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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. -
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... -
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. -
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. -
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 -
“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. -
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. -
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. -
‘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. -
Emotional Intertexts: Female Romantic Friendship and the Anguish of Marriage
Posted on February 11, 2013 | No CommentsIn the decades after the path-breaking work of Lillian Faderman and Caroll Smith- Rosenberg, critical energy was largely directed to questions of the compatibility of female romantic friendship with marriage and the contested erotic content of inter- female intimacy. -
![Four 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.](http://earlymodernengland.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Victorian-London-115x115.jpg "Living in Victorian London: The Clay Pipe Evidence")
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. -
Actresses As Working Women In the Victorian Theatre
Posted on January 30, 2013 | No CommentsVictorian performers were an unusual socioeconomic group. Unlike other professionals they were recruited from all classes of society. While some performers demonstrated that hard work and sheer talent could overcomeany class disadvantages, there were others who spent their entire careers in poverty... -
The concept of male honour in seventeenth century England
Posted on January 21, 2013 | No CommentsThe aim of this thesis is to demonstrate the importance of honour to men as a value and power system in seventeenth century England. -
The Power of Desire and the Danger of Pleasure: Victorian Sexuality Reconsidered
Posted on January 20, 2013 | No CommentsThese revisionist accounts provide a much needed corrective in our view of Victorian sexuality. Unfortunately, corrective exercises all too often produce their own simplifications. These revisionist accounts have, I believe, replaced the popular stereotype of the repressed Victorian with an overly sanguine, modem image. -
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. -
Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Ermine: Elizabeth I’s Coronation Robes and Mothers’ Legacies in Early Modern England
Posted on January 8, 2013 | No CommentsThe first part of this essay explores how many links between mothers and children were therefore conceived through—even created by—mate- rial goods. -
“Thy Righteousness is but a menstrual clout”: Sanitary Practices and Prejudice in Early Modern England
Posted on January 7, 2013 | No CommentsAs well as the physical threat that menstrual blood could pose, it might also pose a psychological one: according to an extreme example, a man’s seeing of a woman’s menstrual blood could be enough to cure him of love sickness or infatuation. -
The Novel-Reading Panic in 18th-Century in England: An Outline of an Early Moral Media Panic
Posted on January 6, 2013 | No CommentsThe epistemology behind this research follows from my understanding of a novel not as a literary genre, but rather as a ‘cultural form’ in Raymond Williams’ cul- tural-materialist sense (Williams, 1997), according to which cultural production (in order to be properly understood) can be studied only in relation to its specific societal and historical frameworks. -
What did eighteenth-century men want?
Posted on December 27, 2012 | No CommentsWe associate the history of home and private life with women, but what did house and domesticity mean to men? More than you might think argues Professor Amanda Vickery. -
A Victorian Christmas in Hell: Yuletide Ghosts and Necessary Pleasures in the Age of Capital
Posted on December 22, 2012 | No CommentsWhat would a post-Victorian Christmas look like after capitalism? Is it even possible, or desirable, to exorcise our Victorian Christmas ghosts? -
‘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. -
A Fortunate Dialect: Class, Language, and Survival in Defoe’s Moll Flanders
Posted on November 25, 2012 | No CommentsMoll expresses her own sense of gentility to the reader by using the language of the upper class, but then, in the same breath, translates the implications and semantics to those of the lower class. She uses this adaptability as a survival tool. -
Hot Holiday Reads!
Posted on November 23, 2012 | No CommentsGreat reads & holiday ideas! -
Some Bloody good reads for Halloween!
Posted on October 30, 2012 | No CommentsSome Bloody good reads for Halloween! -
Cunning Folk and Wizards in Early Modern England
Posted on October 28, 2012 | No CommentsI aim to offer an original perspective on white witchcraft in this period; revealing its relevance to the historical study of witchcraft in which it is often overshadowed. -
Anne Boleyn, the second wife of Henry VIII
Posted on October 21, 2012 | No CommentsThe aim of this bachelor thesis is a detailed analysis of Anne Boleyn`s life. The thesis is divided into five main chapters. -
To Converse with the Devil? Speech, Sexuality, and Witchcraft in Early Modern Scotland
Posted on October 15, 2012 | No CommentsIn both of the above cases, the women involved were accused of witchcraft as a consequence of their wilful and disorderly speech; yet, in the course of the witch trial, they were also accused and convicted of participating in an unnatural sexual relationship with the devil. -
Deeds Against Nature: women and Crime in Street Literature of Early Modern England
Posted on October 9, 2012 | No CommentsIn early modern England, when news in printed form designed for a large- scale readership was only beginning to develop, accounts of murders committed by women assumed an importance entirely disproportionate in relation to their actual occurrence. -
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. -
Victorian Values
Posted on October 6, 2012 | No Comments‘ “Victorian” is an academic epithet with which I feel profoundly uneasy for a number of reasons’, Kate Flint remarked in 2005, arguing that it has led to an unwholesome ‘period fetishism’, together with a limited view of transnational cultures, and an unreflective inclination to pack too many disparate intellectual and social movements into one simple grouping. -
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. -
Infanticide in Victorian England, 1856-1878: Thirty legal cases
Posted on September 15, 2012 | No CommentsTo combat this lack of modern memory of infanticide,it will be the purpose of this work to make a contribution to the understanding of the motives of the men and women who committed the crime in the nineteenth century and of those who commit it today -
MOVIE REVIEW: BYZANTIUM
Posted on September 11, 2012 | No CommentsThis a review of Neil Jordan's new movie, 'Byzantium', released at the Toronto International Film Festival. -
Finding the Bodies
Posted on September 6, 2012 | No CommentsCastlehaven was a minor peer, but it was rare for the early modern English state to try, much less to behead, a nobleman for anything but treason. Castlehaven is the only peer of whom I am aware who was executed solely for what on the record were sexual crimes... -
The Medical Diagnosis of Demonic Possession in an Early Modern English
Posted on September 6, 2012 | No CommentsIn the families of the English gentry where the majority of the documented cases of demonic possession occurred, doctors played a significant role in interpreting strange and unusual illnesses. It was considered important to first rule out the possibility of natural causation when a supernatural affliction was suspected, and physicians were regarded as crucial in making the distinction. -
Jane Austen and the History of England
Posted on September 4, 2012 | No CommentsAlthough it is suggested frequently that Jane Austen embraced a particular understanding of English history, historians have only just begun analyzing exactly what this understanding of history might have been, or how her particular understanding of English history shaped her oeuvre. -
‘Queen Lilies’? The Interpenetration of Scientific, Religious and Gender Discourses in Victorian Representations of Plants
Posted on September 3, 2012 | No CommentsTo establish the continuity of the ideas involved, the first half of this article outlines modes of thinking that Victorian women inherited from Linnean botany, and from Romantic responses to it, across a broad range of social practices: in systematics, field study, flower painting and illustration, and popular botanical writing. -
“A Right Sort of Man”: Gender, Class Identity, and Social Reform in Late-Victorian Britain
Posted on September 3, 2012 | No CommentsBecause of a lack of consensus among policymakers on the education issue, school fees were not eliminated until 1891, and compulsory attendance did not become national policy until 1880. -
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. -
The Grotesque Body: Early Modern Representations of Women and the Subversion of the Elizabethan World Picture
Posted on September 2, 2012 | No CommentsThe language of some tragic heroines from the English Renaissance is the first subversive strategy that contributes to uncover the oppressive doings of the hegemonic group. -
“Putting to Hazard a Certainty”: Lotteries and the Romance of Gambling in Eighteenth-Century England
Posted on September 1, 2012 | No CommentsI hope to enrich our understanding of the early decades of the Financial Revolution by examining a financial instrument that has received much less attention, at least from literary scholars with interests in financial and economic history: the lottery. I focus on the lottery to show the deep foundations of the Financial Revolution in gambling. -
The Duke’s Devil and Doctor Lambe’s Darling: A Case Study of the Male Witch in Early Modern England
Posted on August 28, 2012 | No CommentsDuring the early modern period in England changing economic patterns, religious reforms, and social relationships altered gender roles. While the role of women in English society has been well documented by scholars of the early modern period, there are few substantial studies of masculinity for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. -
Devotion and Piety of English Women, 1480-1620
Posted on August 28, 2012 | No CommentsThese very personal invocations to God were self-reflective and pensive, capturing some early modem English women's desire and need to comprehend the intrinsic complexities of their intimate relationship with God. -
English Reformation and Irish Witches: The Effects of Confessionalisation in Suppressing Witchraft Accusations in Early Modern Ireland
Posted on August 28, 2012 | No CommentsIndeed, Ireland stands out among the countries of early Modern Europe as having very few recorded witchcraft trials and no actual witch hunts. In point offact, there was no actual statute in Ireland criminalizing witchcraft until 1586.3 Why was Ireland spared this plague of internal suspicion that took the lives of nearly 50,000 women and men in the rest of Europe? -
Home invasions: Victorian domestic space and the figure of the outsider
Posted on August 28, 2012 | No CommentsIn order to explain the Victorian ideology that underlies domestic space and its perceived threats, my thesis discusses several different aspects of identity in relation to inside and outside the home. -
‘So manie gallant gentlemen’: Imperial humanists and Tudor imperial identity
Posted on August 27, 2012 | No CommentsIn Tudor England, the salient features of civic humanism became support of the status quo according to a "princely" model, an emphasis on the vita activa as necessary for a life of manly virtue, and a commitment to programs of social and economic reform instituted by the state.