This thesis examines the Scottish Conservative party between 1832 and 1868. It focuses on the party's organisation, structure, leadership, and attitudes. It begins by examining the social, occupational, educational, and religious background of its MPs, candidates, and peers. This reveals that the party's composition, while predominantly aristocratic, nevertheless boasted a range of distinctive and often competing interests. The thesis then explores the make-up, organisation and activity of the party on a local constituency level. This illustrates that the party was more inclusive and heterogeneous than might be assumed, and was very active in promoting itself through a wide variety of methods. The party thus had a notable impact on the wider social and cultural life of Scotland throughout the mid-nineteenth century. Following this, the structure and leadership of the Scottish party on a national level is examined. These could be a source of innovation and accomplishment, and their subsequent decline had a marked effect on the party's overall performance. Above this level, the party's role in parliament, governance, and in a British context is explored. It is demonstrated that the Scottish party maintained a modicum of distinctiveness even at Westminster. Moreover, its multifaceted role in Scottish governance gave it significant influence over Scottish society. Finally, the positions of the Scottish party on important political issues are examined, as are the underlying attitudes which determined these positions. The Scottish party contained many competing and overlapping factions, which held a hitherto unsuspected diversity of outlooks. Overall, this thesis illustrates that the Scottish Conservative party had a pronounced effect on many different facets of Scottish politics and wider society, and was itself more complex and more popular than is reflected in the existing historiography. It therefore counters the assumption that Scotland was almost hegemonically Liberal - a finding which has potential implications for scholarship spread across Scottish and British political, social, and cultural history.

Tea is a drink the Western world associates with Britain. Yet at one time tea was new and exotic. After tea was introduced to Britain, tea went through a series of social transformations. The British gradually accepted tea consumption as a sign of gentility and all social classes enjoyed the drink. After 1834, when the East India Company lost their monopoly on the trade with China, a new tea industry began in India and control passed to British entrepreneurs. Faced with difficulty in their efforts to make their industry into a facsimile of Chinese methods, the British reconstituted their tea industry from the ground up. British ingenuity flourished under the guidance of innovators with machines reshaping the industry. As tea became part of British society and industry, an image of tea formed. Advertising brought that image to the public, who accepted the concept of a proper cup of tea.

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In this study, I consider five of the most eminent children’s novels of the Golden Age period, 1860-1920, The Water-Babies by Rev. Charles Kingsley, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll, The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett, and Peter and Wendy by J. M. Barrie, to illustrate that the central concern of all of these novels is what it means to be a child self engaged with the world and growing up. It is my contention that, if we are to embrace what Marah Gubar terms a “kinship model” of children’s literature scholarship that sees the child and adult as in relationship to one another, a new vocabulary is necessary to discuss child and adult selfhood. In this project, I propose using Charles Taylor’s postsecular theory as a foundation for this new language, thus offering the terms porous and buffered as a new way of understanding the relationship between a child and the adult she becomes.

This dissertation examines the popular theatre of the late-nineteenth century and focuses on the most commercially successful and popular playwrights of the era: Henry Arthur Jones, Arthur Wing Pinero, and Oscar Wilde. Looking at the major popular playwrights reveals that the commercial stage had different concerns than the avant-garde theatre of Ibsen and Shaw. Foremost among these concerns was religion, and starting with Jones’s 1884 play Saints and Sinners, a massive change swept through the commercial stage as religious prejudice and official censorship fell by the wayside. In its place, religion started to become a topic that was once again seen as acceptable, and the fin de siècle stage was awash with syncretic religious views. This syncretism was aided by the publication of scripts and the religious pluralism of the day. Though publication aided the literary and religious quality of the texts, they were crafted as staged works, complete with the shared, collective experiences and emotions of the audience, a collective affect that mimics the collective emotional experience of a congregation in a church, and the stage thus became one of the largest venues for ecumenical religion during the late-Victorian era. The alacrity with which this happened challenges not only the common conception of the secularization of the late-Victorian stage, but also of the larger culture

“Diagnosing Narratives: Illness, the Case History, and Victorian Fiction” explores how the medical case study competes with patients’ experiential accounts of disease in the development of popular nineteenth-century fictions. During most of the Victorian period, clinical medicine served as the primary producer of medical knowledge. At the same time, its objectification of the sufferer—epitomized by the case narrative, the most prevalent form of nineteenth-century medical writing—led to an increasingly distanced relationship between doctor and patient. I argue that the mid-century novel responds by featuring narrator-sufferers who co-opt aspects of the medical case in order to represent their own subjective experiences and rethink what constitutes medical knowledge. As the century came to a close, however, sciences of the laboratory, rather than the clinic, began to gain epistemological sway. In light of widespread skepticism regarding the possibility of translating discoveries made in the lab into effective bedside practices, I contend that popular novels and short stories now returned full circle to the clinical case approach as a valuable alternative to the laboratory. The result is late-century fiction structurally and thematically driven by the useful yet sometimes callous techniques of the diagnostician and his case method. I chart these shifts through an examination of works by Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, and Arthur Conan Doyle. My project illustrates the responses of these authors to prevailing power dynamics in the world of medicine and offers a new reading of the ways in which the Victorian preoccupation with disease shaped literary narrative.

Prayer is a central element of all religions (Coleman, 1999; Engebretson, 1999). Alongside the sense of the theological importance of prayer there has been increased recognition of the psychological function and personal benefit of prayer for adults (Pargament, 1997). This thesis reports on research that investigated the theological and psychological perceptions of prayer held by children, shown through their understanding of the meaning and function of prayer. This thesis contributes to the research field of children’s spirituality. As there is little existing research literature on children and prayer, the findings of this study provide valuable new understanding and propose new aspects of theory with implication for professionals involved in the education and the welfare of children. The research reported in this thesis represents the first Australian research on children’s perception of the meaning and function of prayer. The choice of participants reflects the diverse philosophical and religious traditions found in the Australian, multifaith society. Semi-structured interviews were video-recorded with 60 participants from primary school Year Five (10-12 years). Five male and five female participants were selected from each of six different schools in the Melbourne metropolitan area. These were: the Catholic, Independent (Christian), Christian (Parent-Controlled or Community School), Jewish, Islamic and the Government schools. Students completed a drawing exercise and a written sentence completion exercise as part of the interview, and the three sources of data were analysed qualitatively using the method of Grounded Theory. The data was interpreted in the light of a detailed literature review on the nature and function of prayer as part of children’s spirituality. The review also examined relevant sections of the literature of religious education and literature on contemporary Australian life. This study has provided Australian data on the meaning and function of prayer for children as part of children’s spirituality. Considerable agreement has been observed through the data, between children educated in a variety of school systems which embraced different philosophical and faith traditions. In the multicultural Australian community said to be secularized, prayer for these children has been shown as a valued aspect of life. The personal experiences of prayer for many were seen to be associated with the community of faith to which the participants belonged, and for others, prayer was learnt eclectically and practised in a private individualistic manner. All participants indicated that they had prayed and all contributed ideas about prayer through the interviews. All participants perceived prayer to function as an aid in life. Prayer was used by participants at significant moments in their life, and the words or thoughts in prayer helped to clarify and articulate deep feelings. Eight elements of theory (in accord with the literature on Grounded Theory ) have been generated through this research which are presented as recommendations for professionals engaged in religious education and student welfare.

Nineteenth-century periodical literature, recognised today as a distinctive and significant feature of Victorian public communication, is voluminous. Yet in order to argue that the editor-publisher Elizabeth Hayes made a significant contribution to evangelising journalism, this thesis finds it imperative to situate her work within the enormous outpourings of the Victorian periodical press. For a Victorian woman to succeed in journalism was impressive and this investigation argues that Hayes capably led an international journal of religious ideas to stability and longevity. The investigation will show that Hayes, foundress of an organisation which edited, published and distributed a Franciscan monthly journal - to date scarcely investigated- was prepared prior to 1872 for her subsequent journalistic mission. The argument that Hayes made a significant contribution to nineteenth-century Catholic journalism appears strongest when evidence of the immense power of the press for good and evil is provided. This is accomplished hopefully though an examination of both secular and religious periodical literature and in particular by situating Hayes’ output within this milieu. The argument is further strengthened through a detailed examination of the actual contents of Hayes’ Annals of Our Lady of the Angels, of the numerous contributions to her Annals and of the editing, publishing and distribution methods which she employed in her mission. The argument shows Hayes’ publication to be a significant contribution in the literary field to a growing body of research on late nineteenth-century professional women who enriched society with religious periodicals. The thesis argues that Hayes provided matter of interest to general readers and presented the progress and development of the Franciscan Order. The journal’s range of themes adds weight to the growing body of evidence of how women’s topics varied in the Victorian religious periodical press. It is argued that Hayes’ diffusion of good literature was an authentic medium of evangelisation over twenty-one years. As writer, editor, publisher, manager of printing and distribution, it is argued that Hayes was a significant contributor to the Apostolate of the Press and that she used her journal as a tool of both adult education and entertainment. NOTE: See hard copy of thesis at St Patrick’s Campus Library for the illustrations to appendix 2.

This study was written in the belief that FitzGerald did not so much translate a poem as invent a persona based on the Persian astronomer and mathematician (but not poet) Omar Khayyám. This 'invention' opened two different lines of interpretation and scholarship, each forming its own idea of a 'real' Omar based on FitzGerald's invention. One line sees Omar as a hedonist and nihilist; the other as a mystic or Sufi. My argument first is that the historical Omar was neither the former nor the latter; second, FitzGerald's Rubáiyát is a 'Victorian' product even if the raw material of the poem belongs to the eleventh-century Persia. ¶ The Introduction tries to find a place for the Rubáiyát in the English nineteenth-century era. ¶ Chapter One sets FitzGerald's Rubáiyát in perspective. First, it surveys the general background and context to the lives and careers of Edward FitzGerald and Omar Khayyám in order to show how FitzGerald's life was affected by some of the main concerns of the period; and that Omar was neither a hedonist nor a mystic; Secondly, it surveys four major critical studies which have generated different approaches to and emphases in the study and the translation of the rubáiyát attributed to Omar Khayyám. ¶ Chapter Two reviews some examples of Persian language and literature as they were perceived by British readers and authors and shows the reception of Persian poetry in general up to and including the Victorian period. Then it traces FitzGerald's progress with Persian literature, showing how the other Persian poets he read influenced his understanding or 'creation' of the Rubáiyát, and how he discarded the great Persian poets but retained Omar Khayyám as 'his property.' ¶ Chapter Three traces FitzGerald's career as a translator and attempts to give general characteristics of Victorian poetry to show how FitzGerald's version can be seen a Victorian product. Study of the poetry of the period shows the heterogeneity of Victorian poetry and FitzGerald's poem is another example of this multiplicity. The Rubáiyát should be read as a revolt against general Victorian values: optimism, earnestness, Puritanism, and science development. ¶ Chapter Four accounts for the initial neglect of the poem and then for the popular reception of the Rubáiyát by the Pre-Raphaelites and shows aspects in particular appealed to his contemporaries (like R. Browning) which, in turn, is a way of measuring the success of FitzGerald's 'Victorian' invention.

This dissertation investigates the cultural connections made between race and color in works of fiction from the Victorian and Edwardian era, particularly how authors who are also artists invent fantastically colored characters who are purple, blue, red, and yellow to rewrite (and sometimes reclaim) difference in their fiction. These strange and eccentric characters include the purple madwoman in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), the blue gentleman from Wilkie Collins’s Poor Miss Finch (1872), the red peddler in Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native (1878), and the little yellow girls of Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Yellow Face” (1893) and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911). These fictional texts serve as a point of access into the cultural meanings of color in the nineteenth century and are situated at the intersection of Victorian discourses on the visual arts and race science. The second half of the nineteenth century constitutes a significant moment in the history of color: the rapid development of new color technologies helps to trigger the upheavals of the first avant-garde artistic movements and a reassessment of coloring’s prestige in the art academies. At the same time, race science appropriates color, using it as a criterion for classification in the establishment of global racial hierarchies. By imagining what it would be like to change one’s skin color, these artist-authors employ the aesthetic realm of color to explore the nature of human difference and alterity. In doing so, some of them are able to successfully formulate their own challenges to nineteenth-century racial discourse.