With the exception of military campaigns in Ottoman history, the only Sultan who traveled to foreign countries and the only caliph who went to Christian countries as an ally was Sultan Abdülaziz. One of the most important stops during Sultan’s journey to Europe in 1867 was Britain. He visited many institutions here and stayed for more than ten days, participated in banquets and balls, was given in his honour and hosted many influential people and institutions at the reception he gave. Sultan’s journey to Europe, the British leg of his travel in particular, aroused great interest in the British press, and liberal, conservative, and satirical newspapers kept a close eye on Sultan. There were page-by-page news about the balls given in the name of the Sultan, the entertainments organised, the apparel and attitudes of the Sultan and his entourage, and what they ate and drank. Accordingly, this study aims to convey the reflections of this journey in British liberal, conservative, and satirical newspapers and to exhibit the attitudes of dissidents and supporters towards the journey together with their impressions and reflections on the British front. The perception of Sultan and Islam that existed in Britain and changed during the journey will also be revealed.
Charlotte O’Conor Eccles’s The Rejuvenation of Miss Semaphore (1897) is a comedic New Woman narrative in which a lonely, middle-aged, single woman gets rejuvenated after drinking an elixir. Miss Semaphore’s rejuvenation goes wrong, for she accidentally turns into an infant—not a beautiful woman in her twenties—and goes through babyfarming, which was a grave social problem in the Victorian era. At first glimpse, the text seems to make a farcical mockery of the old maid, but it also allows the aging female character to transgress Victorian gender and age norms. My goal is therefore to discuss how Eccles uses humour in letting her protagonist accidentally live backward and develop into a social activist, who testifies in court as a victim and witness of child abuse in the workhouse. Initially, the middle-class protagonist and her sister appear as old-fashioned Old Women at the beginning, but once the former unexpectedly turns into an infant, she indeed gets pushed out of a social safety net, as babyfarmers illegally adopt and abuse her. Eccles creates an ironic situation where the Old Women rejuvenate metaphorically into radical New Woman activists, who raise their own voice to fight against the given system of the world, in which unmarried women and their unwanted children are constantly marginalized. I claim that the comic rejuvenation enables the Old Woman characters to deviate from the normative women’s views and be reborn as New Women. The female rejuvenation plot bridges the gap between the New Woman and the Old Woman in a way that allows the formulation of New Woman ideals. The first part of my article will discuss Eccles’s and other New Woman writers’ critical essays on the female life course. The second part will scrutinize how Eccles’s comedic novel itself responds to the late Victorian female aging question. I ultimately argue that Eccles’s humorous New Woman narrative serves as a critique of social injustice that women and children were faced with in the late nineteenth century.
This article intends to delineate the contours, both epistemological and methodological, of civilisation as an academic discipline. First, two of the chief characteristics of civilisation shall be examined: interdisciplinarity and the “paradoxical externality” of civilisation specialists. Then, it will be shown that these characteristics are compatible with comparatism, whose various forms and possible applications to the field of civilisation will be considered.
One of the main roles played by Italian history in the works of Robert Browning is to serve as a model for a general political reflection on how societies evolve and on the connections between art and politics, which are as valid as regards nineteenth-century European history as more specifically English debates within the Victorian society. At the centre of the poem ‘Old Pictures in Florence’ stands the figure of Giotto’s Campanile, whose design was left unfinished after the fall of the Florentine Republic, as the symbol of this reflection. From an aesthetic as from a political viewpoint, the fact that it remained unfinished is precisely what gives the work of art its main strength, inasmuch as it leaves open the necessary space for a taking up, a progress rooted in the ambitions of the past, and the promise of a political evolution which uses the past, against all reactionary fantasies, as the model for a progressive momentum. This apparently paradoxical point of view, which searches the past for the forces of renewal, is in direct opposition to the reactionary trends that can be traced in the majority of Victorian attempts to extol the past, first among which are the Young England movement and the Oxford Movement, which Browning satirized in ‘The Flight of the Duchess’ (1845) and ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’ (1855). This dimension of Browning’s work echoes a reflection on the role of the past in politics, which he opened in Sordello (1840) : instead of looking for a Golden Age in contrast to which the present could be criticised, he adopted the viewpoint of the past itself, which allowed him to reconsider the contemporary situation in the perspective of a longer evolution, symmetrically opposed to such reactionary nostalgia. Browning does not regard the Florentine Golden Age as a lost perfection which should be recreated, but rather as outlining in its very shortcomings the promise of future progress. In this, his reflections espouse the impetus of the Risorgimento, which he was witnessing first-hand in Florence (his wife, Elizabeth Barrett, gave an account of this in Casa Guidi Windows, 1855). This political movement gave artists a central role in creating the political identity for their contemporaries. Browning explores the way in which reformism can achieve real progress, by turning reconstruction into a form of reinvention, against the revolutionary hope of making a clean slate of the past.
In Tomorrow! A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (1898) Ebenezer Howard proposed a blueprint for an ideal society, in which he formulated his solution to the ‘Land question’—roughly speaking, the conjoined phenomena of the overcrowding of towns and cities, and the so-called ‘rural exodus’. His was a vision of a ‘Social City’: a ‘Central City’ surrounded by six satellite towns or ‘Garden Cities’, all with limited numbers of inhabitants. The famous diagrams and maps show how complex and detailed and even fastidious Howard’s investigation of the topic of land reform had been before he ventured to publish his views on the subject. While his programme is usually known for these spatial aspects, the other core elements of the Garden City programme are actually not about planning or mapping, but about the proposed social organisation. In the introduction to his only book, Howard makes it clear that two out the three ‘proposals’ from which he initially drew inspiration were themselves influenced by the pregnant ideological template of industrialism: Buckingham’s ‘Model Town’ of Victoria and Alfred Marshall’s ‘industrial district’. Howard purported to transcend the apparent contradiction between socialism and capitalism by planting his vision firmly on the common ground of these two supposedly incompatible conceptions of society. Ebenezer Howard’s ‘Garden City’ proposal is thus arguably the most accomplished formulation of a plan for an ideal social model along the main lines of the collective psyche and experience of industrialism.
At the start of the British nuclear programmes, most technological choices were made away from public scrutiny and behind closed doors. Early nuclear decision making was backed by the rationale that British citizens lacked technical and specialised knowledge to make informed decisions on nuclear questions. The emergence of public debates on nuclear risks was thus greatly hindered by limited public communication. However, this technocratic decision-making model came under fire in the wake of the 1957 Windscale accident and the rise of environmental opposition throughout the 1960s. The environmental risks of contamination, pollution, and radiation became a source of heightened tension between industry and anti-nuclear activists. This paper aims at exploring the impact of the rise in public environmental anxiety on state-sponsored television footage released between the late 1950s and the early 1980s. Analysing television footage helps identify the institutional communication strategies used to negotiate the British public’s understanding and acceptance of nuclear-induced environmental risks between 1956 and 1982. This analysis suggests that the industry’s communication approach was only cosmetically altered by this changing context. It contends that, if these cultural productions participated in constructing a more nuanced depiction of nuclear risks, they nonetheless remained based on the idea that citizen opposition mostly reflected deficiencies in scientific literacy.
This paper traces the presence and the particular uses made of the seven Penitential Psalms in services for Ash Wednesday and related occasions, in successive versions of the Book of Common Prayer, from 1549 to 1662. A brief history of the Seven Psalms and their place in pre-Reformation liturgy, as set down notably in the Use of Sarum (though they were prescribed in ecclesiastical treatises even earlier), precedes a close examination of the evolution of their use in the first four Anglican prayer books, and in the earliest American (Episcopalian) version (1789). It is notable that the seven Psalms were included, in various groupings and at various points within the Ash Wednesday or Lenten Sunday services, throughout the period of the early revisions of the Prayer Book. The striking symmetry of the Latin incipits of the seven Psalms, and their perceived appropriateness for the services of penitence on Ash Wednesday and other services in Lent, continued to command the attention and respect of revisers of the successive versions of the Book of Common Prayer, as it had done for their predecessors since the early Middle Ages.
This article provides an overview of British trade unions’ activism against the United Kingdom staying first in the EEC and then in the European Union during the referendum campaigns held in 1975 and 2016. It assesses the evolution of the unions’ agenda and rhetoric from one referendum campaign to the other. The argument put forward consists in regarding British trade unions’ commitment to tripartism as the main motivation for their anti-Marketeer stand in 1975, whereas their cautious commitment over Brexit has developed into a left-wing alliance with Jeremy Corbyn, the new leader of the Labour Party. Hence their common aim to take part in a left-led pan-European dynamic eager to fight against the neoliberal policies of the European Union.
Better Together was the main umbrella organisation of the No camp during the 2014 Scottish independence referendum campaign. It represented the common effort of three otherwise unlikely-minded British parties to work together and publicly collaborate to safeguard the Union. The difficulties that this collaboration represents were immense in that the three participating parties had distinct electoral and political histories in Scotland and each faced inner divisions and distinct challenges which this paper seeks to examine.
From the mid 1840s to the present day, the unrepresentability of the Famine has repeatedly been stressed regardless of a rich and homogenous iconography. This paradox can be explained differently according to time periods. Our analysis will therefore focus successively on 19th-century press illustrations, paintings and contemporary public or independent commemorative works influenced by trauma studies. Emphasizing iconographic continuity, this study demonstrates that visual representations of the Famine are filtered through political, social, and cultural interpretation grids but also shaped by changing visual codes and techniques.
Art Competitions formed part of the modern Olympic Games during its early years. From 1912-1948, art contests were featured in Summer Games in Stockholm (1912), Antwerp (1920), Paris (1924), Amsterdam (1928), Los Angeles (1932), Berlin (1936) and London (1948), where artists competed for medals in the categories of painting, architecture, literature, music, and sculpting. Ireland competed in four of those summer games, and a total of thirty-one Irish artists (twenty-one men/ten women, most of them members of the Royal Hibernian Academy or the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art) participated in nine separate art contests and submitted forty-three works for competition.
First published in 1874 and reissued here in its second edition of 1879, this substantial work provides information on the vegetable material medica used by Victorian pharmacists, principally in Britain but also in India. Arranging the entries according to the type of plant from which each drug is derived, Daniel Hanbury (1825–75) and Friedrich August Flückiger (1828–94) give a description of each drug as well as covering its botanical origin and history, including its first medicinal application. They also discuss chemical composition, referring to the investigations of other scientists as well as their own, and comment on microscopic structure. Intending to create a broad reference work rather than an encyclopaedia, the authors chose not to focus on the therapeutic applications of the drugs. In many instances, however, they give some information on how the plant products are used. The appendix provides short biographical and bibliographical notes.
Between 1558 and 1570, Protestant and Catholic propagandists debated the claim of the English Church to be a true Church; after the excommunication of Elizabeth, the dispute moved on to whether Catholics were being executed for a political crime or sacrificing their lives for their faith. The irreconcilable positions of the two sides concerning orthodoxy, heresy, and treason form the subject of this essay.
In his notebooks and prefaces, Thomas Hardy dwells heavily on the elusive, non methodical quality of his writing, pointing at the absence of any philosophical coherence in his work. This deliberate artistic preference for uncertainty is visible in the poet’s hesitant stances, wavering between harsh renunciation and the relief of conscious dreaming. The Hardyan approach to life is therefore essentially a « tentative » one, and Hardy’s work functions as a set of impressions, « a series of seemings ». This constitutes a very personal form of literary impressionism which bears testimony to the modernity of Hardy’s writing, though outside the realm of modernism per se.
When in the late nineteenth century Aestheticism slowly lost ground to the Arts and Crafts Movement and then to Decadence and Art Nouveau, the Victorian artistic field had considerably evolved. Freed from the moral task traditionally assigned to it, English art now claimed its autonomy — « All art is quite useless » wrote Wilde in the Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray in 1891 —, relying on a pictorial idiom which, in time, had become quite familiar to a large public. The purpose of this paper is to examine the role and function of the graphic arts in the Victorians’ familiarity with avant-garde theories. At a time when the demands of an enlarged readership triggered a remarkable development of periodical literature, the illustrated press was partly responsible for the circulation of the very ideals it meant to ridicule. From the vantage point offered by such publications as The Illustrated London News and, of course, Punch, cartoons became the missing link between highbrow and lowbrow culture, thus contributing to the long-lasting fascination exerted by Aestheticism on the rest of society.