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The rise of agrarian capitalism and the decline of family farming in England
Posted on May 22, 2013 | No CommentsThe rise of agrarian capitalism and the inter-related topics of the growth of large farms and the decline of the English peasantry have been the subject of very extensive investigations by historians of rural society since the early years of the twentieth century. -
Mistresses and marriage: or, a short history of the Mrs
Posted on May 22, 2013 | No CommentsThe word 'mistress' has a multi-layered history. Today, it generally refers either to a woman an illicit sexual relationship, or, more rarely, to someone who is in perfect control of her art. Both the sexual connotation and the inference of complete competencei date back to at least the later middle ages. -
Victorian and Edwardian Sporting Values
Posted on April 23, 2013 | No CommentsIt was understood that a boy's mind might be overtaken, if care were not taken, by one or both of the twin temptations that the cloistered life of the public school could give rise to - masturbation and homosexuality, the two great unmentionables of the Victorian age. -
THE DESTRUCTION OF A PRIORY
Posted on April 23, 2013 | No CommentsMerton priory was now suppressed, and demolition began immediately. There would have been countless workmen and craftsmen employed at the priory, but would they have been willing to destroy the work of their own hands? All strata of society had difficult decisions to make. Principles could so easily be forgotten, especially where there was a family to feed and no prospect of other employment. -
The Kildare Rebellion and the Early Henrician Reformation
Posted on April 15, 2013 | No CommentsThe Kildare Rebellion and the Early Henrician Reformation Steven G. Ellis (The Queen's University, Belfast) The Historical Journal, 19, 4 (1976), pp. 807-830 Abstract In the 1530s, Henry VIII and Thomas... -
Henry VIII, rebellion and the rule of law
Posted on April 15, 2013 | No CommentsHenry VIII, rebellion and the rule of law Steven G. Ellis (University College, Galway) The Historical Journal, 24, 3 (1981), pp. 513-531 Abstract It has been traditional to regard the reaction... -
Brewers’ tales: making, retailing and regulating beer in Southampton, 1550-1700
Posted on April 15, 2013 | No CommentsBrewers' tales: making, retailing and regulating beer in Southampton, 1550-1700 James R. Brown Journal of the Brewery History Society, No.135 (2010) Abstract For some years now early modernists have been... -
Women, ale and company in early modern London
Posted on April 15, 2013 | No CommentsWomen, ale and company in early modern London Tim Reinke-Williams Journal of the Brewery History Society, No.135 (2010) Abstract This article explores attitudes to female ale- and beer-drinkers and the... -
Milton’s History of Britain in its historical context
Posted on April 8, 2013 | No CommentsThe prologue studies the Tory publication of Milton's Character of the Long Parliament (1681). It argues that the provenance of this tract is best explained if Milton did in fact attempt to include the Digression in his History of Britain. Further ambiguities in Milton's early reputation are discussed in a review of the History's reception. -
Representations of Elizabeth I
Posted on April 8, 2013 | No CommentsThis thesis looks at three themes in representations of the Queen in Elizabethan literature. They are: the problem of representing a female ruler; the relation between the cult of Elizabeth and the cult of the Virgin Mary; and representations of Elizabeth as Cynthia, the moon-goddess. These topics are seen as focal points for problematic issues in panegyric. -
Marriage and the position of women, as presented by some of the early Victorian novelists
Posted on April 7, 2013 | No CommentsThe subject of this thesis is the unusual nature, in the presentation of courtship and marriage, of Trollope's depiction of women as compared with that of other novelists of the first part of the Victorian age. -
The role of the laity in the Church of England, c. 1850-1885
Posted on April 7, 2013 | No CommentsThe initial hypothesis which I state and then set out to test and refine here is the hypothesis that lay membership of the Church of England during the Mid and late nineteenth century largely ceased to be an involuntary act and became, instead, a voluntary one. -
Irish journalists and litterateurs in late Victorian London, c. 1870-1910
Posted on April 6, 2013 | No CommentsThe above thesis is an examination of nineteenth century Irish literary emigration to London, with particular reference to the 1880s and 1890s. It begins with an exploration of the political, social, economic and cultural reasons, both in Ireland and Britain, why Irish writers, Catholic and Protestant, flocked to London, and especially Fleet Street, during this period. -
“The lying’st knave in Christendom”: The Development of Disability in the False Miracle of St. Alban’s
Posted on April 1, 2013 | No CommentsWhat none of these studies have examined, however, is the performance of disability at the center of the St. Alban's episode. -
The Treatment of Disability in 19th and Early 20th Century Children’s Literature
Posted on March 31, 2013 | No CommentsIn many books, disability, where it occurs, and its cure are associated with character. Cure may result directly from a healthier attitude to life, often implying a voluntary relinquishment of the disabled role. -
The First French and English Translations of Sir Thomas More’s ‘Utopia’
Posted on March 30, 2013 | No CommentsAn investigation of the editions of the 'Utopia' of Sir Thomas More is an exciting subject in itself, but a comparison of the first French and English translations throws remarkable light upon the parallel developments of the two countries in Renaissance literary history. -
Charles Dickens’s A Child’s History of England and Spain
Posted on March 30, 2013 | No CommentsTrue to his didactic interests, Dickens’ idea was to allow not only his son to learn the history of his country in the way that his own father wanted him to know it, but to convey a particular authoritative viewpoint as to how English youths should learn the history of their country, that is, with an England-centred bias. Literary criticism has not been kind with Dickens’s incursion into children’s and youngster’s historiography and has not therefore been too generous in terms of appraisal. -
Dark Side of the Moon: Dickens and the Supernatural
Posted on March 30, 2013 | No CommentsDickens’s initiation into the genre of supernatural fiction may be attributed to his nanny Mary Weller about whom Dickens says ‘Her name was Mary though she had none on me’. -
“Cruel and Abominable Tyrant”: The Pope Who Took on Henry VIII
Posted on March 30, 2013 | No CommentsHenry VIII's enemy, Pope Paul III, was a man of determination but with his own dark side. -
The Singing ‘Vice’: Music and Mischief in Early English Drama
Posted on March 25, 2013 | No CommentsAmidst non-textuality and the resulting shortage of extant scores to serve as documentation of musical activity, even the most restrained speculative approach still leads to the conclusion that music and musicians were crucial both to the emergence of the interlude as a genre of household entertainment and in the actual performance of interludes. -
Victoria’s Sovereign Obedience Portraits of the Queen as Wife and Mother
Posted on March 25, 2013 | No CommentsIn this essay I explore some specific ways in which Victoria's gender and marital status enabled such representations during the early part of her reign, simultaneously creating the appearance of limited female and monarchic power and expanding the monarchy's symbolic power and ideological influence. -
Saints on Stage: An Analytical Survey of Dramatic Records in the West of England
Posted on March 25, 2013 | No CommentsThis essay provides an analysis of the known surviving records relating to mimetic representation of non-biblical saints in a broad region of western England, from the north (Cumberland, Westmorland) to the southern tip of Cornwall. The question of how many of these references can be considered 'scripted' drama is addressed, and other categories (pageant, costumed guild ridings, and festive customs such as boy bishop ceremonies) proposed. -
Changing Fortunes during the Fifteenth Century Recession
Posted on March 24, 2013 | No CommentsHow far did the fifteenth-century recession change the relationship between landlords and tenants in Durham? There can be little doubt that this was a period of hardship for landowners. -
John Dee, King Arthur, and the Conquest of the Arctic
Posted on March 24, 2013 | No CommentsSince neither of the most significant early Arthurian pseudo-histories go so far as to place Arthur in Greenland, America, or the Arctic—although Geoffrey's account prefigures such claims by extending Arthur's conquests to the farthest known northern and western limits of European civilization—we must therefore turn to Dee's own manuscripts for some illumination as to where this idea came from and how it developed. -
Devising the Revels
Posted on March 19, 2013 | No CommentsRevels were the result of collaboration by painters, sculptors, costume designers, poets, composers, artisans, and labourers in relation to whom an appointed supervisor (beginning in 1510 called the master of the revels) stood as what we might call executive producer and director. -
Making Darkness Visible Capturing the Criminal and Observing the Law in Victorian Photography and Detective Fiction
Posted on March 18, 2013 | No CommentsLike another remarkable Victorian visual apparatus, the camera, we might think of Holmes (and the "sharp-eyed" detectives he represents) as the literary embodiment of the elaborate network of visual technologies that revolutionized the art of seeing in the nineteenth century. -
Servants and hands: Representing the working classes in Victorian factory novels
Posted on March 17, 2013 | No CommentsMany of the middle-class readers who would have read Trollope’s novel probably shared the servants’ discomfort at the prospect of a “factory boy” in the midst of a middle-class home. Servants, of course, were an integral part of the familiar world these readers lived in; employing servants, in fact, has often been used by historians as the standard of middle-class status in Victorian England -
L’Estrange His Life: Public and Persona in the Life and Career of Sir Roger L’Estrange, 1616-1704
Posted on March 16, 2013 | No CommentsThis dissertation examines the life and career of Roger L’Estrange, an unsuccessful soldier and prisoner for the king, royalist pamphleteer and Tory apologist, licenser of books and Surveyor of the Press, scourge of Protestant dissent and the first Whig party, literary translator and amateur musician. -
Exhuming Henry VIII’s Court: The Tudor Household on the Jacobean Stage
Posted on March 16, 2013 | No CommentsBy revisiting the recent past of Henry's reign, the plays construct the events as a historical past, distinct and separate from the present. Early modern performance presents, reshapes, and diverges from the collective memory of a diverse socio-economic populace. Plays about recent history offer both a form of remembrance and construction of a memory for the historical moment brought to life on stage. -
Play Houses: Drama at Bolsover and Welbeck
Posted on March 11, 2013 | No CommentsBetween 1590 and 1634, a period more or less exactly coterminous with the great age of English Renaissance drama, a group of remarkable houses took shape in the north Midlands of England, on the borders of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire. -
Dust Piles and Damp Pavements Excrement, Repression, and the Victorian City in Photography and Literature
Posted on March 11, 2013 | No CommentsAlthough to the Victorian social crusader such behavior was mentionable, it was not so to the novelist or photographer. Both Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend and Thomas Annan's Photographs of Old Closes and Streets of Glasgow brought imagery of human waste dangerously near to the drawing room, but only by employing evasive strategies. Much recent work in Victorian social history reminds us how omnipresent this subject matter must sometimes have seemed. -
The Meaning of Thunder and Lightning: Stage Directions and Audience Expectations
Posted on March 11, 2013 | No CommentsThe linking of thunder and lightening with supernatural figures was not theatrical in origin; rather, the effects were a theatrical reproduction of unnatural disruptions generally believed to accompany the appearance and actions of figures such as witches, devils, and conjurers in the real world of the audience. -
“The Right Thing in the Right Place” P. H. Emerson and the Picturesque Photograph
Posted on March 11, 2013 | No CommentsBetween Emerson's theories of photography and his conceptions of landscape, however, that subject vanishes into the picturesque, the laborers themselves reduced to mythical, powerless creatures, faceless models of charming work. -
“Tell me a story, dear, that is not true”: Love, Historicity, and Transience in A. Mary F. Robinson’s An Italian Garden
Posted on March 8, 2013 | No CommentsThrough a poetic voice compelled to recognize that individual desire is often not reciprocated and that love entails great risk that is itself ennobling, Robinson explores the nature of love that is selfless in that one gives oneself to another, yet selfish in that one comes to need a totality of love not possible in a finite context. Paradoxically, then, love evokes both pleasure and pain. -
“Be unto me as a precious ointment”: Lady Grace Mildmay, Sixteenth-Century Female Practitioner
Posted on March 7, 2013 | No CommentsLady Grace Mildmay's manuscripts represent an unusual presentation of three interrelated areas of family, devotion, and medicine -
Reassessing Gilbert and Gubar: Women, Creativity, and Hopkins
Posted on March 5, 2013 | No CommentsGilbert and Gubar’s identification of Hopkins with Victorian sexism has undoubtedly influenced Hopkins studies. Since the publication of The Madwoman in the Attic, several Hopkins critics have speculated that the poet’s wish for ‘masterly execution’ appears to betray his own fear of becoming unmanly or effeminate in his art and life. -
My Secret Life and the Sexual Economy of Fin-de-Siècle England
Posted on March 4, 2013 | No CommentsAlthough in 1969 the memoirs were regarded as an obscene publication, they can be read as an important document of sexual history and will be treated as such in this paper. In doing so, it engages with but challenges earlier readings of My Secret Life. -
British Foreign Policy and the War of the Austrian Succession, 1740-48
Posted on March 3, 2013 | No CommentsThis article seeks to examine policy as perceived by British statesmen during the period of the War of Austrian Succession. -
On Resistance: The Case of 17th Century Quakers
Posted on March 3, 2013 | No CommentsDrawing on Scott's influential paradigm I present an historical anthropology of seventeenth century Quakerism, focusing on this religious movement from its genesis in around 1650, to the Act of Toleration in 1689. -
Paradise Observed: Taxonomic Perspective in Alfred Russel Wallace’s The Malay Archipelago
Posted on February 27, 2013 | No CommentsIn 1869, the Victorian naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace—co-founder with Darwin of the evolutionary theory of natural selection—published an account of the eight years he had spent in the Malay Archipelago. For a scientific travel narrative, the account opens in a surprisingly fairy-tale like manner. -
Re-orienting Victorian Studies: A European Perspective
Posted on February 27, 2013 | No CommentsAt the same time, however, the study of the relationship between the world of Victorian literature and culture and the context of Continental Europe remains firmly Anglocentric, or to be more precise Britocentric: both Continental Victorianists and Continent-conscious Anglophone critics tend to think about the relationship between Victorian Britain and Europe very much from within the context of English literary studies, relating their discoveries and analyses back to the conceptual frame of reference defined firmly in terms of the literary and cultural context of the British Isles, -
Re-familiarizing Victorian Marriage
Posted on February 27, 2013 | No CommentsThis article will define the familiar marriage model, discuss its historical evolution, and explore its presence in Victorian fiction. What I want to suggest here is that the central plot of the Victorian novel, the marriage plot, is about love only inasmuch as love is a problem. As Victorian novels obsessively rehearse the clash between romantic and familiar marriage, we see a culture struggling to come to terms with the event that defined its subjects’ – above all, its female subjects’ – lives. -
All Shut Up: Carlyle and the Pursuit of Domestic Silence
Posted on February 26, 2013 | No CommentsThese two opposing visions of the home – as a form of super secure refuge, and as a mode of dizzying flux and tumult – were contained, however uncomfortably, within the same four walls. -
The Mysterious Miss Austen
Posted on February 25, 2013 | No CommentsFor the past two centuries, historians and literary scholars have attempted to solve the mystery that is Jane Austen’s life. How did a woman from a small village in Hampshire come to write six of the most beloved novels in the English language? -
The politics of piracy : pirates, privateers, and the government of Elizabeth I, 1558-1588
Posted on February 25, 2013 | No CommentsThis thesis addresses the distinctions between 'pirates' and 'privateers' and the reasons for and usefulness of these distinctions. -
‘A Hand Prepared to be Red’: Manliness and Violence on Britain’s Colonial Frontiers
Posted on February 25, 2013 | No CommentsOn the frontiers of Queensland and British Columbia in the mid-nineteenth century, a culture of violence prevailed. Frontier men accommodated violence in their lives as a routine and normal part of frontier living. The Victorian ethos of 'manliness' - the possession of essential virtues such as self-restraint, courage and strenuous effort - had within it the potential for violence. On the frontier the practice of manliness often entailed violence and the manly ethos could be distorted to justify and legitimise violent acts. -
‘Thou glorious kingdome, thou chiefe of empires’: Persia in seventeenth-century travel literature
Posted on February 24, 2013 | No CommentsThe late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries saw a rise in European travel to Persia, and consequently in writings about such travel. -
Crime Among the Puritans … and the penalties therefor
Posted on February 24, 2013 | No CommentsMassachusetts in the seventeenth century. You weren’t afraid to walk the streets. Drugs and pornography hadn’t yet become stylish, and the big overcrowded prison hadn’t been invented. Some of us might long to return to that morally unambiguous, less violent age. But before giving in to such yearnings, let’s take a closer look at Law and order in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. -
The Spanish Ulcer: Napoleon, Britain, and the Siege of Cádiz
Posted on February 20, 2013 | No CommentsWhen the dust settled on the Napoleonic Wars, Cádiz held the distinction of being the only city in continental Europe to survive a siege by Napoleon. -
Newton, The Last Magician
Posted on February 18, 2013 | No CommentsNewton was very guarded about discussing his experimental results, especially in chymistry. He loathed the thought of someone figuring something new out from his ideas, and he was obsessed with getting full credit for discoveries.