Maria Graham is known as a travel writer, but she also translated works from French and German into English, wrote on history, painting, stories for children, and kept personal journals. My thesis centres on her travel journals and memoirs, published and unpublished. Graham is one of the first female travel writers to acquire fame as a writer shortly after publication, or to provoke controversy; in the cases of Brazil and Chile she actually is the first woman to write about those emerging states. She is outstanding as well for the authority of her narrative voice, her disregard of restrictions imposed on women’s text during her time, her complex approach to gender issues and for the changes experienced by her narrating persona. She begins by constructing a well informed but detached observer who reports her visit to India and the first visit to Brazil in a cold and distant voice, but who later allows another voice to filter through her text, an event that turns the narrator into a mere shadow in parts of the journal on Chile. It is in this journal that Graham begins to build up a contradictory persona who can be superior, ironic, and scathing when describing other women, but who can portray herself as a helpless heroine in a traditional romance when her script so demands it. In the second visit to Brazil this complex narrator becomes warmly eulogising of the country and its ruler, but this attitude does not last. The position is reversed in the third journal, which has elements of a spy thriller at times. The last chapter concerns the journals written in and about Europe regardless of chronology; they illustrate one of the main postulates of the thesis: that Graham evolved as narrator from detached observer to heroine up to the journals written at the end of her life, which become explorations into the narrator’s inner self.

This thesis explores the lives of women in a small group of families in the Nottinghamshire elite between 1720 and 1820. A close reading of family papers, gives access to the minutiae of female life and it is from these small details that the attitudes, activities and responsibilities of elite women are constructed. Drawing on the distinct historiographies of women and gender, and of the elite, the evidence produced by this sharply-focused approach is used to explore women's formal and informal roles, and the specific ways in which they were fulfilled, in the domestic, social, economic and political life of the elite. Consideration is first given to attitudes towards girls within the family and to how childhood experience contributed to the construction of elite womanhood. An assessment of the level of convergence between family and individual interests in the matter of marital choices is followed by an exploration of the weight of domestic responsibility experienced by women within the family, as wives, mothers and housekeepers. Attention turns to assessing the extent of female engagement with political, economic and social life, in the pursuit of personal and family interests. The narratives of women and their families illuminate how the female elite balanced the particular mix of subordination and privilege conferred upon them by gender and status. The range of activities in which they engaged and the multifaceted nature of that engagement demonstrate that throughout the eighteenth century women at all levels of the Nottinghamshire elite worked to support the ethos of elite pre-eminence in many small but cumulatively significant ways.

This thesis is the first academic study of nineteenth-century artist and drawing master Samuel Lines (1778-1863) and his five sons: Henry Harris Lines (1800-1889), William Rostill Lines (1802-1846), Samuel Rostill Lines (1804-1833), Edward Ashcroft Lines (1807-1875) and Frederick Thomas Lines (1809-1898). The thesis, with its catalogue, has been a result of a collaborative study focusing on a collection of works on paper by the sons of Samuel Lines, from the Permanent Collection of the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists (RBSA). Both the thesis and catalogue aim to re-instate the family’s position as one of Birmingham’s most prominent and distinguished artistic dynasties. The thesis is divided into three chapters and includes a complete and comprehensive catalogue of 56 works on paper by the Lines family in the RBSA Permanent Collection. The catalogue also includes discursive information on the family’s careers otherwise not mentioned in the main thesis itself. The first chapter explores the family’s role in the establishment of the Birmingham Society of Arts (later the RBSA). It also explores the influence of art institutions and industry on the production of the fine and manufactured arts in Birmingham during the nineteenth century. The second chapter discusses the Lines family’s landscape imagery, in relation to prevailing landscape aesthetics and the physically changing landscape of the Midlands. Henry Harris Lines is the main focus of the last chapter which reveals the extent of his skills as archaeologist, antiquarian and artist.

Charting the trans-Atlantic movement of ‘dynamic’ psychiatry from The Henry Phipps Psychiatric Clinic, Baltimore, to Gartnavel Mental Hospital, Glasgow, this thesis throws light upon the resultant ‘dynamic’ case note records, produced in Gartnavel during the 1920s. By undertaking an in-depth, qualitative analysis of Gartnavel’s case note records and corresponding archival materials, I explore the polemical question, posed, amongst others, by Foucault, of how psychiatry achieves its distinct status as a science of the individual. Foucault, most notably in Discipline and Power, ascribes to the psychiatric profession the power to fashion individual patient histories into cases, cases which simultaneously emphasise the individuality of a patient, while condensing, i.e. ‘fixing’ their identities that they may be constituted ‘an object for a branch of knowledge and a hold for a branch of power’. This thesis, while recognising the validity of this argument, explores how the clinical practices and philosophical outlook of dynamic psychiatry in the early twentieth century enabled both patient and psychiatrist to negotiate the construction of the psychiatric case note record, and consequently of patients’ individual identities. D. K. Henderson, physician superintendent of Gartnavel between 1921 and 1932, was one of the first, if not the first psychiatrist fully to incorporate dynamic principles into the working practices of a British mental hospital. Initiating methods of case note taking and staff meeting consultation (now integral components of modern day psychiatric practice) he transported the teachings of his mentor, the Swiss émigré psychiatrist Adolf Meyer, to the everyday clinical practices of Gartnavel. The dissemination of dynamic psychiatry through Henderson’s published works and medical teachings is recognised as having integrally shaped the practices of Scottish psychiatry in the twentieth century. However, the significance of the unpublished case note records, produced under his superintendence of Gartnavel during the 1920s, as sources of historical enquiry has gone largely unrecognised. A near-unique archive of ‘dynamic’ case note records is used in this thesis to reveal, what Roy Porter termed, a ‘history from below’ of clinical practices and examinatory processes. For as Henderson employed stenographers and clinical clerks to record verbatim and semi verbatim the dialogues that passed between patients and psychiatrists within staff meetings and mental examinations, I, as Porter himself aspired to, take as the focus of my research a history of the ‘two-way encounters between doctors and patients’. By employing an interdisciplinary research method, one that incorporates Foucauldian, literary, critical medical humanities, as well as more traditional forms of medical history scholarship, I establish a history of dynamic psychiatry set within clinical encounters. Engaging with current debate, evolving primarily within the interdisciplinary sphere of the medical humanities, I argue these records reveal a history of medical humanism, one in which both patients and psychiatrists actively shaped the history of twentieth century Scottish psychiatry.