This thesis examines the values and attitudes of the British Army’s officer corps during the period from 1871 to 1901, and how these values were linked to those of the British landed classes. Through studying the memoirs and other writings produced by the officers of this period, this thesis confirms that the link between these two systems was extremely close, and that the landed classes’ ideas of what constituted ‘gentlemanly’ behaviour were vitally important in shaping army officers’ conduct. This thesis argues that the acceptance of these values by the officer corps was not merely a product of their own social origins, but that officers subscribed to these values because they believed them to be particularly appropriate to military service. This attachment to gentlemanly values produced a deeply imbalanced set of competencies in the officer corps’ members, the effects of which remained present in the institutional culture of the army well beyond the end of this period. / Graduate / 2021-08-28

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This thesis will examine the portrayal and reception of ‘novel’ technology as constructed spectacle in the military and popular coverage of the Abyssinian (1868) and Ashanti (1873-4) expeditions. It will be argued that new and ‘novel’ military technologies, such as the machine gun, Hale rocket, cartridge rifle, breach-loading cannon, telegraph, railway, and steam tractor, were made to serve symbolic roles in a technophile discourse that cast African expansion as part of a conquest of the natural world. There was a growing confidence in mid-Victorian Britain of the Empire’s dominant position in the world, focused particularly on technological development and embodied in exhibition culture. During the 1860s and ‘70s, this confidence was increasingly extended to the prospect of expansion into Africa, which involved a substantial development of the ‘idea’ of Africa in the British imagination. The public engagement with these two campaigns provides a window into this developing culture of imperial confidence in Britain, as well as the shifting and contested ideas of race, climate, and martial prowess. The expeditions also prompted significant changes to understandings of ‘small wars’, a concept incorporating several important pillars of Victorian culture. It will be demonstrated that discourses of technological superiority and scientific violence were generated in response to anxieties of the perceived dangers posed by the African interior. Accounts of the expeditions demonstrated a strong hope, desire to claim, and tendency to interpret that novel European technology could tame and subjugate the African climate, as well as African populations. This study contributes to debates over the popularity of imperialism in Victorian society. It ties the popularity of empire to the social history of technology, and argues that the Abyssinian and Ashanti expeditions enhanced perceptions of military capability and technological superiority in the Victorian imagination. The efficacy of European technology is not dismissed, but approached as a proximate cause of a shift in culture, termed ‘the technologisation of imperial rhetoric’.

Thesis (PhD)--Stellenbosch University, 2014. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Architecture is a complex concept, and as such many factors contribute to its creation. These factors include geographical, economical and climatological aspects, but above all architecture is formed by the specific times, circumstances and lifestyle of the creator. The human being, with his background, ideas and values, shapes and influences the architecture surrounding him, and is also shaped and influenced by it. Therefore, when the lives and opinions of people are radically changed, it follows inevitably that their way of architectural expression will also change. There are marked differences between domestic buildings erected during the Victorian period in England and South Africa. English domestic buildings consist of long uniform terraced rows of two or more storeys, while freestanding single-storeyed houses are the norm in South Africa. A large percentage of English buildings are built with unfinished bricks (sometimes stone), while the bulk of South African buildings are finished in plaster. The general roofing material for Victorian houses in South Africa, namely corrugated iron, are not used on English houses at all. English roofs are most often covered in slate tiles. The very elaborate wood and/or cast-iron decorative elements so typical of the Victorian style in South Africa are largely absent in England, and most English buildings also do not have an architectural element comparable to the South African veranda. All styles which occurred in England during the Victorian period are termed Victorian, but in all cases it refers to the period, not the style. Although in South Africa other styles from the Victorian period are sometimes also referred to as Victorian, a clearly distinguishable style with unique characteristics developed at the end of the nineteenth century in South Africa. This style came to be known as Victorian. This study investigates the underlying reasons for the differences which exist between the Victorian architecture of England and South Africa. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Argitektuur berus op 'n komplekse basis, en as sodanig is daar talle faktore wat tot die skepping daarvan aanleiding gee. Hierdie faktore sluit onder meer in geografiese, ekonomiese en klimatologiese aspekte, maar bowenal word die argitektuur geskep deur die spesifieke tydsgees, agtergrond en leefstyl van die skepper daarvan. Die mens, met inbegrip van sy agtergrond, idees en waardes, vorm en beïnvloed die argitektuur wat hom omring, en word self ook daardeur gevorm en beïnvloed. Wanneer die lewens en sienings van mense dus verander, volg dit vanselfsprekend dat hulle argitektoniese uitdrukkingsvorme ook sal verander. Woonhuise wat tydens die Victoriaanse periode in Suid-Afrika opgerig is, verskil opvallend van dié in Engeland. Engeland se woonhuise bestaan uit lang aaneengeskakelde rye huise (terraces), wat oor twee of meer verdiepings strek, terwyl enkelverdieping alleenstaande geboue die norm in Suid-Afrika is. Geboue in Engeland vertoon ook 'n opvallende uniformiteit wat in Suid-Afrika ontbreek. 'n Groot persentasie Engelse geboue is van ongepleisterde baksteen (soms klip) gebou, terwyl Suid-Afrikaanse geboue oorwegend afgepleister is. Die algemene dakmateriaal vir Victoriaanse huise in Suid-Afrika, naamlik sinkplaat, word glad nie op Engelse huise gebruik nie. Die oordadige versieringselemente uit gietyster en/of hout wat so tipies van die Victoriaanse styl in Suid-Afrika is, is grootliks afwesig in Engeland, en die meeste Engelse geboue het ook nie 'n bou-element wat vergelykbaar is met 'n Suid-Afrikaanse stoep nie. Alle style wat in Engeland tydens die Victoriaanse periode voorgekom het, word Victoriaans genoem, maar in alle gevalle word die tydperk bedoel, en nie die styl nie. Hoewel daar in Suid-Afrika ook soms na ander style van die Victoriaanse periode as Victoriaans verwys word, het daar teen die einde van die negentiende eeu 'n eiesoortige styl met unieke kenmerke in Suid-Afrika ontwikkel wat as Victoriaans bekend staan. Hierdie studie ondersoek die dieperliggende redes vir die verskille wat tussen die Victoriaanse argitektuur van Engeland en Suid-Afrika bestaan.

The selection of an inappropriate regime by policy makers can thwart the effective implementation of public policy and lead to implementation failure. Competing values in the implementation process have a significant impact on the results of implementation, and the regime selected for implementation implies the choice of one value over another. Stoker has argued that on the one hand central leadership is valued for consistency, benefits of scale, co-ordination and cost sharing (instrumental model); and on the other, diffuse authority is valued as knowledge is particular and situational, and the task of analysis is to understand the problems, perspectives and interactions of implementation participants at the contact point between public programs and their clients (accommodation model). This study examines the implementation regime chosen by the Victorian Government for the introduction of a modern internal auditing function into the Victorian Public Service, using the Bureau of Internal Audit within its Department of Management and Budget. The selection of the Department of Management and Budget for the introduction of Internal Audit as a managerial accountability mechanism indicates that the instrumental model was held by the Victorian Government to be the most important in implementation. It is argued that use of a top-down central agency leadership approach resulted in implementation failure. Three propositions suggesting the mechanisms by which this result is brought about are examined: that lack of co-ordinated planning at the outset will result in inadequate definition of client needs as part of policy formulation; that intraorganisational conflict during the implementation success, as individual participants are likely to exercise their veto; and the increasing the number of participants contributes to complexity, so that they should only be involved in implementation when their presence is absolutely required. It is argued that the essential task of implementation is to create an environment where participants are likely to co-operate to achieve predetermined public policy goals; and that the introduction of a modern internal auditing approach into the Victorian Public Service required a more participatory implementation regime in order to facilitate policy outcomes and prevent implementation failure. It is also argued that the dominance of economic reform over accountability in Victoria restricted the ability of the Bureau of Internal Audit to implement change to internal audit practices within Victorian Government departments. The selection of an instrumental model of implementation by the Department of Management and Budget is examined in the context of the environment that existed in Victoria between 1982-1987; and while some of the values which Stoker associates with the top-down approach to policy making were observed, an alternative view to the development of internal auditing in the Victorian Public Service can be sustained.

This dissertation critically examines why mid-Victorian fiction often dismisses or complicates monetary transactions and monetary charity, even as it negatively portrays differences in social status and wealth. I argue that the novel uses representations of failed charity to reconstruct, however briefly, a non- monetary and non-economic source of value. Further, I examine how the novel uses techniques of both genre and style to predict, form, and critique alternate, non-economic, social models. While tension surrounding the practice of charity arises in the late eighteenth century, the increasing dominance of political economy in public discourse forced Victorian literature to take a strong stance, for reasons of both ethics and genre. This stance is complicated by the eighteenth-century legacy that sees charity as a kind of luxury. If giving to the poor makes us feel good, this logic suggests, surely it isn’t moral. Thus, while much eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature remains dedicated to the ethics of charity, the practice becomes immensely complex. By discussing the works of Tobias Smollett, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and George Eliot, this project exposes a wide variety of responses to this deep cultural anxiety. These authors are, ultimately, strongly invested in redefining the meaning of benevolence as a valid form of social action by moving that benevolence away from monetary gifts and toward abstractly correct moral feelings, though their individual solutions vary widely. / text

My dissertation, "Renovating the Closet : Nineteenth-Century Closet Drama Written by Women as a Stage for Social Critique," contributes to a new understanding about nineteenth-century closet drama through three distinct and innovative texts: George Eliot's The Spanish Gypsy (1868), Michael Field's Stephania (1892), and Augusta Webster's A Woman Sold (1867). I contend that these three women writers employed the closet drama, a genre written in dramatic form but intended to be privately read or performed, to critique the social, cultural, and ideological limitations placed upon women of their time. In their symbolic use of the genre and innovative experiments with form, Eliot, Field, and Webster created a new stage on which their female protagonists challenge belief systems, institutions, and conventions that confine their gender roles, sexual identity, and social power. My chapter, "'Angel of the Homeless Tribe' : The Legacy of The Spanish Gypsy," shows how George Eliot melds the conventions of epic narrative with those of Victorian closet drama and reveals a dynamic connection between the character development and genre. Eliot's canonical novels are famous for their indictment of the limited roles Victorian culture offered to women. Equally famous are the tragic destinies of her rebellious heroines: they end up dead, unfulfilled, or virtually imprisoned. But scholars have failed to notice that in her experiment with The Spanish Gypsy, Eliot created a female epic: Fedalma, a woman of fifteenth-century Spain, becomes the leader of her "Gypsy" nation, sung into the future by an admiring bard. Eliot's formal experiment makes The Spanish Gypsy an important text for understanding how genre shaped gender representation in Eliot's canon, and in Victorian literature generally. My chapter, "'Something of His Manhood Falls' : Stephania as Critique of Victorian Male Aesthetics and Masculinity," offers Stephania as Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper's commentary on the predominantly-male Aesthetic and Decadent movements of the 1890s. Through the pseudonym Michael Field, Bradley and Cooper wrote their way into, and claimed their own space inside, a very exclusive males-only closet. The chapter demonstrates how Stephania, set in Rome 1002 A.D., reclaims agency for a Victorian artistic "sisterhood" adulterated and exiled by a "brotherhood" of male Decadents (who saw woman as a nemesis to social order, personal salvation, and creative production), both through its form, and its cast of three: Stephania, Emperor Otho, and his old tutor Gerbert. Stephania, a former Empress turned courtesan bent on revenge for her husband's murder, challenges homosocial exclusivity and ultimately triumphs as a symbolic queen and emperor. Successful in her plan to bring down Otho through her seduction and manipulation of both men, Stephania is redeemed and saved; she has restored social order. In its resistance of the boundaries and expectations of the closet drama genre, Stephania projects a new ideology for Victorian womanhood and female authorship. My last chapter, "'I Could Be Tempted' : The Ev(e)olution of the Angel in the House in A Woman Sold," presents A Woman Sold as an early example of Augusta Webster's strategic social rhetoric, as her use of the closet drama acts as a structural metaphor for the sociomythological confinement of the nineteenth-century middle class woman. I investigate how A Woman Sold exposes the notion that marriage for nineteenth-century middle class women symbolized a closet of social and cultural paralysis, as grown from a history of socially and culturally institutionalized gender expectations. At the same time, I demonstrate how Webster employs irony through a nexus of genre, narrative, and form to support and advocate for opportunities outside marriage that encourage female agency to develop. Essentially, the fundamental argument in this dissertation hinges on the ways in which Eliot, Field, and Webster revised the conventional closet drama to renovate and, in turn, reveal the metaphorical and literal closets that confined social and cultural possibilities for nineteenth-century women. / text

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The intractable problems posed by the decline of the Ottoman Empire were a defining feature of the nineteenth-century British experience. Events such as the Greek War of Independence (1821-32), the Crimean War (1853-5), and the Bulgarian Agitation (1876-8) were merely prominent denouements in the protracted history of what contemporaries called 'the Eastern Question'. The Eastern Question could be construed in many ways and admitted many answers. But by the 1870s, many Victorians had come to construe the Eastern Question as primarily an historical question. This thesis explores the ways in which Victorian public intellectuals brought 'historical-mindedness' to bear on the Eastern Question. Nineteenth-century historiography, it is suggested, may often be understood as a variety of contemporary political thought. Part One takes the historian E.A. Freeman, one of the Bulgarian Agitation's leaders, as its subject. Studied in depth, Freeman becomes a window onto how nineteenth-century intellectuals could experience and understand the Eastern Question. Part Two turns to the remarkable efflorescence of historical writing elicited by the so-called Eastern Crisis of 1875-80, investigating how historical arguments were invoked not merely in history books but also in newspaper reports, politically-freighted travel writing, and above all in periodical articles, over two-hundred of which are studied here. When Gladstone invoked the authority of 'the historical school of England' to criticise Lord Beaconsfield during this period, he did so advisedly, for historians both lay and professional were remarkably unanimous in their interpretation of events in south-eastern Europe. Drawing on the insights of comparative philology and often sympathetic to Eastern Orthodoxy for reasons of religion, these historians tended to emphasise the Balkan Christians' European identity, situating them within teleological narratives of progress which evoke contemporaneous Whig histories of England.