Between the lodge and the meeting-house: Mapping Irish Protestant identities and social worlds in late Victorian Toronto

The urban lives of Irish Protestant immigrants and their descendants are a neglected feature in geographies of the Irish diaspora. Prominent settlers from the early nineteenth century, they played a key role in the shaping of a host culture in Anglophone Canada. The social and spatial processes that moulded Irish Protestants into a wider loyal British identity are examined at a number of scales in Toronto, 'the Belfast of North America'. After initially exploring the rhetoric and practices of city-wide institutions that served many Irish Protestants, the autobiographical reflections of John McAree are used as a case study on the micro-geographies of everyday lives experienced within local space as well as an empirical test for Bourdieu's ideas of practice and 'habitus'.     

Distance and social interaction in a Victorian city

The paper examines patterns of marriage in a small industrial city—Huddersfield—between 1850 and 1880, when the residential structure of the city was becoming more modern in its spatial organization. The need to interpret distance-decay patterns of interaction in their social context is stressed. The apparently unchanging relationship between physical distance and frequency of interaction is related to the balance between changing patterns of individual mobility, class consciousness and scales of residential segregation. The more extensive interaction fields of the rich are attributed to their greater mobility, but also their lower population density. The close-knit patterns of the poor reflect their higher population density and more particularly the segregation of the Irish community. Finally, the differences between normative (within-class) and non-normative (between-class) marriage distances are considered. It is suggested that physical distance operated independently of social distance, although this conclusion requires further testing at different scales of analysis, and using information on forms of interaction other than marriage.     

Between science and religion: The reaction to scientific naturalism in late Victorian England

From its ornamental and often bookish exterior to its use as an exegetical tool for understanding the Book of Nature, the 18th-century microscope was socialized as an instrument of letters as well as of science. This essay proposes a reading of the microscope as a literary artifact by examining its bindings, its texts and its illustrations. While the instrument promised to extend human sense perception and to give its user access to invisible worlds, it simultaneously threatened to alter received views concerning both aesthetics and social hierarchy. Nevertheless, the destabilizing effects of the microscopic message entered polite society cloaked in a veil of familiarity in the binding of a good book. The nostalgia-encrusted instrument absorbed the shock of the new.     

People and Things on the Move: Domestic Material Culture,Poverty and Mobility in Victorian London

The development of what Mayne and Lawrence (Urban History 26: 325–48, 1999) termed “ethnographic” approaches to studying nineteenth-century households and urban communities has gathered momentum in recent years. As such research agendas have taken hold and been applied to new contexts, so critiques, methodological developments, and new intellectual and theoretical currents, have provided opportunities to enhance and develop approaches. This article contributes to this on-going process. Drawing upon household archaeological research on Limehouse, a poor neighborhood in Victorian London, and inspired by the theoretical insights provided by the “new mobilities paradigm,” it aims to place “mobility” as a central and enabling intellectual framework for understanding the relationships between people, place, and poverty. Poor communities in nineteenth-century cities were undeniably mobile and transient. Historians and archaeologists have often regarded this mobility as an obstacle to studying everyday life in such contexts. However, examining temporal routines and geographical movements across a variety of time frames and geographical scales, this article argues that mobility is actually key to understanding urban life and an important mechanism for interpreting the fragmented material and documentary traces left by poor households in the nineteenth-century metropolis.     

Writing Inside the Kaleidoscope: Re-Representing Victorian Women Public Figures

‘The myths that crystallize in the literary imagination are the buried lives of women whose lives are themselves further emboldened by these same myths.’¹     

Seafaring as social action

This paper builds upon traditional investigations of maritime activities, particularly seafaring itself, to study the social relationships between people and the sea as well as the technology, necessary knowledge and skills that are implicated. The research is based upon evidence of seafaring drawn from the circulation of obsidian from the island of Lipari around the central Mediterranean throughout the Neolithic c.6500–3500 BC. It focuses upon journeys across the Adriatic, identifying the importance of travel in the creation of social alliance and identity, shedding light upon relationships and practices that are generally invisible without proper consideration of maritime activity. The implications of ongoing maritime activity in the region reflect upon Neolithic activities and temporalities which are outside the sphere of settlement specific landscapes, hitherto the sole focus of the majority of Italian Neolithic research.     

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.