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The central intention of this thesis is to analyse a body of Victorian legislation, which was enacted to control atmospheric pollution by the chemical industry. Its concern is predominately with enforcement, and the principal aim is to assess the role and effectiveness of the British State and its agencies in this respect. The major focus is a somewhat neglected body of legislation - the Alkali Acts of 1863-1906. These initiated the State regulation of noxious emissions from the early heavy chemical (alkali) industry, and set up a central government body, the Alkali Inspectorate, to this end. The major focus is the ability of Victorian institutions to formulate and implement environmental reforms, especially those which necessitated the increased control of industrial behaviour. It will explore the enforcement and decision making processes, assessing how priorities were set and whose interests were served. Furthermore, it examines the influence of economic, legislative, social, ideological and political factors upon inspection and prosecution. This study also assess whether the control of industrial atmospheric pollution was the consequence of a Victorian regulationist fervour or an example of utilitarian concern with environmental degradation. The main body of the thesis is constituted by chapters on biography, the fiscal context and enforcement. These themes are drawn together by an assessment of the extent and effect of various constraints upon the Alkali Inspectorate. Throughout, some vital comparisons and contrasts with the inspectorates of factories and mines are made, in order to gauge State support for the Alkali Inspectorate. This assessment of the effectiveness of the Alkali Inspectorate and the legislation which created it, facilitates broader insights into the relationship between the State and industry and the extent of State intervention in nineteenth-century Britain

The Victorian publishing industry has been frequently analysed, debated and discussed within the fields of book history, publishing history, media studies and literary studies, yet there is a gap within academic business research on the publishing industry from the approach of organisational studies, in particular from the perspective of new institutionalism. This research examines how the business practices of organisations in the British publishing industry - which I refer to as literary businesses - developed in the Victorian era, by exploring the formation of these practices in relation to wider societal influences. My research analyses how authors, publishers and literary agents instigated and reproduced business practices in the industry, examining why these practices became accepted and legitimised. This historically oriented research is constructed around primary and archival sources, in particular trade periodicals, personal letters and business documents.

While writers of the Victorian era were free to address contemporary social issues, playwrights were forced to contend with government censorship that ostensibly discouraged them from debating politically controversial topics. An adjunct of the Lord Chamberlain's Office, the Examiner of Plays was responsible for censoring morally and politically sensitive material, giving this individual tremendous influence over the English stage. My dissertation, Dramatic Anxieties: William Bodham Donne, Censorship and the Victorian Theatre, 1849-18 74, focuses on the career of one dramatic censor, William Bodham Donne (1807-82). Throughout his tenure as Examiner (1849-74), Donne controlled the written content of every play performed in every theatre in England. His was a position of remarkable cultural and social influence, offering him the opportunity to shape the performed drama, and thereby the attitudes of those who attended it. This study examines Donne's censorship of dramatists' attempts to treat in a serious manner such political and social issues as Anglo-Jewish emancipation, Chartism, the repeal of the Com Laws, prison reform, and the condition of the working classes. I demonstrate that to evaluate the cultural impact of dramatic censorship in the Victorian period requires an understanding of the ongoing tension between Donne and the playwrights who, despite the professional ignominy that accompanied censorship, often struggled to address the political and social issues of their time. The relationship between Victorian playwrights and the Examiner involves a cultural dialectic that negotiates the boundaries of a licensed public space. In exposing the explicit and implicit pressures which one such Examiner brought to bear on dramatists, this study begins to uncover what is still a largely unexplored feature of Victorian theatre history. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This thesis examines the celebrity of governesses in British culture during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Victorian governess-mania was as pervasive as it was inexplicable, governesses comprising only a tiny fraction of the population and having little or no ostensible effect on the social, political, or economic landscape. Nevertheless, governesses were omnipresent in Victorian media, from novels and etiquette manuals to paintings, cartoons and pornography. Historians and literary critics have long conjectured about the root cause of popular fixation on the governess, and many have theorized that their cultural resonance owed to the host of contradictions and social conundrums they embodied, from being a `lady' who worked, to being comparable to that bugbear of Victorian society, the prostitute. However, while previous scholarship has maintained that governess-mania was produced by their peculiarity as social or economic actors, I intend to demonstrate that this nonconformity was extrapolated in visual and literary depictions to signify a more prurient deviance, specifically a fixation on human suffering. This analysis reveals that whether depicted in mainstream press or in nefarious erotica, popular interest in governesses was contoured by a fixation on their perceived relationship to corporal violence. Over the course of the nineteenth century governesses were increasingly portrayed as the victims of a huge range of internal and external threats, such as disease, sterility, assault, murder, rape, and even urban accidents like train crashes or gas leaks. Cast as flagellant birching madams in pornographic fantasy, governesses were also construed as deriving erotic authority through the infliction of pain on others. From imagining the governess as a pitiful victim of brutality or conversely eroticizing her as the stewardess of sadomasochism, all of these constructs rely on the dynamics of violation, on bodies that experience misfortune and bodies that mete that it out. Utilizing a wide array of sources and methodological approaches, I will demonstrate that the Victorian governess was not only popularly correlated with social or sexual irregularity, but that these themes were ultimately circumscribed by a larger preoccupation with the governess as an icon of violence and pain.

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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.

Despite consumption and retailing having grown to form a meta-narrative in historical enquiry, the village shop has largely escaped attention. Remarkably little is known about the long-term development of rural services, particularly shops, which are often ignored as marginal and undynamic. Moreover, whilst their recent decline has highlighted their perceived importance to the vitality of village life, the extent to which this is based on a romanticised or historically myopic image is unclear. This thesis seeks to rectify this lacuna by critically assessing the real and imagined role of the shop and shopkeeper within village life during the nineteenth century, in terms of supplying goods and services, integrating and representing community as a place and a network of people, and projecting images of the rural into the wider national consciousness. It adopts an innovative interdisciplinary approach and offers an integrated analysis of a wide range of visual, literary and historical sources: from paintings and serialised stories to account books and trade directories. Central to the argument is a sustained interrogation of the shifting historic construction of the village shop and its keeper, from exploitative and anti-rural to the epitome of a nostalgic and sentimentalised view of England’s rural communities. This is compared to the lived experience, as established from the historical record, quantitative analysis conducted at both village and county level. This synthetic approach has required the amalgamation of multiple perspectives: writer and artist; reader and consumer; observer and participant; patron and critic; shopkeeper, customer and villager. The thesis inputs into debates relating to the commercial history and cultural understanding of rural communities, the findings broadening our understanding of the history of rural retailers and the communities they served, shedding light on rural consumption and how changing attitudes to retailing, rural communities and the countryside were developing. It also contributes to other key areas of research including the notion of community (places and networks) and cultural representations of people, place, space and everyday life.

The collection of Victorian-themed wearables and accessories of  "No Person Detected" serves as an innovative solution to the issues surrounding biometric technology and the invasion of privacy. This wearable technology was designed to counteract the involuntary recording of an individual's unique biometric data through the use of body cameras and CCTV, which can be accessed by law enforcement and marketing companies. The technology represents a democratization of design ideas and collaboration that allows individuals to create adversarial fashion and provides a level of biometric protection. This thesis explores the potential of technological innovation and collaboration to result in a more privacy-conscious society, one where individuals can take control of their personal data and protect themselves against the dangers of biometric tracking. The convergence of fashion, technology, and design has the potential to revolutionize how we approach privacy in a digital age, and "No Person Detected" represents an exciting step towards that future. / Master of Fine Arts / As technology becomes a larger component of our daily lives, our digital footprint continues to expand, leaving behind sensitive identifying information. From this data, law enforcement agencies such as the FBI and ICE derive insights and conclusions about our lives. Due to unreliable data, facial recognition technology (FRT) has demonstrated implicit bias, particularly toward racialized bodies. This highlights the need for public education and responsible online behavior and raises questions about the privacy and security of personal data. At the intersection of fashion, history, and technology, "No Person Detected" aims to fight against the involuntary collection of biometric data in an adversarial way. With the proliferation of FRT and the accumulation of personal data from a variety of sources, it is crucial that both businesses and individuals establish transparent policies to protect user data. This thesis highlights both the historical context of racism in policing and the significance of privacy in the digital age.

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