In the 1880s, two cycling clubs formed in New Orleans—the New Orleans Bicycle Club in 1881 and the Louisiana Cycling Club in 1887. These clubs were institutions of Victorian middle class culture that, like other athletic clubs, arose from the conditions of urban modernity and Victorian class anxieties. The NOBC, like other American cycling clubs, conformed to Victorian values of order and respectability. The attitudes and activities of the LCC, whose membership was younger, reflected instead a counter-Victorian ethos. This paper examines these two clubs in the context of late Victorian culture in New Orleans as it responded both to the conditions of urban modernity common to American cities in this period and to the particular cultural situation of New Orleans at the end of the nineteenth century, including proximity to and amalgamation with the recently-dominant, non-Anglo culture of the Creoles.

Dans l'échange verbal entre plusieurs personnes, des termes en particulier sont souvent employés pour s'adresser à autrui : il s'agit des termes d'adresse. Ces termes peuvent être considérés comme créateurs de liens entre le langage et la société par le fait qu'ils fournissent des informations non sans intérêt sur la relation unissant les interlocuteurs. Il existe divers moyens de communiquer et de traduire une certaine forme de politesse, de familiarité, de distance, d'affection, de haine, etc., dont ces termes font partie. En plus de leur valeur sémantique, ils possèdent une valeur sociale et culturelle non négligeable.Les huit romans retenus dans cette étude, écrits par quatre grands écrivains de l'époque victorienne (Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot et Anthony Trollope), offrent au lecteur curieux un aperçu privilégié de la deuxième moitié du XIXème siècle. Outre l'aspect littéraire, les thèmes abordés en relation avec les événements de l'époque intéresseront le lecteur historien et le mode de vie et les mœurs décrits fourniront de précieux détails au lecteur sociologue, tous ces aspects étant également facilement accessibles au lecteur ordinaire. Cet examen synchronique des termes d'adresse permet, non seulement de montrer la pluralité des termes pouvant être utilisés en adresse directe, mais aussi de souligner l'importance des facteurs linguistiques, paralinguistiques et extra-linguistiques dans toute étude de cette nature. / In verbal exchange between several speakers, a particular category of linguistic sign is frequently used when naming the participants: these are known as terms of address. Insofar as they provide information about the nature of the relation that unite the members of the group, these terms can be regarded as a means of creating links between language and society. They are also among the main contributors to the various systems implemented in the expression and communication of courtesy, familiarity, distance, affection, loathing, etc. Apart from their semantic value, they are of an indubitable socio-cultural interest.The eight novels, written by four major Victorian authors (Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot and Anthony Trollope) that have been chosen for this study, provide, for the curious reader, a precious insight into the second half of the nineteenth century. Of great appeal to the lay reader, the themes developed in their historical context – apart from the purely literary aspect – cannot fail to interest the social historian and the customs and conventions described contain precious data for the sociologist. This synchronic study of terms of address, not only reveals the plurality of the terms that are available in verbal exchange, but also underlines the importance of the linguistic, paralinguistic and extra-linguistic factors that should be taken into account in any study of this nature.

This thesis analyses the experiences of ragged school pupils in England and Scotland between 1844 and 1870, focusing on the interaction between scholars and teachers and exploring the nature of the social relationships formed. Ragged schools provided free education to impoverished children in the mid-nineteenth century; by 1870 the London schools alone recorded an average attendance of 32,231 children. This thesis demonstrates the variety of interactions that took place both inside and outside the classroom, challenging simplistic interpretations of ragged school teachers as unwelcome intruders in poor children’s lives. In analysing the movement in terms of the social relationships established, this thesis counters the dominant focus on the adult as actor and child as passive subject. Wherever possible the focal point of the analysis builds on the testimony of ragged school scholars, shifting emphasis away from the actions and words of adults in positions of authority towards those of the poor and marginalised children who were the subjects of intervention. By concentrating on the voices of those who received ragged schooling, this thesis highlights the diverse experiences of ragged school scholars and underscores their agency in either rejecting or engaging with teachers. As such, it demonstrates the integral contribution of children’s testimonies when seeking to understand the impact of child-saving movements more generally. This thesis contributes to understanding on a variety of broader topics. It highlights changing attitudes towards children, education, and the poor. Through focusing on juvenile testimonies it investigates how children responded to poverty, disability, philanthropic work, and the evangelical religious message that ragged schools conveyed. The impact of Victorian philanthropy and the nature of the cross-class relationships it fostered are explored, and the significant contribution that women and working-class individuals made to such work is underscored. Finally, it sheds light on the experiences of working-class British emigrants, both their fortunes and their attachment to their homeland. A rich array of sources is used, including ragged school magazines and pamphlets, committee minutes, and annual reports. In using promotional literature in combination with local school documents, the public portrayal of children and teachers is contrasted with that found in practice. Most significant, however, are the day to day exchanges between scholars and their teacher explored through a microhistory of Compton Place ragged school in North London. Using the journals the school’s superintendent maintained between 1850 and 1867 alongside the 227 letters 57 former scholars sent him, this thesis pieces together a picture of the evolving and complex relationships forged. The journals and letters together enable an analysis that draws on the words of both ragged scholars and their teacher. Moreover, they provide rare access to how relationship developed over time and, in some cases, despite considerable geographical distance.

In the mid-1890s the London based Society for Psychical Research dispatched researchers to the Scottish Highlands and Islands to investigate an extraordinary power of prophecy said to be peculiar to the residents of these remote regions. Described in Gaelic as the An-da-shealladh or ‘the two sights’, and given in English as ‘second sight’, the phenomenon was most commonly associated with the vision of future events: the death of neighbour, the arrival of strangers into the community, the success or failure of a fishing trip and so forth. The SPR were not the first to take an interest in this pre-visionary faculty, rather they joined a legion of scientists, travel writers, antiquarians, poets and artists who had made enquires into the topic from the end of the seventeenth century. This thesis examines the remarkably prominent position enjoyed by Scottish second sight in the Victorian popular imagination. In seeking to appreciate why a strange visionary ability was able to make claims upon the attention of the whole nation where other folk motifs were consigned to the realms of specialist interest only, this project charts its migration through a series of nineteenth-century cultural sites: mesmerism and phrenology, modern spiritualism and anthropology, romance literature and folklorism, and finally psychical research and Celtic mysticism. Binding these individual case studies together is a cast of shared actors - Walter Scott, Catherine Crowe, William Howitt, Marie Corelli, Andrew Lang and Ada Goodrich Freer - and a focus on their common investigative and creative cultures. My interest is with how the power of second sight, once defined as a supernatural occurrence tied to the geographically distant and mysterious Scottish Highlands, comes to be transformed by the close of the nineteenth century, into a supra-normal facet of the psyche, potentially accessible and exploitable by all.

This paper explores the fundamental meanings of deconstruction in fashion design and has the aim to investigate deconstruction in feminine ideal. It also stresses other thoughts of deconstruction in terms of philosophy through Jacques Derrida, architecture and philosopher Peter Eisenman and how deconstruction can be applied to find parallels between its setting and the setting it is compared to. Since the 1960s, deconstruction is a term that has been interpreted within many fields and traversed across different media. Influential Japanese designers have used the term in their works, juxtapositioning them to traditional Western ideas to create clear contrasts between stereotypical and categorised perception and unconventional interpretations. During the 1980s, designers such as Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto explored the term to subsequently create a great distress in the fashion field. Their designs were examples of archetypes evoked from the past and presented as newborn strangers or dismantled ghosts. These designers investigated the mechanical functions of each archetype as they sought to find the meaning of each garment to later reinterpret its traditional essence. Also, they questioned the relationship between body and garment, raising thoughts of whether or not the bearer of the garment was personified to the garments traditional significance. The deconstructed element chosen for investigation in this project consists of a personification of the silhouette of the 1870s dress. This personification is discussed in terms of social and moral standards and constrictions as well as the political function of the dress. The fact that you could deconstruct a 1870s dress is clearly a way to take a historical archetype from its traditional meaning and place it into a new context. Similar to Jacques Derrida, the works of deconstruction in fashion design discuss our assumptions of archetypes and whether or not these archetypes can ever lack of historical or individual meaning. The constant dialogue with the past is a catalyst to reinterpret standardisations in fashion design through questioning the conformity of archetypes. / Program: Modedesignutbildningen

This thesis examines the work of ordained clergymen, of all denominations, who were active photographers between 1839 and the beginning of World War One: its primary aim is to investigate the extent to which a relationship existed between the religious culture of the individual clergyman and the nature of his photographic activities. Ministers of 'the Black Art' makes a significant intervention in the study of the history of photography by addressing a major weakness in existing work. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the research draws on a wide range of primary and secondary sources such as printed books, sermons, religious pamphlets, parish and missionary newsletters, manuscript diaries, correspondence, notebooks, biographies and works of church history, as well as visual materials including original glass plate negatives, paper prints and lantern slides held in archival collections, postcards, camera catalogues, photographic ephemera and photographically-illustrated books. Through close readings of both textual and visual sources, my thesis argues that factors such as religious denomination, theological opinion and cultural identity helped to influence not only the photographs taken by these clergymen, but also the way in which these photographs were created and used. Conversely, patterns also emerge that provide insights into how different clergymen integrated their photographic activities within their wider religious life and pastoral duties. The relationship between religious culture and photographic aesthetics explored in my thesis contributes to a number of key questions in Victorian Studies, including the tension between clergy and professional scientists as they struggled over claims to authority, participation in debates about rural traditions and church restoration, questions about moral truth and objectivity, as well as the distinctive experience and approaches of Roman Catholic clergy. The research thus demonstrates the range of applications of clerical photography and the extent to which religious factors were significant. Almost 200 clergymen-photographers have been identified during this research, and biographical data is provided in an appendix. Ministers of the Black Art aims at filling a gap in scholarship caused by the absence of any substantial interdisciplinary research connecting the fields of photohistory and religious studies. While a few individual clergymen-photographers have been the subject of academic research - perhaps excessively in the case of Charles Dodgson - no attempt has been made to analyse their activities comprehensively. This thesis is therefore unique in both its far-ranging scope and the fact that the researcher has a background rooted in both theological studies and the history of photography. Ecclesiastical historians are generally as unfamiliar with the technical and aesthetic aspects of photography as photohistorians are with theological nuances and the complex variations of Victorian religious beliefs and practices. This thesis attempts to bridge this gulf, making novel connections between hitherto disparate fields of study. By bringing these religious factors to the foreground, a more nuanced understanding of Victorian visual culture emerges; by taking an independent line away from both the canonical historiography of photography and more recent approaches that depict photography as a means of social control and surveillance, this research will stimulate further discussion about how photography operates on the boundaries between private and public, amateur and professional, material and spiritual.

This dissertation considers how defenses of traditional faith in Britain have adapted to new frontiers of cultural relativism and religious difference. Its contention is that poetry has become central to such defenses. Relativistic thinking would seem to dispose against metaphysical belief; poetry, as a parallel claimant for cultural and expressive particularity, and as a sensuously non-empirical rhetorical medium, offers a way of muffling the dissonance that might otherwise arise from positioning difference and particularity as pretext for claims of universal truth. This study traces formal and rhetorical innovations from the Victorian crisis of faith forward to literary modernism, with a brief conclusion contemplating related developments in more contemporary poetry and religious thought in Britain.

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This thesis examines instances of sustained or regular encounter between British and French nationals in the second half of the eighteenth century and considers the evolution and form of a national identification which occurred for the English participants in the light of such contact. It is distinguished from previous historical studies of British nationality at this time in several respects. First, it is an approach derived from anthropological studies which have examined episodes of interaction between proximate national groups to consider the impact these have on the development of national awareness or identity. In choosing this approach the thesis, therefore, looks at encounters between people as opposed to between discursive frameworks, so often in the eighteenth century informed by stock and inaccurate stereotypes of the French to be found in British print culture and which constituted a form of 'virtual' encounter between the two nationalities. This study is distinguished in a further capacity in that it uses archival source material that was not produced with the intention of mass publication or readership, but which instead reflects personal or private opinion and identity with respect to the nation. That the French nation occupied an important and influential position in the development of national identities in Britain at this time is fully recognised. However, the principal argument is that notions of Anglo-French opposition and enmity frequently portrayed in the British press were inevitably modified by the experience of encounter between various respective national groups. As a result, the binary model of a developing British nationality in contrast and opposition to perceived French characteristics must likewise be re-assessed. Instead, this study demonstrates that the form of a national identification and its course of evolution, for those who engaged in regular encounter with the French, was fluid and differentiated for a variety of individuals and groups. Understood in terms of a process, this then has implications for the way in which nationality developed among those individuals and groups who had experienced no direct contact with the French.

Thesis (M.S. and M. Arch.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1982. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ROTCH. / This study is an exploration of the relationship between understanding and transforming an architectural context. The question asked is; What formal lessons can be learned from an existing context? The discussion is limited to issues of form and rule structure, particularly in reference to the zone of exchange between outside/inside and public/private. The Victorian residential form in San Francisco is used as a case study. There are four parts to the study: 1. An observational study of existing residential facade zones which consists of measured drawings in plan and elevation of a four block area in San Francisco. 2. A design projection of a support infill building based on intuitive interpretation of the observed context. 3. A methodological analysis of the context to derive the implicit generating rules and principles. 4. Based on a comparison of the analysis and projection, a discussion of the lessons to be learned from the context. / by R. Thomas Hille. / M.S.and M.Arch.