Nineteenth-century Britain Research Articles

Inheriting Empire, Wealth, and Art: The Baring Family and London’s National Gallery in the Nineteenth Century

ABSTRACT The Baring family was one of the most influential families in nineteenth-century Britain. They held great financial power through the merchant bank Baring Brothers, political influence as members of parliament, and cultural pre-eminence through their longstanding involvement with institutions such as the National Gallery. The Barings were also esteemed art collectors. Members of the family gained wealth from both the British East and West Indies, as well as owning plantations and enslaved people in the Danish West Indies. Simultaneously, they gained profits from imperial commerce, made public statements both for and against abolition, while being praised for their picture collection, thus complicating the relationships between their commercial, political, and cultural identities. In light of the Gallery’s bicentenary in 2024, this article, engaging with previously underutilised archival sources, argues that we can write back into the National Gallery’s history the previously absent histories of the British Empire, including the lived experiences of colonised people by using as a case study an intergenerational investigation of a single family.

Arbitration and Mediation in Nineteenth-Century England by Francis Calvert Boorman and Rhiannon Markless

Arbitration and Mediation in Nineteenth-Century England by Francis Calvert Boorman and Rhiannon Markless

Snait B. Gissis, Lamarckism and the emergence of 'scientific' social sciences in nineteenth-century Britain and France, Springer, 2024.

Snait B. Gissis, Lamarckism and the emergence of 'scientific' social sciences in nineteenth-century Britain and France, Springer, 2024.

From fiscal-military state to laissez-faire science: liberal government and the nineteenth-century market of scientific activity

AbstractIn nineteenth-century Britain, the role of the state in the cultivation of scientific activity was controversial. After the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, successive governments rolled back the apparatus of the ‘fiscal-military state’, characterized by high taxation and government spending. What followed was a moment of self-avowedly laissez-faire, liberal governance in which contemporaries placed great emphasis on the value of minimal government intervention in market activity. This not only concerned the nation’s social and economic life, but its scientific culture. Leading political and scientific figures frequently promoted science as something best advanced if left to individuals. Yet by the 1900s, the British state was increasingly engaged in financing and organizing large-scale scientific research. The twentieth century would see governments around the world expand their scientific and technological investment, epitomized by the American concept of ‘Big Science’. This article analyses the relationship between the British government and scientific activity during the nineteenth century and argues that, far from a simple matter of minimal intervention, the state was always highly active in the market of science.

Lamenting the Idyllic--Thomas Hardy’s Nostalgia in Far from the Madding Crowd

The useful conceptions of nostalgia are instrumental for a close look at Thomas Hardy’s pastoral sentiment towards the vanishing rustic life, which is disturbed by the abrupt intrusion of industrialization in the country. Hardy’s pastoral nostalgia finds its refuge in the partly real, partly dreamlike Wessex, in which a self-contained atmosphere of idyllic contentment remains. Through a nostalgic interpretation of Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd, the essay explores Hardy’s nostalgic construction of a fraternal Weatherbury community, including the incarnation of his idealized peasant type Shepherd Oak and the desirably pastoral romance. Through a collection of Hardy’s imaginations, the research aims to probe into the individual’s ambiguous psychology and complicated perception when confronting with the social and cultural transitions in the late nineteenth century England.

The monster mechanical delusion: nineteenth-century controversies concerning perpetual motion

Abstract The history of attempts to make a perpetual motion machine is not (just) the saga of irrational efforts to defy the laws of thermodynamics. In the eighteenth-century Enlightenment there were good reasons to believe in perpetual growth both in Nature and the economy, just as the planets and Sun appeared to move perpetually in the heavens. Why not machines also? In nineteenth-century Britain numerous purported perpetual motion devices were patented and promoted as potential investments in unbounded energy sources. While such frauds were finally prevented by a change in law in 1932 that rendered patents for perpetual motion devices impermissible the lessons learned from six centuries of failed attempts to deliver practical forms of perpetual motion gave some of the strongest evidence to support the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics. In the twenty-first century the energy industry’s solar, wind, geothermal and tidal power generation can now secure effectively free energy to move our machinery for the indefinite future.

‘Stable and Four-Square:’ A Colonial History of Property-Owning Democracy

ABSTRACT This paper explores the colonial history of the theory of ‘property-owning democracy.’ Focusing on R.R. Torrens’ title registration system, the paper links property-owning democracy to nineteenth-century debates on land rights and title registration. Instituted in South Australia in 1858, Torrens’ system linked the simplification of transactions in land to visions of a property-owning society. Seeking to replace complex land laws, Torrens’ system’s emphasis on speeding up land transactions appealed both to settler society and metropole. This transformation facilitated the dispossession of Indigenous lands and intertwined property law with colonial narratives of progress, liberty, and democracy. Ultimately, Torrens’ vision identified democracy with a new property regime securing the future of property title and political rights. Through a common engagement with nineteenth-century Britain’s ‘land question,’ Torrens’ project in South Australia is linked to the development of the twentieth-century political concept of property-owning democracy. The paper makes the case that exploring land registration debates reveals the importance of secure property rights and human capital in the history of ideas of property-owning democracy. Legal and bureaucratic innovations like the property register were considered to free individuals to invest in their own economic development and create the economic conditions for democracy.

The Chinese Freshwater Jellyfish Unbound

Jellyfish are commonly known as dangerous sea creatures that humans should avoid. Focusing on the newly discovered freshwater jellyfish in the late nineteenth century, this article explores a global history of Craspedacusta sowerbii, a species native to China first noted in nineteenth-century Britain but since traveling the world over. The worldwide distribution of C. sowerbii, as both polyps and medusae, made it a global subject of scientific inquiry. However, no independent study has examined the history behind the origin, circulation, and implication of the freshwater jellyfish and its relationship with marine types. The late nineteenth century was the period when our premodern knowledge of jellyfish transformed from it being purely a marine life to the modern recognition of jellyfish as both marine and freshwater organisms, triggered by the discovery and discussion of the Chinese freshwater jellyfish C. sowerbii among naturalists and philosophers. This article focuses on Arthur de Carle Sowerby’s engagement with C. sowerbii in terms of narratives of evolution, nomenclature, and bioinvasion between 1880 and 1941. I argue that jellyfish, as a lowly form of invertebrates, should be taken more seriously by historians of modern China and historians of biology who are interested in the diverse roles of animals in shaping human–animal interactions in the Anthropocene. While the scientific research of jellyfish’s global bloom abounds, the interpretation of the global rise of jellyfish could benefit from a historically and culturally bound analysis of this classical animal. This is particularly so as scientists recognized the diverse perceptions of jellyfish. The global jellyfish bloom requires historical perspectives on a topic that has hitherto received scant attention from historians of science.

Two English Ladies and a Jew from Polotzk: A Chapter in the History of Jewish-Christian Interactions in Nineteenth-Century London

Abstract: The essay treats a fascinating aspect in the life of Solomon Yom Tov Bennett (1767–1838), a Polish-Jewish immigrant trained as a copper engraver but also a gifted Hebraist and biblical exegete who lived in London from 1800 until the year of his death. Despite his many intellectual and artistic talents, the elites of Bennett’s own community rejected him while he was embraced by an impressive number of powerful cultural and political figures from all corners of London’s Christian community. Bennett took full advantage of the opportunities London afforded him to interact with all kinds of Christian patrons, clergy, and literary figures spanning a wide range of political and religious persuasions. While almost all his Christian associates in London were men, two were women. This essay is devoted to these latter two individuals and their unusual relationships with Bennett. Rachel Fanny Antonina Lee (1773?–1829) and Catherine Housman (1770–1855) both employed Solomon Bennett as a copper engraver, but both ultimately developed long-term relations with him that were primarily based on his Hebraic and biblical expertise. But both were radically different individuals. Rachel Fanny Antonina Lee was a well-known public figure tarred in her youth by the allegation she had run away with two brothers who had taken advantage of her, for which she was subsequently scandalized and satirized in the press for indiscretion. In contrast, Catherine Housman, a pious Christian devoted to Bible study, was little known outside her city for her generous acts and literary activity. Bennett’s close relations with both offer a window into the possibilities and limits of Jewish-Christian encounter in nineteenth-century England.

Cash Cows and Dogs with Dentures: Prostheses for Animals in Nineteenth-Century British Culture

Abstract This article shows how the history of prostheticized animals is much deeper and richer than one might think. Investigating the interest in fitting animals with prostheses throughout the nineteenth century in Britain, this article explores the emergence of animal prostheses in bovine agriculture through to their use in late Victorian pet keeping. The key concern of this piece is the varied responses to prostheticized animals in print culture. As this article shows through an analysis of magazine and newspaper contributions, reactions to animal prostheses varied from admiration and amazement to annoyance and disgust. By analysing this coverage, the article reveals how representations of animal prostheses brought into collision a surprising variety of important social discourses, including those related to economic productivity, prosthesis access, food adulteration, professional recognition, social norms, class hierarchies, and gender relations. Animal prostheses proved a novel yet apt image that distilled a wide variety of societal concerns. Redirecting the critical momentum established by recent scholarship that unites disability studies and critical animal studies, this article uses nineteenth-century animal prostheses as a case study to demonstrate how the concepts of disability, ableism, classism, and misogyny have been extended by humans across species boundaries and how our approaches to nonhuman care are impacted by them. It therefore establishes a new field of inquiry within Victorian studies for scholarship on the interface between discourses of disability and nonhuman animals.

‘The Wild West of England’: Enclosure, Stag-Hunting, and the Creation of New Popular Perceptions of Exmoor in the Nineteenth Century

ABSTRACT Recent research emphasises parallels between agrarian enclosure campaigns in eighteenth and nineteenth century Britain and Ireland, and neo-colonial discourses. Both used the ‘wasteful’ under-exploitation of land by indigenous populations as moral justifications for its appropriation for capitalist agriculture. Focusing on reclamation campaigns on Exmoor, a former royal forest in south-west England, sold by the Crown in 1818, this article shows how these discourses were displaced by emergent defences of undeveloped ‘wildness’, advanced in sustained media campaign by advocates of stag hunting. Although they pitted ‘wildness’ against ‘civilised’ agriculture, the article argues that this was an alternative discourse of modernity. 1

Rebuilding the Roman imperial currency in nineteenth century Britain

Rebuilding the Roman imperial currency in nineteenth century Britain

The reckoning table, the periodoscope and the shaping of modern pregnancy in nineteenth-century print forms

How did Victorian print forms shape experiences of pregnancy? This article focuses on pregnancy calendars, a form that rose to prominence in nineteenth-century Britain and Europe. Such calendars appeared in...

'Down pythons' throats we thrust live goats': snakes, zoos and animal welfare in nineteenth-century Britain.

In nineteenth-century Britain, captive snakes in menageries and zoological gardens were routinely fed with live prey - primarily rabbits, pigeons and guinea pigs. From the late 1860s, this practice began to generate opposition on animal welfare grounds, leading to a protracted debate over its necessity, visibility and morality. Focusing on the c.1870-1914 period, when the snake-feeding controversy reached its zenith, this article charts changing attitudes towards the treatment of reptiles in captivity and asks why an apparently niche practice generated so much interest. By looking at the biological arguments put forward for and against live feeding, the article traces the changing nature of humanitarian activism in the late nineteenth century and shows how the shifting character of the live-feeding debate paralleled wider trends in the animal welfare movement. It also highlights the different types of knowledge and expertise involved in the debate, as naturalists, veterinary surgeons, legal professionals, zookeepers and humanitarians offered conflicting perspectives on questions of reptilian dietary requirements and animal sentience.

CRIMINAL INTENT IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND

Abstract This article examines how intention became key to criminal responsibility in nineteenth-century England. It focuses on trials where judges wrested with defence counsel and juries for control over its determination. The most important rule that developed to support proof of intention was the presumption that a person intended the natural and probable consequences of their actions. The article charts the origins and functions of the presumption to offer a revised view of the nineteenth-century foundations of the modern law of criminal intention.

“Spanish” Casta Paintings in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Casta painting, the distinctive Hispanic genre that depicts biracial families, has been well studied by scholars for what it reveals about colonial Latin America. We study its reception in nineteenth-century Britain, which is where some of the earliest known examples of these paintings first appear in the historical record. As we show, they were consistently ascribed to early modern Spanish artists such as Velázquez. Taking seriously such misattributions reveals what nineteenth-century Britons understood by Spanish art and helps recover the period eye that made them plausible. Misattributions are not mere mistakes to be corrected but important subjects in their own right.

Symbolic Meanings of Violets in Villette

Charlotte Brontë bestows symbolic meanings in her novels on some of the vegetation based on their popular meanings and images, and she would have expected contemporary readers to know the meanings of such vegetation. Villette (1853) is marked by the symbolical use of violets. Supported by the image of violets from the language of flowers that was popular in nineteenth-century Britain, this article explores several meanings at play in Brontë’s symbolic use of violets. Firstly, she uses a violet to contrast Paulina’s beauty with Ginevra’s. Secondly, M. Paul Emanuel also communicates his messages through violets. Thirdly, Lucy Snowe reminds us of Lucy Gray from Wordsworth’s poems because both women are associated with violets. And finally, M. Paul is linked to violets to both accentuate his Napoleonic characteristics and to symbolise his short life, evoking Hamlet. They imply his death and the end of his relationship with Lucy, an ending which is not clearly described at the end of the novel.

WALE, Matthew. Making entomologists, how periodicals shaped scientific communities in nineteenth-century Britain

WALE, Matthew. <i>Making entomologists, how periodicals shaped scientific communities in nineteenth-century Britain</i>

The Mesolevel Economy in Nineteenth-Century England and Wales: Applying Input-Output Accounting and Spatial Interaction Modelling to the Historical Study

This paper is offered as a contribution to understanding historical trade. The method of input-output modelling is utilised to evaluate the evolution of cities (and their associated regions) in England and Wales between 1851 and 1911. The construction of input-output accounts for each city region is based on “heroic” data assumptions, which enable the construction of a demonstration model illustrating a new iterative approach to historical analysis. In its current application, the model enables estimates to be made of mesolevel trade between cities, which enhances our analysis of urban evolution in this period.

Thomas Carlyle and kingship

ABSTRACT Despite an efflorescence of historical scholarship on the theme of monarchy in nineteenth-century Britain, the views of the great Victorian man of letters Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) in this regard have been explored only in fragmentary and incomplete fashion. The present article aims to offer a comprehensive survey of Carlyle's thought regarding monarchy, arguing that on the whole, Carlyle was strongly and consistently opposed to monarchy on the hereditary principle, claiming that this had become an absurd anachronism in the modern (democratic) world. Instead, Carlyle strongly and consistently promoted a merit-based aristocracy of talent, in which the ‘best’ man would rule, regardless of heredity or social origin. Indeed, in his historical writings, he was quite prepared to endorse regicide as a means to replacing inept hereditary monarchs with low-born men of destiny such as Oliver Cromwell. Although Carlyle refrained from publicly demanding the abolition of the monarchy in contemporary Britain, his private correspondence and conversation were replete with sneers and snide asides regarding Queen Victoria and her predecessors.