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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. -
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 -
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 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. -
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. -
Boys’ Adventure Magazines and the Discourse of Adventure, 1860-1885
Posted on February 7, 2013 | No CommentsRecent cultural critics have cited adventure magazines as tools—of a ruling class frightened of the increasingly powerful underclasses; or of the Imperial establishment; or of a middle class dead set on imposing its narrow racist, patriotic, Evangelical, superior, manly, anti-virtually-everything-not-it attitude on impressionable working- and lower middle-class boys. -
Fragments of the Modern City: Material Culture and the Rhythms of Everyday Life in Victorian London
Posted on February 4, 2013 | No CommentsIn this article we explore the potential of material evidence to generate new understandings of everyday life in the Victorian metropolis. -
The Development of the English Board Game, 1770 – 1850
Posted on February 4, 2013 | No CommentsIt is known from surviving records, paintings and artifacts that games of the period (and today) are played in a similar way to those of ancient civilisations in the near and far east. There are only a few basic methods of playing games and over the past 250 years many thousands of variations have been created. The basic methods of play come down to four types – race games, strategy games, table games and card games. -
From the Unusual to the Banal: the Archaeology of Everyday Life in Victorian London
Posted on February 3, 2013 | No CommentsWhat do we know about everyday life in Victorian London? At one level, it would seem we know an awful lot. Few cities have generated such lively interest among historians and there is no shortage of contemporary accounts of the 19th-century metropolis. -
Living in Victorian London: The Clay Pipe Evidence
Posted on February 2, 2013 | No CommentsFour small fragments of clay pipe stem were found in context [5]. Despite attempts to date pipes by their stem bore, this remains an inadequate system at best, and fragments of this kind are almost impossible to date at all closely. Given the associated finds, it is highly likely that they are contemporaneous, unless residual or intrusive. -
With This Ring, I Surrender: Politics, Religion, and Marriage in Shakespeare and Tudor England
Posted on February 1, 2013 | No CommentsThe ideas I wish to explore are the overarching themes of politics, religion, and marriage in the Turor period under the rule of King Henry VIII from 1509 to 1547. The popular opinion of the period on Henry VIII's behavior can be seen in William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, Measure for Measure, and Henry VIII. -
Strange Things Out of Hair: Baldness and Masculinity in Early Modern England
Posted on January 17, 2013 | No CommentsReading early modern texts on baldness, one cannot escape noticing how insistently it is portrayed as a laughing matter. -
Victorian Christmas
Posted on December 25, 2012 | No CommentsThe Victorian era has long been associated with an idealized vision of Christmas. Where did this modern notion originate? -
‘Man is a dining animal’: the archaeology of the English at table, c.1750-1900
Posted on December 20, 2012 | No CommentsThis thesis covers the material culture of food and dining c.1750-1900. At first view this is a long period to attempt to cover within the remit of a doctoral thesis, which might reasonably be expected to concentrate on one specific aspect of the dining experience or a single case study within the period, or to consider a few decades only. The length of the period to be considered has been dictated by the wish to study and explain large-scale changes in dining in England in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century. -
Household Politics: The View From Early Modern England
Posted on December 17, 2012 | No CommentsThat’s a glimpse of the sort of evidence I’ll canvass in this book. I hope to conjure up a social world full of ornery, funny, sickening, and lethal controversies about gender, patriarchy, misogyny, public and private, and more. -
“The Nightmare in Early Modern England.”
Posted on December 10, 2012 | No CommentsThis paper was held at Victoria College by the Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies and dealt with the idea of the nightmare and its evolution from demonic possession to medical malady. -
The London Vagrancy Crisis of the 1780s
Posted on November 20, 2012 | No CommentsIn part, this can be seen as simply one more of a broad series of changes in the administration of crime. A whole raft of old and new punishments were being used in new ways, largely as a result of the end of transportation to North America – that had formed so prominent an aspect of penal policy prior to 1776. -
Poor Relief in Edinburgh and the Famine of 1621-24
Posted on October 22, 2012 | No CommentsAlthough Scottish (and English) historians have not ignored the famine of 1621-24, the crisis still needs to be adequately contextualised within investigations into the development of poor relief in the early seventeenth century. -
Witchcraft and Family: What Can Witchcraft Documents Tell Us About Early Modern Scottish Family Life?
Posted on October 15, 2012 | No CommentsA wide range of document-types survive for the early modern period. But random survival rates of potentially detailed docu- ments coupled with their often significant lack of detail about women and the lower orders means that at this stage we do not know even the very basics about family life, let alone people’s subjective thoughts and experiences of family. -
Becoming British? Navigating the Union of 1707
Posted on October 15, 2012 | No CommentsThis paper will take one extended family, the Humes of the Merse (Berwickshire) and use it as a lens through which to view the process of “Brittification;” the four main areas addressed will be the legal, religious and educational ramifications of union for ambitious Scots and the issue of self-identification. -
LANT STREET, SOUTHWARK, IN THE MID NINETEENTH CENTURY
Posted on October 9, 2012 | No CommentsIn the nineteenth century, the main industries of the Borough included “leather working, printing and bookbinding, hat making, wharves, warehousing, food processing and engineering”.3 Many of the heads of household of Lant Street in 1851 were employed in these industries. -
A Woman’s World: How Afternoon Tea Defined and Hindered Victorian Middle Class Women
Posted on October 7, 2012 | No CommentsAs England developed in the Industrial Revolution, fear grew that the rapidly changing society would threaten the patriarchal system. Technological advances allowed women to participate in manual labor alongside men, which was quite an attack on traditional gender roles. With the public sphere changing, home life was viewed as the means to stabilize society. Tea, long the dominion of women, was a method used for such a cause. -
Policemen in Mid Nineteenth Century Whitechapel
Posted on October 7, 2012 | No CommentsIt can be seen that the majority of the policemen came from outside London. This reflects the preference of the authorities for rural recruits, who were considered to be physically and temperamentally better suited to becoming reliable policemen. It can also be seen that 23% of the men came from Ireland, which highlights the fact that recruitment was a matter of supply as well as demand, and that the decision to be a policeman was related to the availability of alternatives. -
The 1738–41 Harvest Crisis in Scotland
Posted on October 5, 2012 | No CommentsTo demonstrate this, the harvest and mortality crisis or macroeconomic depression of 1738–41, a hitherto largely unexplored event in Scotland’s eighteenth-century economic history, has been chosen. -
Literary servants’ vanishing act in the eighteenth century
Posted on September 19, 2012 | No CommentsWhere are the servants in Jane Austen's novels? What causes servants to vanish from the literary landscape between the publication of Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740), or Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews (1741) and Austen's Sense and Sensibility (1811). -
Eat, drink, man, woman: Food, eating, and social formations in Renaissance culture and drama
Posted on September 15, 2012 | No CommentsThis dissertation explores the ways in which representations of food and eating in the drama and culture of Early Modern England contribute to its social formation. -
England’s Domestic Chemists: Science and Consumerism in Eighteenth-Century Recipe Collections
Posted on September 9, 2012 | No CommentsThis historical re-appraisal of the eighteenth-century recipe collection aims to uncover the often unassuming roles of England's domestic chemists. -
Gender Equality in Wage Labour Relations: the example of statutory regulation in late medieval and early Tudor England
Posted on September 2, 2012 | No CommentsThe first question, not yet raised in labour historiography, is about the impact of wage labour relations on gender equality. The second question is related to the first one: what role did women play as protagonists of wage labour relations. -
‘Wanton and torturing punishments’ : patterns of discipline and punishment in the Royal Navy, 1783-1815
Posted on August 20, 2012 | No CommentsThe British Navy of the time of the Napoleonic Wars acquired a fearsome reputation, not only for its success but also, in the eyes of many historians, for the cruelty with which it recruited and treated its men. It is not simply that the forms of punishment, including hanging, flogging and gagging were, to the modern eye, barbaric and unacceptable. -
Ideal and practice : aspects of noble life in late Elizabethan and Jacobean England
Posted on August 20, 2012 | No CommentsEarly modem England witnesseda significant number of political, social and cul- tural changes.The transformation of the ideal of the nobility was amongthosechanges.The sixteenth century saw the appearance of humanist tracts that tried to redefine the idea of nobility, and its role in society. -
The early modern demographic dynamic : celibates and celibacy in seventeenth-century England
Posted on August 20, 2012 | No CommentsBut by failing to investigate shifts in the nature and extent of celibacy from a more holistic perspective, historians have also failed to appreciate the overall impact of a rise in the proportion of lifelong celibates on the economy, society and culture of Tudor and Stuart England. -
Melancholy and the Idle Lifestyle in the Eighteenth Century
Posted on August 19, 2012 | No CommentsThe thesis considers Johnson‘s preoccupation with idleness as a symptom of his melancholy, a notion that has received little critical attention. Shenstone‘s experience is used to illustrate the depressing effect that a retired lifestyle could have on the individual. -
Good Reads for the Dog Days of Summer
Posted on August 18, 2012 | No CommentsSee summer off with these fun reads! -
England and the Machinery of Reason 1780 to 1830
Posted on July 18, 2012 | No CommentsThe increasingly sturdy optimism that nature could be understood and controlled both influenced and was equally strengthened by, the growing development of manufactures and attempts to understand labour productivity during this period. -
The Education and Training of Gentry Sons in Early-Modern England
Posted on July 6, 2012 | No CommentsIn this paper, we examine the relationship between birth order and the education and training received by sons in gentry families in early modern England. -
Adultery in Early Stuart England
Posted on July 6, 2012 | No CommentsBut spectacles of sexual transgression could not only be seen in theatres. Rhymes and broadside ballads sung at street corners or markets, or hung up on walls of taverns and private houses told of lusty bachelors and maidens, of unfaithful, slothful, or violent husbands and wives. -
Finding Real Life In Cookbooks: The Adventures Of A Culinary Historian
Posted on June 26, 2012 | No CommentsI am a culinary historian: I study how food is obtained, preserved, prepared, and eaten, and the very considerable freight of cultural meaning that these processes carry with them. -
Changing Tastes: How Foods Tasted in the Early Modern Period and How They Taste Now
Posted on June 14, 2012 | No CommentsIn dietetic and natural philosophical frameworks of the period from Antiquity to the seventeenth century, the subjective experiences of taste, and indeed the experiences of digestion, testified to the make-up of the world's edible portions. -
Disciplinary History and Historical Culture. A Critique of the Histor: the Case of Early Modern England
Posted on June 1, 2012 | No CommentsWhat are we to make of this story, which appears nowhere in the standard accounts of early modern historical thought? A conventional historiographical analysis would see this as simply one more episode, and a very minor one at that, in the development of antiquarian interests in the early seventeenth century -
Alcohol taxes in early modern England did little to stop drinking, study says
Posted on May 29, 2012 | No CommentsSteep rises in taxes on alcohol do not necessarily reduce consumption, according to research into the history of intoxicants in 16th and 17th century England. -
Witches, Wives and Mothers: witchcraft persecution and women’s confessions in seventeenth-century England
Posted on May 23, 2012 | No CommentsMany problems arise in using documents relating to witchcraft trials in general and these confessions in particular as source material. We have no records left directly by the women themselves. -
Patriotic women: Shakespearean heroines of the 1720s
Posted on May 19, 2012 | No CommentsEarly 18th-century adaptations of Shakespeare can arguably be regarded as reconstructions of the plays for the ‘modern’ stage. Commentators such as Jean Marsden have convincingly suggested that post-1660 drama turns its attention to love, family and marriage, all subjects befitting the presence of women... -
‘The inordinate excess in apparel’: Sumptuary Legislation in Tudor England
Posted on April 29, 2012 | No CommentsSumptuary legislation can be defined as a set of regulations, passed down by legislators through statutory law and parliamentary proclamations, that sought to regulate society by dictating what contemporaries could own or wear based on their position within society. -
The Seymour Family: Edward, Jane, and Thomas, c. 1500-1552
Posted on April 21, 2012 | No CommentsThe Seymour family was a very old and well established, if not distinguished, family. Their lineage can be traced to an obscure knight who came to England v/ith 1/iliiam the Conqueror. The Seymour name came to the family in the first half of the fourteenth century when Sir Roger de St.Maur married Cicely,the eldest sister and heir of John de Beauchamp. -
An ordinary metropolis: the evolution of criminal justice in London, 1750-1830
Posted on April 19, 2012 | No CommentsHistorians often view the creation of the police as separate from legal and penal reform. The three are intricately related. Reformers' and pamphleteers' messages for reform joined law reform to a general plea for modernity. -
“Unspottyd Lambs Of the Lord”: Presbyterianism and the People in Elizabethan London
Posted on April 11, 2012 | No CommentsAs a result of this popular appeal, the presbyterian movement was able to endure the systematic attempts to eliminate it carried out by the Queen and the church hierarchy, to continue to help shape the nation's religious climate under the Stuarts, and to leave a lasting mark on English culture. -
Local Government and Society in Early Modern England: Hertfordshire and Essex, C. 1590-1630
Posted on April 11, 2012 | No CommentsIn this dissertation, I propose to study the administrative and social history of two adjoining English counties, Essex and Hertfordshire, for the period of 1590 through 1630. As a political and social history, this study will track the careers and social relationships of the justices of the peace, as well as other county officials, such as the sheriff, the deputy lieutenants, and the lord lieutenant (usually the resident nobleman of a county). -
“The Prince and His People”: A Study of Edwardian Propaganda, 1547-1549
Posted on April 11, 2012 | No CommentsThe conclusion of this study draws direct parallels between the 1549 petitions and the rhetorical strategies used in the previous two years. The government’s direct patronage of this propaganda and the language that drew the commons into a political partnership with their king helped to spark the rebellions, resulting in a crisis of leadership and legitimacy. -
Anatomizing the social body: representing the plague in London, 1665
Posted on April 10, 2012 | No CommentsThis thesis will analyze the motivations behind a broadsheet produced in response to the outbreak of bubonic plague in the City of London in 1665.