Mid-nineteenth Century Britain Research Articles

Spoils of War among the Art Treasures: Exhibiting Empire in Mid-Nineteenth Century Britain

ABSTRACT This essay investigates the assemblage, curation and reception of ‘oriental’ material culture at the Exhibition of Art Treasures of the United Kingdom held in Manchester in 1857. It does so to examine the relationship between exhibitions and empire in the mid-nineteenth century. Going ‘behind the scenes’ of the exhibition, interrogating the provenance of the objects and the actors involved in the assemblage, the essay reveals how some of the objects were infamous spoils of war, a detail omitted from the exhibition narrative as they were recast as ‘art treasures’, generously donated by their British owners for the benefit of the public. In analysing this dynamic, the essay builds on the current scholarship on imperial exhibitions by demonstrating an alternative, more subtle, way in which empire was ‘domesticated’ to British audiences. In addition, the essay challenges our current understanding of imperial exhibitions as masculine endeavours by revealing that Annette Royle played a key role in the curation of ‘oriental’ objects in Manchester, as well as at the other major exhibitions of Indian material culture in this period.

‘An Exceedingly Painful Case’: The Aftermath of Divorce in Mid-Nineteenth Century England and Wales

Research into the Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act 1857 has revealed surprising and unexpected findings, particularly surrounding the accessibility of the Divorce Courts, and the relatively slow uptake of English and Welsh couples who sought to legally dissolve their unions. The aftermath of this process – when the dust of the court room had settled and the litigation was (one way or another) complete – has received significantly less attention, with our knowledge of post-divorce life limited predominately to brief discussion of remarriage statistics. This article uses divorce petitions, census returns, probate records, newspaper reports, and parish records, to reconstruct five case studies to explore what happened to couples after their divorce petitions had been heard and a judgment made. Although in some cases divorce could represent a distinct end point in a relationship and the start of a new stage of the lifecycle, for others an appearance before the Divorce Court was a further step in a longer series of litigation, as well as an event that continued to exert influence on their socio-economic opportunities and prospects. These case studies reveal important new information about how individual understanding of the law influenced the decision-making processes of the men and women whose marriages had ended and indicate the wealth of research waiting to be carried out.

Women and Children First: Appropriated Fiction in the Ten Hours’ Advocate

This article examines interclass strategies to bring about reform in mid-nineteenth century England. It specifically explores the way the Ten Hours’ Advocate, a paper written for the working classes, looked to present itself as a middle-class periodical in order to further the argument for factory reform. In reproducing fiction filched from middle-class periodicals, the Advocate performed its argument for the Factory Bill: that the Bill would ease social tensions, dissipate the Chartist or radical threat, and ensure a “return” to traditional gender roles. The appropriated fiction is mild, rather bland; the non-fictional argument for reform is direct and unapologetic. That the Advocate was opportunistic in the way it made the case for reform is an example of the advantages provided to reformers by the absence of strict copyright laws and by Victorian periodical culture in general. But it also contextualises the debate over the family-wage argument and the working-class role in hardening the Victorian sexual division of labour.

Aspects of the Decline of English Rough Music and Effigy-burning and the Transformation of the Fifth of November in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

ABSTRACT One of the most important practices associated with rough music, the effigy-burning of unpopular neighbours, was still practiced widely in mid-nineteenth century England, including on the Fifth of November, or Guy Fawkes Night. But once the Fifth became transformed by new patronage, the practice of effigy-burning became the object of criticism and policing and generally declined after 1900. It had undergone a steady stream of criticism in the press and in the magistrates’ courts and was by the twentieth century regarded as a cultural anachronism. Meanwhile the Fifth of November, which had always been a day of entertainment, was increasingly embraced by commercialism after 1918.

The Ten Hours Movement and the Working-Class Family in Mid-Nineteenth Century Britain

AbstractThe Ten Hours Movement of the 1830s and 1840s in Britain was the first large-scale working-class struggle to challenge the impact of industrial capitalism upon working-class family life. Yet its discourse on family has been relatively neglected by historians of the movement. This article examines the nature of the movement's critique, the vision of family life that it tried to realize, and the challenge that this posed to the emerging bourgeois order and, on this basis, to reconsider its contribution to the gender ordering of working-class family life.

Corruption and the Public Service Ethos in Mid-Victorian Administration: The Case of Leonard Horner and the Factory Office

Abstract While the problem of political corruption in mid-nineteenth century Britain has been much studied, the experience of corrupt behaviour in public bodies, both new and long established, is comparatively neglected. This article takes the example of one of the first inspectorates set up after the Great Reform Act, the Factory Office, to examine the extent of corrupt practices in the British civic state and the means whereby it was addressed. It examines the changing processes of appointment, discipline and promotion, the issues of remuneration and venality, and the relationships between inspectors, workers, factory owners, the government and the wider civil service, and the press and public opinion. The article argues that the changing attitudes of the inspectors, especially those of Leonard Horner, were indicative of a developing ‘public service ethos’ in both bureaucratic and cultural settings and that the work of such unsung administrators was one of the agencies through which corrupt behaviour in the civic structures of Victorian Britain was, with public support, challenged. The article concludes that the endogenous reform of bureaucratic practice achieved by the factory inspectorate may even be of equal significance as that which resulted from the celebrated Northcote–Trevelyan Report of 1854.

Were Banks Special? Contrasting Viewpoints in Mid-Nineteenth Century Britain

In 1853 a Royal Commission was set up to investigate whether laws related to limited liability in Britain needed to be modified. As part of its evidence gathering the commission issued a questionnaire that included a number of questions on whether banks should be subject to the same liability laws as other types of commercial enterprises. This paper analyses the responses to the questions about banks to understand whether banks were seen as a special case. Support for modifying the law to make limited liability more easily available to banks was lower than for enterprises in general. Banks were seen as a special case because of the risk of bank runs and because their creditors were not able to assess accurately the riskiness of banks. But the special nature of banks caused others to favour limited liability because it made banks’ capital levels more transparent. These arguments echo wider debates during the nineteenth century and are similar to contemporary theories for why banks are regulated.

‘Come with me, sweetest sister’: Unravelling the Enigma of Sacred Sisterhood in Aurora Leigh by Elizabeth Barrett Browning and “Goblin Market” by Christina Rossetti

Throughout the Victorian era, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti occupied a prominent position in a newly emerging female literary movement. Both authors sought to resist and revise the limitations of Victorian womanhood through the composition of controversial works that rivalled the achievements of their male contemporaries. In the 1856 epic Aurora Leigh by Elizabeth Barrett Browning and the 1862 narrative poem “Goblin Market” by Christina Rossetti, both Barrett Browning and Rossetti employ an early feminist perspective to explore the parameters of Victorian sisterhood and the potential strength of female friendship. Although Laura, Lizzie and Jeanie in Rossetti’s work possess a sororal relationship that is distinct from Marian Erle and Aurora Leigh’s relationship in Barrett Browning’s work, the innumerable connections between both publications have caused critics to compare and hierarchize the two authors. Thus, a literary sisterhood has developed between Barrett Browning and Rossetti that curiously mirrors the sisterhoods of their fictions. This paper seeks to assess the inescapable presence of sisterhood in Aurora Leigh and “Goblin Market” by analyzing the manner in which a sisterly connection, not only through blood relations but also through close friendships that resemble sisterhood, allowed female forces to be allied, nurtured, and empowered amidst the patriarchal and misogynist structures of mid-nineteenth century Britain.

Insulting Jean Massieu: Debating Representational Control of Deaf People in Mid-Nineteenth Century Britain

In 1876, an educator of the deaf and a ‘deaf-mute’ publicly clashed over topics ranging from the nature of deafness and the identity of those who are ‘deaf-mute’ to the best methods to be used in deaf education and what deaf children following those methods might be expected to achieve. The debate occurred at a point in the nineteenth century when expert authority ‘about’ deaf people was beginning to sweep away deaf people’s own right to self-representation. Although richly nuanced and highly personal, the debate’s occurrence at a period that studies of the history of the deaf community have identified as pivotal to deaf people’s categorisation as ‘disabled’ means that much of its complexity has been lost in subsequent historical over-writing. This article explores the debate in depth. It provides a valuable glimpse into the mechanisms of expertise, and the ways that both non-deaf and deaf experts understood who deaf people were, what they could do, and what their place within society should be at that pivotal time. It also highlights the rich complexity of a much more complex history available to those prepared to dig beneath the surface to expose historical texture.

Past, Present, and Pornography

Past, Present, and Pornography Simon Joyce (bio) Early on in The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth Century England (1966), Steven Marcus lays down a marker of methodological principle with the declaration that he will not “play the easy game of ‘showing up the past,’” a statement that raises the question of what relationship between present and past he is suggesting instead (12–13). One possibility arrives via a book that Marcus influenced, and that has in many respects come to overshadow his own: Michel Foucault’s first volume of The History of Sexuality (1976). From its opening sentence invoking how “the story goes” (or has gone up to now) (3), Foucault’s introductory chapter “We ‘Other Victorians’” details what he terms “the speaker’s benefit” that typically accrues when we “show up” the past: if we can continue to view the past as repressive, deluded, or hypocritical, we can pat ourselves on the back for being bold, truthful, and liberated—the other of those Victorians (6). Marcus figured pornography as a contemporary “other” to the Victorian mainstream and, in interesting ways, to the canonical Victorian novel; we might want to ask, though, what Foucault meant by positioning us as those “other Victorians.” Do our ways of thinking and talking about sex align with Victorian pornography, running against or alongside more dominant images of the period? Or are “we” simply more “Victorian” than we like to allow—in which case, do we show up the present, or compliment the past for being a lot more modern than we usually admit? I pose these questions not only to get at the complicated relationship in Marcus between past (or pasts: the Victorian one and its contemporary other) and present (or presents: that of the early 1960s and today), but also to think through the relationship between his text and Foucault’s. When I [End Page 466] wrote The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror (2007), I placed what now seems to me an undue emphasis on the notion of otherness, suggesting that figuring pornography as a Victorian subcultural underground shared with other recovery projects a desire to isolate some progressive element in the past that might have gone largely unnoticed at the time. In that reading, far from “showing up the past,” Marcus was seeking to compliment it by rescuing a nugget of proto-modernity from what E. P. Thompson famously called “the enormous condescension of posterity” (12). Re-reading The Other Victorians now, I’m more struck by how its vision of the past as emergent modernity is offset by a counteracting view of pornography’s otherness as signaled instead—or at the same time—by its regressiveness. Victorian pornography’s forward-looking capacity is best exemplified by Marcus’s reading of My Secret Life (1888), a text he views as evolving a conception of sexuality that is “an end in itself and not merely a means to something” (189); elsewhere, he refers to this as a “significant anticipation of what is generally thought of as the modern, liberal, and liberated conception of sexual morality” (151). In between those two assertions, however, this idea of anticipation gets radically qualified, as My Secret Life is said to represent “the last prepsychological epoch of modern culture” in part because its author is so reluctant to reflect upon his own sexuality. Along the same lines, the work’s “revolutionary” quality (such a loaded term in the 1960s) is called into question because its vision of sexual self-liberation does not extend consistently to its social attitudes (166). It is not only My Secret Life that emerges from The Other Victorians as Janus-faced—“emergent” and “residual” at the same time, to use Raymond Williams’s terms (121–27). The prodigious output of the pornographer James Campbell Reddie is described in one memorable sentence as “an interesting combination of stale eighteenth-century euphemisms and some kind of mid-Victorian anticipation of Mickey Spillaine,” a formulation that nicely suggests Marcus’s present as an echo of an even older past that brackets the Victorian (239). It is easy to see what he means by this, given the presence throughout Victorian pornography of...

Stones of Science: Charles Harriot Smith and the Importance of Geology in Architecture, 1834-64

In mid nineteenth-century Britain, the study of geology involved radical new understandings of the earth's history. This had ramifications for architecture, providing new ways of seeing stone and designing buildings. This article examines the works of stone-mason Charles Smith. Following the destruction of the Houses of Parliament in 1834, the government initiated a national survey to select a stone for Britain's new legislature. Alongside geologists Henry De la Beche and William Smith, Charles Smith toured the buildings and quarries of Britain, producing a report that was intended to guide not only the choice of stone at Westminster, but all future architectural projects. He spent the following two decades promoting geological knowledge for architectural work. His reading of texts that examined the earth's geological formation, such as Charles Lyell's, shaped new understandings of stone and cement. This article demonstrates how, in a rapidly industrialising society, geology and architecture became increasingly inseparable.

Anatomy on trial: Itinerant anatomy museums in mid nineteenth-century England

ABSTRACTIn the mid nineteenth century there were several travelling collections of anatomical waxworks in England. Their stated aim was to educate the public, especially women, about health, particularly reproductive health, to which end their proprietors gave demonstrations, sold pamphlets, and in some cases practised medicine. Most large population centres on the railway network played host to a museum and the total number of visitors is estimated at over a million. Despite a lack of complaints from the public, there was opposition from the magistrates which resulted in a series of prosecutions on charges of obscenity. Owing to their impermanence and their reputation as indecent exhibitions, these itinerant anatomy museums all but disappeared from cultural histories of nineteenth-century England. They were, however, sufficiently successful in engaging with audiences that they briefly challenged the monopoly that the medical profession — newly unified under the Medical Act — exercised over the study of anatomy.

Stones of Science: Charles Harriot Smith and the Importance of Geology in Architecture, 1834–64

AbstractIn mid nineteenth-century Britain, the study of geology involved radical new understandings of the earth's history. This had ramifications for architecture, providing new ways of seeing stone and designing buildings. This article examines the works of stone-mason Charles Smith. Following the destruction of the Houses of Parliament in 1834, the government initiated a national survey to select a stone for Britain's new legislature. Alongside geologists Henry De la Beche and William Smith, Charles Smith toured the buildings and quarries of Britain, producing a report that was intended to guide not only the choice of stone at Westminster, but all future architectural projects. He spent the following two decades promoting geological knowledge for architectural work. His reading of texts that examined the earth's geological formation, such as Charles Lyell's, shaped new understandings of stone and cement. This article demonstrates how, in a rapidly industrialising society, geology and architecture became increasingly inseparable.

Collecting Histories

Collecting Histories Lynn Ransom In the fall of 2014, the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies convened the Seventh Annual Lawrence J. Schoenberg Symposium on Manuscript Studies in the Digital Age to consider the question: what can the study of collecting habits and provenance tell us about manuscript culture?1 Sometimes considered niche areas of interest, the history of collecting and provenance studies have broad implications for how we understand and interpret the manuscript book today. In the symposium, which we called “Collecting Histories,” our aim was to tease out some of those implications and provoke further thought on how examining patterns of collecting confirms or confounds assumptions about readership and the interpretation of texts and contexts of the premodern manuscript. This issue of Manuscript Studies highlights the results of the “Collecting Histories” symposium and continues the conversations started during the event. As the contributions in this issue reveal, the life of a manuscript book only begins when a scribe puts down his or her pen. What happens from that moment to the present day can reveal a wealth of information about readership and reception across time. [End Page 161] Patterns of collecting can shed light on the cultural and intellectual values of societies, institutions, and the individuals who create, conserve, and disperse manuscript collections for a variety of reasons. At a fundamental level, these patterns can tell us about the changing role of manuscripts across time, from simple vehicles of textual transmission to revered objects of collectors’ desires. For example, Megan L. Cook’s essay highlights an early instance of how a manuscript copy of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (now Cambridge University Library, MS Gg.4.27) represented for its early sixteenth-century collector a better witness, and therefore more authoritative version, of Chaucer’s original work than contemporary printed editions due to its perceived proximity to Chaucer’s own time and to the author himself. Lisa Fagin Davis also considers how collectors’ relationships to past ideals inform collecting habits in her exploration of the journey of an illuminated breviary made for a church in France in the fifteenth century that ended up in the library of a Hollywood movie star-turned-missionary in the middle of the twentieth century. Other essays reveal how trends in scholarship as well as in the trade both reflect and shape the interpretive frameworks that motivate collectors to focus on certain types or groupings of manuscripts over others. For example, William P. Stoneman considers the effect that two key scholarly exhibitions in mid-nineteenth century England had on the dispersal of one man’s collection and on the acquisition of another’s. Similarly, in her essay on the motivations of Isabella Stuart Gardner, the great collector of the golden age of Venetian painting, Anne Marie-Eze argues that Gardner began to acquire Venetian illuminated manuscripts, which were otherwise largely overlooked by other North American collectors at the time, under the direct influence of her teacher and early historian of Venetian art Charles Eliot Norton, who also happened to be a dealer. As was the case with Gardner, the forces that propelled the buying and selling of manuscripts could have a protective effect upon the books that passed through the trade. Gardner was determined to preserve her precious manuscripts intact for future generations to study and to appreciate as intended by the culture that created them. Other essays and contributions to this volume expose the deleterious effects that the trade can have on these books when they are taken, frequently by theft, from personal and [End Page 162] institutional libraries or broken up and sold as fragments or individual leaves for greater profit. Julia Verkholantsev tracks, for instance, the provenance of a fragment of a Greek New Testament now in the University of California’s Young Research Library’s Special Collections back to the renowned library of St. Catherine’s Monastery on Mt. Sinai. She makes the strong case that it was stolen in the nineteenth century likely by a biblical scholar who may have wanted the fragment for his own study, or possibly for his own profit, as it appeared on the market relatively soon after its last appearance in a...

Evangelical Protestants, Jews, and the Epistle to the Hebrews in midnineteenth-century Britain*

Evangelical Protestants, Jews, and the Epistle to the Hebrews in midnineteenth-century Britain*

TheArt-Journaland Fine Art Publishing in Victorian England, 1850–1880

The two books under review deal in very different ways with aspects of the production and circulation of visual imagery in mid-nineteenth century Britain. Both volumes grow out of the interest in V...

John Mason Neale and ‘Sacrilege’: Spelman (1643) Re-Invigorated

In 1846 a new, greatly expanded, edition of Sir Henry Spelman's History and fate of Sacrilege (1643, published in 1698) appeared, edited anonymously by ‘two priests of the Church of England’. These priests were John Mason Neale and his friend and apparent assistant Joesph Haskoll. The monograph-length introductory essay and other editorial contributions show, as well as vast learning, an aspect of Neale's multi-faceted achievement hitherto unnoticed, that of a stringent critic of great families and other lay people who possessed former church property (Spelman's definition of ‘Sacrilege’) and, more widely, of political and economic conditions in mid nineteenth-century England.

Dickens and Race by Laura Peters (review)

Laura Peters. Dickens and Race. Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 2013. Pp. xii + 170. $100; 63 [pounds sterling]. There is a question that at some point all Dickens students, scholars and enthusiasts are forced to ask themselves: how we reconcile Dickens, the champion of the London poor, the fighter for social justice, with the Dickens who advocated that the race should be raze[d] off the face of the Earth (110) and who published an article arguing that executing Indian mutineers by blowing them from the mouths of cannons was not painful enough? Do we simply put it down to Victorian hypocrisy? Was Dickens the emblematic man of his times in this regard, as in so many other ways, or were there more fundamental reasons for his apparently contradictory attitude towards race and class? During the 2012 bicentenary celebrations, many of which were organized by the British Council, this question loomed large but remained largely unarticulated. If Dickens were writing today, it was proclaimed more than once, he would not be writing of London but of Delhi or Mumbai, Lagos or Rio de Janeiro. But what would the man who stated that if he were Commander in Chief of India he would do [his] utmost to exterminate the have made of such a claim (109)? In her new book Dickens and Race, Laura Peters provides some tentative answers to these questions and some much needed contextualization. As Peters points out, critics have tended to shy away from acknowledging the full measure of Dickens's objectionable views on racial difference and the extent to which they influenced his work. There has been a widespread desire to read journalistic efforts like his 1833 article Noble Savage and his reaction to the Indian Mutiny of 1857 as aberrant and exceptional. But, as Peters adeptly proves, this was not the case. Rather such reactions were part of a larger pattern of thinking about science, fancy and race. Starting in the 1840s with Dombey and Son and an early review piece for The Examiner, Peters traces the development of Dickens's thinking about race in the 1840s through the controversial fifties and then onto the post-Darwin era. Emphasizing the influence of life-long interests in travel literature and the exotic on the one hand, and racial science on the other, Peters charts how contemporary debates on science, empire and social justice coalesced with the ideas of childhood, fancy and the exotic in Dickens's mind. In Peters's conception, race is a powerful signifier for Dickens, representing something both profoundly personal and politically significant. The first two chapters map out the different trends in thinking about race in mid-nineteenth century Britain and Dickens's relation to them. At the beginning of Peters's period, Dickens's racial thinking, as with most of his contemporaries, is based on ideas of civilization and class. Race is cultural rather than biological. Dickens is a polygeist and views the different races as all fundamentally belonging to the same species. Differences were viewed as the result of differing levels of civilization. But, as Peters shows, with the publication of Robert Knox's The Races of Men (1850) and the ascendency in contemporary scientific culture of the notion of race as biologically determined, the idea of a shared humanity gave way to one of a hierarchy of races. Race, in other words, was not simply a matter of difference, or of environment, but of innate biological difference that reflected a supposed deficiency in the non-white races. At mid-century, to be African or to be Oriental was to be less human. …

Sports, Bodies, and Futures: An Epilogue

Since their invention in mid-nineteenth century Britain, modern sports have traveled: first, as they were exported to all regions of the world, often piggybacking on colonial projects; second, as sports are often brought to troubled economies and states in the context of development and reconciliation projects; and third, as athletes moved across national and other borders to play and seek a livelihood by playing. Athlete mobility is more alive than ever in the contemporary world, and Pacific Islanders’ participation in this mobility is disproportionate to the visibility of their nations on the global stage. Understanding the meaning of sport in the region, however, raises important questions whose implications reach beyond the confines of sport: the workings of power in a world in which bodies become commodities; the conflicts that arise between different epistemologies of development and resource use; and the clashes between different conceptualizations of the future.

The Interface of the Civil and Criminal Law of Suicide at Common Law (1194-1845)

Nowadays, suicide is considered essentially a private act, although what constitutes suicide for epidemiological and even clinical purposes in not wholly resolved. Historically, however, at common law, the act of self-killing was a felony with significant religious and legal consequences that impacted upon the deceased person as well as upon his or her whole family. This article identifies the influence of Christian theology, legal theory, and social and medical developments upon attitudes to the felony of self-murder and its definition. It focuses upon what it identifies as the start of a liberalisation in more psychologically informed attitudes manifested in landmark court judgments involving exclusion clauses in insurance contracts in mid-nineteenth century England. The article illustrates that the law in respect of socially controversial matters neither necessarily develops in a linear progression, nor accurately reflects public sentiments. More specifically, it describes an ongoing definitional conundrum with suicide – whether it should be designated as committed by persons of significantly impaired mental state. It observes that in spite of reform to the criminal law of suicide, the civil law relating to suicide has continued to be characterized by ambivalence, ambiguity and significant vestiges of counter-therapeutic moralizing.