Victorian Reform Research Articles

Language purism in the mirror. William Barnes and August Treboniu Laurian

The article sets out to draw a very brief comparison of the common features shared by the purist attitudes displayed by two 19th-century English and Romanian scholars, William Barnes and August Treboniu Laurian and classifies them according to the set of criteria devised by Thomas (1991). The paper also goes over several concepts regarding purism. The author of the paper analyses the concept of purism in both countries within the intellectual and temporal dimensions of purism. William Barnes was a Victorian reformer, a polymath, a priest, a poet in his Dorset dialect and a utopian prescriptivist linguist capitalizing on the Germanic word stock of English and suggesting the removal of excessive Latin & Greek vocabulary. He wrote several linguistic books and poetry. August Treboniu Laurian was an outstanding Romanian reformer and polymath. He penned a theoretical book heralding his reformist belief: “Tentamen Criticum”, in 1840 and a huge Dictionary of the Romanian language in 1876 (after a seven year work) capitalising on the Latin word stock of Romanian and suggesting the removal of non-Latin lexemes.

“Clutch[ing] Gold”: Wives, Mothers, and Property Law in The Ring and the Book

“Clutch[ing] Gold”: Wives, Mothers, and Property Law in The Ring and the Book Jill Rappoport (bio) In Robert Browning’s epic exploration of a 1698 murder case, Count Guido Franceschini confesses to killing his wife Pompilia, confident that her alleged dishonor justifies his action and, crucially, that the money he married for will pass into his hands despite his guilt. Because his responsibility for the deed is never in question, the poem’s twelve-book, multivocal narration of Guido’s trials uses this murder less to assign blame than to invite assessments of seventeenth-century systems of gender, justice, and property. Those systems may seem remote from the companionate marriages and reformed divorce laws of the nineteenth century, yet The Ring and the Book (1868–1869) also encourages Victorian readers to judge their own present legal system through its critique of the earlier Italian laws, softening the implications of more direct commentary by “Linking our England to his Italy.”1 Along these lines, Pompilia’s tragic union with Guido has been compared to the Victorian marriage market, commonly understood to traffic in women.2 Guido unequivocally views his wife as a possession, “avow[ing that he] dared buy / A girl,” calculating “the market-price” of his title in that exchange, and expecting that “when I buy, timber and twig, a tree— / I buy the song o’ the nightingale inside” (V: ll. 425–426; V: l. 462; V: ll. 605–606). Pompilia’s struggle for ownership has been framed, accordingly, in terms of her claims to body, spirit, and child, rather than to the substantial material wealth for which she acts as conduit. Discussions of material property in the poem, on the other hand, generally emphasize inheritance and its vertical and male lines of descent, focusing on birth and confusion over rightful heirship rather than on wives or marriage (Petch, “Law” p. 318). Yet a wife’s economic agency is central both to the poem’s tragedy and to English legal debates during the years when The Ring and the Book was being written. Whether or not women should lose their claims to property upon marriage or continue to inherit, earn, possess, or alienate independent wealth was a vital question during the 1860s, and Browning’s poem [End Page 1] engages in it, not only through Pompilia and her embattled inheritance but also through the actions of her biological and adoptive mothers. The decades-long Victorian reform of married women’s property law is typically understood in terms of its effects on wives and marriage, but as we will see, the prospect of changing marital rights affected entire families and unsettled other features of Victorian life as well. In its depictions of money-wielding mothers, Browning’s poem reflects cultural tensions regarding these economic developments. By demonstrating sympathy toward disempowered wives along with widespread concern regarding the generational ramifications of maternal economic agency, The Ring and the Book underscores the dissonance in popular attitudes toward women’s property rights shortly before the first legal reforms. If in this telling the “British Public” the poem addresses remains ambivalent,3 depictions of Guido’s trial render a more consistent verdict, finally suggesting the necessity not only of improving individual laws but of altering the court system itself. I. “He Only Stipulated for the Wealth” (VII: l. 779): Property Matters in Marriage The golden “Ring” that opens and names Browning’s poem has invited copious critical interpretation as “a figure, a symbol, say; / A thing’s sign” (I: ll. 31–32).4 But it is also, and essentially, a piece of precious metal. Temporarily mixed with alloy to create a “manageable mass” (I: l. 21), the ring, once shaped, returns to its original, unmixed state: “Prime nature with an added artistry— / No carat lost” (I: ll. 29–30).5 As a costly object of enduring value, this metal— “Gold as it was, is, shall be evermore” (I: l. 28)—introduces the key problem of property into this variably retold trial. Valuable property and the question of whose “it was, is, shall be” motivate adoption, marriage, and murder in The Ring and the Book and explicitly and implicitly figure in the social and...

Reconstructing an Ancient Monument to Mid-Victorian Liberalism, One Annotation at a Time: John Stuart Mill’s Marginalia in George Grote’s History of Greece

Abstract John Stuart Mill inscribed nearly 1,200 individual examples of marginalia into his personal copy of George Grote’s twelve-volume History of Greece (1846–56). Of these, roughly two-thirds are verbal annotations ranging in length from a single letter to a short paragraph. Analysis of the 136 annotations found in volumes one and two, and comparison of each page containing annotations across five editions of Grote’s History, reveal not only that Mill was directly responsible for sixty revisions made to the text of volumes one and two but also that Mill read and annotated his friend’s “opus magnum” multiple times. Considered not just in terms of its significance in intellectual history—when ancient Greece, specifically Athens, was repositioned as central to modern Britain, particularly as it was being reimagined by Victorian liberal reformers—but also as a case study for how to approach the epistemological challenges posed by marginalia more broadly, Mill’s interactive and durable relationship with Grote’s History testifies to the ongoing influence of reading conventions inherited by the Victorians from their Enlightenment and Romantic predecessors and demonstrates the heuristic value of considering marginalia’s effects in order to discern its content, attribution, intent, and chronology.

Gender differences in the lifecycle benefits of compulsory schooling policies

We estimate the lifecycle benefits of policies that raise the minimum school leaving age (MSLA). Using a difference-in-differences method, we estimate the causal impact of two adjacent Australian state reforms that extended the MSLA from 14 to 15 in mid 1960. Important gender and state differences emerge in how the reforms affected secondary and postsecondary education outcomes. The biggest winners were women in Victoria, for whom the reform increased postsecondary education, while the reform lifted only minimum schooling qualifications in South Australia. As a consequence, the Victorian reform improved the lifecycle capital accumulation process especially for women, while few benefits were observed for South Australians. Victorian women entered higher-skilled occupations, were more likely to own homes, to be still married and satisfied with family life in pre-retirement age. Victorian men also gained, but the gains were limited to better cognitive and non-cognitive skills, health, and satisfaction with (family) life. Yet, all groups benefitted from delayed and reduced fertility, and a happier family life. We conclude that raising education levels for individuals at the lower end of the education spectrum produces lifecycle benefits that exceed market-return considerations, but major benefits occur only if the reform impacts education outcomes beyond minimum schooling.

The ‘Minster’ Jug as a ‘Pet’ Agent of Victorian Design Reform

The ‘Minster’ Jug as a ‘Pet’ Agent of Victorian Design Reform

‘A Peaceful Path to’ Healthy Bodies: The Biopolitics of Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City

Recent renewed discussions of the garden city as a “developmental model for the present and foreseeable future” (Stern, Fishman, & Tilove, 2013) have prompted us to reflect upon its endurance as an agent of spatial and urban reform. Looking to extend the established garden city literature, we argue the history of Ebenezer Howard’s community model should be reexamined as a cultural history of body and environmental politics. In this commentary, we explicate how Howard’s garden city model served as a spatial vehicle for installing the biopolitical agendas of Victorian reformers keen to “civilize” working class bodies in the service of British industrial and imperial power. This entails a brief examination of the biopolitical dimensions of garden city history, keying on the prescribed restructuring of urban life and the concomitant “regeneration” of working class bodies within and through garden city designs. Our aim is to challenge scholars, planners, and policymakers of the garden city <em>present</em>, to consider the ways the garden city was historically planned to reproduce the cultural, spatial, and biopolitical relations of Western capitalism.

The right to know versus the right to privacy: donor anonymity and the Assisted Reproductive Treatment Amendment Act 2016 (Vic)

[Extract] On 1 March 2017, the Assisted Reproductive Treatment Amendment Act 2016 (Vic) came into effect, allowing for the retrospective release of anonymous donor information to donor-conceived children.1 The legislation, an Australian first, allows donor children to know the name, date of birth, ethnicity, physical characteristics, genetic conditions and donor code of their donor parents, even where anonymity has been requested. Donor children can access information about their biological parents through a new “one-door-in” service to be provided by the Victorian Assisted Reproductive Treatment Authority (VARTA), which is now managing the state's central donor registry and providing information and support to donor-conceived people, parents, donors and their relatives. The donors affected by the legislation are those who donated before 1 January 1998; anonymous donation ceased in Victoria after that date. Many commentators have welcomed the Victorian reforms and believe that they will help mend the fractured sense of identity that some donor children experience.2 Yet critics point out that the legislation violates donors' right to privacy. Some would suggest that this is of even greater importance than the desire of donor children to know their biological parents. As other legislatures review their donor anonymity legislation, it is useful to review the main ethical and sociological issues surrounding the Victorian model.

Helen Taylor’s work for land nationalisation in Great Britain and Ireland 1879–1907: women’s political agency in the British Victorian land movement

ABSTRACTThis article explores the contribution made by Helen Taylor to the Victorian land reform movement, 1879–1890. It concentrates on her political agency after 1882 to evidence that the importance of Taylor was three-fold. She was a leading activist in all land reforming groups and drew large audiences; she had independent means which enabled her to fund the organisations she was involved in and exert influence on them; and her background as John Stuart Mill’s step-daughter and intellectual collaborator put her in the position of being able to introduce the leading players in the 1880s land campaigns to one another. Taylor introduced Henry George and Michael Davitt to the leadership of the British land movement and thus enabled their involvement. Davitt’s and George’s importance in British land campaigns has been documented by historians but the woman who was instrumental in facilitating their involvement has been largely forgotten.

Victorian Reformations: Historical Fiction and Religious Controversy, 1820–1900, by Miriam Elizabeth Burstein

Victorian Reformations: Historical Fiction and Religious Controversy, 1820–1900, by Miriam Elizabeth Burstein

Bad Girls at Samarcand: Sexuality and Sterilization in a Southern Juvenile Reformatory by Karin L. Zipf

Reviewed by: Bad Girls at Samarcand: Sexuality and Sterilization in a Southern Juvenile Reformatory by Karin L. Zipf Rebecca Kluchin Bad Girls at Samarcand: Sexuality and Sterilization in a Southern Juvenile Reformatory. By Karin L. Zipf. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2016. xii + 242 pp. Cloth $39.95. North Carolina’s sterilization program became national news in 2010 when the legislature voted to offer reparations to victims of the state’s eugenic sterilization program. In 2014, the state began making payments of $20,000 each to qualifying individuals, the majority of whom were sterilized in the post–World War II era. Scholars, journalists, and politicians have dissected North Carolina’s postwar sterilization program, focusing in particular on its efforts to reduce welfare costs by rendering poor black women infertile. Karin Zipf, however, starts her story of sterilization and eugenics in the state earlier, in the late 1910s, when Victorian-era reformers successfully pressed state legislators to establish [End Page 287] institutions for “fallen” girls, who they believed could be redeemed through state intervention. Of course, in the era of Jim Crow, the opportunity for redemption existed only for white women; reformers did not invest in “wayward” black girls whom they deemed unworthy of public support. The North Carolina legislature created Samarcand Manor in 1917 to rehabilitate white adolescent girls, a process steeped in white supremacy. Reformers believed that all white girls embodied southern womanhood, even if they had strayed from its central tenets of piety and gentility. The state invested in the rehabilitation and training of white women regardless of background as part of its efforts to ensure white dominance. In 1931, a fire set by residents at Samarcand destroyed two buildings on the property and led to the arrest of sixteen girls for the crime of arson, then a death penalty offense in North Carolina. Their trial proved a catalyst for major changes in North Carolina’s handling of delinquent white girls as it intersected with the rise of eugenics and the influence of mental hygienists—social workers who embraced and practiced eugenics. In the wake of the trial, which concluded with the judge sentencing twelve of the girls to five years in prison (they served only one), mental hygienists assumed control of Samarcand and other state institutions. Applying “scientific” techniques to juvenile reform, they implemented a classification system based upon eugenic constructs and measured by IQ tests. Using IQ scores, inmates’ sexual history, and the presence or absence of venereal disease (believed to be a symptom of lack of reproductive fitness), mental hygienists diagnosed, treated, and paroled inmates in an orderly, “scientific” manner. Institutional policy encouraged sterilization for all girls with IQ scores of sixty-five and below upon release; between 1929 and 1950, nearly three hundred Samarcand residents underwent sterilization (131). Like Victorian reformers, mental hygienists continued to infuse their approach to juvenile reform with white supremacy, but unlike their predecessors, who believed all white girls embodied the possibility of reform, “modern” reformers believed many girls were genetically unable to be reformed and as such, the state held a responsibility to control their reproduction in order to preserve white supremacy. Poor, “unfit” girls could drag down the white race, diluting its bloodlines and causing social instability unless their “destructive” behavior could be neutralized. Sterilization offered a solution to this problem, and while the North Carolina reformers who assumed control of Samarcand ended the practice of indefinite sentences and vicious whippings, they replaced these methods of control with a surgical one that had an equally destructive effect on the lives of its victims. Zipf is an expert storyteller and a first-rate scholar. She creatively employs a range of sources to tell the story of juvenile reform and eugenics in North [End Page 288] Carolina before 1950 and presents humane, complicated profiles of the main actors in her narrative. Zipf is equally attentive to reformers, politicians, judges, and inmates. She spends a chapter recounting horrible stories of abuse towards Samarcand residents under the leadership of superintendent Agnes MacNaughton, but reminds the reader that MacNaughton remained Victorian in her approach to juvenile reform, always believing in the ability of her charges to change. In another chapter...

The Enactment of the Matrimonial Causes Act 1857: The Campbell Commission and the Parliamentary Debates

ABSTRACTRather surprisingly none of the existing accounts of the Matrimonial Causes Act 1857 considers the mechanics of reform which brought about the legislation in any great detail. Yet this subject as much as the final legislation merits attention in its own right. The nineteenth century in England was a significant period of law reform and the legislation provides a vivid illustration of the inner workings of the process. The passage of the Matrimonial Causes Act 1857 was not entirely smooth. The fact that it succeeded at all makes it an ideal case study in Victorian law reform. This article considers the pressures for divorce reform, the working of a Royal Commission, the debates in Parliament, and ultimately how reform was finally achieved through a series of compromises between those who wanted more radical change and defenders of the status quo.

Victorian Reformations: Historical Fiction and Religious Controversy, 1820–1900

Victorian Reformations: Historical Fiction and Religious Controversy, 1820–1900

Victorian Reformations: Historical Fiction and Religious Controversy, 1820–1900 by Miriam Elizabeth Burstein (review)

Victorian Reformations: Historical Fiction and Religious Controversy, 1820–1900 by Miriam Elizabeth Burstein (review)

Miriam Elizabeth Burstein. Victorian Reformations: Historical Fiction and Religious Controversy, 1820–1900

Miriam Elizabeth Burstein. <i>Victorian Reformations: Historical Fiction and Religious Controversy, 1820–1900</i>

Dirty old London: the Victorian fight against filth

In Victorian London, filth was everywhere: horse traffic filled the streets with dung, household rubbish went uncollected, cesspools brimmed with night soil, graveyards teemed with rotting corpses, the air itself was choked with smoke. In this intimately visceral book, Lee Jackson guides us through the underbelly of the Victorian metropolis, introducing us to the men and women who struggled to stem a rising tide of pollution and dirt, and the forces that opposed them. Through thematic chapters, Jackson describes how Victorian reformers met with both triumph and disaster. Full of individual stories and overlooked details-from the dustmen who grew rich from recycling, to the peculiar history of the public toilet-this riveting book gives us a fresh insight into the minutiae of daily life and the wider challenges posed by the unprecedented growth of the Victorian capital.

The Good Women of Peterhouse: Patriarchal Community, Femininity and University Reform

This article reads a Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Company stained glass window in light of Victorian reforms extending university education to women. Designed by Edward Burne-Jones and installed in the Senior Combination Room of Peterhouse College in 1870, the window boasts six stained glass panels that together illustrate twelve characters from Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Legend of Good Women. I argue that the beautiful, passive, idealized women the panels represent constitute a discursive response to the social and cultural anxieties raised by the emerging figure of the girl-under-graduate, who was widely understood to threaten the patriarchal structure of the academy. Comparing Chaucer’s poem to Burne-Jones’ design, I contend that both poet and artist defined ideal femininity as an expression of masculine mastery, and a ‘good woman’ as compliant to male authority in love and life. I then frame the ‘goodness’ of the window’s figures within the contemporary discourses levelled against female undergraduate students. Taking surviving archival evidence into account, I interpret the decision to include the window’s visual illustration and material incarnation of fragile femininity within the cloistered, homosocial space of the Combination Room as a defensive one, intended to bolster a masculine community that feared itself besieged by power-hungry women.

Book Review: Victorian Reformations: Historical Fiction and Religious Controversy, 1820–1900, written by Burstein, Miriam Elizabeth

Book Review: Victorian Reformations: Historical Fiction and Religious Controversy, 1820–1900, written by Burstein, Miriam Elizabeth

“I Have Remembered How to Seem”: The Symbolic Monarchy after King George

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsMiriam Elizabeth BursteinMiriam Elizabeth Burstein is Associate Professor of English at the College at Brockport, State University of New York. She is the author of Narrating Women's History in Britain, 1770–1902 (Ashgate, 2004), Victorian Reformations (Notre Dame, 2014), and (editor) Robert Elsmere (Victorian Secrets, 2013), as well as articles on historical fiction, popular history, and religious literature.

Book Review: Victorian Reformations: Historical Fiction and Religious Controversy, 1820–1900. By Miriam Elizabeth Burstein

Book Review: Victorian Reformations: Historical Fiction and Religious Controversy, 1820–1900. By Miriam Elizabeth Burstein

Victorian reformations: historical fiction and religious controversy, 1820-1900

In Victorian Reformations: Historical Fiction and Religious Controversy, 1820-1900, Miriam Elizabeth Burstein analyses the ways in which Christian novelists across the denominational spectrum laid claim to popular genres-most importantly, the religious historical novel-to narrate the aftershocks of 1829, the year of Catholic Emancipation. Both Protestant and Catholic popular novelists fought over the ramifications of nineteenth-century Catholic toleration for the legacy of the Reformation. But despite the vast textual range of this genre, it remains virtually unknown in literary studies. Victorian Reformations is the first book to analyse how high theological and historical debates over the Reformation's significance were popularised through the increasingly profitable venue of Victorian religious fiction. By putting religious apologists and controversialists at centre stage, Burstein insists that such fiction-frequently dismissed as overly simplistic or didactic-is essential for our understanding of Victorian popular theology, history, and historical novels. Burstein reads lost but once exceptionally popular religious novels-for example, by Elizabeth Rundle Charles, Lady Georgiana Fullerton, and Emily Sarah Holt-against the works of such now-canonical figures as Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot, while also drawing on material from contemporary sermons, histories, and periodicals. Burstein demonstrates how these novels, which popularised Christian visions of change for a mass readership, call into question our assumptions about the nineteenth-century historical novel. In addition, her research and her conceptual frameworks have the potential to influence broader paradigms in Victorian studies and novel criticism.