Victorian England

This MA Thesis analyses hundreds of Victorian newspapers, periodicals, pamphlets and other media to investigate how Victorian perceptions of Napoleon I affected perceptions of Napoleon III and vice versa. It is argued that Victorian Britons frequently viewed Napoleon III through the lens of Napoleon I with significant consequences for the legacies of both Emperors today. Through analysis of letters to the editor and newspapers which appealed to all classes of society, this thesis does not produce a history of ‘Great Men’ from the top-down but rather an analysis of how such men were perceived from the bottom up and how popular perceptions helped shape their legacies. Why is it that Napoleon I, once the most hated and feared enemy of Britain, has obtained an almost celebrity-like status in Britain today whilst Napoleon III, the friend of Queen Victoria and champion of the entente cordiale is largely forgotten by the general public? The answer, this thesis argues, can be found in Victorian perceptions of both Napoleons, and in the resulting perceptions of themselves.

In a recent contribution to this journal, Ian Hesketh correctly points out that the famous phrase ‘History is past politics, and politics present history’ was not coined by Sir John Robert Seeley, as the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations has it, but by Seeley’s contemporary, Edward Augustus Freeman. According to Hesketh, Freeman first employed the phrase in his opening address to the Historical Society in Birmingham on 18 November 1880. Throughout the 1880s, he kept using it, most notably during his lecture tour (1881–82) through the United States, where the phrase was given wider currency by Herbert Baxter Adams, who wrote an essay on it and had the motto painted in great letters on the wall of his seminary room at Johns Hopkins University. Contrary to Hesketh’s assertion, however, Freeman’s Birmingham audience in the fall of 1880 was not the first to hear the British historian expound his view of history as past politics.

This report documents the results of a two day survey of the crypt underlying the Non-conformist chapel at Sheffield General Cemetery, Sheffield (NGR SK 34132 85882), undertaken by the Department of Archaeology at the University of Sheffield. It was found that the crypt spans 2 subterranean floors, built in the Egyptian style in stone and handmade red brick. The first floor covers a total area that is up to 23m long and 9m wide, and comprises a main central passage with a separate space at the north end (under the portico) and the south end, and a total of 12 adjacent vaults. One vault contained human skeletal remains. The second subterranean floor is only accessible by ladder, and comprises four separate spaces. A total of 5 non-ferrous or composite metal artefacts were recovered. It is recommended that the Hadfield family vault be fully excavated and recorded, and that measures are taken to ensure that the doorway in the second subterranean floor be made structurally safe.

Victorians' engagement with the past permitted a means by which they could express, and reconcile themselves with, the emerging idea of the modern. Developments in sound technologies (namely, Edison's phonograph) created new ways of preserving the past and reviving it for the present moment. Edison's machine, first demonstrated in 1877, inaugurated a new method of recording history and preserving both personal and national memory. Initially proposed as a technology for dictation and as a secretarial aid, the phonograph became a multisensory index for memorialising Victorian culture for future generations. It therefore created a tension between old and new, and implied a rupture in understandings of chronological time and memory. The phonograph allowed for the physical and auditory containment of what had hitherto been psychological or visually recorded. Recognising the phonograph as a tactile embodiment of history and an aural record of the disembodied voice, Victorians viewed the machine as an uncanny vessel that defamiliarised ideas of time. In this essay, I argue that Victorians expressed, and came to terms with, modernity through an active engagement with the past. In particular, this expression is achieved through a conscious historicising of the present moment. In my chosen texts, Florence McLandburgh's 'The Automaton Ear', Arthur Conan Doyle's 'The Japanned Box', and Rudyard Kipling's 'The Finest Story in the World', the 'talking machines' become symbolic of the Victorians' attempts to archive the ancient and recent past, presenting a friction between technological advancement and the present creation of a historical relic. 1 Florence McLandburgh's 'The Automaton Ear' (1876) is concerned with what Pamela Thurschwell describes as the 'technological resuscitation' of sound. 2 Relenting that 'some individuals can distinguish sounds which to others […] would be wholly lost', 3 the narrator proposes the invention of 'an instrument which could catch these faint tones vibrating in the air and make them audible' (pp. 1-2). Like the

This paper examines the social commentary of late Victorian England masked by humor in  "An Ideal Husband". Through theatrical and literary comedic devices, Oscar Wilde showcases the hypocrisy of absolute ideals of morality by parodying the frivolity of nobility, the double standards to women with the the idealized notions of gender as a foil, and subverts masculine gender convention by contrasting the Effeminate Dandy and the Manly Man.

I woke up this morning missing my life as a potter, missing the clay, missing its feel and textures for there is a difference to the touch between porcelain and stoneware and between earthenware and stoneware, clays out of which pots are shaped. My fingers ached to centre the clay ball on the wheel before raising and lifting it, forming the walls of the pot while the wheel is turning. My fingers groped for the invisible half formed pot in order to firm its walls before deciding whether it was going to be a plate, a bowl, or an elegant tall vase. Clay smells of the earth and is as ageless, so holding it in one's hands is like holding time and squeezing. It is easy to let your imagination turn as the wheel turns and push your way through geological sediments and formations. Clay minerals are typically formed over long periods of time by the gradual chemical weathering of rocks. The weathering of rocks needs vast spans of time. Isn't it wonderful? Making pots is like playing with geology and reading the history of the world in a pot? I had my own philosophy about pots and I thought of them as time travellers because some of them are still with us after almost ten thousand years. I called my self then an archaeological ceramist because in my pots I tried to be something like Dr. Who, a time lord, travelling

Στην εργασία γίνεται μια προσπάθεια να εξεταστεί η εξέλιξη του όρου και οι διαφορετικές προσεγγίσεις πάνω στο φαινόμενο της “εργατικής αριστοκρατίας”. Θα διερευνηθεί αν μπορούμε να μιλάμε, μέχρι τα τέλη του 19ου αιώνα, για ένα τέτοιο στρώμα στην αγγλική κοινωνία και κάτω από ποιες προϋποθέσεις. Η εργασία ασχολείται με το ζήτημα παίρνοντας υπόψη παράλληλα τις ραγδαίες οικονομικές εξελίξεις και μετασχηματισμούς της περιόδου. Σκιαγραφεί την αντανάκλαση του φαινομένου στην καθημερινή ζωή και στην πολιτική και συνδικαλιστική δράση.

This paper explores the work and legacy of nineteenth-century Anglo-Jewish writer Grace Aguilar. Following a brief overview of her life and literary career, the study establishes a gap in the literature on Aguilar which has, notably, been produced mostly by scholars of English rather than by Jewish historians. Such scholars have, nonetheless, successfully situated Aguilar within the reality of the powerful Evangelical movement of 1830s England, as well as vaguely as a thinker of the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment) movement — though largely in terms limited to her perspectives vis-a-vis the relationship between biblical and Talmudic Judaism. The paper goes on to demonstrate how an improved historical understanding of Grace Aguilar and her Anglo-Sephardic community has the power to illuminate her purposes and ideas in authoring her 1845 polemic, The Women of Israel. In addition, the paper explores the unique contribution of Grace Aguilar to Haskalah theory: the use of gender as a tool by which Jewish modernity is argued and solidified.

This paper examines the reasons for the popularity of devotion to St Charles Borromeo in the nineteenth century that the high incidence of churches dedicated to him suggest. It argues that claims that St Charles was only a figure of devotion by what the literature calls new Catholics are oversimplistic. Rather, devotion to St Charles was widespread among both reticent Catholics and recent converts as the history of the different churches suggest. The paper then postulates different reasons as to why devotion to St Charles was particularly popular in England during this time.

Victorian England is often seen as an era of stability for marital and family life. In reality, it was a period of significant legal and social change that opened the way for the introduction of the modern family court system. It was a time and place where women had very few legal rights in regards to divorce and matrimonial property. John Stuart Mill was a key proponent for the advancement of women's rights in the Victorian period. The article argues that Mill was an advocate for equal opportunity for women based on ideals of liberty, but this was based on a gender complementarian division of roles within the family. The article focuses on Mill's major work on women's rights, The Subjection of Women. Mill presented a radical piece of writing based on principles of equality as a source of moral progress amidst the reactionary politics of Victorian England.

This article recovers a dissonant voice from the nineteenth-century nahḍa. Antonius Ameuney (1821-1881) was a fervent Protestant and staunch Anglophile. Unlike his Ottoman Syrian contemporaries, who argued for religious diversity and the formation of a civil society based on a shared Arab past, he believed that the only geopolitical Syria viable in the future was one grounded in Protestant virtues and English values. This article examines Ameuney's complicated journey to become a Protestant Englishman and his inescapable characterization as a son of Syria. It charts his personal life and intellectual career and explores how he interpreted the religious, cultural, political, and linguistic landscape of his birthplace to British audiences. As an English-speaking Ottoman Syrian intellectual residing permanently in London, the case of Antonius Ameuney illustrates England to have been a constitutive site of the nahḍa and underscores the role played by the British public in shaping nahḍa discourses.

In the framework of contemporary ecocritical and posthumanist theories, this comparative analysis of works by Paolo Mantegazza, Ouida, and Vernon Lee focuses on the conflictual relationship of proximity and differentiation at stake in the human-animal distinction in a post-Darwinian context dominated by the rise of experimental sciences. A discussion of vivisection and animal taming prompted by anthropocentric works as Mantegazza's _Fisiologia del dolore_ and _Upilio Faimali_ in tension with pro-animal essays by Ouida and Vernon Lee shows how the animal, caught between pure inert materiality and idealization, emerges as an intrinsic lack that the human fills with contending rational, utilitarian, moral, and affective motivations.

The theme of overcoming adversity and finding yourself is a common trope in realist fiction, particularly a Bildungsroman. This dissertation will offer a feminist critique of the works of Villette (1853) and Jane Eyre (1847), with the question of displacement as a rite of passage that forges freedom, resistance, and happiness for women of the working class. The psychological voyage the protagonists Jane and Lucy embark on is painfully forged with survival at the forefront of their bildung prior to their growth and independence.

Football was the winter game at Uppingham School, a boys’ boarding school in the English Midlands, throughout the headmastership of Edward Thring. The rules of play were never static for they evolved under pressures from boys, former pupils, masters and the headmaster, and through comparison with the football codes played at other schools and at the universities. An examination of the rich archive material held at the school enables a case study of the evolution of Uppingham football to be traced throughout its thirty-six-year lifetime, from its introduction by Thring in 1853 until its abandonment by his successor in 1889.

During the Georgian and Victorian periods, the fourteenth-century hero Edward the Black Prince became an object of cultural fascination and celebration; he and his battles played an important part in a wider reimagining of the British as a martial people, reinforced by an interest in chivalric character and a burgeoning nationalism.

Drawing on a wealth of literature, histories, drama, art and material culture, this book explores the uses of Edward’s image in debates about politics, character, war and empire, assessing the contradictory meanings ascribed to the late Middle Ages by groups ranging from royals to radicals. It makes a special claim for the importance of the fourteenth century in Georgian and Victorian culture as a time of heroic virtues, chivalric escapades, royal power and parliamentary development, adding to a growing literature on Georgian uses of the past by exposing an active royal and popular investment in the medieval. It reveals that the Middle Ages was a contested terrain in Victorian Britain, disputing frequent modern assumptions that the Victorians saw the medieval period as an idealised and unproblematic past.

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. Royal associations: heroic character and chivalric ceremony at the court of George III
2. Prince George reclaims the heroic? Transition, ambition and domesticity
3. Chivalry and politics in Victoria's early reign: art, exhibitions and palace renditions
4. Politics, parliament and the people's prince
5. Emulating Edward? Redefining chivalry and character
6. Warrior for nation and empire
Conclusion

The scientific paper that I presented (in the early form: 2017) at the Graduate Research Colloquium in Modern Greek Studies UK, organised by The Society for Modern Greek Studies UK, and held on June 15th, 2017 at the Senate House, University of London.

Please find the full volume of the Diogenes Journal (The University of Birmingham) ISSUE 14, here: https://gemuob.files.wordpress.com/2022/07/diogenes-july-2022-1.pdf

Blog: Gurkhas occupy an interesting place in British folklore. Universally recognised as ferociously loyal, heroic and determined fighters in the British army, they were only recently given right to settle in this country, and then only after a high-profile media campaign. In this guest blog, Krishna P Adhikari recounts what is known of one of the first Nepali visitors to Britain, Motilal Singh, who came to the country halfway through the 19th century.

Table of Contents for Aries: Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism
Editor-in-chief: Peter J. Forshaw
Guest Editors: Tessel M. Bauduin & Nina Kokkinen
Issue 13.1 containing articles by Nina Kokkinen, Serena Keshavjee, Jonathan Shirland, Victoria Ferentinou, and Christopher Partridge
Plus 'In Memoriam' for Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke

Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2022. Print. Writers and their Work.

Heralded by Virginia Woolf as “one of the extremely rare novelists who believes in the power of the mind, who makes his people think,” George Gissing (1857-1903) was one of the most influential British writers of the late-Victorian period. This study provides a chronological survey of his major writings, reviews some of the seminal as well as more recent scholarship about them, and suggests the critical interest of his oeuvre for modern readers. Beginning with an examination of his juvenilia, it maps Gissing’s engagement with and his responses to contemporary debates regarding a succession of pressing social and literary issues including the city and its working class, the Woman Question, consumerism and the life of writing, and the critical reassessment of Dickens. Tom Ue’s attentive analysis explores Gissing’s writing in the light of a number of critical and theoretical traditions and reveals how closely he reflected on contemporaneous social and cultural changes across his novels, short stories, poems, and criticism.