This thesis examines in depth the six borough and county asylums of Hampshire and Sussex between 1845 and 1930. The research is of an interdisciplinary nature and offers a synthesis of archaeological, historical, and sociological methodologies. The primary focus is on the standing asylum buildings. Fieldwork has been used to establish a permanent record of the building complexes prior to their imminent destruction and redevelopment and has provided a basis upon which to examine the quality of these buildings as places of treatment and cure. This fieldwork has then been coupled with extensive documentary research in order to repopulate the asylum with the patients and staff that lived and worked within them. The key themes of this study are designed to provide a three dimensional analysis of the buildings in order to assess their quality and effectiveness. These themes include: reading gender, status and control from the building complexes; understanding the epidemiology of the asylum populations; establishing the effectiveness of the asylums as hospitals in view of asylum borne disease; and charting the asylum building genre evolution over a period of eighty years as a design response to providing better treatment and care. In order to do this over 6,000 separate patient transactions have been incorporated. Asylum buildings have received little attention from archaeologists or historians. No asylum building to date has been rigorously researched. This study takes six asylum buildings, extensively examines them, repopulates them, and evaluates their effectiveness. This is done within the context of the original purpose of the asylum commissioners, the epidemiological facts, and the current historiographical debate.

Drawing on the conceptual framework developed by Charles Taylor in his A Secular Age (2007), this thesis seeks to recast the question of Victorian ‘secularization’ – a notion largely abandoned by historians. It does so by analysing the temporal dimension of three Victorian social imaginaries and their technological performance: railways and the establishment of a uniform national time; newspapers and the public sphere; and Bank of England paper notes and the integration of a national economy. It argues that in all three cases, a concept of secular time was actively invested and embedded on the level of the social imaginary and its material mediation. This allows historians again to speak of a process of secularization, albeit only on this particular level. However—and contrary to Taylor—the thesis argues that the temporal structure of Victorian modernity comprised two kinds of time at this very level, articulated together in a dialectic fashion: a secular time conceived as isochronic, abstract, and independent of motion; and a historical time conceived as pure qualitative duration. In this way, the thesis contributes towards the development of a genuinely postsecular paradigm for future research into the nature of Victorian modernity.

In 1859 a queen, a duchess and a clan chief’s daughter came together in Scotland for the inauguration of a pumping station. Piping water into Glasgow from distant Highland hills was an “engineering marvel.” The monarch opened the Loch Katrine Waterworks, a duke’s kilted army gave the royal salute - and city and countryside were linked. Victorian engineering skills mixed with tartan nostalgia. In these ‘Rob Roy’ haunts a progressive age beckoned, but it was one that took with it an invented past…This thesis will examine ‘Highlandism’, a phenomenon viewed with suspicion because it is a product of the British Empire, the British army, royalty and aristocracy. It will examine its authenticity, analyse its worth and detail the contribution made by three women to this male driven trend. Queen Victoria was a patron, the Duchess of Athole an enabler, and Miss MacGregor an intellect behind this plaid and piping craze. This work will show that Highlandism’s intellectual foundations are deeper than thought and that royal and aristocratic roles in its development are more positive than imagined. ‘Tartan and shortbread’ traditions are accused of impeding cultural and political change. Yet Highlandism has stimulated trade and tourism. It has encouraged a global piping tradition,boosted the Gaelic movement and engendered worldwide emotional support for Scotland. With the “tartan monster” possibly being viewed more kindly, perhaps the “haggis” can sit more comfortably with the “culture”.

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No description available.

To invade and conquer Great Britain by conveying the large armies of the Continent to her shores was a strategic problem which absorbed the most eminent military authorities of pre-1914 Europe. Firpitz, Schlieffen, Foch, Roberts, Repington, Fisher, and the British, French, and German General Staffs devoted years of study to the complex issues involved in this enigmatic enterprise. In Britain, the question inspired the birth of the Blue Water School of naval strategy and for a generation thereafter remained the chief contention in a bitter struggle for predominance between the two services. Invasion was the first defence problem to be considered by the Committee of Imperial Defence and remained its major preoccupation, inspiring altogether five exhaustive reviews between 1902 and 1914. Interest in invasion was not, however, confined to the military establishment. The German staff studies were activated by the Kaiser himself. In Britain, Cabinet ministers such as Balfour and Churchill, and civilian strategists such as Corbett, attacked the mysteries of invasion with an intellectual sophistication which eclipsed the work of serving professionals. Especially in Britain, a possible invasion was a defence question which preoccupied all classes of society. Journals and newspapers analyzed its complexities for the patriotic edification of a middle class readership, while unscrupulous Journalists and publicists exploited the public's anxiety over overseas attack for less noble motives. The common man attested to his interest in the issue by purchasing sensational prophesies of future invasion by the million, and invasion scare in 1888, 1900, 1909, and l914 revealed a deep national concern that would diminish only during the war itself. he test of war provided the final proof that invasion was a remote contingency. By 1918, a long strategic era was drawing to a close as airpower displaced seapower as Britain's first line of defence.

This thesis explores how the fallen woman was depicted in British visual culture between the late 1840s and 1900. Previous research has focused on how the fallen woman was portrayed in art, literature, and to some extent the illustrated press but has not considered her representation in the illustrated periodicals produced by the Salvation Army or the implications of her illustration in the coverage of the Jack the Ripper murders. This thesis encompasses these neglected sources and argues that the intended audiences of these images profoundly influenced how the fallen woman was presented in each medium and how these portrayals were received. This research highlights, both thematically and chronologically, the impact which social thought had upon the portrayal of the fallen woman, the role of editors and critics in the mode and reception of works, concerns regarding the social acceptability of the fallen woman as a subject for mass consumption, and how the purpose of the image influenced its message. Chapter One explores the origins of the notion of the fallen woman and the significance of Christian tradition within Victorian culture. Chapter Two considers the portrayal of the fallen woman in painting, whilst Chapters Three and Four examine the role of the illustrated press. The thesis concludes with an examination of the publications produced by the Salvation Army during the 1890s, arguing that these periodicals purposefully adopted elements from the different mediums studied in the previous chapters so as to have the greatest impact upon their intended readers. It is my contention that the fallen woman was a malleable concept which could be subtly shaped to suit the sensibilities and pre-existing belief systems of different audiences, and that it can therefore be understood as a case study for the exploration of wider Victorian attitudes towards gender, morality, and artistic production.

This is a study of the 'remaking' of the English county town between 1860 and 1910. During this period, under the pressure wrought by a shifting urban hierarchy, declining status and an eroded market position, the municipal elites in late Victorian county towns transformed their boroughs into specialised urban centres. The study uses a combination of printed sources including census returns, directories and local newspapers together with local manuscript sources, including municipal records, to analyse the process of urban specialisation in two English county towns in different regions, Bedford and Lincoln. The thesis argues that county towns were more dynamic than is generally perceived. In support of this argument the evolving central place function of the county town is examined together with the administrative and market role. Two chapters focus on significant occupational sectors, manufacturing and the professions, to demonstrate the economic dynamism of Victorian Bedford and Lincoln. The core of the thesis is a comparative study of the development of the two municipal boroughs considering the influence of geographical location, networks and the existing urban resource base in developing economic and environmental specialisation. Finally the managers of urban change, the municipal elite, are examined to assess how their composition, occupations, and lifestyles impacted on their strategies of urban management.

Whilst both high politics and pressure from below have been both fully and brilliantly studied on the complex events of the years 1866-8, redistribution, as a political concept and effect in its own right, has been rather neglected. The reasons for this are obvious. It lacked the gladiatorial nature of the parliamentary battle, few politicians were intimate with its intricacies, only a net fifty-two seats were changed and to build an edifice of c. four hundred individual constituencies takes time. Nevertheless, the politics of no change and lack of intention was as important, and as interesting, in rather different ways, to the more obvious attractions of the great debates on the nature of constitutional representation in 1866, the dancing on eggshells in the following year and the Irish Church question and General Election of 1868. Partly for reasons of space and time and also to do with the nature of the voluminous evidence, the study is focused on the years 1866-8, though it is put into its context, both before and afterwards. Documents have been quoted, where relevant, to aid other writers in their approach to the period and to give a flavour and authenticity to the work which was undertaken. What emerges is a limited triumph of sorts for Disraeli. A success it was in a party sense because it was a Conservative settlement, it avoided what had to be achieved at all costs, a second Whig/Liberal Reform Bill and it tilted a previously unfair and clearly gerrymandered system, emanating from 1832, back to, if not a position of Tory advantage, then at least to one of some sort of equilibrium. In that sense the final redistribution of 1868 was a negative victory, in that it avoided something worse. The first third of the writing tells the tale of redistribution from when it first reappeared as a political issue after 1832, the fe-emergence in 1848 effectively and rather neatly coinciding with Disraeli's de facto leadership of the Protectionist party in the House of Commons. The remaining two thirds divide Great Britain up into seven major psephological and regional areas in order to see the impact, both intended and unintended, on the individual constituencies. What emerges, and perhaps surprises, is the knowledge and understanding of the British electoral system in general, and its parliamentary seats in particular, which Disraeli had mastered by the time that Liberal error had, rather fortuitously, given him the opportunity to put his ideas and plans into practice. The conclusion of a limited Tory redistribution was due to the political situation and the not to be forgotten circumstance of a parliamentary minority of c. sixty-five seats - in normal circumstances. Disraeli's unique ability to keep matters abnormal was the key to his settlement.