ASPECTS OF DOMESTIC SERVICE IN GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND, 1841–1911

Abstract

Domestic service has been neglected by historians until comparatively recently. Partly the lack of attention has been due to the paucity of sources – although these tend to emerge when interest grows – and a lack of interest in women’s history. Some research has, however, been done and here a number of recent studies are discussed. These relate to the geographical origins of the servants employed in the six houses occupied by the 7^th Duke of Devonshire at the censuses of 1861-91; the changes in servant-keeping experienced by two upper-middle-class owners of a house in Hertfordshire, in the late 19^th century; aspects of ‘kin’ and ‘true’ servants in the Scottish textile town of Kilmarnock as revealed by the 1871 census; and some features of domestic servants working at the Roman Catholic seminary of St Patrick’s College, Maynooth, Ireland, based upon the household schedules of the 1911 census and a wages book

These and other studies reveal that it is from local, micro-level research that the most fruitful insights into the experience of domestic service in the past are likely to emerge. This is, in part, because of the variety of that experience; in part, because that is where the sources are to be found; and, in part, because the sources often require a local interpretation. For example, work on the census enumerators’ books is revealing that each 19^th-century census is best seen as a series of local censuses, often reflecting local interpretations of standard questions.     

The Swiss community in Genoa from the Old Regime to the late nineteenth century

Abstract

Drawing on extensive and original archival research, this article is the first to reconstruct the origins and historical development of the Swiss community of Genoa from the sixteenth to the late nineteenth century. During these four centuries, the Swiss were constant and significant agents of the Genoese economy and society. The Swiss presence in the city dates back to the mid 1500s, when Swiss soldiers were the predominant component of the army of the Republic. In the 1700s the Swiss community broadened its economic scope and varied its social configuration. It consisted of both a well-established Protestant, élite of merchant-bankers and textile entrepreneurs and a lower layer of craftsmen, confectioners, street vendors and servants. By the end of the 1700s the Swiss élite was such a thriving and well-integrated group that in 1799 Genoa was selected to be the seat of the first Swiss consulate of the Italian peninsula, the second in Europe after Bordeaux (1798). From the Restoration (1815) to Italian Unification (1861), the Swiss merchant-bankers and textile industrialists continued to be active promoters of the city's economic and trading system. In the decades after Unification (1861–80s), Swiss capital investments moved into new economic sectors (steam-shipping and maritime insurance) that contributed to the modernization of the Genoese and Italian merchant fleet. During the nineteenth century the Swiss community created its own social spaces and identity within the city – a church, a cemetery, a school, and a charitable foundation. As in many other northern Italian cities, the consolidation of the community's external image did not weaken the Swiss élite's integration with the local Genoese upper class.     

Conformity and resistance in the Victorian penal system: archaeological investigations at Parliament House,Edinburgh

Abstract

Archaeological investigations at Parliament House in Edinburgh included the recovery of artefacts from a void discovered during building works. This space had been used as undercourt jail cells in the late 19th century, a time of penal reform. The assemblage contains items representing domestic, light industrial and clerical activities, as well as personal items such as children's toys and women's clothing. The Victorian penal code, contemporary accounts of prisoners, warders and chaplains, and historical and criminological studies suggest that they reflect not only the Prison Board's attempt to enforce conformity but also prisoners' and prison employees' resistance to the system.     

The congresses of Italian scientists between Europe and the Risorgimento (1839 – 75)

Abstract

This article reconstructs the history of the Italian scientific congresses from 1839 until 1875. The congresses are analyzed in the context of the political Risorgimento, but also as a reflection of relations among social groups, and between society and institutions. We examine the troubled coexistence of a minority interested primarily in encouraging the professionalization of science in state institutions of learning, and a broader sector of eminent citizens that placed the value of ‘expertise’ alongside the values of birth and social ranking. This complicated coexistence was the chief reason that the Italian congresses failed, and after 1861, as well, in their effort to establish a national scientific association comparable to those existing in many other countries, both inside and outside Europe. This essay reconstructs the main points and phases of the debate and the changes in the relations among the social and professional groups and scientific work, up until the foundation of a Società Italiana per il Progresso delle Scienze (SIPS, Italian Association for the Advancement of Science), which explicitly rejected the heritage of the Risorgimento.     

A Georgian gentleman: child care and the case of Harry Tremayne, 1814–23

Abstract

This case study considers the manner in which a well-to-do Georgian family managed a child's ill health during the 1820s. The study sheds light on three matters: the operation of a geographically widely spread medical market place, family relationships under the stress of illness and the function of the male within the domestic 'private' sphere of caring for the sick. While the study is located in a well-defined historiography, this is the first time that the unique correspondence from this family has been used for wider historical analysis, and it provides a unique insight into issues of health, family and family relationships in Georgian England.     

Beira,the ocean gateway to Rhodesia and Nyasaland

The History of Sicily from the Earliest Times. By Edward A. Freeman, M.A., Hon. D.C.L., LL.D. 2 Vols.: Pp. 609 + 583. With Maps. Oxford : at the Clarendon Press, 1891.

Denmark. Edited by H. Weitemeyer. With a Coloured Map. London : W. Heinemann. Copenhagen : A. F. Host and Son. Pp. 268.

New Light on Dark Africa: being the Narrative of the German Emin Pasha Expedition. Related by Dr. Carl Peters, the Commander of the Expedition. Translated from the German by H. W. Dulcken, Ph.D. London: Ward, Lock, &; Co., 1891. Maps and Illustrations. 1 vol., pp. 597.

Rulers of India: The Earl of Mayo. By Sir W. W. Hunter. Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1891. Pp. 201.

Wild Beasts and their Ways. By Sir Samuel W. Baker, F.R.S., P.R.G.S., etc. London : Macmillan and Co., 1891. Pp. 455.

Log of a Jack Tar; and Captain O'Brien's Captivity in France. Edited by Commander Lovett Cameron, R.N. “ Adventure Series.” London: Fisher Unwin, 1891. Pp. 379. Price 5s.

Portugal. By H. Morse Stephens, “ Story of the Nations “ Series. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1891. Pp. xxiv+450. Price 5s.

Industrial Ireland: A German View of the Irish Question. By J. B. Keller. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1891. Pp. 48.

A Lady's Letters from Central Africa : A Journey from Mandala, Shiri Highlands, to Ujiji, Lake Tanganyika, and back. By Jane F. Moir. With an Introduction by Rev. T. M. Lindsay, D.D. Glasgow: J. MacLehose and Sons, 1891. Pp. 91.

Manica: Being a Report addressed to the Minister of the Marine and the Colonies of Portugal. By J. Paiva de Andrada, Colonel of Artillery. With a Sketch‐Map by E. G. Eavenstein. London : George Philip and Son, 1891. Pp. 63. Price 1s.

Matabeleland and Mashonaland. Being a Special Number of South Africa. London : at the Offices of South Africa, 1891. Pp. 146. Price 2s.

The Bermuda Islands: A Contribution to the Physical History and Zoology of the Somers Archipelago, with an examination of the Structure of the Coral Beefs. By Angelo Heilprin, , F.G.S.A., etc. etc. Published by the Author. Philadelphia, 1889.

Wanderings in South America, etc. By Charles Waterton. Illustrations and Index. Pp. xxxix + 367. Thomas Kelson and Sons, 1891. Price 4s.

The Malay Archipelago : The Land of the Orang‐utan and the Bird of Paradise. A Narrative of Travel, with Studies of Man and Nature. By Alfred Russel Wallace. London and New York : Macmillan and Co., 1890. Pp. xvii + 515.

The Opening of the Arctic Sea. By H. A. N. Demsford, C.E. London : Eidgway, 1890.

The Cruise of the Dunottar Castle. By W. Scott Dalgleish, M. A. Edinburgh : T. and A. Constable, 1890. Pp. 94. Illustrated.

The Cyclists’ Route‐Book of Great Britain. By W. J. Spurrier. London : Iliffe and Son, 1890. Pp. 170. Price 1s.

History of Newport and the Parish of Forgan ; and Rambles round the District. By J. S. Neish. Dundee: W. and D. C. Thomson, 1890. Pp. vii+256. Price 3s.     

Notions of solidarity and integration in times of war: the idea of Europe, 1914–18

Abstract

This article argues that the First World War did not just aggravate nationalist sentiments but also encouraged intercultural exchange and a better understanding of other societies and ways of life. Indeed, the wartime prevalence of notions of solidarity and integration requires more attention and careful analysis. The essay explores three key issues, focusing in particular on solidarity practices and transnational interaction. It investigates military alliances, the collaboration between national independence movements, and the role of neutral countries as refuge and gathering place of pacifist groups and intellectuals. Many of these actors discussed and promoted forms of at least regional cooperation in post-war Europe.     

Police and power in the pre‐war Papua New Guinea highlands

Abstract

In public life Europeans are occupation oriented, which has meant that colonial officials then and European researchers since have tended to think of indigenous servants in terms of their occupations — of a catechist as a Christian missionary, for example, or a man in a police uniform as a policeman. Papua New Guineans are clan or village oriented. In taking European jobs, how far did they change worlds? This article argues that indigenous policemen did acquire new allegiances in police service, making the police almost a clan, but that traditional imperatives and objectives remained key motivations. For space reasons the paper focuses on the period of ‘influence’, of early contact and administration, rather than the succeeding period, of ‘control’. For good discussions of both see Kituai, ‘Innovation’, 156–66, and ‘My gun’.     

William Rutherford Sanders (1828–1881) and his neurologically fertile years (1865–1868)

ABSTRACT

William Rutherford Sanders (1828–1881) was an Edinburgh physician who occupied the Chair of Pathology at the University of Edinburgh from 1869 to 1881. All of his published output between 1865 and 1868 was concerned with neurology. In arguing that a patient did not have paralysis agitans, Sanders (1865) employed the term “Parkinson’s disease” for the first time in the English-language literature to distinguish between the disorder that Parkinson (1817) termed “paralysis agitans” and other types of shaking palsies. He contributed a major chapter on the same topic to Russell Reynolds’s A System of Medicine (1868). Sanders also investigated the innervation of the palate and facial muscles (1865), and in 1866 recorded the autopsy findings in two cases of aphasia. Here, for the first time in the English-language literature, he described findings that supported Broca’s location of the representation of speech to a particular area of the left cerebral hemisphere.     

The Political Style of Hubert H. Humphrey

Abstract

Political philosophy has a “curious” place in intellectual affairs. It wants to know whether philosophy has a place in the city. It also is aware that once political things have accomplished their purpose, the major issues of what-it-is-to-be-a-human-being remain. Aristotle warned that politics was not the highest science as such, but an understanding of politics that saw no place for anything but the political would end in a tyrannical exclusion of the human good from public life. Politics would claim that its definition of the good was the only definition. This exclusion meant that there was no natural or transcendent order to which man was open. The discipline of political philosophy, at its best, is open both to human and, indirectly, to divine things, as Artistotle intimated.     

La position de la France dans l'industrie européenne des machines à vapeur durant la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle∗

At least from the standpoint of the steam‐engine industry, the nature of industrial relations between France and other countries underwent a significant change during the half century which elapsed between 1860 and 1910. Towards 1860, the major characteristics are dispersion and nationalism; on the other hand, at the beginning of the twentieth century, while there is a new concentration on the national level, it confronts a distinct cosmopolitanism on the international level. To give an idea of this evolution, we will refer to two French works on steam‐engines, dated 1861–62 and 1913 respectively. They are of an essential practical nature and describe a large number of engines which were actually available on the market. Below, we will successively examine the early manufacturers existing through 1861–62, then those dating from 1913 only, and finally the establishments which have endured throughout the whole period under consideration. This study aims at pointing out the clear decadence of the French industry which became increasingly dependent upon foreign sources in the areas of technical creativeness as well as production.     

Du ‘géant remueur de terre’ à ‘Monsieur jardine’: valorisation et dévalorisation des images de la terre à la Belle Époque

Images of the Earth in Belle Époque fiction are frequently called upon to express an author's view of what defines an individual's relationship to self, history, and society. This article focuses on two examples whose significance is highlighted by the fact that the authors have radically opposed ideologies. In Diary of a Chambermaid (1900), Octave Mirbeau uses the provincial backyard garden satirically, as a site where society's repressed, sadistic and anal impulses are let loose. By contrast, René Bazin's highly conservative Donatienne (1903) illustrates the author's Catholic belief in the biblical sanctity of the relationship between a man and his native place. How uniquely relevant to the representation of the fictional Subject these images are is further demonstrated by the fact that women are unapologetically excluded from them. As it happens, these novels' female protagonists are both domestic servants, whose defining relationship is not to the Earth where they were born, but—second in the order of Creation—to the home where they live.     

Was Thomas Favent a political pamphleteer? Faction and politics in later fourteenth-century London

Thomas Favent’s Historia has long been recognised as an important source for the turbulent middle years of Richard II’s reign, in particular for its praise of the actions of the Lords Appellant in the Merciless Parliament of 1388. But why did Favent write the Historia and for whom was it written? In recent years the Historia has for the first time been subjected to detailed scrutiny and a case has made for regarding it as a political pamphlet written for a community of reform-minded civil servants eager to celebrate the achievements of parliament. This study offers an alternative explanation. It seeks to place the Historia more squarely within the turbulent environment of London’s factional politics. Favent’s factional affiliations are easily discerned, but his motivations for writing the Historia were complex and multi-faceted. A new reading of this text suggests, in fact, that it was written not to perpetuate divisions within London, but to draw a line underneath them. The article highlights the use of textual representation to shape and ultimately control memories of political conflict.     

Lincoln and Chiriquí Colonization Revisited

Abstract

This article looks at Abraham Lincoln's pursuit of colonization in the Chiriquí region of Colombia (now Panamá), conventionally known as one of just two places that he seriously considered with respect to his policy of relocating African Americans. Challenging the standard account of the scheme's demise around October 1862 due to vehement Central American protest, this piece questions whether such a development really took the president by surprise. The two weak threads running through the Chiriquí proposal were its scope for diplomatic upset and the embarrassment that might arise from its corrupt proponents’ links to the administration. The author argues that Lincoln was aware of both issues from an early date – even if they each became more complicated than he had initially realized – but that he made persistent attempts to address them. The administration was also more concerned about the ramifications of divisions within Colombia than the widespread isthmian outcry at colonization. Lincoln accordingly tried to place colonization policy on a sounder diplomatic and legislative footing as it became apparent that his contract with a domestic businessman also carried international implications. Yet ultimately, it was the Chiriquí venture's corruption that killed it when the president discovered that it went all the way to the cabinet.     

Population,Households and Fisheries in the Parish of Hvalsnes,Southwestern Iceland, 1750–1850

Abstract

This is an in-depth study of the parish of Hvalsnes, a small fishing community situated on the Reykjanes peninsula in southwestern Iceland, during the period 1750–1850. The study is inspired by the nordic Coastal Region Project carried out in the 1990s, focussing on the relationship between economic factors and household size and structure. With reference to the concept of ecotype, Hvalsnes is compared to a few farming communities in southern and western Iceland as regards a number of economic and demographic factors. Among the features characterizing the Hvalsnes community was the large proportion of crofter and cottar households in relation to those of independent farmer-fishermen; the former constituted a valuable workforce for the commercial cod fisheries on the abundant Reykjanes banks. At the same time, the study reveals that during the winter season the operation of the fishing fleet was highly dependent on seasonal migration from farming areas. In this perspective Hvalsnes appears to be an Icelandic parallel to Lofoten in Norway. A closer view of the techniques and social organization of fishing in the parish discloses significant differences between its three individual sections. It is argued that these differences help to explain why some sections suffered more, in economic and demographic terms, than others from the natural catastrophes and political changes which took place towards the end of the eighteenth century. However, these changes did not alter the general condition of the landless population: cottars by the seaside and living-in servants in the countryside. Among these groups many individuals continued now as before their seasonal migration between the two ecotypes. Tentatively, it is argued that the seasonal exchange of workforce between fishing and farming communities contributed to an efficient use of the labour capacity of their members.     

Estimating Antebellum Passenger Costs: A Hub-and-Spoke Approach

Abstract

Over 30,000 miles of railroad and 4,000 miles of canals were constructed in the United States between 1815 and 1861. However, the lack of data has prevented the study of this “transportation revolution” for most cities. This article thus enables a closer study of antebellum travel improvements by constructing a hub-and-spoke network that is capable of estimating the cost of passenger travel from New York City and Philadelphia to any U.S. city in 1836, 1850, 1856, 1859, and 1867. The semi-parametric approach provides an accurate cost estimate by using available historical information to determine the travel cost to all other cities.     

Editorial

In this article it is argued that men and women have been considered as "too old" in the labour market at an earlier age than people in general have been considered old, irrespectively of the actual biological life expectancy. The article discusses, first, farm servants in the old peasant society on the basis of the Swedish Hired Labour Acts, and, second, the migration restrictions imposed on elderly servants. The third point of discussion concerns age composition and wage by age of industrial workers in Finland at the turn of the 20th century, while the fourth point covers long-term unemployment in the 1930s and the introduction of old-age pension schemes. Some tentative explanations for the variation in the incidence of age discrimination over the past two centuries are suggested.     

‘Women—Keep Australia Free!’: Women Voters and Activists in the 1951 Referendum Campaign

Abstract

This article considers three aspects of the women's vote and activism during the 1951 referendum campaign. First, it is argued that the appeal to women was conducted in terms of the democratic right to freedom of expression and protest especially as it connected to domestic issues. Second, women's engagement in this campaign has been overlooked, but was influential, diverse and prominent, as evidenced by the involvement of activists such as Millicent Preston Stanley and Margot Mahood. Finally, the campaign directed at the woman voter points to the increasing appeal by the major parties to women as independent voters.     

Meeting at Manchester

Abstract

The grammatical and historical evidence cited above strongly suggests that an administrative system was in vogue among the ancient Israelites through which servants of the crown were supported by the income from estates. The ‘ownership’ of many of these estates was granted (or at least sanctioned) by the king.     

CONTEMPORARY AND RECENT ARCHAEOLOGY IN PRACTICE

Abstract

The archaeology of the 20th century has been studied since the 1960s, but it is only more recently that explicit theoretical and methodological issues have been explored by the wider archaeological profession. This paper explores some of those issues in the contexts of developer-funded archaeology and community archaeology. Ways in which the archaeology of the more recent past may both help and hinder the discipline are considered, together with the relevance of archaeology to society at large.