By the early nineteenth century, Herefordshire's commons hosted 96 settlements comprising ten or more dwellings. Were they peopled by 'squatters' who had built their shanties illegally on the waste and were the inhabitants a rough, uncivilized people who indulged themselves in vice and profanity of every kind? Contemporary views are understandable given the geographical isolation of these settlements, but they ignore entirely the diversity of settlements encountered as a result of the varied topography and types of agriculture practised within the county's five principal regions. Except in the south-west corner of the county, farmers themselves relied little on the exercise of common rights – an important prerequisite for settlement growth. Conversely, this mixed agricultural economy created a wide range of employment opportunities; commons settlements were marginally placed between woodlands and fields, creating a rhythmic cycle of seasonal employment for male commoners. In contrast, women's lives were structured around the spatial organization of domestic tasks and in particular, access to and control of fire and water. Threatening to undermine this cohesive intermeshing of complimentary roles in squatter society was the problem of tenurial insecurity, although obsessions with the origin of squatter housing have tended to obscure the increasingly complex web of tenurial interrelationships in which the squatter, freeholder, copyholder, vestry and manorial lord were entangled. Tenurially, settlements tended to develop along three distinctive paths; some became enveloped by large rural estates, illustrated in the case study of Tarrington's commons. More isolated settlements retained a staunch freeholders' presence; in others petty landlords predominated as a result of enclosure and proximity to market centres. This classificatory model becomes a useful tool for analysing nonconformist tendencies. Each type of settlement, though, should be viewed in the context of a developing capitalist economy, which ultimately is responsible for giving birth to, and destroying, squatter communities.

This is a study which investigates the forms of femininity both available to, and created by, certain unmarried women in the immediate post-war period 1945-1965 in Britain. Utilizing varied historical and literary approaches the study conducts a detailed analysis of a variety of contemporary texts and sources including film, fiction, autobiography and oral testimony, as well as archival material. It examines how portrayals of the post-war unmarried woman increasingly resisted or re-articulated traditional notions of femininity and the feminine role, and how different types of independent women (‘spinsters’, single-mothers, career/working women) were able to develop and explore potential femininities through the creative use of cultural texts and other opportunities available to them. The study questions prevalent assumptions that the era was a low point for feminism, evidencing instead a contemporary awareness amongst many women that the war, and certain developments in the preceding two decades, had significantly challenged the validity of traditional gender dynamics. The study demonstrates how, as opportunities for employment and social provision expanded for post-war women, the feminine norm of the stay at home ‘wife and mother’ became unstable, producing conditions in which unmarried women might imagine alternative feminine identities and Second Wave Feminism might come into being.

This thesis seeks to analyse the political philosophy, organisation and historical significance of the Liberal Unionist Party, which was created following the first Home Rule debate of 1886 and the subsequent general election in which Unionists stood against ‘Separatists.’ The Liberal Unionist Party has rarely been taken seriously as an electoral force by political historians, who see the party as a collection of peers, intellectuals and lawyers, who objected to Home Rule from a desire to maintain the supremacy of Parliament and the rule of the law in the face of the burgeoning forces of nationalism, democracy and class-based politics. Given its elitist nature, the party is perceived as having failed to build a strong electoral base among the newly enfranchised workers and to have willingly succumbed to ‘fusion’ with the Conservative Party due to the parties’ fellow-feeling on issues of imperial expansion and the fear of socialism. This thesis offers an alternative interpretation of the Liberal Unionists as a diverse group of liberals, who formed an electoral alliance with the Conservative Party largely from political necessity rather than ideological affinity. Committed to the maintenance of a political culture of strong regional identity, independence of political conscience and concepts of individual liberty, the Party only reluctantly engaged with the centralised machine politics that had begun to emerge after the electoral reforms of the 1870s and 1880s. Due to this, the Party barely escaped an electoral debacle in 1892, but reformed itself and its electioneering tactics and was perhaps the crucial force in the Unionist landslide of August 1895. The thesis also suggests why the Party swiftly declined as an independent force after this triumph and thereby came to be seen by most twentieth-century historians as a mere ‘revolt of the Whigs.’

This thesis explores the electoral geography of nineteenth-century Britain. It is inspired by contemporary studies of the British electoral landscape since 1945 and the geography of campaign fund-raising and expenditure. Using the ideas and concepts developed in these studies this thesis applies these to nineteenth-century elections in a way that has never before been attempted using unique source materials. It is focused around three main themes: the geography of the electoral landscape of the nineteenth century, disproportionality and bias in the electoral system and the geographies of campaign expenditure. The findings of this thesis suggest that the notion of Britain as a democratising nation needs to be revisited, at least with respect to the operation of its electoral system. The dominant narrative in the political and electoral historiography of the democratisation of nineteenth-century Britain remains one which is focused around the importance of the extension of the franchise and the resultant growth of the electorate, the implementation of single-member constituencies and the redistribution of seats, and the introduction of anti-corruption measures such as the secret ballot. While these undoubtedly aided the development of a more democratic political system, this thesis demonstrates that the electoral system itself still produced outcomes that were disproportional, biased and beginning to be manipulated by the major political parties; the Liberal party especially was better rewarded by the process of translating votes into seats than they should have been, and were more effective in influencing the vote through geographically targeted campaigning. Ultimately, the thesis uses these different themes, arguments and methodologies to investigate how efficient the translation of votes into seats was in the nineteenth century, opening up new debates about the process of democratisation and political modernisation in Britain.

This thesis explores a cultural history of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the second half of the nineteenth century. Particularly, I focus on a group of provincial liberal citizens, who dealt with the problems of growing urban society and in that process developed a forceful notion of 'civic community'. Their civic mission revolved around a new intellectual strand of liberalism, which reconsidered the ideas of the individual and the social and contemplated active citizenship. In Victorian cities, voluntary institutions and the popular press served to prepare the ground for liberal urban government. As the centre of an industrial district, Newcastle enjoyed a strong, progressive sense of community deriving from its achievements in science and technology. To express the sense of urban modernity, the practitioners of urban liberalism sought to design a free-flowing, transparent, clean and supposedly 'neutral' environment as a governable sphere of the city. Exhaustive, active constructions went hand in hand with the advancement of engineering technologies. Furthermore, urban elites were concerned with producing a 'public culture' as the essential agency of self-governing citizenship. Civic ritual and new urban institutions such as free libraries, art galleries and public parks acted to encourage a civic mentality, linking the anonymous individual with a virtuous, patriotic awareness of collective public life. In Newcastle, urban intellectuals explored an inclusive social imagery of 'the people' by turning to extra-urban traditional idioms of 'native' folk society and culture. History was also employed in service of various civic principles and practices, where urban inhabitants increasingly enjoyed the past as part of the public culture in order to make sense of progress and modernity. Even though what the provincial liberal intelligentsia produced did not fully discipline the masses, we may see that the public culture vitalized the norms of the civic community and endured well during the Victorian period.

The experiences of children during World War Two have attracted considerable attention, both scholarly and popular. Not all children however, have received equal attention. ‘Handicapped’ children are conspicuous by their absence from all types of literature, both on evacuation and on children’s experiences of World War Two. This thesis restores these children to the story of wartime England and assesses their experiences. It examines the plans that were made for their evacuation and how they were carried out, and compares their lives, both individually and institutionally (i.e. in the various types of ‘special’ schools) with those who, for various reasons, were not evacuated. It also compares their experiences, to a lesser degree, with those of their ‘non-handicapped’ counterparts. The thesis argues that for many ‘handicapped’ children it was a positive experience but one which depended on specific aspects, such as the attitudes of the authorities and of the general public, and perhaps more importantly, the attitudes and quality of the teaching and nursing staff, who were responsible for the children on a daily basis. Finally, the thesis assesses the impact of the war, and the children’s wartime experiences, on post-war social policy. Contemporary, rather than present-day, language (i.e. ‘handicapped’ instead of ‘disabled’) is used throughout the thesis. This is purely in order to avoid confusion and in no way reflects the personal views of the author.

There are few local studies of a comparative nature encompassing poor law unions in different regions. This thesis is unique in considering a union in the north midlands and one bordering the south-west, from 1780 to 1914. The provision of relief in Cheltenham and Belper is set in the context of social and economic conditions in these two areas. Were Cheltenham and Belper different in their management of their poor between 1770 and 1914, and how did poor relief in these two unions conform or differ to the specifications laid down in the 1834 Act? Chapter 1 looks at relief under the old poor law, while chapter 2 considers the manner in which the unions were formed. Chapters 3, 4 and 6 analyse the workhouse and union populations at various times, and chapter 5 investigates charity and its assistance to the poor. Several major themes are looked at including emigration, vagrants, the children and aged. Cheltenham and Belper managed their poor in a similar manner, except most notably with regard to assisted emigration. Only Cheltenham used this to reduce pauperism. It provided out-relief for a greater number of paupers than Belper, and its expenditure per head was much higher. Workhouse populations were very distinctive in 1851. Belper had a high percentage of children and female able-bodied paupers at that time. By 1911 the workhouse populations had become more similar in both unions, being dominated by the elderly, sick and infirm. The thesis argues for general trends, observes a common trajectory of change, assesses charity alongside formal relief, and shows how interestingly different socio-economic contexts affected the comparative details and nature of pauperism. It thus invites further comparative research into the varied regional application of the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act, using the benchmarks and salient features highlighted here.

The subject of this thesis is the gentry in the county of Leicestershire during a period of transition, from an age defined by the supremacy of the landed classes, to one which presaged the emergence of an urban, industrial democracy. The thesis examines changes in the character and identity of the gentry as a social group, and its social, cultural and political roles. Leicestershire has been selected for study as it was essentially a ‘middling’ county. The gentry had maintained a strong presence there from the medieval period and had provided many of its members of parliament, justices and other office holders. Unlike in some of its neighbours, the nobility did not, in the eighteenth century at least, dominate the county politically. During the nineteenth century, the number of lesser ‘squirearchy’, whose development has sometimes been studied less than that of major, aristocratic landowners, was increasing in the county. Part One defines and identifies the gentry. It traces changes to its composition over the period, and notes the effect of new entrants on its structure and nature. This part also assesses the wealth of the gentry and its spending. It further shows that few members of the industrial elite in the rapidly growing borough of Leicester attempted to enter landed society. Part Two examines the culture of the gentry in its social and political setting. It considers patterns of education and marriage among a representative sample of Leicestershire gentry families, and their public and professional roles. This part looks in particular at the growth of networks of influence and authority, which extended beyond the county in a nationwide web of connections based on shared values and interests. It is argued that their development helped the gentry retain some influence in society when its political power was beginning to fade.

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