Victorian Liberalism Research Articles

‘Schools for the moral training of the people’: Public Baths, Liberalism and the Promotion of Cleanliness in Victorian Britain1

This article examines Victorian public baths as institutions of active, embodied liberalism: as political spaces where subjects went to practise and enhance their powers of self-government, and in so doing embody and perform a clean and respectable lifestyle. To some extent, public baths can be understood as disciplinary institutions. According to its promoters, personal cleanliness went hand in hand with sober, industrious habits and a conscientious sense of domestic and social responsibility. At the same time, they also formed significant ethical sites, for bathing was a privilege that had to be paid for and as such actively adopted as a lifestyle choice; and, to this extent, they were about facilitating, rather than coercing, a certain civilised freedom. Public baths also allow for an exploration of the material facets of Victorian liberalism, of its spatial and corporeal dimensions. Washing was a practice that not only took place within a privatising architecture but one that also entailed an intensified awareness of the materiality of the self, and especially its covering, the skin. As an art of the self, as a form of subjective individualisation, washing was at once an ethical and a sensory, a moral and a physical, enactment of power. résumé Cet article se penche sur les bains publics comme un exemple pratique et physique du libéralisme, comme un espace ou les possibilités de la connaissance de soi et de la gouvernementalité pouvaient s'exprimer. Dans un certain sens les bains publics avaient une fonction disciplinaire dans le sens d'un parallèle entre la propreté et la sobriété, la responsabilité et la domesticité. En un autre sens les bains représentaient un site éthique dans la mesure où ils restaient un privilège payant et un choix de vie qui facilitait plutôt qu'il ne forçait une entrée dans le domaine de la liberté et de la civilité. Les bains publics permettent aussi une exploration de l'espace physique et matériel du libéralisme et des rapports entre une entreprise de type privé et les soins du corps et plus particulièrement de la peau. Dans ce sens les soins corporels et les bains représentaient un ensemble d'exercices du pouvoir de soi sur soi: éthique, sensorial, moral et physique.

Presidential Address: The Empire Strikes Back: The Nineteenth-Century Origins of the Canadian Secret Service

While the history of the RCMP security service is becoming better known, study of its nineteenth-century predecessors is just beginning. From experiments with a rural police force established in Lower Canada in the aftermath of the 1837 Rebellions, the United Provinces of Canada created two secret police forces in 1864 to protect the border from American invasion. With the end of the Civil War, these forces turned to protecting the Canadas from Fenian activities. The Dominion Police, established in 1868, provided a permanent home for the secret service. The NWMP followed in 1873. Unlike the English, whose Victorian liberalism was suspicious of political and secret police, Canadians appear to have been much more accepting of such organisations and did not challenge John A. Macdonald's creation or control of a secret police. Republicanism, whether in the guise of Quebec, Irish or American nationalism, was seen as antithetical to the new nation of Canada, and a secret police was deemed necessary to protect the nation against it.

Perfection, the State, and Victorian Liberalism (review)

Perfection, the State, and Victorian Liberalism (review)

Bodily Matters: The Anti-Vaccination Movement in England, 1853-1907 (review)

Reviewed by: Bodily Matters: The Anti-Vaccination Movement in England, 1853–1907 Martin Fichman (bio) Bodily Matters: The Anti-Vaccination Movement in England, 1853–1907, by Nadja Durbach; pp. xiii + 276. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005, $22.95, £14.95. The anti-vaccination movement in England during the latter half of the nineteenth century, despite its medical, political, and cultural significance, has scarcely been [End Page 532] noticed—much less analyzed—by historians of the Victorian period. Nadja Durbach's Bodily Matters is one of the very few recent works to redress this historiographical oversight. Drawing on a variety of published as well as unpublished documents—including Parliamentary papers, newspapers and periodicals, and the archives of a wide variety of English libraries and public records offices—Durbach provides a lively and informed account of this fascinating episode in Victorian history. Durbach focuses on the period from the enactment of the Compulsory Vaccination Act in 1853 until 1907, when magistrates were authorized to grant numerous exemptions to parents who "conscientiously objected" to compulsory vaccination of their children. In one sense, the 1907 decision marked a major victory for popular protest against growing state intervention in the late Victorian period. But anti-vaccination, as Durbach demonstrates, was far more complex an issue than merely one of ever-increasing state control. The strength of Bodily Matters is its nuanced account of the multiple factors at play in late-Victorian vaccination debates. Durbach is at her surest when she details the "events of the resistance campaign and the richness of its rhetorical strategies" (11). She accomplishes this by locating the anti-vaccination movement within a broad range of dissenting movements that formed the "vibrant culture of political protest and social reform that was characteristic of the second half of the nineteenth century" (11). Anti-vaccinationism grew, in part, "out of well-established traditions of medical dissent that pitted [certain segments] of the people against the alliance of orthodox medicine and a bureaucratic state" (36). Durbach shows how the anti-vaccinationists found allies within other movements by "tapping into concerns over working-class exploitation," such as those at the heart of the cooperative and trade unionist agitation. Other allies were to be found among the ranks of Noncomformists and relatively new alternatives such as spiritualism, theosophy, and Swedenborgianism. These particular movements were tied together by similar theories of the relationship between physical and spiritual health. Vaccination was considered an invasion of both the bodies and minds of those vaccinated. Equally crucial was the perception of enthusiastic groups of progressive and humanitarian activists who added the anti-vaccination cause to their social and political agendas. Rounding out this "community of dissent," female "social reformers began to absorb anti-vaccinationism into their feminist platform[s]" (46). Anti-vaccinationism was, thus, a movement that cut across both class and gender lines. The populist rhetoric of anti-vaccinationism appealed to middle, lower middle, and working classes, as well as to certain members of the gentry. This flexible rhetoric "found its clearest expression in the language of citizenship that emphasized the rights of the freeborn" English men and women (71). Durbach also shows how anti-vaccinationism forced a clarification of certain elements of Victorian liberalism. She is careful to emphasize, however, that this cross-class campaign was not without considerable tension: "The classed nature of the implementation of vaccination policy meant that the values and goals of [anti-vaccination] campaigners were sometimes in conflict" (92). Members of the middle and upper classes had financial and political resources to resist the lancet of vaccination that most working-class agitators simply did not possess. As its title implies, Durbach's study focuses on changing concepts of the body in late-nineteenth-century England. Chapter 5, "Vampire, Vivisectors, and the Victorian Body," is, arguably, the most provocative section of the book. "By scarifying the flesh and introducing disease into the system," as its opponents maintained, "vaccination threatened [End Page 533] strongly held beliefs regarding bodily integrity and blood purity. It also wielded the power . . . to transform the individual into something 'other,' a monstrous version of the self" (113). The language of violation, contamination, and degeneration was central to the anti-vaccination...

Bodily matters: the anti-vaccination movement in England, 1853-1907

Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1. The Parliamentary Lancet 13 2. Fighting the Babies' Battle 37 3. Populism, Citizenship, and the Politics of Victorian Liberalism 69 4. The Body Politics of Class Formation 91 5. Vampires, Vivisectors, and the Victorian Body 113 6. Germs, Dirt, and the Constitution 150 7. Class, Gender, and the Conscientious Objector 171 Conclusion 199 Notes 209 Bibliography 243 Index 269

On a Darkling Plain: Victorian Liberalism and the Fantasy of Agency

historic number of Britons protesting the Anglo-American march to war. Baxter and Perowne confront one another as class opposites: the lower-class tough, whose angry intention is all fists and kicks, and the upper-class professional, all brain, no brawn, and now bloodied, who yet has the last word when he defuses Baxter's embodied aggression into an abstract diagnosis of Huntington's disease. The impending rape is therefore for Baxter much more about regaining his bodily authority than revenging the ding on his car. With a knife at the throat of a wife, and an intent to ravage a daughter, Baxter listens to the naked young woman recite Arnold's masterpiece, is apparently overcome with awe at the human-made beauty of it, and gives up his violent ambition. McEwan is too shrewd an observer of his contemporary moment to attempt an unironized translation of Miranda taming Caliban; McEwan sees all too well the bad faith at work in the story of the beauty and her beast.' If, in his mesmerized admiration of the poem, Baxter is rendered awestruck, he is also rendered a dupe, for he is led to believe that the poem is the daughter's own creation-a ruse

BOOK REVIEW: Albert D. Pionke.PLOTS OF OPPORTUNITY: REPRESENTING CONSPIRACY IN VICTORIAN ENGLAND. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2004.

Reviewed by: Plots of Opportunity: Representing Conspiracy in Victorian England Chris R. Vanden Bossche (bio) Plots of Opportunity: Representing Conspiracy in Victorian England, by Albert D. Pionke; pp. xxxii + 188. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2004, $44.95. Albert Pionke situates Plots of Opportunity as a contribution to the current reassessment of Victorian liberalism as a form of guardianship that produces disciplined individualism. He thus seeks to show how the British ruling elite deployed the rhetoric of conspiracy first to discredit social, political, and religious movements and then to define forms of Englishness consistent with the principles of guardianship democracy. At the same time, however, he aims to discover opportunities for resistance that arose when this rhetoric collapsed upon itself, undoing the oppositions—between openness and secrecy, candor and deception, order and subversion—through which it operated. The heart of the book lies in four chapters concerned with the application of the rhetoric of conspiracy to working-class trades unionism, the Tractarian movement and Anglo-Catholicism, the Indian rebellion of 1857, and Italian republicanism during [End Page 183] the era of unification. The first of these chapters demonstrates how the prosecution and judges, during the 1838 trial of the Glasgow spinners, treated the accused as members of a conspiratorial cabal. By accusing them of taking secret oaths of initiation, the prosecution suggested that the spinners' loyalty to the union precluded loyalty to the nation. Moreover, the accusation that a secret committee directed the actions of the union implied that a small cabal had manipulated the rank and file for its own political ends. As Pionke demonstrates, the British press and members of Parliament used this same discursive formation to depict the Indian Mutiny as a conspiracy by a handful of designing men rather than a broad-based rebellion against English oppression. By implying that the rank and file lack social agency—that their actions were the result of conspiratorial manipulation, not their own volition—such representations legitimated guardianship of subaltern groups deemed incapable of self-governance. Because Pionke is interested not only in how ruling elites use this rhetoric to produce Englishness as guardianship democracy, but also in the potential for resistance, he seeks out texts that destabilize this rhetoric and, in some cases, reframe it as a counter- discourse. As he points out in chapter 1, because freemasonry was practiced respectably by members of the ruling elite, the figure of the secret society could not always be confined to marginalized groups. Charles Dickens's Barnaby Rudge (1841), for example, depicts the Prentice Knights as a dangerous secret society, but then destabilizes the opposition between English candor and conspiratorial secrecy by depicting the Protestant Association as equally secretive and socially disruptive. By the time we reach Benjamin Disraeli's Lothair (1870) and Italian unification, the rhetoric is radically destabilized. While there were attempts to stigmatize the Italian republican movement, which operated through secret societies, in a manner similar to the treatment of the Indian rebels, the opponents of the movement—the Pope and the Roman church—could not readily be aligned with British Protestant nationalism. Consequently, a whole series of such unstable oppositions phantasmatically emerge and dissolve throughout Disraeli's novel. Like much recent work on liberal democracy, this study seeks to discover sites of "individual resistance" that a deterministic Foucauldianism would foreclose (xviii). This does not mean, however, that advocates of radical democracy produced a counter- rhetoric in response to the rhetoric of conspiracy deployed against them. Indeed, the kind of direct counter-discourse mounted by the Tractarians and Anglo-Catholics— exemplified here by John Henry Newman's brilliant riposte to charges of Jesuitism during the Papal Aggression crisis—seems to have been the exception rather than the rule. Pionke is careful to note that he finds no evidence that Dickens (or Disraeli, in whose Sybil [1845] he finds a similar destabilization of the rhetoric of conspiracy) meant to critique the rhetoric of power or those who deployed it. While his analyses suggest that these textual aporias opened up sites of resistance, however, exactly how these instabilities could ground resistance to power is not always clear. Two unacknowledged critical issues are at play in Pionke's work, the...

The Place of Liberalism

here was liberalism? From the liberal point of view, this is almost certainly the wrong question to ask. As Uday Singh Mehta notes in his provocative study, Liberalism and Empire (1999), the universalist principles of nineteenth-century liberalism promoted a denial of place in liberal political theory, a purposeful neglect of the significance of territory (120). Liberal thinkers embraced the concept of evolution in time, emphasizing that individuals and societies unfolded in historical stages. But if the significance of time in liberal theory was assured, the role of place was suspect. Indeed, the liberal espousal of historical development was matched by an equally powerful insistence on transcending categories of place—region, territory, or nation—as part of the peculiar pointillism or decentralization of power in liberal society. In the nineteenth century, the repudiation of place was politically meaningful because it aided the articulation of a specifically liberal brand of imperialism. The rejection of place allowed Victorian liberals to refuse the territorial claims that typically bolstered anticolonial nationalist movements. Thus, the doctrine of “placelessness” had great utility for the governance of empire. But it has been a remarkably robust doctrine, a sturdy legacy of liberal thought. It continues to function as a crucial element in the neoliberalisms and neocolonialisms W

Planning and deregulation

In 1996, the Victorian Liberal Kennett Government embarked on an ambitious experiment on the State's land use planning system by introducing the Victoria Planning Provisions (VPP). Since then, seven official reports have been made on aspects of this system. All have referred to operational inadequacies but none has proposed major changes. The Whitney Committee (2002), for example, argued that the system was inefficient and uncertain but concluded that the system was experiencing teething problems and was not in crisis. Better Decisions Faster (DSE 2003) recommended 18 measures to reduce the volume of permits and processing delays, and increase consistency in decision making. But despite promises by both the former Victorian Liberal (Maclellan 1996) and the current Labor (Thwaites 1999) governments, the system is not properly monitored and no comprehensive review of its performance by a state government has been carried out.

On a Darkling Plain: Victorian Liberalism and the Fantasy of Agency

At the climactic crisis in Ian McEwan's recent novel, Saturday (2005), set in the days before the United States declares war on Iraq, Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach" (1867) saves the day. Not a poem generally known for its optimism, let alone for its salvific capacities—"for the world...Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, / Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain" (30–34)—"Dover Beach" manages, even so, to tranquilize the savage pathology of a home intruder. This intruder, who is called Baxter, seeks payback for a humiliating confrontation between himself and the protagonist of the novel, Henry Perowne, earlier in the day, when their cars had randomly collided on a London street that had been barricaded to control the historic number of Britons protesting the Anglo-American march to war. Baxter and Perowne confront one another as class opposites: the lower-class tough, whose angry intention is all fists and kicks, and the upper-class professional, all brain, no brawn, and now bloodied, who yet has the last word when he defuses Baxter's embodied aggression into an abstract diagnosis of Huntington's disease. The impending rape is therefore for Baxter much more about regaining his bodily authority than revenging the ding on his car. With a knife at the throat of a wife, and an intent to ravage a daughter, Baxter listens to the naked young woman recite Arnold's masterpiece, is apparently overcome with awe at the human-made beauty of it, and gives up his violent ambition. McEwan is too shrewd an observer of his contemporary moment to attempt an unironized translation of Miranda taming Caliban; McEwan sees all too well the bad faith at work in the story of the beauty and her beast.1 If, in his mesmerized admiration of the poem, Baxter is rendered awestruck, he is also rendered a dupe, for he is led to believe that the poem is the daughter's own creation—a ruse [End Page 92] that is equally effective on the eminent neurosurgeon Perowne, who knows the brain but apparently not its culture. After some moments of confusion, he too is arrested by this poem that he thinks his beloved Daisy has penned. In the thick of these misattributions of authorship, "Dover Beach" nonetheless saves this Saturday in the lives of these characters. Incredible and surely repulsive if proffered merely as a rape prevention technique, as deployed in this way Arnold's poem dramatizes a powerful fantasy, a Victorian fantasy that still entices us. The explicit claims that Arnold himself might wish to make for "Dover Beach" and art more generally—something about art's capacity to humanize the Baxters of our day—just doesn't seem politically correct or even very plausible in a post-9/11 era. Even so, at a moment of acute danger, when terrorists both domestic and foreign amass—"as on a darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, / Where ignorant armies clash by night" (35–37)—"Dover Beach" delivers to this little group the very loveliest version of the Victorian fantasy of liberal agency: "Ah love, let us be true / To one another!" (29–30). Arnold's poem, of course, is much more than a love poem, for it details his belief in the liberal subject's ability to seek out a private space of thoughtful emotion, of human intimacy, where subjects alienated in mind or body can become fully authentic and intentional in relation to themselves and to each other, in spite of the chaotic world without. To what extent McEwan himself indulges in this fantasy of liberalism is difficult to measure, but the author does allow Perowne his own version of "Dover Beach."2 Having helped to push the distracted Baxter down a flight of stairs, gravely injuring him, Perowne then volunteers to operate on his damaged brain. By demonstrating his powers of detachment, his...

Plots of Opportunity: Representing Conspiracy in Victorian England (review)

Reviewed by: Plots of Opportunity: Representing Conspiracy in Victorian England Chris R. Vanden Bossche (bio) Plots of Opportunity: Representing Conspiracy in Victorian England, by Albert D. Pionke; pp. xxxii + 188. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2004, $44.95. Albert Pionke situates Plots of Opportunity as a contribution to the current reassessment of Victorian liberalism as a form of guardianship that produces disciplined individualism. He thus seeks to show how the British ruling elite deployed the rhetoric of conspiracy first to discredit social, political, and religious movements and then to define forms of Englishness consistent with the principles of guardianship democracy. At the same time, however, he aims to discover opportunities for resistance that arose when this rhetoric collapsed upon itself, undoing the oppositions—between openness and secrecy, candor and deception, order and subversion—through which it operated. The heart of the book lies in four chapters concerned with the application of the rhetoric of conspiracy to working-class trades unionism, the Tractarian movement and Anglo-Catholicism, the Indian rebellion of 1857, and Italian republicanism during [End Page 183] the era of unification. The first of these chapters demonstrates how the prosecution and judges, during the 1838 trial of the Glasgow spinners, treated the accused as members of a conspiratorial cabal. By accusing them of taking secret oaths of initiation, the prosecution suggested that the spinners' loyalty to the union precluded loyalty to the nation. Moreover, the accusation that a secret committee directed the actions of the union implied that a small cabal had manipulated the rank and file for its own political ends. As Pionke demonstrates, the British press and members of Parliament used this same discursive formation to depict the Indian Mutiny as a conspiracy by a handful of designing men rather than a broad-based rebellion against English oppression. By implying that the rank and file lack social agency—that their actions were the result of conspiratorial manipulation, not their own volition—such representations legitimated guardianship of subaltern groups deemed incapable of self-governance. Because Pionke is interested not only in how ruling elites use this rhetoric to produce Englishness as guardianship democracy, but also in the potential for resistance, he seeks out texts that destabilize this rhetoric and, in some cases, reframe it as a counter- discourse. As he points out in chapter 1, because freemasonry was practiced respectably by members of the ruling elite, the figure of the secret society could not always be confined to marginalized groups. Charles Dickens's Barnaby Rudge (1841), for example, depicts the Prentice Knights as a dangerous secret society, but then destabilizes the opposition between English candor and conspiratorial secrecy by depicting the Protestant Association as equally secretive and socially disruptive. By the time we reach Benjamin Disraeli's Lothair (1870) and Italian unification, the rhetoric is radically destabilized. While there were attempts to stigmatize the Italian republican movement, which operated through secret societies, in a manner similar to the treatment of the Indian rebels, the opponents of the movement—the Pope and the Roman church—could not readily be aligned with British Protestant nationalism. Consequently, a whole series of such unstable oppositions phantasmatically emerge and dissolve throughout Disraeli's novel. Like much recent work on liberal democracy, this study seeks to discover sites of "individual resistance" that a deterministic Foucauldianism would foreclose (xviii). This does not mean, however, that advocates of radical democracy produced a counter- rhetoric in response to the rhetoric of conspiracy deployed against them. Indeed, the kind of direct counter-discourse mounted by the Tractarians and Anglo-Catholics— exemplified here by John Henry Newman's brilliant riposte to charges of Jesuitism during the Papal Aggression crisis—seems to have been the exception rather than the rule. Pionke is careful to note that he finds no evidence that Dickens (or Disraeli, in whose Sybil [1845] he finds a similar destabilization of the rhetoric of conspiracy) meant to critique the rhetoric of power or those who deployed it. While his analyses suggest that these textual aporias opened up sites of resistance, however, exactly how these instabilities could ground resistance to power is not always clear. Two unacknowledged critical issues are at play in Pionke's work, the...

CLASS, GENDER, AND LIBERALISM IN PARLIAMENT, 1868–1882: THE CASE OF THE MARRIED WOMEN'S PROPERTY ACTS

The class and gender identities created by male politicians are vital to a proper understanding of how and why parliament increased women's legal rights in the nineteenth century. An examination of the parliamentary debates on the Married Women's Property Acts of 1870 and 1882 reveals that it is misleading to divide men into supporters and opponents of women's rights, because even some of those who supported the most radical reform did so in the belief that the gender hierarchy should be left intact. At the same time, politicians were reluctant to accept that their own homes should be affected by changes to women's rights, both because they feared that these changes would reduce their domestic authority and create discord in their homes, and because they did not think that the critique of male behaviour which justified the reforms should apply to them or their class. Their ability to confine both charges of abuse and the effects of the acts to the poor was essential to the successful passage of the Married Women's Property Acts. Rather than see this as the defeat of a liberal individualist vision, it was in fact the victory of an alternative strand of Victorian liberalism.

Reviews of Books:The Persistence of Victorian Liberalism: The Politics of Social Reform in Britain, 1879-1900 Robert F. Haggard

Reviews of Books:The Persistence of Victorian Liberalism: The Politics of Social Reform in Britain, 1879-1900 Robert F. Haggard

Robert F. Haggard. <italic>The Persistence of Victorian Liberalism: The Politics of Social Reform in Britain, 1879–1900</italic>. (Contributions to the Study of World History, number 77.) Westport, Conn.: Greenwood. 2001. Pp. 209. $62.50

Journal Article Robert F. Haggard. The Persistence of Victorian Liberalism: The Politics of Social Reform in Britain, 1879–1900. (Contributions to the Study of World History, number 77.) Westport, Conn.: Greenwood. 2001. Pp. 209. $62.50 Get access Haggard Robert F.. The Persistence of Victorian Liberalism: The Politics of Social Reform in Britain, 1879–1900. (Contributions to the Study of World History, number 77.) Westport, Conn.: Greenwood. 2001. Pp. 209. $62.50. Nancy LoPatin-Lummis Nancy LoPatin-Lummis University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 107, Issue 2, April 2002, Pages 618–619, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/107.2.618 Published: 01 April 2002

Uniting the whole people: proportional representation in Great Britain, 1884–5, reconsidered*

Abstract This article examines the ideological context and political role of proportional representation in the reform crisis of 1884–5. It demonstrates that proportional representation was part of a broader liberal project to promote social cohesion both at home and in the empire. As shown by the cross-bench support for the Proportional Representation Society, proportional representation roused unexpected enthusiasm in the Commons in 1884. It was rejected because single-member districts were more acceptable to Gladstone while promising to achieve the same narrowly political ends as proportional representation, though not its liberal purposes. This reconsideration of proportional representation revises the history of the reform crisis and lends support to the contention that Victorian liberalism emphasized not rights-based individualism but rather the building of voluntary communities.

Ruskin and the Dawn of the Modern, and: Ruskin's Culture Wars: Fors Clavigera and the Crisis of Victorian Liberalism, and: Ruskin's Mythic Queen: Gender Subversion in Victorian Culture (review)

Ruskin's Culture Wars: Fors Clavigera and the Crisis of Victorian Liberalism, by Judith Stoddart; pp. xi + 193. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1998, $32.50, £24.99.

Ruskin's Culture Wars: 'Fors Clavigera' and the Crisis of Victorian Liberalism by Judith Stoddart (review)

Ruskin's Culture Wars: 'Fors Clavigera' and the Crisis of Victorian Liberalism by Judith Stoddart (review)

Ruskin's Culture Wars: 'Fors Clavigera' and the Crisis of Victorian Liberalism

In Ruskin's Culture Wars, Judith Stoddart provides the first sustained modern critical reading of Fors Clavigera, placing this classic work in the context of its Victorian contemporaries: art journals, liberal and working-class periodicals, and popular criticism. In recreating the intellectual climate, she demonstrates the sense of cultural crisis and change evident at the time. Rebelling against the tendency to treat Ruskin's letters as the prose lyric of a damaged psyche, Stoddart shows how the cumulative text of Fors Clavigera not only records but revises and redirects the preoccupations of his period. He was an integral part of Victorian discussions of literary tradition and of the roles of democracy and nationality in late-nineteenth-century Europe.

Rushkin's culture wars: Fors Clavigera and the crisis of Victorian liberalism

Rushkin's culture wars: Fors Clavigera and the crisis of Victorian liberalism

Conflict in Water Use in Victoria, Australia: Bolte's Divide

In 1964, the Premier of Victoria, Australia, Henry Bolte, announced that, in order to protect irrigation interests in the north of the state, he would prevent Melbourne from developing new water resources from the north of Victoria's Great Divide. Neither the water resource needs of Melbourne, the need for irrigation development nor the changing economic structure of the state provides a satisfactory explanation for this decision. Instead, Bolte's policy appears simply to have provided a means of improving the parliamentary position of the Victorian Liberal government. Bolte's principle has never been formally revoked and continues to influence water resource planning in the state. In order to make the most appropriate use of Victoria's limited natural resources, it is imperative that ‘Bolte's divide’ should not continue to influence future resource development and allocation.