Hospitals throughout the nineteenth century remained the one of the main channels for the Victorians’ voluntary zeal, but from the 1850s onwards tensions emerged as charity became ill-suited to meeting all the hospitals’ financial needs. An historiographical survey shows that metropolitan hospitals have been seen as an institution funded and administered through philanthropy, but these views are insufficient. By looking at seven hospitals in London between 1850 and 1898 a different view is suggested. Hospital governors were adept at manipulating philanthropic interests through their innovative fundraising tactics, playing on a wide range of motivations for benevolent action. Administrators used feelings from guilt to gratitude to promote support, suggesting that philanthropy and contributions cannot be constrained by any simple approach. Using the hospitals’ financial records, charitable contributions are placed in the overall context of funding in an institution that drew its income from a wide variety of sources. Over time these sources of funding changed their relative relation to one another in a process of financial diversification. Expenditure, expansion, the financial demands of different hospitals, local charitable resources, competition for funds, and popular perceptions of individual institutions all created pressures on finances that made diversification desirable. Financial diversification, however, took place in a context where the hospitals’ voluntary ethic was not affected. Hospitals experienced administrative expansions as they adopted more medical functions, but management remained on voluntary lines and administrators continued to be drawn from London’s wealthy business and social elite. Within this changing managerial structure doctors competed for authority and asserted their influence through a series of internal conflicts which often stressed the importance of medical science. A comparative investigation of the Whitechapel Union shows that a similar process of change occurred. Financial and administrative diversification was therefore more the consequence of institutional healthcare rather than a development limited to the voluntary hospitals.

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.

Using the example of the London-based children's organisation Barnardo's, this thesis examines the influence of contemporary ideas regarding the relationship between environment, health and disease on the organisation and everyday institutional practices of the charity. While autobiographical accounts and historical investigations have written on the 'man himself' as well as the discursive and representational strategies used by Barnardo's to justify child removal, the importance of environmental discourses to the institution remain underexplored. The thesis addresses this lacuna through a detailed analysis of archival materials relating to Barnardo's (committee minutes, pamphlets, reports, Dr Barnardo's personal notebooks) as well as through a textual analysis of Night & Day, the main outlet for publicising the work of the charity and stimulating support for it. The thesis covers the period from 1866, when Barnardo's was founded, to the death of Dr Barnardo in 1905. This is a period when the environmental idea was arguably at its strongest, with a host of social ills (from criminality and prostitution, to human health and vitality and later in the period racial degeneration) linked to the influence of the environment. Like many other social reformers and philanthropists, Dr Barnardo was a firm believer in environmental explanations for such social ills, as well as a committed evangelical Christian, and promoted the rapid removal of young people (not all were orphaned but the vast majority were destitute) from urban and familial environments believed to do harm to their physical, moral and spiritual health. Where the first part of the thesis covers the importance of environment to the Barnardo's justification for his child removal practices, the remainder of it considers the response of the institution to environmental ideas. In addition to examining the influence of environment on institutional design and on the everyday practices of the 'inmates', for example the promotion of light and air in the girl's home at Barkingside, emphasis is also placed on ideas of mobility and movement. Here the thesis explores the paradoxical relationship between the organisation's 'anti-institutional' projection and the institutional realities of constructing and policing 'out of home' care practices (trips to the country- and seaside, boarding-out, emigration). This thesis contributes to extant accounts of Dr Barnardo's; however, its primary contribution lies in its nuanced examination of the role of environmental ideas on shaping institutional design and on its influence on the everyday practices of Barnardo's young inmates.

Thesis (Ph.D, History) -- Queen's University, 2009-07-20 14:36:15.104 / The thesis is an interdisciplinary history of the crowd in late-Victorian London. It examines the crowd using novels, newspapers, and periodicals, Home Office, Metropolitan Police, and Parliamentary records, and the personal papers of politicians and city officials. The thesis focuses on riots, demonstrations, and processions beginning in 1848 through to the Trafalgar Square mle in 1887 as well as the way novelists imagined the crowd at the fin de sicle. In the process, it re-evaluates the urban environment that gave rise to the crowd and it explores the crowds influence on space, geography, and movement. The thesis rethinks crowd activity after mid century as the coming together of crowds and new concerns with modernity. It brings together the Marxist tradition of interpreting the crowd with writing on cultural and intellectual history as well as sociological and geographical theory in order to assess the crowds experience at street level. It aims to expand the traditional crowd model to include the spatial attitudes and practices that shaped the crowds relationship to the city and the citys relationship to the crowd. The thesis shows that the crowd, through its struggle for space, was not only a condition of the city, but one of the compelling features of urban modernity after mid century. The thesis traces the crowd in London in six chapters. An introductory chapter first locates the crowd historiographically. Chapter two focuses on the extent to which Londons improvement project mobilized the crowd. Chapter three describes the crowds battle for private space, after huge swathes of the urban population were dis-housed, and the challenges this posed to spatial ordering. Chapter four examines the battle for public space in the form of the radical political crowds occupation and production of space, between 1848-1868, as well as the states heavy-handed response. Chapter five describes the culmination of earlier issues in Trafalgar Square in 1887. Finally, chapter six explores the way novelists imagined the crowd in late-Victorian slum fiction. / Ph.D

The thesis investigates anxieties about urban life in late Victorian and Edwardian culture, and examines emotional responses to urbanisation, industrialisation and modernity at this high point of urban growth and rural-urban migration: one that marked Britain’s decisive breakthrough to a largely and permanently urbanised society. During the period, earlier nineteenth-century tropes of the ‘shock’ of the city, and anxieties surrounding rapid early urbanisation and industrialisation, began to recede. But from the 1880s onwards, as life in industrial cities came to be regarded as the norm, new anxieties came to the fore: concerns that related to the very pervasiveness and inescapability of urban life. I argue that the historically unprecedented growth in the size of cities placed enormous strain upon conceptions of the individual in modern society: the impulse to conceive of mass urban society in the abstract was in constant tension with a new, modernistic awareness of the essential humanity of each individual. The research utilises insights from the recent ‘emotional turn’ within the humanities, which is more sensitive to psychological factors in cultural practices and social processes; and brings this historiographical turn to bear on attitudes towards the city. An emotional approach enables both a deeper and subtler exploration of high cultural responses, and the extension of the range of sources and actors beyond ‘ideas’ and ‘intellectuals’. The thesis integrates a wide range of sources: literature, art, the writings of urban planners and social commentators, medical writings, working-class autobiographical writing, and oral history transcripts. Such an approach reveals the common emotional impulses and shared structures of feeling behind a diverse range of responses to the urban environment, and provides a deeper understanding of contemporary emotional life. It thus illuminates the ways in which individuals, societies and culture react to the complexities of modernity, and provides insights into the relationship between social transformation and emotional experience.