‘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.     

Spying in the British Post Office,Victorian Politics and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White

In 1844, the British public learned that the government was secretly opening exiled Young Italy leader Giuseppe Mazzini’s private letters and sharing information with continental authorities. For outraged citizens, espionage in that quintessential liberal institution, the reformed British Post Office, appeared un-English, despotic and criminal, the makings of a Gothic plot. Representations of the Post Office Scandal in Parliament and print predict the revision of the Gothic into the sensation novel that occurred with the publication of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White. Attention to the fields of Anglo-Italian studies, mid-Victorian print culture and the development of narrative form in the mid-nineteenth century illustrates the historical and political implications of letter-opening for the emergence of a new fictional genre. The Post Office Espionage Scandal and The Woman in White share a central place in a mid-Victorian moment of evolution in the mutually constitutive relationship between Italian and British national identities, producing and reflecting a crisis in Britishness focused on the secret tyrannies concealed beneath the surface of Victorian liberalism. The letter-opening scandal reveals a crisis in Victorian liberalism in the political realm and the media, while The Woman in White translates this Victorian crisis of confidence into a literary genre defined by exposing the sordid undercurrents of British society: sensation fiction. Together, the espionage scandal and Collins’s novel respond to and generate a challenge to Victorian complacency that emerged out of the collision of British and Italian politics and culture in the mid-nineteenth century.     

The Meaning of Things: Kipling’s Formative Journey ‘Home’ in 1889 and the Late Victorian Imperial Tour

The ‘seven years’ hard’ Rudyard Kipling spent as a journalist in north India are generally seen as the making of both his poetic and his politics. But, important as origin, community, identity and ‘my father’s house’ are to Kipling, he should also be seen as a wayfarer of no fixed abode. In 1889 he used his first royalties to return to metropolitan fame by the long way round: Burma, the Straits, Japan, the Pacific and a transcontinental journey past landmarks of his Americanophile boyhood reading. Both distressing and exhilarating, it was a journey that stimulated the productive tension in him between the parochial and the universal. If an upcountry Punjab station had impressed him with the necessity of colonial rule, it was this voyage that engendered his all-embracing imperial vision. If he had honed his eye for ‘local colour’, this trip intimated to him that his metier would lie in culturally translating disparate portions of the empire to one another. Anticipating Baden-Powell’s call to ‘look wider’, vagabonding proved to be an agreeable mode of existence, but metropolitan arrival was to hold its own unforeseen challenges and anxieties. At a time when English writers like Arthur Symons aestheticised their sensation of cultural rootlessness in the figure of the vagabond, Kipling sought to foreground his own vagabondism with a persuasive claim to belonging.     

‘The Epitheatrical Cartoonist’: Matthew Somerville Morgan and the World of Theatre,Art and Journalism in Victorian London

This article examines the vibrant cultural milieu inhabited by one of Victorian Britain's most famous cartoonists, Matthew Somerville Morgan. Morgan is well-known as the cartoonist who attacked Queen Victoria's withdrawal from public life (and her associations with John Brown), and the lifestyle of Albert, Prince of Wales, in the short-lived rival to Punch: the Tomahawk. Likewise, his post-1870 career in New York as cartoonist of the ‘Caricature War’ over the 1872 Presidential elections, and involvement with ‘Buffalo’ Bill Cody have been well-studied. However, his involvement with the world of the 1860s Victorian stage – and the social circles in which he moved – have not been given close attention. This broader social, cultural, and economic context is essential to understanding Morgan's role as a cartoonist-critic of politics, class, gender and art in Victorian Britain. Special attention is given to the ways in which Morgan's work as a theatrical scene-painter informed his other pursuits, including his political cartoons for Fun, the Comic News and the Tomahawk. So central was the theatre to Morgan's life story that he may be appropriately described as an ‘epitheatrical’ figure. Indeed he is one of the most spectacular exemplars of the interconnected worlds of journalism, high art and theatre in Victorian London. The theatre provided him with the artistic and journalistic connections needed to raise himself above his lower-class origins; to move in ‘clubland’ and fashionable bohemian society; and to win an influential place in the key political and cultural debates of his age.     

‘The True Love of the People and the Motherland’: The concept of socialist patriotism,socialist nation and anti-nationalism in Hungary in the 1960s and 1970s

In the late 1950s, the concept of socialist patriotism in Hungary was reformulated as a basic political concept in the ideology and propaganda of state socialism. The definite appropriation of Leninist contraposition of socialist patriotism and bourgeois nationalism became paramount in the second half of the 1950s because of the nationalist sentiments of the 1956 revolution. I trace the history of the concept of socialist patriotism in the 1960s and 1970s in socialist Hungary. During this period, socialist patriotism served as a slightly undetermined, yet didactic counter-concept to set against ‘bourgeois nationalism’ which was characterised as a xenophobic sense of nation. From the late 1960s, the doctrine of socialist patriotism confronted a new ideological enemy: supra-nationalism or cosmopolitanism. In the mid-1970s, a new ideological equilibrium was elaborated in Hungary between socialist patriotism and proletarian internationalism, which served the economic and political integration of the Eastern bloc countries. In this sense, socialist patriotism was meant to express a link with socialist political order, its achievements and its institutions, in contrast to the ethnic character and revanchist tendencies of nationalism.     

The comfort of the river: understanding the affective geographies of angling waterscapes in young people’s coping practices

ABSTRACT

This paper draws on ethnographic research with angling intervention programmes working with ‘disaffected’ young people in the UK to demonstrate how young people use the affective geographies of waterscapes to regulate their feelings and escape stressful lives. But rather than interpret the restorative or therapeutic quality of waterscapes as the consequence of (passive) immersion into green/blue spaces, we argue that ‘comfort’ is derived from an ongoing, active engagement with(in) the world. Drawing on works influenced by phenomenological theories and relational understandings of the more-than-human world, we illustrate how the affectual qualities of waterscapes are continually ‘woven’ into being through the material and embodied practices of young anglers. However, understanding why waterscapes ‘matter’ to young people also requires accounting for those assemblages originating in the past that shape these co-experienced worlds.     

The Fluidity of the ‘Farming Ladder’: The Experience of the Duffin Family,Yorkshire, 1870-1950

This article examines the nuances of the ‘farming ladder’ through a case study of the Duffin farming family. It explores the circumstances in which they flourished and faltered; the internal and external determinants affecting their ability to maintain a grip on the ‘farming ladder’; and the fluidity of the ladder. Drawing upon the personal archive of the family and complementary sources, the variable position of the family on the ‘farming ladder’ as they progress from agricultural labourers to farmers and then back to labourers is charted within wider historical and geographical frameworks. The social and spatial relationships forged are identified as being particularly important in the operation of the ‘farming ladder’.     

‘A Terrific Ogre’: The Role of the Devil in Victorian Popular Belief

The Devil played a vital role in Victorian popular belief. He was a multifaceted figure who could be humorous or terrifying, depending on the occasion. While he struggled for space with an array of supernatural figures, the Devil managed to maintain a presence in a wide variety of supernatural narratives and beliefs.     

Small and scattered: poor law children’s homes in Leeds, 1900–1950

By the turn of the twentieth century, the concepts of home and family had begun to have a positive influence on institutional life. Within poor law circles, large, residential institutions became seen as inappropriate for the needs of children without family support, and moves were made to transfer them into smaller, family-sized units of care. Cottage homes were one option, and, less commonly, scattered homes. This article argues that it was scattered homes that held the greatest potential to create a homely, family-orientated environment, and its adoption by the Leeds Poor Law Guardians in Leeds placed them in the vanguard of best practice at the beginning of the twentieth century with regard to the care of children. At the twentieth century’s mid-point, the local authority in Leeds continued to favour the same system.     

The golden and the brazen world: Papers in literature and history, 1650–1800

From the seventeenth century onwards, English Reformed ministers engaged in lively correspondence and publishing exchanges with men from different countries and Protestant traditions. In the eighteenth century, appreciation of their shared intellectual and cultural heritage and a desire to sustain the patterns for religious living it encouraged inflected the content and style of textual interactions among Halle Pietists, English dissenters and New England Congregationalists. Interest in the present state of religious life was also important, and therefore news about awakenings and materials for pastoral care circulated around Europe and North America through existing channels and by new means. Their encounters and the texts that they produced were mutually generative, and the language and manner of the participants' personal interactions were important features of published works. These personal associations, publishing activities and discursive styles can be understood as aspects of the literary sociology of a religious culture that valued intellectual and emotional engagements and sought to inculcate religion through education and friendship.     

Reassessing the ‘Crisis of Faith’ in the Victorian Age: Eclecticism and the Spirit of Moral Inquiry

This article examines both recent scholarship in the field of Victorian religion and conviction alongside new research on secularization that have cast doubt on an older historical narrative about the ‘crisis of faith’ and the ‘triumph’ of the secular. My discussion challenges the emergence of an alternative narrative of crisis that focuses on the ‘crisis of doubt’ rather than the ‘crisis of faith’. In particular, it answers the recent work of Timothy Larsen who argues that many past (and some present) approaches to Victorian religious culture have overemphasized doubt at the expense of considering enduring forms of Christian religiosity. By reappraising the career histories of the radical secularists (notably, Annie Besant) that Larsen uses to support his thesis, I test some of the key assumptions and conclusions of his influential account. My analysis questions the positioning of faith and scepticism as polar opposites and the usefulness of the idea of ‘crisis’ when examining either belief or doubt. Changes in individuals' convictions and practices might be better seen as part of their life-long quest for an all-embracing morality.     

The husbandry,perception and ‘improvement’ of turkeys in Britain, 1500–1900

The introduction of the turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) to Britain is documented during the first half of the 16th century. These birds initially featured on the tables of the powerful and served as living garden ornaments or pets. Shifting human perceptions, driven in part by the ‘ethic of improvement’, affected turkey husbandry methods and animal-human relationships as well as the bird’s symbolic role. This transition was complicated; the turkey remained a palimpsest of attributes throughout 1500–1900, with different associations assuming prominence over time.     

The rise and fall of ‘critical’ historiography? Some reflections on the historiographical agenda of the left in Britain,France and Germany at the end of the twentieth century

This article compares the rise and fall of ‘critical’, that is to say oppositional and emancipatory, historiography in Britain, France and Germany since 1945. It argues that the prolonged crisis of the old ‘critical’ paradigm from the late 1970s onwards had much to do with political disillusionment and methodological weaknesses. It concludes by suggesting that any new ‘critical’ historiography will have to explore the opportunities inherent in the multitude of radical histories which developed in the 1980s and 1990s (most notably history‐from‐below, cultural, feminist and post‐modernist histories), without attempting to homogenise and synthesise these diverse and separate forms of historical writing into some new super‐paradigm, which would only produce new closures and erasures.