The plight of the impecunious unmarried gentlewoman is a familiar theme in Victorian social history. Historians have ransacked literary sources to demonstrate the misery of the Victorian governess and the depth of a dilemma that was sufficiently serious to generate the feminist movement. Yet there has been no systematic study of the changing fate of the Victorian "distressed gentlewoman" in the face of all the attempts by reformers and philanthropists to improve her position during the nineteenth century. The problem of writing a social history of the Victorian middle-class spinster has been aggravated by the paucity of appropriate sources. This study is based on the records of contemporary female emigration societies and Colonial Office emigration projects, and on the personal correspondence of some emigrants. It investigates the position of distressed gentlewomen from 1830 to 1914, and explains the results of one popular remedy for their dilemma: emigration. Only in the latter half of the nineteenth century did voluntary organizations establish facilities expressly for the emigration of middle-class women. Yet some early-Victorian gentlewomen were sufficiently hard pressed to use the facilities of working-class organizations to escape from difficult circumstances in Britain. The emigration records permit a closer analysis of the social backgrounds and careers of some Victorian gentlewomen than has hitherto been possible. Throughout the nineteenth century in Britain there was an increasing surplus of women of marriageable age. This intensified the problems of middle-class women who were without any means of financial support. The Victorian social code stressed marriage as the most respectable career for women, and for those unable to achieve that status the employment field was confined, in large measure, to the overcrowded and exploited occupation of the governess. For women with only mediocre qualifications for teaching who were accustomed to the relative leisure of the middle-class home the need to find employment could come as a rude shock, and usually involved a certain loss of caste. The economic problems of distressed gentlewomen are familiar, but it is not generally recognized that many of them suffered from what we today call alienation. Emigration, more than any possible occupation in Britain, was able to alleviate this sense of alienation by providing remunerative work in combination with secure social relations, a combination rarely enjoyed by the working gentlewoman in Britain. In the British colonies a gentlewoman could safely become a domestic servant without losing social rank and the companionship of her employers. Yet several factors prevented large numbers of distressed gentlewomen from taking advantage of emigration. The early-Victorian prejudice against female emigration, the preference of the colonists for working-class women, the rigid principles of the feminists and the insistence of British emigration organizations on expensive preliminary domestic training raised formidable barriers against the emigration of most impecunious gentlewomen. When, in the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods, voluntary organizations used the rhetoric of the Victorian feminine civilizing mission to encourage large numbers of educated women to emigrate, it was well-trained lower-middle-class women seeking professional work who benefited most, and not the less qualified distressed gentlewomen. The latter had not profited from the late-Victorian advances in female education; rather, the resulting competition worsened their relative position in the search for employment. Neither emigration nor the achievements of the feminists could solve the problem of the distressed gentlewoman, a problem which remained acute while the Victorian social code survived. Only the decline of that social code and the mass-mobilization of the female labour force during the First World War eliminated the existence of distressed gentlewomen as an important social problem. / Arts, Faculty of / History, Department of / Graduate

This thesis examines the evidence of long swings in British house-building from 1860 to 1914. The central issue of the present inquiry concerns the existence of cyclical fluctuations in residential construction and the nature of the causal mechanisms by which these phenomena might be explained. A general analysis of the structure of the housing market and the institutional peculiarities which give rise to the lagged adjustment process by which changes in demand are translated into changes in the supply of housing accommodation suggests that the appropriate level at which to analyze the behavior of house-building is the regional or local level. The importance of specifying relationships whose underlying behavioral implications are consistent with the level of aggregation, is stressed. With this in mind, a general regional model of housebuilding activity is developed and its theoretical solutions explored. This provides a conceptual analytical framework used subsequently to study the regional (and local) housebuilding experience of South Wales and South-east Lancashire. These disaggregated regional studies show local patterns of residential construction to exhibit a wide range of variation. Operative causal mechanisms found to exist at this level of analysis disclose significant regional differences which seriously question the validity of the macro-causal relationships which have been offered to explain fluctuations in British house-building. The limits of the present analysis and the tentative nature of our conclusions are emphasized. With this in mind, there are suggested a number of areas which require far more intensive study than they have received in the past. Only when we learn more about the inter-relationships in the pattern of regional development will we be able to more fully understand the mechanisms of the long swings. / Arts, Faculty of / Vancouver School of Economics / Graduate

Islam and the Reflection in Multiculturalism in Great Britain

Many studies of the British Labour Party have emphasised disputes within the Parliamentary Labour Party and attempted to explain them. There has, however, been no attempt to apply the concept of factionalism, with criteria detailing how a faction might be identified, to a study of the Parliamentary Labour Party over a period of time. It is the aim of this paper to succinctly define the term faction; to establish criteria for the purpose of identifying factions, and to determine to what extent parties to Parliamentary Labour Party disputes could be identified as factions. Prom the definition of a faction employed, six criteria were established, against which to assess a group as a faction. Employing histories of the Labour Party, biographies and autobiographies of contemporary Labour politicians and contemporary newspapers and journals, major disputes during the years 1945-1970 were isolated and examined. It was found that there were four periods of intense Parliamentary Labour Party dispute. Application of the six criteria to groups involved in each dispute showed that four factions could be clearly identified. The policies expounded by three of these factions were identified as left-wing. One faction was identified as of the right-wing of the Labour Party. A number of implications of factionalism in the Parliamentary Labour Party were drawn. / Arts, Faculty of / Political Science, Department of / Graduate

The affair of the Ukase of September, 1821, evokes such questions as these: What was its real purpose? Was Alexander guilty of aggression in North America or was he only attempting to solve a domestic problem, viz., smuggling in the Alaskan colony? Why did George Canning negotiate separately with Russia after he had expressed a desire to cooperate with the United States? Did he really believe that Russia would be more impressed by separate negotiations, as Harold Temperley has suggested? Did the tsar deliberately appease Britain in the hope of securing her aid in a Russo- Turkish war, as S. B. Okun and Hector Chevigny have contended, or did he follow a policy of expediency?

Coleshill House was a much admired seventeenth-century country house which the architectural historian John Summerson referred to as ‘a statement of the utmost value to British architecture’. Following a disastrous fire in September 1952 the remains of the house were demolished amidst much controversy shortly before the Coleshill estate including the house were due to pass to the National Trust. The editor of The Connoisseur, L.G.G. Ramsey, published a piece in the magazine in 1953 lamenting the loss of what he described as ‘the most important and significant single house in England’. ‘Now’, he wrote, ‘only X marks the spot where Coleshill once stood’. Visiting the site of the house today on the Trust’s Coleshill estate there remains a palpable sense of the absent building. This thesis engages with the house that continues to exist in the realm of the imagination, and asks how Coleshill is brought to mind not simply through the visual signals that remain on the estate, but also through the mental reckoning resulting from what we know and understand of the house. In particular, this project explores the complexities of how the idea of Coleshill as a canonical work in British architectural histories was created and sustained over time. By considering how past owners of Coleshill subscribed to the notion of the canonical house this thesis contributes new knowledge about architectural ideology and practice in the long eighteenth century. Furthermore an examination of the pivotal moment when the house was lost in the mid-twentieth century sheds new light on how approaches to historic architecture impacted on ideas of national heritage at the time. This allows us not only to become more cognizant of the absent house, but the practice of formulating architectural histories is itself exposed to scrutiny.

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Boston University. University Professors Program Senior theses.