Queen Victoria's Reign Research Articles

The influence of phrenological theory on the science curriculum in Victorian England‡

‡ The term ‘Victorian England’ is commonly used to denote the period of Queen Victoria's reign, from 1837 to 1901. It was during this period that science education in England developed from isolated, individualistic endeavours to a formal component of the school curriculum.

The Unspeakable in Pursuit of the Uneatable: Some Comments on Fox-Hunting

'A MAN wanting to set down a picture of the society of England will find his models at the games' (Masefield, v)-so wrote the former Poet Laureate, John Masefield. His comment underlines the importance of sport in the patterns of traditional English upper-class life-style.' And of all sports, none is perhaps more the object of mawkish sentiment, nationalistic fervour, class warfare and general controversy, than foxhunting. A popular idyllic scene on Beautiful Britain calendars, it is not in fact an ancient sport. Hunting with hounds was a favourite pastime from Saxon times onward, but though it was known at least as early as Edward I's reign (1239-1307), foxes were not hunted regularly till the latter part of the seventeenth century. Before that time they were thought of as vermin and killed by farmers. During the Middle Ages and later hunting was an aristocratic diversion, though usually with a practical end-product: wolves, for example, were dangerous animals which had to be killed, and hare, boar, and deer provided food. Today the correlation of pastime and class remains largely unchanged, because hunting was, and still is, an expensive sport. In the nineteenth century, when money was worth much more, it cost the Master of a Hunt between ?2,000 and ?4,000 a year to maintain his own packs of hounds and underwrite the organisation. Only wealthy landowners could afford to do this, and by the end of Queen Victoria's reign (1901) most hunts were under subscription; few private packs were left. Subscriptions vary from ?15 to as much as ?75. There is also the cost of a saddle, a good horse and its upkeep, and of course the correct outfit. In his Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man the poet Siegfried Sassoon (b. 1896) describes his feelings of social discomfort on appearing improperly dressed at his first hunt:

Counting the Degenerates: The Statistics of Race Deterioration in Edwardian England

Britain's experience in the Boer War, as even enthusiastic supporters of that conflict conceded, was not an auspicious debut to the twentieth century. The early military disasters and protracted difficulties encountered in subduing a small, presumably inferior nation of stubborn farmers and herdsmen, stirred up serious doubts about the ability of the race to cope with the complex challenges it would surely confront in the decades ahead. Liberal imperialists and other advocates of 'national efficiency' were not alone in seeing signs of physical, mental, intellectual, even cultural and artistic deterioration, among important sectors of the population, which, in the closing years of Queen Victoria's reign, pointed to a decided waning of the extraordinary 'racial energy' that had carried imperial Britain to pre-eminence in the nineteenth century. The uninspiring performance of the armed forces in South Africa, following upon several years of agricultural and industrial depression, rural depopulation and mounting commercial and imperial competition from expansive new rivals, provoked a veritable orgy of criticism, enquiry and analysis focusing upon the alarming possibility that the race was somehow decaying. These anxieties, which persisted until muted by the outbreak of the First World War, were compounded by a growing awareness on the part of the Edwardians that their fertility was decidedly below that of their Victorian predecessors. The following pages examine the public debate about 'race' deterioration or decadence, as the more pessimistic feared, which preoccupied a substantial number of middleand upper-class politi-

Child Workers in the Pillow Lace and Straw Plait Trades of Victorian Buckinghamshire and Bedfordshire

Although for most country girls in Victorian England the choice of work outside the home was limited to domestic service, there were certain areas to which this did not apply. In some cases the reason lay in the existence of competing employment in local factories or workshops - so that in Lancashire (taking rural and urban districts together) about one in four girls aged between ten and fifteen were employed in cotton manufacture at the time of the 1871 Census of Population. But in other places, the cause was the continued survival of a cottage industry in which child labour played a significant role and where ‘a wellordered family [could] obtain as much or more than the husband who [was] at work on [a] neighbouring farm’ This latter circumstance applied to the counties of Buckinghamshire and Bedfordshire, where particularly during the first half of Queen Victoria's reign the pillow lace and straw plait trades were of considerable importance - the latter being organized primarily to meet the needs of the hat industry of Luton and Dunstable. Table 1 shows the size of the work force as recorded in the Census Reports of 1851,1861 and 1871. Nevertheless, these figures are probably an under-estimate of the true position, since many of the women and children working only on a part-time basis did not bother to declare their occupation to the Census enumerator.

A fertility survey in the Maltese Islands

Abstract In order to determine whether fertility is declining in Malta, a sample was taken by the Maltese Central Statistical Office in mid-1955, along the line of the Family Census of 1946 in Great Britain. The size of the sample was 10,000, and the response very good. The sample shows no noticeable decline in fertility since the marriage cohorts of the beginning of the century. Some decline is noticeable int he fertility of the later durations of marriage, but completed family size remained more than 6 for the cohorts of the 1920's. This contrasts with the declining fertility shown by the enquiry in Great Britain, and the figure of 6 is in fact much greater than the completed families born to cohorts in Great Britain at the end of Queen Victoria's reign. Fertility seems in fact to be still rising in Malta for the first 18 months of marriage; and the first decade of marriage continues to show an average of 4 births. It seems therefore that the recent decline in the birth rate is to be attributed to chang...

Portrait of an England

Some fourteen years ago Lord David Cecil published a penetra‐ting study of the greater English novelists of the mid‐nineteenth century. That was a period of our literature which in one way was the converse of that in which we are living. Today we have a con‐siderable number of competent and more than respectable novelists of the second class, but surely none who is indisputably of the first. In the first half of Queen Victoria's reign there were five or six of the first class, and best sellers at that, and after them almost nothing in front of a great crowd of also‐rans.

The Imperial Conference of 1937

THIS year is studded with anniversaries for English-speaking peoples. It marks the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the drafting of the American constitution; the centenary of the Canadian rebellions, which were responsible for the ablest state paper in British colonial policy, Lord Durham's report; and the fiftieth anniversary of the Imperial Conference. The least attention has been paid to the last of these anniversaries, fact which appears somewhat surprising in view of the area and importance of the British Commonwealth of Nations, and its oft-repeated claim to have reconciled unity and freedom, the imperial connection and dominion nationalisms. The absence of celebrations may be due to the sobering realization that the golden years of unchallenged British supremacy have passed, or to the uneasy apprehension that this ambitious experiment in empire organization is presenting as serious problems of both machinery and policy as the federations which were established in Canada and Australia. When the Colonial conference assembled in i887, during the Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria's reign, it counted for little, and, in fact, owed its very existence to the activities of one of those unofficial political associations which play so great part in British history. The Imperial Federation League interviewed Lord Salisbury, the Prime Minister, in August i886 with the request that he call conference with the colonies to discuss trade, communications, naval policy and any other means for securing the closer federation or union of all parts of the empire. Lord Salisbury agreed and his colonial secretary, Sir Henry Holland, prominent member of the League, acted as chairman. The delegates were chosen in rather casual fashion, those from Canada for instance being the Lieutenant-Governor of Ontario and Sir Sanford Fleming, the distinguished engineer; and the conference was in Mr. Duncan Hall's words a casual and amorphous thing. Few took its proceedings seriously. True, Lord Salisbury solemnly hailed

Recent Literature Hospitals and Asylums of the World: Their Origin, History, Construction, Administration, Management and Legislation . With plans of the chief Medical Institutions accurately drawn to a uniform scale, in addition to those of all the Hospitals of London in the Jubilee Year of Queen Victoria's Reign. By Henry C. Burdett. In Four Volumes and a Portfolio. London: J.

Recent Literature Hospitals and Asylums of the World: Their Origin, History, Construction, Administration, Management and Legislation . With plans of the chief Medical Institutions accurately drawn to a uniform scale, in addition to those of all the Hospitals of London in the Jubilee Year of Queen Victoria's Reign. By Henry C. Burdett. In Four Volumes and a Portfolio. London: J.

Recent Literature Hospitals and Asylums of the World: Their Origin, History, Construction, Administration, Management and Legislation . With plans of the chief medical institutions accurately drawn to a uniform scale, in addition to those of all the hospitals of London in the Jubilee year of Queen Victoria's reign. By Henry C. Burdett. In four volumes and portfolio. Vols. I and

Recent Literature Hospitals and Asylums of the World: Their Origin, History, Construction, Administration, Management and Legislation . With plans of the chief medical institutions accurately drawn to a uniform scale, in addition to those of all the hospitals of London in the Jubilee year of Queen Victoria's reign. By Henry C. Burdett. In four volumes and portfolio. Vols. I and