To its late-Victorian participants, London “Society” was one of those abstractions, like “the young,” that deteriorated with each passing generation. For decades chroniclers of Britain's clannish ruling circles had lamented the diminishing refinement, morals, and breeding of those highest sections of elite society that migrated to the capital each spring for the parliamentary and social “season.” Thus, when the press, with many contributors from the aristocracy itself, launched a new campaign against London Society in the last years of Victoria's reign, the charges had a familiar ring. Society was expanding alarmingly, abandoning its standards, worshipping notoriety and opulence, and abdicating serious responsibilities in the pursuit of frivolous amusement. If the criticisms contained few surprises, the intensity of the alarm was unprecedented. Beginning in 1874, with The Way We Live Now, Anthony Trollope's novel of a greedy and credulous beau monde, and continuing through a series of journal articles bearing titles such as “The New Society,” “The Deterioration of English Society,” “The Sins of Society,” and “The Enlargement of London Society,” critics subjected the aristocratic elites and the informal institutions of the London season to fierce scrutiny and nearly universal diagnosis of advanced illness.

Samuel Smiles' popular book Self-Help (1859) is usually cited as a convenient example of mid-Victorian individualism and middle class values. Yet the source and meaning of the self-help ideal is not to be found in the 1850's. Instead, the historian must first turn to eighteenth century values.

The article will therefore trace the intellectual origins of Smiles' ideal of self-help, and show that it was strongly influenced by Enlightenment concepts. Secondly, and a central theme of the article, it will be argued that Smiles' ideal of self-help in fact consisted of two avenues to reform-one active and one passive-and that these avenues to reform can only be understood in the context of the intellectual origins of the self-help ideal. Thirdly, the paper will analyse the continuing relationship between the active and passive components of Smiles' avenues to reform, and will contend that between the 1830's and the publication of Self-Help, Smiles' ideal of self-help as two modes of reform remained consistent. In order to support these claims the article will trace the development of Smiles' thought, concentrating firstly on Smiles' earliest book, Physical Education (1838), then on his time as editor of the reforming Leeds Times (1839-1845), and finally on his place in the health and education reform movements of the late 1840's and early 1850's leading into the writing of Self-Help (1859).

In the mid-1980s Stuart historians began a major re-evaluation of the restoration era. Among the principal themes are the period's unsettledness, the continuing impact of the radical tenets that had been manifested so forcefully in the mid-century upheavals, the significance of religion and ideology, and renewed debate over the origin of political parties. As I have suggested elsewhere, the period is most accurately conceived as a time of recurring crises of varying magnitude and duration. The first extended from Oliver Cromwell's death in September 1658 to the passage of the Conventicle Act in 1664, the second from 1667 to the enactment of the Test Act in 1673, the third from the revelation of the spurious Popish Plot in 1678 to the repression of the Rye House schemers and the Monmouth/Russell/Essex cabal in 1683, the fourth the rebellions of the earl of Argyll and the duke of Monmouth in 1685, and the fifth the crisis that entailed the collapse of James II's regime and the constitutional settlement of 1689.

Bunyan lived through the first four periods of crisis and died amid the final one. It is appropriate to ask how this reinterpretation of the restoration period affects our interpretation of Bunyan. Elsewhere I have offered some suggestions, particularly with respect to the crisis of 1678–83 and our understanding of The Holy War, Of Antichrist and His Ruine, and Seasonable Counsel: or, Advice to Sufferers. This essay will focus on the crisis of 1667–73, the principal interpreter of which is Gary De Krey. For him this controversy at root entailed a crucial debate about liberty of conscience—a revival of the debate that in his judgment was central to the mid-century revolution. De Krey makes a compelling case for the significance of the debate in the period 1667–73 because it challenged many of the assumptions on which the restoration settlement was founded, including the limits of political authority, the relationship between church and Crown, and the rights and obligations of subjects. In their various assertions of the right of conscience, nonconformists rejected the restoration settlement by insisting on God's ultimate sovereignty in the spiritual realm and “the autonomy of the conscience as God's vicegerent in that sphere.” For them the issue was not parliamentary versus royal sovereignty—not least because the policy of persecution was parliamentary—but the sovereignty of the conscience against any persecutorial authority.

Looking back on his tenure as First Lord of the Admiralty from 1771 to 1782, Lord Sandwich considered that one of his most important accomplishments was the introduction into the royal dockyards of task work for shipwrights — “a matter very little known in the world, but the only material improvement … which will enable us to build and repair a much larger number of ships.” Task work had long been universal in private shipyards, and its use in the navy's own yards was discussed at intervals for eighty years at least before its adoption in 1775. But opposition to the method — from the Navy Board and the shipwrights and their officers — was entrenched. Arguments against it, having once prevailed, afterwards were seemingly invincible, their mere invocation being enough to stop further consideration. The obstacles after so long a time might have been insuperable to one less confident and determined than Sandwich. Indeed, the innovation when it was made produced a strike of shipwrights which forced its partial abandonment before the scheme had properly been tried.

Task workers, instead of being employed for a fixed daily wage with an additional allowance for overtime, were paid according to the amount of work actually performed, the ship itself being divided into parts, for each of which an over-all labor price was established and apportioned equally among the men. The advantages of the method appear on the face of it overwhelming. The shipwrights were encouraged to work steadily and rapidly in order to increase their earnings, which thus were greater than those of the day workers.

The noun “radical” as applied to reformers who held advanced views came into general use in the early nineteenth century. It was at first used in a derogatory sense, denoting, as Walter Scott wrote in 1819, “a set of blackguards.” However, it was taken up by the subjects of the intended abuse and quickly acquired a certain respectability—so much so that by 1830 one middle-class radical was recording that “the term Radical once employed as a name of low reproach, has found its way into high places, and is gone forth as the title of a class who glory in their designation.” Reformers from across the political spectrum were soon being designated “radical,” as can be seen from the application of the term to individuals as diverse in outlook as Lord Durham, Richard Oastler, and Bronterre O'Brien.

This eclecticism has led historians to pronounce the concept useless as a tool of historical analysis. If any tradition at all emerges from studies of English radicalism, then it is a tradition of liberal humanitarianism, a pattern of reform that is nonclass and nonideological. At best “radical” retains its original adjectival power of describing a root-and-branch reformer, an individual who worked to change quite substantially existing economic, political, or social structures by word or deed. But the evident contradictions and discontinuities in the so-called “radical tradition” have made historians balk at making further claims than these. This essay, however, is a provisional attempt to shift the focus away from the personalities and the specificities of reform movements in their peculiar conjunctural moments to the operation of radicalism as a powerful ideology that, far from being nonclass and nonideological and despite (or even possibly because of) its internal contradictions, has profoundly influenced class development and class relations.

We are so used to the “revisionist” account of the English Reformation as a story of Protestant failure and of (relative) Catholic success that it is easy to forget how late sixteenth-century English Catholicism was once viewed by scholars not as an innocent parish pastime or a culturally conservative reaction to puritan evangelical excess. In the older narratives of the religious struggle in early modern England, historians recounted a fierce battle—the papal excommunication of Queen Elizabeth, the endless plotting to promote the dynastic claim of Mary Stuart, and foreign enterprises to invade the realm and put paid to the Tudors. Here the politics of disagreement about religion engendered a fair measure of violence on the part of the state toward some of its Catholic subjects, and this confrontation has come down to us most vividly through the martyrological narratives in which leading Catholic clerics described the sufferings of the faithful. Yet these narratives were themselves deliberately depoliticized. The context of the state's proceedings was largely cut away, and the actions and opinions of the Catholic martyrs that so irritated the regime were glossed over as part of an incisive rhetorical statement that Catholics died for their religion, not for any treasonable inclinations on their part. This was a brilliant polemical reply to the official propaganda that described Roman Catholic Englishmen as not merely ungodly but a lethal threat to the security of the state. In the regime's opinion, and in the antipopish canon that developed at this time, they were a fifth column of dissent set fair to exploit and assist foreign attempts to unseat the Tudor regime. The language of antipopery rode continually on a fear of domestic plots and schemes to meddle in the settlement of religion and the succession to the throne.

This article examines the relationship between politically motivated murder, martyrdom, and the death penalty in Britain and Ireland in the period from 1939 to 1990. First, it investigates the nexus between historical experience and memory, political martyrdom, and capital punishment as it applied to Irish Republicans in Britain during the Second World War. Secondly, it examines the use of extraordinary legal powers to impose the death penalty in the Irish state during the “Emergency,” and charts the processes through which the threat of capital punishment continued to be perceived as an essential instrument of security in both Irish jurisdictions in the postwar period. Thirdly, it evaluates the effectiveness of the death penalty in deterring politically motivated murder and explores the anomalous, paradoxical decision to abolish capital punishment at the height of subversive killing in Northern Ireland. The essay concludes that the national security issue and the potential martyrdom of Irish Republicans were pivotal factors in dissuading successive British governments from reintroducing the death penalty for politically motivated offenses in Britain and Northern Ireland.

This article shows how John Maynard Keynes's lifelong commitment to eugenics was deeply embedded in his political, economic, and philosophical work. At the turn of the century, eugenics seemed poised to grant industrial nations unprecedented control over their own future, but that potential depended on contested understandings of the biological mechanisms of inheritance. Early in his career, Keynes helped William Bateson, Britain's chief proponent of Mendelian genetics, analyze problems in human heredity. Simultaneously, Keynes publicly opposed the efforts by Francis Galton and Karl Pearson to study inheritance through statistical biometry. For Keynes, this conflict was morally laden: Mendelism incorporated the only ethical theory of uncertainty, while biometry rested on false and dangerous concepts. This early study of heredity shaped Keynes's visions of industrial democracy after 1918. Liberals looked for a system of societal and economic management to engineer an escape from the postwar Malthusian trap. Britain's economic plight, Keynes argued, was rooted in the hereditary weaknesses of its leadership. Successful technocratic liberalism would depend on control over the quality as well as quantity of human beings. Ultimately, in his essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” Keynes predicted that effective eugenic management would bring about capitalism's end.

Court records provide invaluable evidence of the existence of laws and notional rights affecting women and how these were (or were not) enforced and exercised. Many documents provide tantalizing glimpses of female thinking and echoes of female voices, but these remain elusive because of the influence of the lawyers, scribes, and officials who helped shape and record them. This article examines the multiple difficulties that researchers face in distinguishing women's contributions from those of lawyers in legal records, and argues that the artificial nature of legal processes complicates conceptions of “authentic” female voices. It suggests ways to address methodological problems and concludes that focusing on multiple voices and processes of collaboration may bear more fruit than seeking to extract individual women's private thoughts and words.

This paper proposes the importance of television, the televisation of US and British race politics, and the framing of “Black Power” in this television coverage, for race politics in Britain in the late 1960s and early 1970s. British politics and culture was “re-racialized” in the postwar era, and television, for white and black Britons, became a site of racial knowledge, racial identification, and racial dislocation. The rise of television as a central medium of everyday life saw it emerge, too, as a central site for the imagination of community. As critics have long noted, the community imagined in British television programming of this era was overwhelmingly white, and black people were featured most often only as a marker of social difference or social “problems.” Many black Britons, excluded from the national “everyday” as it was constituted on television, and facing increasing institutional and interpersonal racism in daily life, found in coverage of the burgeoning black liberation movements of the United States a useable politics through which to articulate new sites of identification, community, and solidarity. For others, though, coverage of race politics in the United States could be a source of anxiety and alarm. The televisation of US race politics was central to the growth of cultures and politics of radical blackness in Britain, but it also reconstituted the politics of white racism, recasting blackness in Britain as a sign of violence and impending social disorder.

In January 1912 in an article on “British Banking Interests in South America,” the South American Journal advised its readers that while British banks were unquestionably profitable investments they did not have the field entirely to themselves, “for they not only had to face the competition of local, in many cases State-owned banks, but also the competition of several very successful and strong German banking companies, such as the Deutsche Bank, etc.” Nevertheless, British banks had the advantage of considerable experience in the business, an experience at that time dating back nearly fifty years. This statement gives direct expression to the theme of this paper, namely, the continuing prosperity of the British overseas banks in Latin America despite the competition of the more recently established, but nonetheless very successful, German overseas banks. Moreover, aside from the inevitable competition from local Latin American banks, it is to be noted that the only foreign competitors mentioned are the German banks. This was because the several Spanish, French, and Italian banks in the region had much more the structure and character of Latin American institutions based on investment and support from the local immigrant communities of those nations rather than the structure of overseas banks run from Europe.

John Ruskin, art and social critic, master of English prose, is one of the most infuriating yet attractive Victorian figures. In the last twenty years, a revival of interest in his work after years of neglect has stimulated a considerable body of scholarly analysis and several biographies. As Ruskin himself would have hoped, historians have been most interested in his trenchant attacks on the assumptions and effects of nineteenth-century political economy, but paradoxically he appears in women's history only as the author of “Of Queens' Gardens,” promoting a fundamental Victorian paradigm, the ideology of pure womanhood. Yet the anthologized excerpts which are all most people read of Ruskin do not do justice even to “Of Queens' Gardens,” an admittedly cloying piece, and although biographers have analyzed his tortured relationships with Effie Gray and Rose La Touche almost to the point of tedium, there is no extended general study of his many relationships with women and the expectations he had of them. An adequate analysis of Ruskin's view of women requires familiarity with all his works, an understanding of his fears for the state of England, and a greater knowledge of his relationships with women than provided by the lurid details of his failed marriage and predilection for adolescent girls. The following is an attempt to sketch an outline of such an account.

The triennium 1536–38 marks the crisis of Henry VIII's reign. The palace coup that toppled Anne Boleyn in May and June 1536 and apparently left Thomas Cromwell more firmly in control instead ushered in a series of further threats to both Cromwell and Henry. The upheaval of the Pilgrimage of Grace convulsed the north in late 1536 and early 1537 and looked for a time as if it would shake Henry's throne. The Pilgrims' calls for the upstart Cromwell's removal forced the chief minister to withdraw behind the scenes for a time, always a tricky maneuver. The battle of wits and wills between the king and his cousin and sometime protégé Reginald Pole runs as counterpoint throughout these dislocations. Pole's intemperate attack on Henry's divorce from Catherine of Aragon, De unitate, arrived at the extremely sensitive moment of June 1536 and announced the beginning of an eighteen-month struggle that finally led to an irreparable breach between Henry and Pole. De unitate has often been taken to signal Pole's crossing of the Rubicon. It should certainly have discomfited Pole's potential allies just as many of his partisans thought they had jockeyed themselves into power by engineering Anne's downfall. In fact, the work had a minimal effect, mainly because the committee entrusted with reading it was heavily stacked with Pole's friends. Henry probably never saw De unitate. Despite its violent language, neither Pole nor his supporters were then quite ready to give up on Henry. Early the next year the situation changed. Paul III created the new cardinal Pole a legate and dispatched him to Flanders, traditional locus of plots against England.

In recent decades, several historians, including myself, have argued that many nineteenth-century British urban elites were akin to a sort of new squirearchy. The intention of this article is to explore how far this idea enables us to better understand the role, power, and style of urban leadership, and the political, social, and economic context in which it existed. Given that the termination point is 1914, it also examines how much the notion has to say about political change in the rapidly expanding urban context after around 1850. The notion of a “new squirearchy” implies two things about nineteenth-century local leadership and the nature of its power: first, that urban elites aped and importantly resembled their rural “old” squirearchical counterparts in both substance and style; second, in so doing, such elites were calling up (whether intentionally or not) rural patterns of behavior to try to resolve problems of order, authority, legitimacy, and power in a situation where they did not naturally have easy and economical access to the means of producing any of these things. With this in mind, and after some preliminary clarification of terminology, the article will divide into three broad sections. In the first, it explores the utility of the squirearchical model to understanding the character and power of urban elites in the period up to around 1880 when local leadership in many industrial towns seemed most generously endowed with attributes to which the model might apply. The not very astonishing conclusion will be that the model is helpful in some ways, less so in others, all of which stem from the urban and industrial context in which leaders were operating. The second section will focus on the years up to around 1918 when “men (and women) of property and station” were withdrawing from active participation in the urban and industrial scene. Here, the argument will be that, at least in those northern towns under particular scrutiny, elements of the “new squirearchical” style proved remarkably resilient in spite of the withdrawal of many of those who practiced it—and may well have much to say about how the transition from one sort of leadership to another was managed, or at least took place. The final section will be concerned with the consequences of withdrawal for the power of urban leaders who remained. It will suggest that, just as property and station was no more than a partial predictor of power in the period when it was most abundantly in evidence, so its decline after 1880 was only one among many factors explaining what happened to the ability of local leaders to achieve intended effects. In fact, for various reasons, again heavily connected with the urban context in which leadership was exercised, the power at least of local political leaders in important respects increased.

When Jack Goody put more than a thousand years into the few hundred pages of his Development of the Family and Marriage in Europe, he could be allowed a little judgmental rhetoric. The documentation from early medieval Europe, unevenly distributed across very diverse situations, may indeed yield fewer examples of female than male predation, and perhaps more examples of female than male benefaction. But, since Goody wrote, historians have been increasingly alerted to complex relationships among individuals, property, and the church, which may extend far beyond the scope of individual documents, across several generations. Goody's female “givers” take on a new complexion in an environment in which donations can be more apparent than real, where a land transfer may prove no more than a social gesture. In such circumstances, identifying the originators of grants, let alone separating male and female action, becomes a delicate process. In the following article, female involvement is considered in the context of pre-Conquest wills, a body of documents that could be interpreted as classic evidence that female “givers” literally as well as morally stood in credit with the church.

The prominence of women in pre-Conquest wills has long been noted.