George III and Parliament*

Circumstances were auspicious when George III came to the throne in 1760, but soon his political actions were much criticized and he was accused from early in his reign until well into the 20th century of weakening the independence of parliament and undermining the constitution. Some contemporaries did defend him and these views received powerful support from Sir Lewis Namier and his followers in the 20th century. Both interpretations have their flaws, however, because of the failure to recognize the profound changes in the context in which George acted over his long reign and the subtle changes that occurred in Britain's unwritten constitution over that half century. By examining how the king appointed and dismissed ministers, sought to influence the composition of both houses of parliament, and endeavoured to shape government policy, this article seeks to revise our understanding of the king's relations with parliament and the constitution and to relocate our overall assessment of him between those offered by his many critics and defenders both during his reign and long afterwards.     

塞缪尔·亨廷顿“文明冲突论”的文化保守主义倾向

如果从现代化的角度解读亨廷顿的"文明冲突论",就不难发现这一理论本身所隐含的社会发展观及其文化保守主义倾向。"文明冲突论"在相对主义文化决定论的框架下,提出多元现代性和多元现代化的观点。这种观点否认存在具有普遍意义的现代性和现代化,宣称每一种文明都有其独特的现代性内涵和现代化模式。这种社会发展观看似开放,其本质却是文化保守主义的,其矛盾折射出西方文明在当前世界格局下文化策略的调整。它旨在将人类共同享有的先进文明成果特殊化、西方化,以非西方中心论的名义将现代性相对化,最终取消非西方社会实现现代化的可能性。非西方社会对此应保持理性的判断。     

《安逊环球航海记》与英国人的中国观

18世纪中期,英国的“中国热”达到了高潮。中国文化受到了英国社会各阶层的极力赞誉和追捧。然而,1748年,英国海军上将安逊出版了他的环球行纪——《安逊环球航海记》。该著详细记述了安逊航至中国东南沿海时的所见所闻,对中国社会生活和科技文化进行了严厉的批判和否定,在英国社会中产生了很大的反响,致使一些人开始质疑此前英国社会流行的乌托邦式中国观的真实性,并最终成为“中国热”退却的导火索。     

A Feminist Network in an Artists’ Home: Mary and George Watts,George Meredith,and Josephine Butler

This interdisciplinary, historicist-feminist paper (combining literary and art historical perspectives as well as an awareness of historical context and an application of recent feminist theory) explores the feminist affiliations of the Victorian artists Mary and George Watts, focusing specifically on their close friendships with the writer and women’s suffrage supporter George Meredith and the women’s rights worker Josephine Butler. It introduces the Wattses’ own anti-patriarchal conjugal creative partnership before investigating their relationships with Meredith and Butler through a reading of Mary Watts’s unpublished and hitherto untranscribed diaries (which record their interactions) as well as a discussion of George Watts’s paintings (particularly his portraits of Meredith and Butler in his ‘Hall of Fame’). This paper thus offers an unprecedented insight into the Wattses’ personal and professional relationships as well as their progressive socio-political positions, reclaiming them as early feminists who were part of a wider emergent feminist community. This paper’s discussion of the Wattses, Meredith, and Butler provides new perspectives on the connections, works, and views of these public literary, artistic, and feminist figures as well as the ways in which they supported and promoted the women’s rights movement that escalated over the course of the second half of the nineteenth century. It thus offers a fuller understanding of these figures as well as of the rise of early feminism in the Victorian period.     

The disillusionment of Robert Dell: the intellectual journey of a Catholic socialist

ABSTRACT

This article considers attempts in the late nineteenth century to bring about a confluence of Catholicism and Socialism in Britain by examining the writing and correspondence of one man, the art critic and Fabian socialist Robert Dell. Beginning with Dell’s involvement as a young man in London-based radical politics, the article examines his efforts to bring his socialist politics and Catholic faith together. Dell attempted this through stressing a narrative of Catholic collectivism, under the aegis of a benevolent Church, contrasted with a post-Reformation Protestant individualism leading to the inequities of capitalism. The appeal of Catholicism in a Victorian Britain undergoing a collective crisis of faith is addressed. The second part of the article documents the failure of these attempts and Dell’s disillusionment with the Catholic hierarchy that by 1908 had led to a complete break on Dell’s part with the Catholic establishment. The catalyst for this break was the brutal treatment of Catholic Modernists such as George Tyrrell, Maude Petre and St George Mivart by the Vatican and the English Catholic leadership. Dell’s final rejection of organised Catholicism is charted through pamphlets, newspaper articles and personal correspondence. Ultimately, the article considers how Dell’s early political and theological career reflects on the relative positions of Catholicism and socialism at the turn of the twentieth century, and more broadly the dynamics of personal belief and political allegiances.     

Achilles or Adonis: Controversies Surrounding the Male Body as National Symbol in Georgian England

This paper analyses the controversy that arose when a monumental bronze nude statue of Achilles was unveiled at Hyde Park Corner (London) in 1822 as a monument to the Duke of Wellington and his army. The neoclassical statue (made by Richard Westmacott) perfectly embodied the ‘modern male stereotype’. According to historian George Mosse, this masculine image was a powerful and stable symbol of nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century bourgeois societies. Intended by the commanders and artist as just such a symbol, the statue in practice was unable to express these high ideals. Ever since its unveiling, the statue has elicited laughter and ridicule. The uneasiness created by male public nudity is an aspect that Mosse missed in his history of masculine imaginary, in which he focused on certain moments of ‘spectacular’ masculinity in modern Western history. Ultimately, the failure of Westmacott's Achilles can best be understood from the well‐known feminist framework on the gendered ‘economy of the gaze’, a framework that is all too often absent in the historiography on masculinities.     

The ‘Sleepiness’ of George Sarawia: The Impact of Disease on the Melanesian Mission at Mota,c. 1870–1900

George Sarawia, ordained in 1873 as the Melanesian Mission’s first Indigenous priest, was a pioneering figure in the mission’s plans for an Indigenous-led Anglican Church in the region. Sarawia founded Kohimarama, a mission station on Mota in the Banks Islands, Vanuatu, where he taught Mota Islanders and hosted visiting teachers and clergy. By the 1890s, some of the European missionaries had become critical of Sarawia and his flock on Mota, underlining their ‘natural, sleepy condition’ and recommending more intensive European supervision. This article will explore the role of epidemic and endemic disease, as well as the shortage of water on Mota, in creating substantial challenges for Sarawia and his mission. As he grew more incapacitated in later life, these challenges were insufficiently acknowledged by Sarawia’s critics.     

George III: a revised view of the royal malady

George III of England's episodic psychotic illness is described. The data has previously been used to substantiate the diagnosis of an unlikely hereditary metabolic disease, porphyria. A scientific perspective, aimed at removing psychiatric diagnosis from dependence on subjective evaluations, is corrected by the diagnosis of a mood disorder. His unipolar mania of late onset is a syndrome, the sine qua non of bipolar disorder, in this instance complicated by the toxicity of quinine, antimony, and purgatives.     

“Free,Compulsory and (Not) Secular”: The Failed Idea in Australian Education*

The nineteenth century radically transformed education from a church function to a state duty. During the early to late 1800s, Australian legislators debated the foundations of education for their new society. Decades of acrimonious argument, and sustained (but failed) attempts to create a workable denominational system led the colonies to explore more radical options. To minimize religious division, Australia's proposal was for public education to be “free, compulsory and secular.” New South Wales legislated these then politically progressive principles in the Public Instruction Act of 1880, following Victoria in 1872, and Queensland and South Australia in 1875. No state defined the term “secular” and each interpreted it differently. Prolonged, ambiguous applications of the secular principle continue to create confusion and division today. This article examines constructions of the “secular” in education and compares the approaches of Henry Parkes in New South Wales and George Higinbotham in Victoria. It follows the erosion of secular intent in public and parliamentary debates from early settlement to 1880.