This thesis traces the transformative potential of allegory as an adaptable sculptural art form in Britain between 1762 and 1840, and provides a detailed analysis of monuments that demonstrate how allegory was manipulated perform and manage changing attitudes towards capitalism, race, gender and empire. By focusing on a variety of monumental sculptures – funerary monuments, political monuments, and war memorials - in a variety of settings – public cathedrals, private churches and colonised spaces – this thesis demonstrates how allegory operated across a variety of sculptural media in the British empire, and reveals a commonality between sculptors who have been separated by period, geography and counter-productive art historical ‘–isms’. In so doing, it presents allegory as a new lens through which to view an alternative history of monumental sculpture in Britain, which acknowledges underlying motivations of greed, misogyny and xenophobia as central to the formation of what we understand today as the British school.

This thesis includes a monograph, The Sculpture of Charles Wheeler (London: Lund Humphries in association with the Henry Moore Foundation, 2012), and a catalogue essay ‘Let There Be History: Epstein’s BMA House Sculptures’, in Modern British Sculpture, ed.by Penelope Curtis and Keith Wilson (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2011). The book is the first study of Wheeler, an important but neglected sculptor who was President of the Royal Academy from 1956-66; the Epstein essay looks anew at a notorious episode in the career of one of modernism’s canonical practitioners, coming to radically different conclusions to the accepted narrative. The accompanying analytical commentary reflects on the complex research journey towards understanding and articulating hidden histories of modern British sculpture. Deploying traditional methodologies of archive exploration and making connections between divergent critical and artistic groupings has enabled the construction of new histories. Disrupting the appropriation and elision of ‘modern’ with ‘modernist’ and ‘avant-garde’ restores the work of non-canonical practitioners to the historical moment of the first half of the 20th Century, while historical analysis draws mythologised artists into the contingencies of the real world. These publications offer original insights and their impact is becoming evident in the fields of British sculptural and architectural history. Beginning in the recent past as I prepared to write this thesis, the commentary moves into the deeper history of the research journey, considering my theoretical approaches, the initial difficulties of writing against the prevailing academic fashion, the serendipities of a supportive scholarly milieu and the details of making Wheeler’s history. The value of the monograph itself is discussed. Reviewing Epstein’s modernist cause célèbre proved the transferable value of dispassionate archival research. The commentary finally comes full circle, concluding in October 2014 when I found myself, unexpectedly, implicated in the very history to which I have contributed.