The expansion of the borstal system at home and abroad, the success of innovative schemes at Wakefield and elsewhere, the gathering together of exceptional governors, housemasters and officers, the increasing involvement of a sympathetic public, and the legislative imprimatur that would be provided when the Criminal Justice Bill became law, all heralded a golden age for reformers. But the war came, reining in the steady progress which until then had ‘generated unalloyed admiration throughout the world’.

The structure erected during the inter-war years was undermined, not so much by German bombs, but by other effects of the war. Two thirds of trainees were discharged, many of whom, along with many of the staff, joined the armed forces. The loss of the latter was particularly damaging. They were the standard-bearers of the reform movement, and had laboured hard to create a tradition that would endure. All gone! So too were some of the institutions. Five were taken over in full or in part for use by the War Office or for adults decanted from urban prisons. Some suffered. While both Rochester and Feltham were hit by bombs, Portland, because of its location, fared the worst, being repeatedly subjected to bombing and machine-gunning by the Luftwaffe, which damaged buildings and killed or wounded several boys. Their comrades got their revenge when one of the planes crashed and the lads, rummaging through the wreckage, made off with the pilot's ear as a trophy. Overcrowded and under-manned, borstals were unable to provide the same quality of training as heretofore. In addition, war-work took precedence over everything, and borstal boys and girls were not exempted. Life for them would be taken at a brisker tempo. As the war progressed the number of young offenders increased and they seemed more difficult and disturbed, an aberration occasioned by the turmoil, disruption of family life, and privations of wartime, or so it was thought. As training was in retreat, birchings as well as committals to prison were on the increase. It was assumed that with victory things would gradually return to normal, borstal would be resurgent and its success consummated.

The most probing investigations of the painters’ trade in early modern England have focused on London and especially on the Painter-Stainers’ Company of that city. The inadvertent neglect of painters and painting elsewhere in the realm leaves the impression that any such activity was either unusual and/or not worth investigation. Some earlier scholarship, as we have seen at the outset, virtually proclaimed such a void. But just as, for example, historians of English political history moved long ago from a sole concentration on the kings, queens, and parliaments at the centre to embrace the additional dynamics of locality and region, so must the study of particular occupations like painting move as well. Even when concentrating exclusively on portraiture, no less a curatorial authority than Sir Roy Strong has suggested the potential at least of regional painting as a worthy subject for study. Tightly focused but still valuable investigations have been made of local painting in provincial centres like Norwich, Bury St Edmunds, Gloucester, and Chester. But a more comprehensive survey of provincial painters has been lacking. Not all of that apparent neglect has been wilful. The subject admittedly presents its own special challenges. For one, it is more difficult to learn about the painters through their work, as less of it has survived. By and large, the production of provincial painting itself has not as often met the aesthetic standards of paintings done at the centre for the court and aristocracy. It is less likely to have been preserved, collected, or, in modern times, analyzed and curated for the public view. Then, too, much of it was produced in the forms of, for example, wall painting, glass painting, and decorative painting in private residences which are all very difficult to display in museums and galleries where they might more effectively be studied and analyzed.

Another impediment lies with documentation. As with all painting of this era, almost none of it was signed, so that one must discover some form of a paper trail to identify the painter. If it survives at all, much of that written record which might inform our understanding of provincial painters’ lives and activities remains either in the private archives of family estates or in myriad provincial archives.

This study has followed a long and winding path which began many years ago with work on the conventional political history of early modern England. Guided by the allure of human activity at the ground level of the local community, that route has meandered through groves of political and then social history, and made long detours into the realms of vernacular building and both civic and material culture. More recently it has entailed extended and enlightening sojourns amongst art historical and curatorial communities at the National Portrait Gallery and elsewhere. It has always entailed frequent fuelling stops in the repositories of local and provincial as well as national and metropolitan archives, taking on information, ideas, and inspiration along the way. But it rarely departed for long from that different country of the past which begins with the accession of the Tudors and comes to a climactic end with the downfall of Charles I.

This latest report of the journey's progress follows on the heels of three earlier monographs which have attempted to link the realms of local and social history on the one hand with those of visual and material culture on the other: an investigation of architecture and political power in urban communities (1995), a study of civic portraiture in those same sorts of communities (2007), and a work on the emergence of a public for portraiture in provincial England (2012).

From the very outset of these meanderings, and especially while working on the role of town halls in the urban communities of early modern England, I began to notice that many such buildings displayed portraits of their founders or local worthies. Most were anonymously and not very well painted: their crude, craft-like quality itself caught my eye. On trying to ascertain who painted them I more often than not came up blank. Those names which did surface in the archives usually disappeared when I searched for them in published scholarship. Yet these painters had obviously gained local importance in the towns and parishes which engaged their services. They had contributed to the material fabric and cultural heritage of their communities.

The doctors would not let their patient escape their clutches until mid-January. For a few days after his return to the platoon not much happened. Then on the 20th he and his men moved up to the front line by the chalk-pits at Loos, and for the next week had ‘a very eventful time’. They were positioned at the extreme right of the battalion by a sunken road. A cellar was their only refuge. There was no trench yet, and it was their task to fortify their flank to prevent enemy infiltration into the village. Coming under heavy artillery and sniper fire, the platoon suffered many fatalities, reducing it to nine men, four of whom were wounded. These were the sole survivors of the sixty-two members who had left England in March 1915.

Throughout this period Angliss considered Paterson to have been ‘outstandingly brave’, a man who ‘never actually flinched to a closely bursting shell or grenade’, and that he well deserved a Victoria Cross. When volunteers were needed to raid German trenches, ‘Paterson would say to his men; “The colonel wants a party to go out tonight. I’m one. Who else is coming?”. The response was pretty well unanimous.’ Only once did he ever admit to ‘some fear’: when, before he could evacuate his men from an exposed sap, he had to wire it in, which he did, thirty-five yards from the German line.

As Soledad Larraín, in collaboration with Lorena Valdebenito and Luz Rioseco, demonstrate in their pioneering study, Country Assessment on VAW: CHILE, published in July 2009 and sponsored by the United Nations, violence against women (VAW) is an area of major concern in Chile. The authors define VAW as

• (i) Occurs within the family or domestic unit or within any other interpersonal relationship, irrespective of whether the perpetrator is currently residing or has resided in the past with the victim, such violence includes, among others, rape, battery and sexual abuse;

• (ii) Occurs in the community as a whole and is perpetrated by an aggressor, including among others, rape, sexual abuse, human trafficking, forced prostitution, kidnapping and sexual harassment either in the workplace, in educational institutions, health facilities or in any other place;

• (iii) Is perpetrated or condoned by the State or its agents regardless of where it occurs.

The third point raised – which itself points to the culpability of State employees actively condoning or turning a blind eye to VAW – is significant and has an important resonance for the two novels written by Chilean women and studied in this and the following chapter, that is, Diamela Eltit's Fuerzas especiales (Special Forces; 2015) and Carla Guelfenbeim's Contigo en la distancia (In the Distance with You; 2015). Fuerzas especiales, in particular, as we shall see, focuses on the representation of VAW, and it does so in the context of the broader political lockdown imposed by State authorities on Chile's subaltern classes.

The authors of the above-cited report also draw attention to the promulgation in Chile of Law No. 19.325, dated August 1994, and Law No. 20.066 of October 2005, which served to criminalize domestic violence, as well as Law No. 19.617 (1999) and Law No. 19.927 (2004), both of which relate to sexual violence and are symptomatic of a ‘conceptual change regarding the judicially protected asset, which was initially considered as being confirmed to the family sphere and to public morality, but is now considered part of “sexual freedom”’. The monitoring of crimes demonstrated that ‘femicide represents nearly half the women murdered in Chile and that they generally occur in a context of past or present intimate relationships’.

When first appointed to the Prison Commission, Alexander Paterson had strong opinions on penology, considerable experience of the workings of the English prison system, but little knowledge of any other. What he also had was a determination to rectify this deficiency. He was insatiably curious, firmly believed in the value of comparative study, and harboured an ambition to become the expert on penal matters. He knew full well that if his project of transforming the prison and borstal systems, as yet in its infancy and amorphous, was to suc-ceed against inevitable opposition he would have to travel far and wide to acquire a detailed understanding of other systems. Thus he would be able to marshal a formidable factual arsenal which he could deploy in both offensive and defensive capacities to progress and protect his great reformatory aim.

His motto was solvitur perambulando (by travelling problems are solved). Like Howard and Fry, he was prepared to learn from other countries and to use their methods and results to challenge or reinforce his own ideas. Like them he had to see ‘with his own eyes how others have faced the same problems and tried to solve them’. During his prison career, in peace and in war, he would travel extensively in Europe, in North America, and throughout the British Empire, sometimes on official business, sometimes on holiday and at his own expense. He wasted no time. In his first three years as a Commissioner he was constantly on the move.

In August 1922 Paterson visited Germany, the first time a Commissioner had done so since Ruggles-Brise in 1905. It was also the first time that Alec had visited the country he had been fighting just four years before. Taking Barkis with him to act as an interpreter, Alec would be a John Howard redivivus, his endeavours greatly eased by the co-operation of the German authorities. Over a period of two months, he saw a large number of prisons and reformatories from Munich in the south to Berlin in the north, and from Munster in the west to Breslau in the east. On each establishment he kept copious notes which he incorporated into his thorough if idiosyncratic report. His whimsical style was very unlike bureaucratic Mandarinese.

Tijuana scholar Sayak Valencia argues that being born a woman and poor in contemporary Mexico condemns girls to live in a precarious circle of violence. Similarly, the writer Fernanda Melchor believes that being a woman in contemporary Mexico carries the stigma of being ‘weak and stupid’ – ‘something like being born with a disability’. Both Sayak and Melchor address the precarious situation for the poor, the working class and migrants in the frame of ‘necropolitics’.

The concept of necropolitics was first proposed by the Cameroonian scholar Achille Mbembe to explain how the lack of governmental action in violent spaces leads to the emergence of private forces that exert control over the deaths (not the lives) of the inhabitants. Mbembe argues that necropolitics develops when the State hands over power to private forces, due to either incapacity or being immersed in corrupt dynamics. The right to kill is no longer an exclusive prerogative of the State. In this regard, both the State and private forces act as necropowers that compete to gain control over the territory and the people.

This chapter addresses the representation of Veracruz as a necropolitical scenario for poor women, girls and sexual minorities in Fernanda Melchor's novel Temporada de huracanes (2017). Melchor was born in 1982 in the Port of Veracruz. At present, she is widely recognised as one of Mexico's most promising and prominent writers. Temporada de huracanes sold more than 37,000 digital and printed copies in Mexico, and Random House had to reprint the book 11 times to continue supplying bookstores with it. The novel has been translated into dozens of languages, and the translations multiplied the success of the book internationally: in Germany, Melchor won the International Prize for Literature in 2019; in the US, the novel was one of five finalists for the pres-tigious International Man Booker Prize in 2020. She is also the author of Aquí no es Miami (2013), Falsa liebre (2013) and Páradais (2021).

In Temporada de huracanes, citizens live in a precarious circle of hostility, which manifests via specific mechanisms of disempowerment led by neighbours, drug dealers and local authorities, such as the police and the judicial system. In the novel, the lack of governmental support and the lack of education, work and social security exacerbate the despair, frustration and anguish and lead people to commit crimes.

University College, or Univ. as it is commonly called, is the oldest collegiate foundation in Oxford, dating back to a bequest made in 1249. Its founder, William of Durham, hailed from the north-east of England, and it was from there that most of its early scholars came. As the centuries passed other colleges were created, and many eclipsed in grandeur and in achievement the first-born, although the kudos of its primogeniture was unassailable and its fortunes fluctuated. By the beginning of the nineteenth century it was respectable if unremarkable. Between 1850 and 1881 the winds of change swept over Oxford and Cambridge. Most significantly, the religious test which prevented entry to those who refused to subscribe to the thirty-nine articles of the Church of England, thus excluding Catholics and Dissenters, was removed. By the time Alec Paterson was ready to go to Univ. his Unitarian background proved no problem. His four years there would reinforce all that he had been brought up to believe, and would open a door of opportunity to put his beliefs into practice.

Paterson, still seventeen, matriculated as a commoner of the college in October 1902, towards the end of the long tenure of James Bright. Bright had been a Fellow since 1874 and became Master in 1881. He would retire the same year that Paterson graduated. Bright was liberal in his theology and Liberal in his politics. Others among the Fellowship were more radical, some even espousing the novelty of socialism. The Bursar, Charles Faulkner, who had caused a sensation by inviting his friend William Morris to give a lecture which had amounted to a public avowal of the cause, had relinquished his post in 1882 and gone on to create the Oxford Socialist League.

When Lionel Fox joined the Prison Commission in 1925, he found Alec placing in each of his colleagues’ offices large cards with the words ‘Borstalium quartum aedificiandum est’ (a fourth borstal must be built). It had become an obsession, as Carthage had been for Cato. He lobbied politicians and civil servants, and in memorandum after memorandum pressed his case. When five years later that borstalium quartum came into being, substituting self-discipline for penal discipline, it would embody ‘all that enlargement of the spirit of borstal for which Paterson was especially responsible’.

One day in early May 1930, Alec burst into his future chairman's room at the Home Office and issued ‘one of his usual and abrupt and excited invitations’:

‘The Doctor’, as John Stansfeld was universally known, was ever ready to welcome Alec back to Bermondsey. They got on. They shared a vision, a vision which Stansfeld began to realise in 1897 when he set up a small medical mission near London Bridge. His Bermondsey venture would soon grow from a one-man endeavour into a university ‘settlement’ in all but name, one of the earliest in London and the only one south of the river. Of the others the most notable were Toynbee Hall in Whitechapel, Oxford House in Bethnal Green, and the Passmore Edwards Settlement in Bloomsbury.

The settlement movement was the same age as Alec himself. Founded in January 1884 and opened before the following Christmas, Toynbee Hall was named after Arnold Toynbee, who had died prematurely the previous year at the age of thirty-one. It had the distinction of being the earliest of the university settlements. It was also the grandest. Established on a non-denominational basis by the Revd Samuel Barnett – ‘in religious faith an idealistic Christian without dogma … in social faith a Christian Socialist’ – it was to be a place where richer students of diverse creeds and different political persuasions could live alongside, befriend, and contribute to the welfare of much poorer people. But it was to be more. Industrialism, and the growth of great cities that accompanied it, had riven society in twain. Toynbee Hall, it was hoped, might ‘do something to weld classes into society’. In this it singularly failed. It appealed to Ruskinian aesthetes rather than Franciscan ascetics.