum as a disciplinary wand. Despite assault on their bodies and subjection to their rescuers' admonitions, prostitutes emerged in this prodigiously researched book as "women who made their own history, albeit under very restrictive conditions" (9). This now classic study has it all: a wide cast of characters, known and discovered; multiple geographies and spaces; sex; and the state. There are workingmen's societies and ladies' house meetings, social purity reformers and Liberal Party stalwarts, and social scientists and evangelical crusaders. Through thick description of the implementation of the CDA and repeal campaigns in the military garrison cities of Plymouth and Southampton, Walkowitz uncovered women who ran away from lock hospitals and refused inspection, as well as the men and women who sheltered them. She put the history of feminism and suffrage in conversation with medical, social, political, and labor history to trace the making of a new category of stigmatized worker and the tentativeness of cross-class sisterhood. Walkowitz herself underscores how Prostitution and Victorian Society is very much a book of its time in her response to the thoughtful reflections in this forum by scholars of commercialized sex and its policing. It appeared when social history was in vogue, before the linguistic turn, although we [End Page 157] find a preview of her later deconstructive studies in her parsing of language and attentiveness to representations. Walkowitz wrote during a heady moment when women's liberation generated an Atlantic exchange between British and US radicals who denounced capitalist patriarchy, defended bodily autonomy, and celebrated sexual pleasure. The spirit of probing the past with an eye on the present pervaded the first decade of Feminist Studies, the journal that Walkowitz joined as part of a collective with Mary Ryan, Christine Stansell, and others connected to the socialist feminist tendency.1 Indeed, the preface to Prostitution and Victorian Society cites the efforts of Ryan, along with Carroll Smith-Rosenberg and Linda Gordon, to chart "the efforts of female moral reformers in America to dictate sexual standards and to carve out a moral territory for themselves in the public world"—although Walkowitz was well aware that the case "for women's power and autonomy" was more complicated than fights against the double standard (vii). In demonstrating the embeddedness of women who sold sex in working-class communities, Stansell's City of Women would demonstrate the survival strategies and constrained choice that Walkowitz already had illuminated.2 At a time when Coyote and other prostitute rights groups were demanding recognition, Walkowitz gave sex workers a vibrant history. Looking for previous cross-class alliances similar to those they desired to forge with women strikers at Dagenham or Harlan County, historians discovered the Women's Trade Union League, explored the legacy of the old left in the great labor battles of the 1930s, and reinterpreted moral reform as more complex than scholars usually portrayed. Left historians took inspiration from the studies of culture and class by E. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, and Stuart Hall. Feminist historians engaged with the work of Juliet Mitchell, Shelia Rowbotham, Mary McIntosh and Michele Barrett, Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, and Silvia Federici, who were redefining work, the people who scholars considered to be workers, the shape of the family, and the value of women's lives and labors. British...

The Awakening Conscience: Christian Sentiment, Salvation, and Spectatorship in Mid-Victorian Britain

From the 1830s into the mid-1850s, key Victorian art and texts depicted passionate Christian feeling through the trope of ‘awakening’. Visual and written representations dramatized awakening Christians in fervent states of salvation, conversion, and devotion. Feeling had always been central to Christian belief but in the long nineteenth century faith was newly wedded to sensation. From the 1780s onwards, Christian reformers explored sensory psychologies and environmental settings as methods for awakening the conscience of men, women, and children in disciplinary institutions. In the late 1830s a ‘new environmentalism’ appeared in Christian high culture, and art began to be promoted as a medium for releasing religious feelings. Painted and architectural narratives of awakening depicted the artwork as a mediating agent and explored its sensory affects. By connecting sentiment to sensation, Christian culture raised a series of questions about the relations between mind and body, senses and spectatorship, and whether the wellsprings of faith lay in mystery or invigilation. By valuing sensory impressions, intense feeling, and active agency, Christian artworks offered a discomforting model for a public exhibition culture concerned with the comportment of spectators. Drawing on a range of examples from mainland Britain to the colonial penitentiary, and from William Holman Hunt to Augustus Welby Pugin, this article links Christian art to fervent feeling and explores how this fervour was uneasily contained within social and religious limits.

“FEELINGS OF ALARM”: CONSERVATIVE CRITICISM OF THE PRINCIPLE OF NATIONALITY IN MID-VICTORIAN BRITAIN

This article is an account of the mid-Victorian conservative reaction to the increasing prominence of the notion of nationality in British debates on European affairs. Conservatives perceived the idea of nationality as a threat, which they tried to deflect by deploying three sets of arguments. They attempted to marginalize the notion by reframing nationality as neither a valuable nor a fundamental aspect of political life; they argued that the sentiment of nationality increased aggression in international affairs and was a threat to the European order; and they argued that nationality was often incompatible with constitutional liberty and a proper patriotism, thereby presenting liberals’ support for nationality as inconsistent with their own values. This conservative rejection and problematization of nationality in mid-Victorian Britain has been absent from existing scholarly work, which has focused on the qualified acceptance of the notion by Victorian liberals and Edwardian conservatives.

Augustus De Morgan's anonymous reviews for The Athenæum: A mirror of a Victorian mathematician

The weekly London-based literary magazine, The Athenæum, supplied Victorian Britain with news of the latest developments in the arts, science, and politics. Book reviews represented a regular department of the periodical. While these reviews were usually anonymous, The Athenæum's editors identified the reviewers in their private marked copies of the journal, now held by City University, London. These marked copies reveal that Augustus De Morgan produced around 1000 reviews for the journal from 1840 to 1869. As a reviewer, De Morgan covered books on a wide variety of topics both within and outside mathematics. A consideration of a selection of the mathematical works De Morgan chose to review gives an insight into how he believed issues surrounding mathematics and its study should be presented to the wide and non-specialist audience of The Athenæum, and thus to the lay reader of mid-Victorian Britain.

The Spectacle of Security: Lock-Picking Competitions and the Security Industry in mid-Victorian Britain

��� Lock-picking competitions first captured the imagination of the British public at the Great Exhibition of 1851. These contests pitted rival brandname locksmiths against each other in trying to circumvent the leading security devices of the day, typically before a crowd of onlookers. As such, they presented a spectacle of security – an opportunity for those present to witness the most sophisticated locks not resting dormant, but under attack from a skilled and determined mechanic taking the part of the criminal. The most celebrated of these lock-pickers was Alfred Charles Hobbs, who first arrived in Britain as a representative of the American lock-making firm Day & Newell, before rising to international acclaim by picking two locks previously considered inviolable: Chubb & Son’s ‘detector lock’, originally patented in 1818; and Bramah & Co.’s famous challenge lock, first patented in 1784. This last had stood proudly in the firm’s Piccadilly shop window for decades, alongside a notice offering two-hundred guineas to anyone who could devise an implement with which to pick it. Hobbs’s conquest of these two ‘unpickable’ locks captivated the press: one newspaper even asserted that no feature of the Exhibition had attracted greater public attention than this ‘celebrated lock contest’. 1 Yet the ‘Great Lock Controversy’, as it became known, was only the most famous of a series of lock-picking challenges and disputes which issued from the emerging security industry of the 1850s and 1860s. The history of the security industry – in Britain as elsewhere – remains largely unwritten. Focusing predominantly on state systems of crime control, historians have barely touched upon market responses to crime. 2 However, recent work has begun to shed light on the history of security more broadly defined. Eloise Moss and David Smith, for example, by examining how security companies influenced popular understandings of crime and the home, have revealed the deep historical roots of anxieties surrounding insecurity, and have highlighted the role of security entrepreneurs in shaping commonplace perceptions of risk, responsibility and prevention. 3 But historians have yet to embark upon any broader exploration of security enterprise as a significant aspect of modern social development.

Palmerston and The Times: Foreign Policy, the Press and Public Opinion in Mid-Victorian Britain, by Laurence Fenton

Two of the major historical developments in British politics from the 1830s were the construction and manipulation of ‘public opinion’ by prominent politicians and the expansion and growing influence of the metropolitan and provincial press. As foreign secretary after 1822, George Canning defined a patriotic, Protestant and liberty-loving ‘public opinion’—bolstering his diplomatic aims of championing liberal progress against repression and promoting British commercial interests around the world. From the 1830s, Palmerston self-consciously took up Canning’s mantle, serving as foreign secretary (1830–4, 1835–41 and 1846–51) and prime minister (1855–8 and 1859–65). A genial affability, diplomatic expertise, and the celebration of the nation’s liberal political values giving Britain a moral sway in the world, were combined with a subtle cultivation of the press. The expansion of the press, meanwhile, gave further force to ‘public opinion’. Debate ensued about the extent to which the press (the ‘fourth estate’, as Macaulay described it in 1828) educated, expressed or directed ‘public opinion’. But there existed a consensus that the comparative freedom of the British press, in contrast to parts of Continental Europe, was evidence of a constitutional liberty by which the political public were moralised and improved.

Managerial failure in mid-Victorian Britain?: Corporate expansion during a promotion boom

This article examines the mid-1840s expansion of the British railway network, which was associated with a large deterioration in shareholder value. Using a counterfactual approach and new data on railway competition, we argue that the expansion of the railway companies, and their subsequent decline in financial performance, was not due to managerial failure. Rather, the promotion of new routes by established railways and mergers with other companies was part of a managerial strategy to maintain incumbent positions, and may have been preferable to not expanding whilst their competitors did.

Mountaineering, Masculinity, and the Male Body in Mid-Victorian Britain.

Golden-age mountaineers attempted to codify gender, like flora and fauna, by altitude. They zoned the high Alps masculine. As women also reached into the highest regions, male alpinists increasingly turned to their bodies, and the bodies of their guides, to give scientific validity to their all-male preserve. Edward Whymper traveled to the Andes in 1879, where he transformed Chimborazo into a laboratory and his own body and those of his guides into scientific objects. His work helped spearhead a field-based, vertical approach to human physiology that proliferated after the turn of the century. By viewing gender through a spatial lens and using the sides of mountains to map it, this essay highlights the gendered notions that directed early research in high-altitude physiology.