The use of classical music as a tool of propaganda in Britain during the War can be seen to have been an effective deployment both of the German masters and of a new spirit of England in the furtherance of British values and its point of view. Several distinctions were made between various forms of propaganda and institutions of government played complementary roles during the War. Propaganda took on various guises, including the need to boost morale on the Home Front in live performances. At the outset of the War, orchestras were under threat, with the experience of the London Philharmonic exemplifying the difficulties involved in maintaining a professional standard of performance. The activities of bodies such as the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts played a role in encouraging music, as did the British Council’s Music Advisory Committee, which co-operated with the BBC and the government, activities including the commissioning of new music. The BBC’s policies towards music broadcasting were arrived at in reaction to public demand rather than from an ideological basis and were developed through the increasing monitoring of German broadcasts and a growing understanding of what was required for both home and overseas transmission. Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony became an important part of the Victory campaign and there was even an attempt at reviving the Handel Cult of the Nineteenth Century. German music was also used in feature film but pre-eminent composers such as William Walton and Ralph Vaughan Williams contributed to the War effort by writing film music too. The outstanding example is Vaughan Williams’ music for Powell and Pressburger’s Ministry of Information sponsored 49th Parallel, in which the relationship between music and politics is made in a reference to Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. Vaughan Williams’ non-film output included the greatest British orchestral work to have come out of the War, his Fifth Symphony; a work that encapsulated all the values that the institutions of public life sought to promote.

Between 1848 – 1870 Dickens’s novels became increasingly outward looking towards transnational spaces. Dickens’s growing interest in China and Chinese commodities such as tea can be seen in his novels where contemporary anxieties about a close association with China and the Chinese is identified. The fraught trading and political relationships between Britain and China both during and after the Opium Wars and the opening of five new ports identifies this nation as one which Dickens perceived to pose a threat to British national identity. Looking at this relationship in terms of commodities, Chinese tea can therefore be a marker not only for a fetishised commodity but also as a representation of a nation. This thesis argues that Dickens’s representation of China through commodities such as tea presents a new way for British national identity to be conceptualised. Dickens’s inclusion of Chinese commodities intersects with other foreign countries that, unlike China, formed part of the British Empire. China’s independence facilitated a commercial freedom that was not available to nations that formed part of the Empire and, as a consequence, increased its commercial power. This thesis underscores some of the significant moments in Dickens’s novels from 1848 -1870 to reveal a commodity dialogue between China and Britain which moves beyond the page and reflects an increasingly interconnected world which was both assimilated and ostracised. This provides a new understanding of Britain that, far from establishing its commercial autonomy, shows how it became increasingly reliant on China and the conversations that these commodities contribute to an understanding of Dickens’s world. The thesis considers the productive readings of China in Dickens’s fiction and the importance of geopolitical commodities in forming an understanding of nation and nationality, identity and culture, and Britain and Britishness through trade.

A look at the historical relationship between Britons and Anglo-Jews through the lens of Tottenham Hotspur supporters' "Yid Army." The influx of Eastern European immigrants in the 1880s, the rise of the British Union of Fascists and the continuing evolution of British national identity speaks to a trend within Anglo-Jewish identity formation. Debates within the Jewish community of how best to live in British society, be it through assimilation or reassertion of Jewishness, have continued to the present day. By looking at the history of the Anglo-Jew in Britain one is able to see that the events surrounding the Y-word in soccer are based in a larger history of the Jewish struggle to form an Anglo-Jewish identity in the midst of an ever-evolving notion of Britishness.

abstract: The union between England and Scotland, which created the United Kingdom of Great Britain, generated heated discussion both before and after the Acts of Union took effect on May 1, 1707. Members of Parliament, the nobility, clergymen, pamphleteers, and authors from both nations participated in debates on the Union, in many kinds of writing, for many years after 1707. The voices of British women, however, have not been sufficiently considered in our scholarship, and are often conspicuously absent from our accounts of these polemical wars, which were still raging in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This dissertation seeks to fill this gap in the academic conversation by taking Scottish, English, and British nationalisms as its theoretical paradigm in approaching writing by female authors. The dissertation's chapters examine how the Anglo-Scottish Union figures in the works by five women writers (Jane Austen, Cassandra Cooke, Dorothy Wordsworth, Mary Brunton, and Susan Ferrier) publishing from 1780 to 1820. I argue that, in the aftermath of the Union, these women writers often expressed specifically gendered concerns— such as the maintenance of social etiquette, better education for women, making sense of national prejudices, and the erasure of regional socio-economic differences. In doing so, they ranged beyond a typically masculine focus on parliamentary politics, international military endeavors, macro economy, and national churches. English women writers' attitudes towards the Union were more positive than those entertained by Scots authors, but compared with contemporary male writers, both sides were less optimistic about the potential for building a blanket national identity for the entire Kingdom. Taken together, the chapters of the dissertation provide a more comprehensive view of how the Anglo-Scottish Union figured in the minds of Britons, male and female, a century after its establishment, when the Kingdom was going through the Napoleonic Wars and another union with Ireland. The dissertation enriches our research on women's use of literary genres and techniques when taking part in political debates. It also serves to point out the need for more extensive surveys of the nuances of individual women writers' national affiliations. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation English 2016

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The project of this thesis has been to examine the results of the development of the reputation and concept of the historical figure of Horatio Nelson as symbol of masculinity from nearly the beginning of the myth-making and mythologizing in the nineteenth century to the present. There have been several studies recently that examine Nelson the myth, Nelson as legend, Nelson as hero: they study the process of the development of this character. As a result of the mythologizing the history of Horatio Nelson is likely lost. However the memory of Nelson a very different thing and the focus of this thesis has been reinforced through commemoration throughout the two centuries since his death coming to a logical conclusion in 2008. This was done in both the public sphere (in the form of monuments) and in the private sphere (Nelson was merchandised) with the logical result in the first part of the twenty-first century being a manifestation of Nelson in fan culture on the internet. He has now been essentialised, extrapolated, and used in a wide variety of ways to navigate masculinity by both genders.

The project of this thesis has been to examine the results of the development of the reputation and concept of the historical figure of Horatio Nelson as symbol of masculinity from nearly the beginning of the myth-making and mythologizing in the nineteenth century to the present. There have been several studies recently that examine Nelson the myth, Nelson as legend, Nelson as hero: they study the process of the development of this character. As a result of the mythologizing the history of Horatio Nelson is likely lost. However the memory of Nelson a very different thing and the focus of this thesis has been reinforced through commemoration throughout the two centuries since his death coming to a logical conclusion in 2008. This was done in both the public sphere (in the form of monuments) and in the private sphere (Nelson was merchandised) with the logical result in the first part of the twenty-first century being a manifestation of Nelson in fan culture on the internet. He has now been essentialised, extrapolated, and used in a wide variety of ways to navigate masculinity by both genders.

[Truncated abstract] Many historical accounts acknowledge the ‘reverberations’ of the Second World War that are still with the British today, whether in terms of Britain’s relationships with Europe, the Commonwealth, or America; its myths of consensus politics and national unity; or its conceptions of national character. The term ‘reverberations’, however, implies a disruptive, unsettling influence whereas today’s popular accounts and public debates regarding national identity, more often than not concerned with ‘Englishness’ as a category distinctive from ‘Britishness’, instead view the Second World War as a time when the nation knew what it was and had a clear understanding of the national values it embodied a time of stability and consensus. This thesis demonstrates that, in the postwar period, ‘British’ was not a homogeneous political category, ‘Britishness’ was not a uniformly adopted identity, and representations of the nation in popular cinema were not uncontested. British national identity in the postwar 1940s and 1950s was founded upon re-presentations of the war, and yet it was an identity transacted by class, gender, race and region. Understandings of national identity ‘mirrored’ by British films were influenced by the social and political context of their creation and reception, and were also a reflection of the cinema industry and its relationship to the state. Both ‘national cinema’ and ‘national identity’ are demonstrated to be fluctuating concepts dominant myths of the war were undermined and reinforced in response to the demands of the postwar present.

This thesis offers an important reconsideration of the place of the Second World War within larger narratives of religious change in the twentieth century. While many scholars have subsumed these crucial war years within accounts of inter-war change, or dismissed them as a period of mellow or austere religion, the Second World War provides a significant opportunity for an analysis of religious change that relies on a confluence of vectors. International geopolitics, political consensus, myths of national cohesion, physical constraints, technological developments and currents in ecclesiastical thought each played a role in shaping the religious culture of wartime, one that the author describes as a “spiritual consensus” that prized unity and commonality over difference. This thesis also opens up an important new front for the history of modern Christianity in Britain. The relationship between mass media, religion and national culture has been under-examined by scholars, as has the particular ways that media shapes mental environments. The relationship between the Churches and the Ministry of Information seems to have sat in a penumbra between disciplines, leaving the rich trove of documents at the National Archives about the activities of the Religions Division of the MOI relatively unexamined. This thesis discusses in detail the global and domestic role afforded to an ecumenical Christianity in MOI propaganda. It also adds to existing scholarship that has emphasised the significant place afforded to Christianity in identity construction during the war, and its importance in the articulation of the narratives through which the urgency and necessity of the conflict was understood. / This is a study of the British Broadcasting Corporation’s religious broadcasting practices during the Second World War and its aftermath. Using documentary sources from the BBC Written Archives Centre and the National Archives, this thesis argues that the wartime context allowed the articulation and development of a particular kind of “BBC Religion,” one that celebrated commonality over difference, emphasized the importance of accessibility, and focused on individual rather than communal worship. BBC Religion was an important site of national propaganda and national identity construction, and was central to the celebration of key civil religious festivals, including the National Days of Prayer. BBC Religion provided listeners with daily prayers, devotionals, talks and entertainments to offer psychological and spiritual support during a time of crisis. Religion can be an effective tool of persuasion, particularly when propaganda builds on pre-­existing beliefs and loyalties. The Ministry of Information and BBC used a generic, practical Christianity as an “ecumenical weapon” to foster unity in Britain and between Allies. This thesis argues that the medium of radio and the technological and physical constraints of war shaped the particular articulation of BBC Religion. While the BBC helped foster a “spiritual consensus” during the war, this consensus quickly degraded in the in the aftermath of the conflict. Instead, the BBC articulated principles of tolerance and liberty in a more straightforward way, celebrating the return of regional and religious diversity in radio programming. In 1948, the BBC broke with its former “ban on controversy” to allow Bertrand Russell to openly question the existence of God on the air for the first time. This study offers a revision to “caesura” and “gradual-­declinist” narratives of religious change by suggesting that religious change in the mid-­twentieth century may be more episodic in nature, and that current historiography would benefit from an approach that considers the formation, development and adaptation of multiple discursive Christianities. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This is a study of the place of religion in British public life during the Second World War. The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) was tasked with creating popular, upbeat entertainment that could boost the morale of the nation while reminding listeners of the reasons to stay committed to the fight. They created a “BBC Religion” during the war, one that emphasised unity by stressing commonalities between all kinds of Christians, and offered psychological and spiritual comfort to listeners in a time of crisis. The Religious Broadcasting Department created engaging content that prized accessibility and simplicity above all, commissioning beloved programmes, including C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, Dorothy L. Sayers’ The Man Born to be King, and Lift Up Your Hearts, a precursor to Radio 4’s Thought for the Day. When the urgency of the conflict passed and victory became assured, this BBC Religion ceased to serve a propagandistic function. Instead, the post-­war BBC celebrated diversity and respected differences in religious belief and interpretation instead of forcing conformity.

The aim of this thesis is to investigate how politics was done at the level of the parliamentary constituencies at the time of the treaty of Amiens 1802-1803. This is achieved through two case studies of the elections in Middlesex and Nottingham, which are investigated as social practices. This thesis argues that understandings of masculinity and national identity, as well as questions about the nature of the constitution and citizen rights were central to participants in the extraparliamentary political process. Collective emotions were also highly important in the process of mobilising political support, and this thesis emphasises that participation in these elections was a collective effort; men and women from all levels of society were significant political actors. Moreover, this thesis demonstrates the importance of competences such as knowledge about the organisation of crowds and political violence in the performance of the election.