Agenda-Setters and Policy Influentials: Results from the Victorian Agendas Project

The Victorian Agendas Project (1991-93) used a snowball sampling method to produce annual peer-nominated lists of agenda-setters and policy influentials in six policy fields: economic policy, health, welfare, transport, education and the environment. Three hundred and fifty-six interviews were conducted with 214 influentials over the three-year period. Respondents identified high-priority issues and policy options on their current and future agendas. This paper deals with the question of who the agenda setters/policy influentials were. Was there evidence of a dominant elite or elites (e.g. business and banking elites) whose influence ranged across policy fields, or was there a more pluralist pattern in which influentials tended to 'specialise' in particular fields? How substantial was the turnover among influentials when the Liberal-National coalition government replaced Labor in 1992?     

Monster soup: the microscope and Victorian fantasy

Abstract

The Victorian predilection for the grotesque owed more than is commonly recognised to nature's microdimension. During the heyday of natural history in Britain (c. 1820–70), the microscope revealed myriads of shapes and creatures so utterly unfamiliar that writers on the subject resorted to flamboyant prose in order to render them intelligible. This had reverberations not least for the visual arts. The metaphors chosen by authors attempting to describe the microscopic world soon developed a visual presence, with supernatural features being projected even onto illustrations in supposedly scientific contexts. At the same time, such illustrations share certain motifs and/or stylistic characteristics with fairy paintings and illustrations by artists such as Daniel Maclise (1806–70), Richard Dadd (1817–86), Sir Joseph Noel Paton (1821–1901), and Arthur Hughes (1832–1915). In view of this, the fact that the golden age of British fairy painting coincided chronologically with the Victorian craze for microscopy seems to be the result of more than mere chance. If we acknowledge this, we must also ask whether, in the mid nineteenth century, points of contact between microscopy and the visual arts led to a liberation or else a limitation of fantasy.     

Sustaining Livelihoods on Mongolia's Pastoral Commons: Insights from a Participatory Poverty Assessment

Under the socialist regime that prevailed until the start of the 1990s, Mongolia made great progress in improving human development indicators, and poverty was virtually unknown. Political and economic transition in the 1990s ushered in a rapid rise in asset and income inequality, and at least a third of the population has been living in poverty since 1995. Many workers made redundant from uneconomic state‐owned enterprises were absorbed into the extensive livestock sector in rural areas and by the growing informal economy in urban areas. The livestock sector grew dramatically, with herders accounting for over a third of the total population and half of the active labour force by the late 1990s. Three consecutive years of drought and harsh winters in 1999–2002 then drastically reduced the national herd. These trends are viewed against a backdrop of relative neglect of the livestock sector in development priorities and a concomitant decline in agricultural productivity. Pressures on common pasture have mounted, and conflict over grazing is becoming endemic. In such a context, sustainable management of Mongolia's pastoral commons should be central to the country's economic development agenda in general, and to its poverty reduction strategy in particular. This article draws on the findings of a country‐wide participatory poverty assessment conducted in 2000. Blending quantitative and qualitative data, these findings help to bring into sharper relief the broad outlines of an integrated approach to building secure and sustainable livelihoods both on and off the pastoral commons.     

Form and deformity: the trouble with Victorian pockets

This essay explores the Victorian debate about the place of pockets in men's and women's clothing. By studying the representation of men as naturally pocketed creatures and the general denial of useful pockets to middle-class women, the essay demonstrates the tenacious cultural logic by which men's and women's pockets were imagined to correspond to sexual differences and to index access, or lack thereof, to public mobility and financial agency. Interconnected readings of visual art, essays, and novels show how the common sense about gendered pockets was utilized and promulgated in Victorian narratives. The question of who gets pockets is thus positioned as part of the history of gendered bodies in public space.     

Hair in the Disraeli Papers: A Victorian Harvest

The Hughenden Collection of Disraeli Papers at the Bodleian Library in Oxford comprises over 50,000 items relating to the life and work of Benjamin Disraeli and his family. This article tracks hair through the Hughenden Collection in order to explore the collecting habits of Mary Anne Disraeli. It argues that reading Mary Anne Disraeli's story through hair – both hair as object, held in an archive and hair as represented in archival text – reveals aspects of that story occluded by reading only those archival texts with self-evident documentary value. It thus makes the case for a holistic reading of the Disraeli archive, and Victorian collections of personal papers more generally, by taking Mary Anne Disraeli as its central case study. In so doing it also illuminates her story, and points to the necessity of reading the stories of forgotten women through archival silences and absences. Section I reviews recent scholarship on hair in nineteenth-century Britain in order to contextualize Mary Anne Disraeli's case. Section II anatomizes the Hughenden hair collection in order to illuminate Mary Anne's history, her impulses as a collector, and the extent to which her activities complicate scholarly narratives about the sentimental commodification of Victorian hair. Section III gestures towards recent work on the archive and material culture to tease out the consequences of her example for our reading of the archive and our understanding of the texture of Victorian ‘thing culture’ more generally.     

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.     

Urban Settlement Systems and Rural Sustaining Communities: An Example from Chan Chan's Hinterland

Abstract

The study of prehistoric cities has often been marked by research strategies that focus completely on urban centers and thus preclude the delineation of entire settlement systems by ignoring the interrelationships between cities and their rural sustaining communities. A major focus of recent research in the Moche Valley on the Peruvian North Coast has been on elucidating the nature of urbanrural relations between the prehistoric Chimú city of Chan Chan and contemporaneous sites located in its hinterland. Excavation at the village of Cerro la Virgen together with additional evidence obtained from other sites in Chan Chan's rural sustaining area has provided insights into Chimú lifeways in nonmetropolitan areas, as well as evidence suggesting a multifaceted plan for organizing lands outside the civic center of Chan Chan. The archaeological data indicate that an important aspect of the organization of rural argicultural zones was the restriction of settlement to villages circumscribed by the Chimú state.     

Tender Beauty: Victorian Painting and the Problem of Sentimentality

One of the most enduring critical legacies of modernism has been the condemnation of the sentimentality of Victorian art. This essay argues that recent art historical attempts to discuss Victorian sentimentality are condemned to repeat modernist critical judgements about sentimental art because of their espousal of historicist methodologies which produce historical distance between artwork and the critical viewer in the present. Instead, I argue, our own emotional involvement with Victorian paintings should form part of our scholarly accounts of their meanings, because their affective power is central to their aesthetic qualities. To look properly, I argue, is also to feel. To exemplify this I discuss Augustus Mulready's Remembering the Joys that Have Passed Away (1873), in order to show how a sentimental look at this painting undermines approaches that absorb sentimentality into historicist, social-constructionist and ideological accounts of such a picture.