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This thesis explores the social reception of the telephone mainly in late-Victorian and Edwardian London. My objective is to understand how urban populations are educated to a new technology, and how technology is socially appraised and embedded. "The social reception of technology" is defined as the development and promotion of a new technology, the political reactions and social comment it stimulates, and the nature of its social and geographic diffusion. This approach, I argue, reveals important connections between technology, ideology and social power in the city. The telephone was one of several new space-binding technologies introduced into Britain between 1870 and 1920. The telephone contributed to the creation of a "networked city", and to the extension of the "public sphere". Because of the telephone's basic characteristics -- its speed and immediacy of communication -- commentators have regarded it as essentially modern and democratic. This view is considered deterministic and an exaggeration of the telephone's early significance. The telephone system developed gradually. Initially an elite technology, the telephone was first used and introduced in traditional ways. Developed in Britain largely by private interests, the telephone was commoditised by its promoters and marketed as a business machine. The long distance network was prioritised over local networks, business over social uses, and the extension of the price system over other possible social objectives. As the telephone system developed, this "entrepreneurialism" clashed with other ideological agents in the city: the individualism of private land ownership, professionalism of engineers and public servants, and with diverse state and non-state institutions claiming to represent the public interest. If not modern in function or consequence, the telephone I suggest was institutionally modern; in the attempts of its promoters and their opponents to use the "public sphere" in their own interest, yet always subject to it; to generate through the press and through material and symbolic practices talk about the telephone, yet always subject to public scrutiny in the form of press comment and criticism. The thesis illustrates these arguments through a survey of how the telephone was reported in the press; through a study of policy as revealed in the archives of the Post Office and the National Telephone Company; and through a case study of the telephone's diffusion in the middle class suburb of Hampstead.

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This thesis considers the representation of women and the gender principles in the work of Gerard Manley Hopkins and situates his perceptions of "masculinity" and "femininity" within a cultural, historical and literary context. A selection of his less canonical poems and prose is discussed and re-evaluated in the light of feminist and psychoanalytieal theory. In particular, the binarisms that fracture the representation of woman in Victorian art and literature and the issue of woman's alterity and subsequent association with death are identified and analysed. The thesis is organized into a tripartite introductory section, ten chapters and a conclusion. The first section of the introduction offers a broadly-based sociohistorical and theoretical examination of the gender principles and their origin. Part 11 of the introduction focuýSp s on Hopkins and his society, examining Victorian cultural views of gender diff6rence and the construction of masculinity. The third introductory section gives specific attention to Hopkins's theory of creativity and its relation to the gcndering of genius and aesthetic production. Chapters 1,2, and 3, offer detailed critical consideration of the deep psychosexual ambivalence towards woman, and the carnal materiality she embodies, in Hopkins's early poems: "ll Mystico", "A Voice from the World", "Hcaven-Havcn", "I must hunt down the prize", and "A Vision of the Mermaids". Chapter 4 gives a contextualized consideration of asceticism as an expression of the masculine will-to-power, and examines Hopkins's attraction to violence and the suffering of martyrs. The following three chapters explore the themes of death, violence and martyrdom, with particular emphasis on the issues of female sexual purity and masculine aesthetic vifility in Hopkins's verse drama on the murder of St. Winefred, St. Winefred's Well, and its accompanying chorus: "The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo". The final three chapters of the thesis elucidate Hopkins's aesthetic and personal response to the Virgin Mary and the "feminine" pyschological characteristics and virtues she represents. Chapter 8 assesses the status of the Roman Catholic Church and the Virgin Mary in nineteenth century England, and also suggests that the image of the Madonna and the fictive "angel in the house" arc symbolically conjoined in opposition to the Tennysonian view of "Mother Nature" as a monstrous destroyer. This is followed, in Chapter 9, by a consideration of the view of Mary presented in Hopkins's prose. Chapter 10, the final chapter, presents a detailed analysis of Hopkins's Marian poem, "The Blessed Virgin Compared to the Air we Breathe", in which the ambivalence and anxiety that surround his concepts of selfhood, masculinity and the body of the mother arc examined. In conclusion, I argue that Hopkins's aesthetic and spiritual vocations are intimately linked with his notion of actual selfhood and are subject to the profoundly damaging influence of conflicting role expectations and mythic paradigms of masculinity and femininity which cannot be reconciled, either within the individual psyche, or in the society in which they are nurtured.

Thesis (MEd (Literacy and Language Education)) --University of South Australia, 1994

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Delaware, 2009. / Principal faculty advisor: Linda Eaton, Winterthur Museum. Includes bibliographical references.

The everyday life of the Royal Society in the second half of the nineteenth century is a largely unworked field within the history of Victorian science. As the principal forum for English science, the Royal Society was a crucial context for' the working out of the major changes in science over the period. The Society made its own singular responses to the developing needs of science for funds to support increasingly expensive researches, and for a more efficient means of publication for the growing number of active workers. These aspects are dealt with at length in the first section. The image of science which was held to by some of its leading practitioners and organisers is very significant in tracing the developing tensions within Victorian science. This led to a widespread sensitivity to any commercial or political involvements on the part of prominent men of science, which might have seemed to compromise their disinterestedness. An area which is very revealing of many characteristic modes of thought entertained by Victorian men of' science, is the evaluation of' scientific performance. Enshrined in the refereeing procedures of the Royal Society, this process provides many insights into the contemporary meaning of the issues of the day. For a long period following 1870 the government of the Royal Society was in the hand of the group of scientific naturalists who surrounded Thomas Huxley. Their personal ambitions and energetic support of the cause of' scientific naturalism contributed to an extremely vigourous phase of the Royal Society's history. A detailed coverage is provided of the spectacular rise and surprisingly rapid decline of the power and influence of this group in this focal point of Victorian science.

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