Compulsory Schooling Legislation: An Economic Analysis of Law and Social Change in the Nineteenth Century

Samples drawn from marriage registers in Birmingham and rural Norfolk, England, which report the occupational status for both the groom and his father, were matched with the 1851 and 1881 English censuses, which also contain occupational information. After performing several checks for selection bias, the author concludes: First, although most occupational mobility took place within 10 years of marriage—when the groom was roughly between the ages of 25 and 35—some continued after he turned 50. Second, approximately 35 percent of the men in each area eventually had an occupational status different from their fathers, and about 30 percent changed occupational status over their careers, belying the stereotype of impenetrable walls between classes in Victorian England. Third, upward occupational mobility seemed to slow in both regions as the period under consideration progressed. Fourth, although occupational mobility rates overall were comparable in these urban and rural areas, it was much easier for an individual to rise from an unskilled to a skilled status in Birmingham than it was in Norfolk. Fifth, and perhaps most surprising, literacy had a greater effect on social mobility in rural Norfolk than in urban Birmingham.     

THEMATIC REVIEW

M. Jeanne Peterson, Family, Love, and Work in the Lives of Victorian Gentlewomen Norma Clarke, Ambitious Heights: Writing, Friendship, Love - The Jewsbury Sisters, Felicia Hemans, and Jane Welsh Carlyle Mary Lyndon Shanley, Feminism, Marriage, and the Law in Victorian England, 1850–1895 Carol Dyhouse, Feminism and the Family in England, 1880–1939     

WESTMORLAND WEDDINGS: A STUDY OF THE 1787 CENSUS

Abstract

There has been much speculation about marriage practices in 18th century England, and many commentators have assumed that cohabitation was common, particularly among the lower orders. More recent work on southern parishes has, however, suggested that formal marriage was the norm, and cohabitation vanishingly rare, both before and after the passage of the Clandestine Marriages Act of 1753. This article sets out to test whether that conclusion holds good for those more remote parts of the north-west in which, it has been claimed, informal practices still flourished. Drawing on a cohort of over a thousand couples identified from the Westmorland ‘census’ of 1787, this article discusses the challenges in tracing where and when those couples had married, and shows how all the evidence nonetheless suggests very high levels of compliance with the formal legal requirements. This in turn has important implications for the assumed completeness of parochial registers and the likelihood of family historians being able to trace a marriage.     

The number of Huguenot immigrants in England in the late seventeenth century

The task of assessing the number of Huguenots seeking refuge in later Stuart England is exceptionally difficult. They left France by stealth, so no emigration lists exist. French names could be anglicized almost immediately on arrival across the Channel or otherwise changed beyond recognition, and marriage and burial records concerning Huguenots are often entered in the registers of English churches rather than those of the French congregations themselves. As refugees the mobility of the Huguenots was great. Guesses as to the numbers reaching England, exaggerated in the eighteenth century and since reduced, have varied from 20,000 to 150,000. A study of surviving baptismal records, in conjunction with other evidence including informed contemporary estimates, suggests that some 40,000–50,000 Huguenots settled in England betwen the late 1670s and the reign of Queen Anne. Refugee communities were located south of a line drawn from the Severn to the Wash. Almost all were near the sea, normally in towns rather than in the countryside. By far the largest concentration was in London; living for the most part in the eastern and western suburbs, Huguenots comprised about 5% of the total population of the capital at the end of the seventeenth century. Their contribution to the commercial and political transformation of England which took place at that time was significant and deserves re-evaluation.     

Sister-in-Law Marriage in the Empire: Religious Politics and Legislative Reform in the Australian Colonies 1850–1900

In 1835, a statute was passed in the parliament of the United Kingdom making it illegal for a widowed man to marry his sister-in-law. 1 Lord Lyndhurst's Act (1835) 5 & 6 Will VI c. 54. Marriage to a sister-in-law after a wife's death was common practice in nineteenth-century England and colonial Australia and aunts often took on the responsibility of raising children after a sibling's death. In the 1840s, a protracted parliamentary and social debate began over whether a widowed man's marriage to his sister-in-law should be made legal and this debate lasted over seven decades. In the Australian colonies, where English law had been inherited, 2 Those Australian colonies settled prior to the passing of Lord Lyndhurst's Act inherited the English position regarding deceased wife's sister marriage at the time, that such unions were voidable in the ecclesiastical courts during the lifetime of the parties, and in those colonies established afterwards, the 1835 statute applied and deceased wife's sister unions were illegal. In both cases colonial parliaments attempted to pass legislation to clarify the law. a similar debate occurred in the 1870s. The marriage was legalised in most of Australia in the 1870s while it remained illegal in England until the turn of the century. The parallel debates in each country provide a window into the comparative effect of religious culture on the development of marriage law. One of the primary reasons for the protracted nature of the struggle for marriage reform in England was its significance for the relationship between church and state. This article explores the implications of the relationship between church and state in Britain and the colonies for marriage legislation.     

West over Sea: studies in Scandinavian sea-borne expansion and settlement before 1300

This article explores marriage settlements in national political debate and legal usage in three Swedish towns, c. 1870–1920. During this period one of the central issues for the Swedish women's movement was to abolish the legalized male dominance within marriage. Despite some ambiguities towards marriage settlements, the women's movement tried to encourage women to write up contracts before marriage, as a way to both protect their property and to achieve more power within marriage. Traditionally, marriage settlements were exceptions in Swedish legal practice, but they became somewhat more common during the period under investigation. This development could be explained by the population increase and industrialization, but only partially. The analysis of the initiators, their social background and civil status as well as the change of contents in the marriage settlements are interpreted not only as reflections of economic change, but as evidence of female agency and emancipation.     

An Occupational Study to Track the Rise of Adult Male Mule Spinning in Lancashire and Cheshire, 1777–1813

This study utilises occupational data abstracted from parish records to track temporal change in the number of adult males who were spinners in Lancashire and Cheshire. The baptism registers of 1813 show that over 80 per cent of adult male spinners in the two counties lived in thirteen parishes only. Two-thirds of the spinners resided within a radius of 10 miles of Manchester town. Manchester and Stockport, in particular, were at the vanguard. Approximately 60 per cent of the spinners lived in the parishes of Manchester, Stockport, Prestwich with Oldham, Bury, Bolton le Moors and Blackburn. The marriage registers of these places contain no entries for bridegrooms who worked as spinners before 1780, the year of the introduction of Crompton’s mule. Thereafter, their number increased markedly. The adoption of the mule was rapid, faster than has been shown previously. Analysis of the trends in the ratio of spinners-to-weavers suggests that cotton spinning by hand and by jenny became effectively redundant in the six parishes during the 1790s. By this time, female cotton spinners in these places had been displaced. The demise of the jenny in cotton spinning, around twenty-five years after its introduction into Lancashire, implies that it was not a major factor to explain why the industrial revolution took off in Britain rather than elsewhere.     

Capac Women and the Politics of Marriage in Early Colonial Peru

During the major Inca civil wars, Atahualpa had almost exterminated Huascar’s kin. Only a few capac women, those who descended from Manco Capac, the founder of the Inca dynasty, remained alive. Atahualpa had planned to take them as his principal wives since only this type of marriage could successfully maintain the authority of the Incas over a large Andean territory. The Spanish arrival in 1532 interrupted his plans, but it did not eliminate Inca claims of sovereignty through marriage. In fact, it was through marriage that Atahualpa aimed to establish political alliances with Francisco Pizarro. While both Incas and Spaniards understood marriage on their own terms, there were many instances in which both were willing to redefine their own concepts of marriage in their struggle for power. In all of these, the women engaged in these unions were not only conscious about their political roles, but agents in the main historical events of this period.     

SKILLS,EDUCATION, AND CANADIAN PROVINCIAL DISPARITY*

ABSTRACT We derive synthetic time series over the 1951–2001 period of the skills of labor market entrants for the 10 Canadian provinces from the 2003 ALL survey. The effect of the skills variable on regional income is significant and substantial. Skills acquired by one extra year of schooling result in an increase in per capita income of around 5 percent, which is close to microeconomic Mincerian estimates. Our literacy indicator does not outperform human capital indicators based on education. This contrasts sharply with recent cross‐country evidence and suggests substantial measurement error in cross‐country schooling data.     

Embroidery as a Means of Diplomacy: The Artisans’ Part in a Royal Marriage Proposal, 1560–1561

The use of fashionable dress played an important part in early modern dynastic politics. In this paper, the diplomatic efforts to engineer a marriage between Erik XIV of Sweden and Elizabeth I of England are used as an example of the interrelations of textiles and diplomacy. Parallel to their negotiations in London, the Swedes organised the production of luxury goods and set up temporary workshops on the spot. The study looks at the Swedish embroidery workshop in London, using written records to investigate its organisation and production, and to discuss artisanal skills and the transnational element in employment in a royal workshop. It is suggested that the entire enterprise was a diplomatic practice, designed to enable the Swedes to draw attention to their presence in London and make their consumption visible on all possible levels.     

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 Progress of Education in the Northern Coalfield Before 1870

Although the literacy of miners lagged behind county and national averages, there was educational progress in the Northern coalfield before 1870. Progress came partly from the private adventure schools and the Sunday schools, which originated in the colliery communities and which have been underestimated by historians. Evidence from parish registers shows that the private adventure schools that proliferated in the collieries, especially from the 1820s, helped to maintain and raise literacy rates in some villages, but were unjustly criticized by educators who favoured state public elementary schools. The colliery Sunday schools, particularly those of the Methodists, were also important in developing the ability to read. The spread of Methodism amongst miners gave an important stimulus to literacy, which resulted in greater support for adult education in the coalfield. The growth of mechanics’ institutes, reading rooms and mutual improvement societies testified to a growing enthusiasm amongst miners for education before 1870. Despite the extraordinary population growth, especially in Durham, and extensive migration of workers in the coal industry, educational progress in the coalfield is evident particularly in the late 1850s and 1860s.     

Afterimages of the Victorian City

As emblematic spaces of social and cultural contamination, the Victorian street and underworld have had remarkable afterlives in twentieth-century reinterpretations of Victorian cityscapes. This article explores what persists in our vision of the nineteenth-century city well over a century after it was, so to speak, first seen, and how what persists impacts on our attempts to reconstruct that act of seeing. In the lived spaces around us there is in fact continuity, in that the city is a palimpsest and patchwork of Victorian and post-Victorian materials. However, to see those spaces as Victorian is in fact to elide a historical process of physical accumulation and syncretism. This article explores spectral ‘afterimages’ of the Victorian street and underground, in a variety of contemporary sources, ranging from Gary Sherman's Death Line (1972) and John Mackenzie's The Long Good Friday (1980) to Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses (New York: Picador, 1988), the material culture of steampunk and the Telectroscope by the artist Paul St George. It traces two distinct genealogies of renderings of Victorian urban spaces in current popular culture. While filmic renderings are obsessed with the ghostly circulation of Victorian spectres haunting the present, steampunk artists imagine an alternative temporality, locating the origin of an alternative future in the mobility of Victorian metropolitan culture.     

Two notaries and their records in England, 1282–1307

Evidence concerning notaries public in England before 1300 has been limited to indirect contemporary references, some scattered original public instruments, and several truncated copies and summaries of their documents (in episcopal registers, for instance). Even with inferences based upon the foregoing — and John of Bologna's guidebook for fledgling English notaries — since none of their notebooks, registers or rough drafts have survived, next to nothing is known about their practical documentary methodologies and daily routines (certainly in comparison with the continental notariate). However, during 1307 a papal commission sitting in London examined and recorded some of the papers and registers belonging to two notaries who had lived and worked in England from at least 1280 to about 1300: John de Beccles and Hildebrand of Siena. The record of that examination, Vatican MS. Cod. Lat. 4016, provides the earliest detailed look at the thirteenth-century notariate in England that has yet come to light.     

Utopian Promise or Burdensome Responsibility? A Critical Analysis of the UK Government's Building Schools for the Future Policy

Abstract: This paper critically analyses a nationwide school‐building programme in England: Building Schools for the Future (BSF). It is argued that, between 2003 and 2010, the UK Government's policy guidance for BSF represented a (re)turn to utopian discourse in governmental policy‐making, mobilised in order to justify a massive programme of new school building in the UK. In doing so, BSF connected with the promise of three further discourses: school(‐children), community and architectural practice. It anticipated that new school buildings would instil transformative change—modernising English schooling, combating social exclusion and leaving an architectural “legacy”. However, it is argued that BSF constituted an allegorical utopia: whilst suggesting a “radical” vision for schooling and society, its ultimate effect was to preserve a conventional (neo‐liberal) model of schooling. The paper highlights the critical role that notions of utopia might have in negotiating—and challenging—promise‐laden mega‐building policies like BSF. In doing so, it develops recent geographical research on utopia, education and architecture.     

Marital distance and its geographical orientation in England and Wales, 1979

"A representative sample of just over one thousand marriages solemnized in England and Wales in 1979 is used to analyse the distribution of the distances between the partners' addresses at marriage....according to various social and demographic variables also derived from the same source. Comparison with other surveys suggests that marriages in which both partners give the same address are likely to be those of couples who cohabit before marriage. Partners who work in unskilled manual occupations, or who marry with a civil ceremony, or who have been married before, appear more likely than the average to cohabit. Of the marriages where different addresses are given, about one-half bring together partners living within 5 km of each other." It is found that "there is a strong relationship between high social class and increased marital distance, and also between greater marital distance and older ages up to about age 40. Longer-range marriages show clear evidence of geographical orientation, the effect being more pronounced at longer distances. This is attributed to variations in population density over the country and geographical constraints on settlement patterns."     

Sir Charles Grandison,Natural Law and the Fictionalised English Gentleman

This article enquires into the relation between enlightened humanist conceptions of natural law and the period novel's fictionalization of the English gentleman in the context of its marriage plot. Marriage played a key role in enlightened theorisations of natural law precisely as an institution capable of grounding familial and civil life in an emerging concept of human nature. Yet public debate about the state's role in the regulation of marriage in mid-eighteenth-century England demonstrates that natural law lent itself to very different models of sovereignty and governance. The antinomies that characterized natural law's circulation in the English context are uniquely fictionalized in Samuel Richardson's last novel, Sir Charles Grandison (1753–54), a lengthy parallel narrative of failed courtship and matrimonial felicity that draws upon Pufendorf's model of natural law, yet is only partly implicated in its secular humanism. The novel's eponymous gentleman hero – a ‘Man of Religion and Virtue’ – exemplifies a mix of Anglican piety, civic virtue and disinterested sympathy that is sanctioned by natural law and sealed by the English marriage plot.     

Migration fields in a traditional Highland community, 1350–1850

Using information on marriages from a clan genealogy composed in 1705 and from parish registers after 1775, a network of social relations within the Clann Mhuirich has been constructed over a three-and-a-half century period. An examination of marriage records and records of the residences of baptizing families throws light on the means whereby social relationships are formed and maintained over space through time in a Scottish highland community before the mid-nineteenth century. A basic characteristic of a Highland clan was its agnatic structure, binding men and women related to each other by patrilineal descent, often bearing the same surname. The territory occupied by a clan became segmented by a process of agnatic migration as clansmen acquired land through marriage. Another characteristic of clan organization was a tendency towards high levels of clan endogamy. Endogamous marriages reinforced the agnatic structure and maintained continuity of possession of a clan's territory.     

Fragments of the Modern City: Material Culture and the Rhythms of Everyday Life in Victorian London

This essay analyses the influence of Charles Baudelaire's and Théophile Gautier's fetishist poetics on the early works of Algernon Charles Swinburne. If the crucial role played by the Victorian poet as a cultural ‘passeur’ between France and England has often been highlighted in recent criticism, his aesthetic delight in certain forms of sexual deviance such as podophilia has rarely been explored in relation to the verse of his French mentors. Swinburne, Gautier, and Baudelaire may have indeed shared this erotic fascination with feet: this is a fascination that was partly grounded in these poets' common interest in antique literary models, in particular in Sappho's poetry. Rather than extolling the Hellenic ‘sweetness and light’ which some of his contemporaries set so high, Swinburne indulged in dangerously eroticised Dionysian aesthetics which were perceived as both ‘too Hellenic’ and ‘too French’. I argue that the fetishism of the poetic foot may be read as one of the keys to the Victorian poet's subversive shift away from the serenity often associated with Victorian neoclassicism in favour of a Dionysian energy that anticipates Friedrich Nietzsche's works.