Janet Taylor made major contributions to Victorian navigational practices. She did so through creating business opportunities for herself as an educator, author, and inventor of nautical instruments. / Master of Arts / Janet Taylor, a woman who made major contributions to Victorian navigation, is representative of a large historiographical gap in maritime and nautical histories. In these fields historians are typically inclined to look at famous men in navigation: John Hadley, John Campbell, and others who invented nautical instruments such as the octant and sextant. However, we have failed to contextualize the significant women who have innovated maritime practices throughout history. Taylor, for example, adjusted calculations for locating positions at sea according to the realization that the shape of the earth is not spherical, but spheroidal. She conveyed this new mathematical principle to the maritime community of London through the classes she taught at her nautical academies, the dozens of books she would publish, and the navigational tools she invented or innovated. Her multiple careers, and her success in each of them, were varied and far-reaching, making her truly a Jane of all trades. Her success as a woman in a male-dominated field was largely dependent on the industrial spirit of the nation and time in which she lived. As the industrial revolution created a need for advancement in technology and navigation, gender norms and the public/private dichotomy of Victorian England began to blur.

This thesis argues that the significance of pre-Civil War southern opposition to slavery has been largely marginalized and mischaracterized by previous historiography. By contextualizing southern antislavery activism as but a single wing within a broader reformist movement, historians can move beyond simplistic interpretations of these antislavery advocates as fool-hardy and tangential "losers." While opposition to slavery constituted a key goal for these reformers, it was not their only aspiration, and they secured considerable success in other aspects of reform. Nineteenth-century Russians, simultaneously struggling with their own system of bonded labor, offer excellent counterpoints to reorient the role of antebellum southern reformers. Through their shared commitment to reforming liberalism, a preference for gradualism as the vehicle of change, and a shared intellectual framework based upon new theories of political economy, the Russian and southerners' histories highlight a transatlantic intellectual community in which southern reformers were full members. Adapting multiple theories from this transnational exchange of ideas, southern reformers were remarkably liminal figures useful for contemporary scholarly exploration into the nineteenth-century culture of reform. Ultimately, it was this liminality coupled with the inegalitarian nature of their movement that ensured that the southern antislavery movement would fail to secure a gradual demise to slavery. / Master of Arts

This study was an historical garment study that investigated the similarities and differences between variables for thread characteristics, such as thread configuration, degree of twist, direction of twist, color, and color match grades of sewing thread used in assembling American women's dresses and suits during the time period between 1880 and 1909. Items were selected using a convenience sampling from the Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History, in Washington, DC, and The Valentine Museum in Richmond, Virginia. A total of 417 observations were collected from 39 garments. Noninvasive procedures were used to examine late nineteenth and early twentieth century garments and record sewing thread characteristics from multiple designated locations. Research objectives of the study included: 1) documentation of thread characteristics for machine-sewn seams, 2) documentation of thread characteristics for handsewn seams or stitchings, and 3) documentation of dominant thread characteristics by five year periods. Frequency distributions and frequency distribution tables were completed. The results of this study revealed widespread use of one basic type of sewing thread for the total sample during the time period 1880-1909. Characteristics of threads used in handsewn and machine-sewn seams or stitchings were 3/2-cord thread with high degree of twist and S direction of twist. It appeared that aesthetic concerns for color differences and matching contrasts of thread with the fashion fabric did not always coincide with use of threads with high strength. Data analyses revealed recurring patterns. Results found for year to year observations were consistent with results found within the five year group increments. Dominant thread characteristics found within the group observations for chain stitch thread characteristics were also present in the lockstitch group observations and machine-sewn group observations. Patterns noted in observations for handsewn seams or stitchings were also similar to those found in machine-sewn seams. Noninvasive methods were used for collection of data during the study. Methods used included naked-eye visual observations and hand-held microscope observations for recording seam, stitch, and thread characteristics. / Master of Science

The purpose of this thesis is to look at the motivations behind the life and work of Caroline Chisholm, nee Jones, 1808-1877, and to ascertain why British historians have chosen to ignore her contribution to the nineteenth century emigration movement, while attending closely to such women as Nightingale for example. The Introduction to the thesis discusses the difficulties of writing a biography of a nineteenth century woman, who lived at the threshold of modernity, from the perspective of the twenty-first century, in the period identified as late modernity or postmodernity. The critical issues of writing a historical biography are explored. Chapter Two continues the debate in relation to the Sources, Methods and Problems that have been met with in writing the thesis. Chapters Three to Seven consider Chisholm's life and work in the more conventional narrative format, detailing where new evidence has been found. By showing where misinformation and errors have arisen in earlier biographies that have been perpetuated by subsequent biographies, they give specificity to the debate discussed in the Introduction. Chapters Eight to Ten discuss, in far greater depth than a conventional narrative format allows, the relevant political, religious and social influences which shaped and influenced Chisholm's life, and which facilitate an understanding of her motivation and character.

This thesis examines the important role of female same-sex relationships in nineteenth-century literature and culture. Whilst drawing directly upon Sharon Marcus's recent book, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England, a revisionary queer reading of inter-dependent same-sex female intimacy and mainstream middle-class heteronormative ideals, my own study extends the parameters of Marcus's work by focussing on alternative contexts and previously overlooked same-sex female relationships. This thesis argues that the culturally endorsed model of Victorian female homosociality identified by Marcus was subject to disruption and transformation both within and beyond the institutions of marriage and the family. It concludes that various forms (rather than one definitive model) of homosocial desire shaped nineteenth-century female bonding. In the first chapter I explore the unstable social status of working middle-class women, and identify instances of employer/employee female intimacy organised upon a disturbance or reversal of social hierarchy. In the second chapter I demonstrate how the ideal of female amity was inevitably undermined in the literary marketplace, and that whilst women writers were engaged in constructing and disseminating this ideal in their novels, they were also embroiled in a series of professional jealousies with one another which served to undo the very ideal they were promoting. In the second part of this chapter I highlight the pluralism of mainstream homoerotic femininity by examining Dinah Mulock Craik's fictional representation of homoerotic surveillance manifest in a culturally endorsed adolescent female gaze. In the third chapter I challenge Marcus's claim that well-known independent nineteenth-century lesbians were fully accommodated into mainstream 'respectable' society by demonstrating that some of these women informed Eliza Lynn Linton's homophobic portrait of radical feminist separatism. I also explore in this chapter Linton's fictional representation of sororal eroticism, and argue that (notwithstanding mother/daughter bonds) Linton, like many of her contemporaries, regarded sisterhood as the primary bond between women. I also evidence in this chapter that Linton's portrait of 'sororophobia' is comparable with cultural ideals regarding the important function that female friends had in facilitating one another's marriage.

This thesis contends that the idea of productive sexual continence - that is, abstinence from sexual activity understood as a constructive practice - significantly shaped a branch of thought within and around the British Aesthetic Movement of the late nineteenth century. Recent critical work has stressed sexual liberation or permissiveness as among the values of Aestheticism, and has read Aesthetic representations of continent states as indications of repressed, sublimated, or coded sexuality. Reading these representations through period-specific sexual discourses, I reveal an alternative discursive tradition within Aestheticism, in which the idea of productive sexual continence formed an important part of thinking about the 'aesthetic life', or the life lived according to aesthetic principles. The enquiry privileges the place of sexual ideas and values in the context of the intellectual culture of the Aesthetic Movement, and of the late-Victorian period generally, rather than focusing (as much scholarship has done) upon the writers' 'real-life' sexual behaviour, desires or identities. Sexual continence was often understood in the period as conducive both to individual health and happiness, and to one's relationship with society. At a time when Aesthetic writers were often accused of endorsing excessive individualism and excessive sensuality, this idea facilitated the elaboration of an aesthetic ethic that could incorporate intense sensuous (but not sensual) pleasure and also responsible sociability. After an Introduction that outlines the scope and method of the thesis, Chapter One illustrates the ubiquity of this idea in medical writing (professional and popular) about the sexual body in the period, and within Classical and Christian intellectual discourses commonly drawn upon by Aesthetic authors. Four chapters follow in which roughly the same idea is shown to take a central role in representations of the 'aesthetic life' in the work of four major writers. Chapter Two posits that there were broadly two traditions of reading Walter Pater in the late nineteenth century: one in which he was taken as an apologist for a radical sensual individualism, and another that emphasized his advocacy of restraint and reserve as both stylistic and ethical principles. Informed by early readings in this latter tradition, I demonstrate the plausibility of an interpretation of Pater as carefully distinguishing between aesthetic sensuousness and sensuality. Pater also, I argue, can viably be read as assessing the ideal aesthetic life in terms of health and love, and representing sexual continence as compatible with both. Chapter Three looks at Lionel Johnson's incorporation of this continent ideal into his Christianized cultural humanism, evolved in his letters, poetry, and criticism. In the poetry resistance to temptation is described as a process by which potentially sensual experience is made safely sensuous, while in the letters and criticism can be found admiration for various continent states that reconcile individual aesthetic experience with social responsibility. In Chapter Four, the pre-1900 essays of Vernon Lee are shown to be consistently anti-sensual, while distinguishing this sensuality from a kind of continent sense experience identified as aesthetic, and associated with Pater. Lee also uses this aesthetic sensuousness as a model for ideal - i.e. disinterested and respectful - relations between people, and between people and things. Chapter Five examines the co-existence of this discourse with other, contradictory models of aesthetic living in the work of George Moore. Moore was generally pro-sensual, and considered 'sex' (in the abstract) to be integral to art; but he also associated the production of art with continent states. An alternative, sexually continent Paterian tradition can, I argue, help to account for these discordant moments. A Conclusion briefly indicates the further relevance of such thinking beyond the bounds of the Aesthetic Movement.

During the nineteenth century, as today, nausea and vomiting were common signs and symptoms of illness, the interpretation of which contributed to doctors' diagnostic, prognostic and therapeutic choices. At the core of this thesis lies the research question: how did medical understandings and management of nausea and vomiting change in the period 1800-1900? In addition to being signs of bodily disorder, nausea and vomiting constituted an individual, typically non-medicalised experience of sickness. As such, a secondary thesis question is: how were nausea and vomiting experienced, interpreted and responded to by sufferers? These questions are pursued through four key themes: physiology, vomit analysis, morning sickness and sea-sickness. Medical textbooks, journals, hospital case reports, newspapers, letters and diaries are the principal source base. Throughout the nineteenth century physiological explanations for nausea and vomiting followed a generally reductionist path. In the 1830s Marshall Hall's reflex theory encouraged new perceptions of the nervous mechanisms involved in nausea and vomiting, and helped stimulate their redefinition into local, central and peripheral causes. Changing physiological explanations for nausea and vomiting were also contemporaneous to the growth of microscopy. This thesis draws attention to the interest nineteenth-century practitioners showed in using vomited matters as pathological fluids. This is explored primarily through a case study of sarcina ventriculi, a vegetable microorganism discovered in fermenting vomit. Responses to this discovery showed that laboratory techniques were largely inapplicable to everyday occurrences of nausea and vomiting. Consequently, neither the increasing localisation of the causes of vomiting, nor interest in vomited matters as pathological fluids, contributed to specificity in diagnoses or treatments. This research thereby demonstrates the cumulative and overlapping nature of nineteenth-century medical cosmologies - 'bedside', 'hospital' and 'laboratory' - and the continuation of the 'clinical art'. The histories of morning sickness and sea-sickness contextualise medical understandings of nausea and vomiting in relation to these transient conditions. They bring to the fore perceptions of health and sickness and show that medical theory was often secondary to cultural beliefs and practices. Specifically, this thesis questions the medicalisation of pregnancy during the nineteenth century and uses experiences of sea-sickness to reveal new features of Victorian understandings of the mind-body relationship. This thesis shows that 'feeling sick' (nausea) was arguably as significant to contemporaries as actually 'being sick' (vomiting). It also confirms the complexity and fluidity of taken-for-granted terms such as: 'patient', 'sufferer', 'disease', 'illness' 'sign' and 'symptom', and, of course, 'sick'. Furthermore, it demonstrates the importance to historians of studying everyday, self-limiting illnesses and morbidity.

Focusing on the three-year period from 1859 to 1862 during which the poet Walt Whitman frequented Pfaff's Beer Cellar on Broadway in New York, this dissertation examines how the barroom and its unique clientele shaped the poet's life and writings. This project demonstrates that Pfaff's functioned as an American saloon and a popular salon and argues that the communities of beer cellar regulars Whitman joined there made Pfaff's the most significant social and literary space of his career. Whitman's participation in two social and intellectual communities at Pfaff's was vital to his literary production before and during the Civil War. While Whitman prepared the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass for publication, he joined a group of writers and artists at the beer cellar--a group now recognized as the first American Bohemians. Later, he became a central figure in the "Fred Gray Association," a little-known group of young Pfaffians. This dissertation shows that Whitman's membership in the Bohemian coterie influenced his writing and revision of his homoerotic Calamus poems, first published in Leaves of Grass (1860). It also reveals that Whitman's time with the Fred Gray members served as a foreground for his volunteer work in Washington's wartime hospitals, where he not only attempted to recreate the beer cellar environment as best he could under terrible conditions, but he also continued to practice the theories of affection he put forth in Calamus . By studying Whitman's years at Pfaff's through an interdisciplinary approach that draws on methodologies ranging from cultural studies and literary history to gender and sexuality studies, this dissertation makes significant contributions to several fields of literary study. In addition to offering a fuller understanding of Whitman's literary production at Pfaff's, it contributes to biographical studies of the poet by drawing connections between his personal and professional transitions from temperance writer to bar-hopping Bohemian, and, finally, from a Pfaffian poet to a hospital volunteer. This study also adds to the history of sexuality by places Whitman's Calamus poems, which are counted among his most sexually radical, in the context of nineteenth-century debates concerning gender and sexuality. It also explores the counter-cultural communities that formed at Pfaff's and illuminates how Whitman's writing is intertwined with the space of the barroom and his relationships to its inhabitants. Finally, this dissertation illustrates how underground networks respond to the larger social and cultural milieus that they both exist within and position themselves against.

No description available.

Writers of the 1830s and 1840s sought to interpret their changing society in an explosion of new forms, developing an all-inclusive aesthetic that saw writing as a direct expression of individual experience, without boundary between life and page and without hierarchy of genre or subject matter. Analyses of social types and behaviour proliferated in which two current preoccupations stood out: the materialist motivation of an industrialising society with an expanding middle class, and the degree of theatricality involved in manoevring for a place in that society. Often groundbreaking, the analyses of August Lewald (1792–1871) were informed by his broad experience which included commerce and the theatre, and for which he was renowned. Contemporary reviews acknowledge the innovativeness of his writing and his sure eye for key issues of the day. In the new conditions after 1848, however, his popularity soon vanished, and he has been largely overlooked since then. My thesis aims to demonstrate that such a strong representative of the period in both his life and works calls for reinstatement as significant writer and personality. Three of Lewald’s works have been selected to support this aim. After an Introduction which tries to place Lewald within the experimental context of the Vormärz, Chapters 1–3 will offer a close reading of each work, contextualised by reference to other works, contemporary reviews, and biographical detail where it seems relevant. Sketches from Album aus Paris exemplify Lewald’s early and influential innovativeness in their humorous scrutiny of social behaviour through observation of its external manifestations, in the style of French Physiologies. Memoiren eines Banquiers exploits fictionalised life-writing as a cover behind which to confront controversial issues around money, Jewish emancipation and prejudice. Theater-Roman plays with the metaphor of society as theatre, conveying the ultimately futile illusoriness of contemporary society’s values, and foreshadowing Lewald’s own increasing rejection of his Vormärz life- and writing style after 1848. My Conclusion claims for Lewald’s life and writing individuality and originality as well as qualities that make him exemplary of his time. It proposes, as a project among other topics for further research, that a new edition of his sketches in particular, enjoyable in their own right, would be a valuable contribution to knowledge of the Vormärz period.