‘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.     

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 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 Profumo affair in popular culture: The Keeler Affair (1963) and ‘the commercial exploitation of a public scandal’

This article demonstrates that the Profumo affair, which obsessed Britain for large parts of 1963, was not simply a political scandal, but was also an important cultural event. Focussing on the production of The Keeler Affair, a feature film that figured prominently in contemporary coverage of the scandal but which has been largely overlooked since, the article shows that this film emerged from a situation in which cultural entrepreneurs, many of them associated with the satire boom, sought to exploit the scandal for financial gain. Many Profumo-related cultural products found an audience, and thus formed an integral part of, and helped to shape public attitudes towards, the Profumo affair. However, these products did not go uncontested, and resistance to them, and especially to the idea that Keeler might benefit materially from her role in the scandal, speak to concerns about cultural mediations of sex, politics and humour in early-1960s Britain.     

‘‘The Acceptable Face of the Unintelligible’: Intermediality and the Science Play’

Abstract

The limitations of the ‘science-in-theatre’ genre is explored and the concept of the intermedial science play is introduced as an alternative to conventional science plays. How the science-in-theatre play dampens the mediality of the stage in order to establish a specific contract with its audience in order to realize what Carl Djerassi calls ‘didactic realism’ is considered. By virtue of the dramatic form and the didacticism it establishes, the science-in-theatre play limits the means by which audiences may encounter and enjoy responding to science. In particular, when staging concepts from the postclassical sciences, the intermedial science play offers artists and spectators new approaches to the sciences of infinities, complexity and emergence whilst also establishing a new, interactive contract with the audience based on forms of pedagogy associated with the thinking of Jacques Rancière. Using the media theory of Peter Boenisch and others, intermediality is identified as more than the mere presence of multimedia, but in terms of the effects it produce on the sensorium of the spectator.     

‘The Stupidest Tea-Party in All My Life’: Lewis Carroll and Victorian Psychiatric Practice

An analysis of the numerous connections of Lewis Carroll to the Victorian psychiatric profession reveals their influence on the portrayal of insanity in Carroll’s fiction. Through examining his relationship with his uncle Robert Wilfred Skeffington Lutwidge, a Commissioner in Lunacy, and collating Carroll’s personal recollections from diaries and letters with correspondences of the Lunacy Commission, this article offers a comprehensive picture of Carroll’s intellectual engagement with Victorian psychiatry. Combining these insights with his literary writings illuminates the psychiatric origins of the ‘Mad Tea-Party’ and characters such as the Hatter in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in the organization and methods of mid-Victorian pauper lunatic asylums and their treatment of impoverished workers. Likewise, the illustrations of Carroll’s works stood in dialogue with popular imagery of insanity as well as ideas of physiognomy and their diagnostic application in asylum photography by Hugh Welch Diamond. This piece will argue that the framework of Victorian psychiatry provided Carroll with imagery he utilizes to satirize aspects of Victorian moral values. It thus aims to highlight the benefits of re-framing the works of Lewis Carroll beyond the genre children’s literature, and considering them as part of the wider Victorian discourse of the sciences of the mind.     

The First ‘Urnfields’ in the Plains of the Danube and the Po

Journal of World Prehistory - Archaeological research is currently redefining how large-scale changes occurred in prehistoric times. In addition to the long-standing theoretical dichotomy between...     

The Ideational Dimension of Federalism: The ‘Australian Model’ and the Politics of Equalisation in Canada

This article examines the ideational dimension of federalism and its consequences for the analysis of policy development. With this objective in mind, the article offers an explanation for Canada's rejection of the two main aspects of the ‘Australian model’ of equalisation: the assessment of expenditure needs and the existence of an arms-length commission to determine payments. As argued, the ideological prevalence of provincial autonomy in Canada explains why federal officials opted to reject the ‘Australian model’ as they prepared to establish the country's program and why subsequent reforms never introduced a needs-assessment dimension or created an arms-length agency to administer equalisation. At the theoretical level, this article shows how ideational factors can shape policy outcomes.     

The question of ‘the political’ in critical geopolitics: Querying the ‘child soldier’ in the ‘war on terror’

After two decades of scholarship on ‘critical geopolitics’, the question of whether it is largely a discursive critique of prevailing knowledge production and geopolitical texts or critique with an implicit, normative politics of its own remains open. These positions are not incommensurate, and much scholarship on critical geopolitics does both. This paper analyzes critical geopoliticians' concern with this question in the present historical moment and probes the possibility of a post-foundational ethic as the basis for ‘the political’ in critical geopolitics and beyond. Empirically, this paper explores these theoretical tensions within ‘critical geopolitics’ by tracing the disparate fates of two young men, both child soldiers at the time of their capture. ‘Child soldier’ is an unstable category subject to geopolitical valence and stigma during the ‘war on terror’. The deployment of extra-legal tactics and spaces of violence, such as those faced by detainees at Guantanamo Bay, point to the rise of biopolitics combined with geopolitics, illustrating the intersection of sovereignty and governmentality as important political fodder for critical geopolitics two decades after its inception. The stories of Canadian Omar Khadr, one of the youngest prisoners at Guantanamo and the only citizen of a Western state still held there, and Ismael Beah, a rehabilitated soldier who fought as a boy from Sierra Leone, illustrate too how geographical imagination strongly shapes access to provisions of international law and the victimized status of ‘child soldier’ in particular.     

The Campbell Committee and the origins of ‘deregulation’ in Australia

The 1981 Australian Financial System Inquiry, known as the Campbell Committee, is widely seen as the start of the reform movement of the 1980s and 1990s. Accounts of its origins have been dominated by a debate about which policy actor can take credit. This paper utilises cabinet and Reserve Bank archives to reassess the origins of the Campbell Committee. The inquiry had its origins in an earlier attempt by the Whitlam government to take federal control of the regulation for non-bank financial institutions and the building society crisis of the mid-1970s. In its response to these political and economic challenges we can identify the moment in which the Fraser cabinet turned towards market-based reform. The political decisions made in the context of crisis set the path for regulatory change in subsequent decades, particularly in the area of prudential regulation, where we have seen regulatory consolidation and expansion rather than ‘deregulation’.     

‘Impressions of Weird Fate’: Revision and Crisis in ‘The Lady of Shalott’

Alfred Tennyson disliked the engraving of ‘The Lady of Shalott’ produced by William Holman Hunt for the 1857 Moxon edition of Tennyson’s Poems, accusing the artist of taking too many liberties in depicting the Lady’s hair and the threads of her weaving as ‘wildly tossing’ around her. This essay traces the histories of both Hunt’s image and Tennyson’s text, arguing that the poet’s objection is grounded in the fact the engraving reproduces the fierce agency that characterizes the Lady in Tennyson’s 1832 original but not his 1842 revision. That pattern of revision, I suggest, reflects the poet’s distress over the 1833 death of his beloved friend Arthur Hallam and is motivated by his new ways of thinking, in the wake of that catastrophe, about the crisis of desire and the perpetual trauma of communication between the living and the dead.     

‘The Claims of Asia and the Far East’: India and the FAO in the Age of Ambivalent Internationalism

If any nation were poised to actualize the developmental promises that the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) extended to the international community, it was India. India's independence came in the wake of devastating famine in Bengal and the fears of its recurrence, and the nationalists who had midwifed India's freedom staked their legitimacy to the promise of food for all. Yet from independence, the FAO played only a marginal role in India's agricultural development, its projects reflecting a winnowing scale of ambition. From early investigations into the improved cultivation of basic food grains, the FAO's projects grew increasingly modest by the time of the Green Revolution, revolving around modest improvements to capitalist agriculture, from wool shearing to timber and fishery development. Instead, India drew more substantively upon resources made available by the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, the United States Technical Cooperation Mission and occasional Soviet largesse. Meanwhile, the Indian most associated with the FAO, B.R. Sen (Director-General, 1956–1967), struggled to align the Organization's capacities with India's scarcity crises, even as his own understanding of famine drew upon his experience as India's Director of Food during the Bengal Famine.     

The ‘superman’ solution: ‘Super soldiers’ and ‘superheroes’ in the United States military

Current US military research focused on the development of pharmacological ‘super soldiers’ – soldiers enhanced through a variety of pharmaceuticals and biomedical technologies to perform far beyond what unenhanced soldiers can do – draws from and often mimics popular or pop-cultural conceptions of the superhero. These biomedical and pharmacological interventions pose profound ethical problems and possibilities that are solved – in part – by imagining the new US super soldier as a superhero. Drugging soldiers to enhance their ability to fight and survive is a frightening proposition, and one that makes people uncomfortable; the solution is to imagine them as superheroes – as positive representations of the enhanced soldier on the side of good, somehow contained and controllable and fundamentally safe and unfrightening.     

‘Chilling’ and ‘hopping’ in the ‘teenage space network’: explorations in teenagers’ geographies in the city of Mechelen

Within the field of children's geographies several calls have been made to develop ‘teenagers’ geographies’ as a complementary field of research and practice. It has been stated that teenagers remain ‘invisible’ or ‘marginalised’ in public debates as well as in research and practice, even within childhood studies and children's geographies. Further explorations in teenagers’ geographies could contribute to the research on ‘diverse childhoods’. This article explores the spatial worlds of teenagers (approximately 12–16 years) in Flanders (Belgium), a region characterised by a dense network of smaller cities and ‘urban sprawl’. Based on street interviews and observations in a small city several mental maps and patterns of teenagers’ use of public space were identified. Starting from a case study in the city of Mechelen, this article suggests how these perspectives can be integrated into urban planning by identifying and tying together relevant planning layers, thus creating a more closely knit ‘teenage space network’. Wouter Vanderstede is an urban planner, anthropologist and historian. He is a researcher and staff member at Childhood & Society Research Centre–Onderzoekscentrum Kind & Samenleving vzw. Child friendly and teenager friendly planning and design of public space is one of the main research themes of the institute. View all notes     

The monumental and the miniature: imagining ‘modernity’ in Astana

This article examines the elite nation-building project in post-independence Kazakhstan through an analysis of monumental architecture and miniature models in Astana. It considers the role of the country's new capital as a modernist project, in which elite geopolitical imaginaries are multiply inscribed in the cityscape. Drawing on interdisciplinary literatures on modernity and authoritarian regime legitimation, the article considers modernity as a discursive trope employed in legitimating the Nazarbayev government, and one that has various material manifestations in the urban landscape of Astana. The research is based on fieldwork in Kazakhstan in Summer 2009, and examines architecture, monuments, and the 2009 Astana Day celebrations. Through a focus on the monumental and the miniature, it highlights their similar roles in transforming symbols of Kazakhstani independence and identity into objects of reverie outside the field of political contestation.     

‘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.     

The ‘Injunction of Jeremiah’: papal politicking and power in the Middle Ages

Throughout the Middle Ages, the ‘Injunction of Jeremiah’ (Jer. 1:10) was employed by countless ecclesiastical writers. Building on an established tradition, medieval contemporaries began applying the allegory of ‘uprooting and destroying, building and planting’ with an intentionally moral and political message. This article examines the Old Testament call narrative with a view to understanding how and why it served medieval popes and other high-ranked ecclesiastics as a political and rhetorical mechanism for legitimising ecclesiastical authority. It argues for a noticeable and deliberate shift in textual interpretation in the ninth century, after which period medieval popes and influential church figures alike marshalled the Injunction to help strengthen the centralising ideology of Rome and her bishop. The effect, it is concluded, contributed ultimately to reinforcing the papacy's claims to govern spiritual and temporal matters throughout Christian society.