Alison Twells

Iron Dukes and Naked Races: Edward Carpenter's Sheffield and LGBTQ Public History

ABSTRACT This article explores the development of a public history walk based on the life of Edward Carpenter (1844–1929), late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Sheffield-based writer, campaigner and sex reformer. It argues that understanding the world in which Carpenter and his comrades, friends and lovers lived, dreamed and loved, requires attention to both the alterity of sexual experiences in the past and historical continuity in terms of sexual identities and practices that are marginalised within different mainstream cultures. Public History brings a new perspective to this debate, drawing attention to the resonance of history in terms of present day identities. The article also addresses the heteronormativity of public history, the role of history in place-making and the ways in which public history, creative history and the practice of walking can challenge dominant versions of urban history and urge us to think critically about different ways of knowing the past.

Migrant Women’s Voices: talking about life and work in the UK since 1945

In her preface to Migrant Women’s Voices, Linda McDowell confesses that the book she has ‘long wanted to write’ is Studs Terkel’s Working: people talk about what they do all day and how they feel a...

‘Went into raptures’: reading emotion in the ordinary wartime diary, 1941–1946

Despite the emergence of studies attentive to the difference between discourses about emotion and the experience of emotion, particularly within histories of gender and sexuality, social class has been a neglected category. Those historical sources which enable engagement with a subjects emotional life have been largely produced by the elite and middle-classes; it remains notoriously difficult to gain access to the interior lives of ‘ordinary’ people. This article asserts the significance of the ‘ordinary’ diary in enabling exploration of the emotional lives of non-elite women and girls. It focuses on expressions of romantic love and sexual interest, anger and disappointment in the pocket diaries of a working-class scholarship girl from the English East Midlands during the years of the Second World War, to argue that ordinary diaries can help us to move beyond cultural directives concerning appropriate female emotional expression to develop a greater understanding of the daily crafting of the modern self.

Infidel Feminism: secularism, religion and women's emancipation, England 1830–1914LAURA SCHWARTZ

Laura Schwartzs important new study opens with a vignette from 1860, where Freethinking feminist Harriet Law defends Eves rebellion against an authoritarian God. This snapshot of a woman refusing...

Introduction: The Missionary Movement, the Local and the Global

Writing of the Somerset village of Cheddar in 1789, Martha (Patty) More stated that there was ‘as much knowledge of Christ in the interior of Africa as there is to be met with in this wretched, miserable place.’1 The people were ‘savages’, ‘depraved and wretched’, ‘brutal in their natures and ferocious in their manners.’2 According to Martha More’s more famous sister Hannah, writing to Elizabeth Montagu about her plans for a Sunday school, they were ‘so ignorant, so poor and so vicious, that I consider it a sort of Botany Bay expedition’.3 Indeed, More felt herself to be ‘the queen of Botany Bay’.4 The neighbouring village of Nailsea, introduced to the sisters by its inhabitants as ‘Little Hell’, drew another colonial analogy: it was ‘abounding in sin and wickedness, the usual consequences of glass-houses and mines; and when we cast our eyes round, and meditated on the great singularity of its situation, we could not help thinking it would become our little Sierra Leone.’5 Similarly, though unaccompanied by the Dante-esque imagery, the More sisters’ home village (from 1804) of Barley Wood was inhabited by ‘a little colony of colliers’ requiring their missionary care.6

Missionary Domesticity and ‘Woman’s Sphere’: The Reads of Wincobank Hall

While the public voluntary society was of considerable importance in bringing together sympathetic men and women to create a missionary movement, a second very social ‘site’ operated to construct a collective missionary identity. The family was of great significance for evangelicals. The household had been spiritualised as part of the Protestant Reformation, as male heads of household were given a special responsibility to direct the religiosity of other household members. The earthly family was seen as an extension of the heavenly family, and relationships between husband and wife, parents and children, and employers and servants were believed to have been ordained by God. According to nineteenth-century readings of St Paul’s Epistle to the Colossians, the male head of the household was to be a caring husband and father, intimately involved with family life. Women were dependent and subordinate, offered salvation through marriage and motherhood, but able through philanthropy to negotiate the boundaries of their ‘sphere’ and assume responsibility for the moral regeneration of the nation.1

‘One Blood’: The ‘Heathen’ at Home and Overseas in Late-Eighteenth and Early-Nineteenth-Century Missions

The national impulse to mission which saw the emergence of a popular missionary movement in England in the early decades of the nineteenth century was shaped both by long-term cultural and theological trends and by the immediate and intense anxieties of the 1790s. Most fundamentally, English Protestantism had undergone a profound change during the course of the eighteenth century, as congregations within Old Dissent and the Church of England were transformed by their encounter with an intrinsically missionary Methodist movement. By the 1790s, Baptists and Independents, as well as the Anglican Clapham Sect, were leading the missionary movement at home and overseas. Their missionary strategy was further consolidated by the dynamic secular theory of cultural change which, developed by Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, saw all societies moving through distinct stages of development. In particular, the polarity of the ‘civilised’ and the ‘savage’ within Enlightenment thought mapped onto the Biblical dichotomy of the ‘Christian’ and the ‘heathen’, emphasising the capacity for progress and salvation of all peoples and providing a framework for missionary intervention.

Charity Begun at Home: Missionary Philanthropy and the New Middle Class in Sheffield

The first two decades of the nineteenth century saw the establishment of an expansive network of missionary philanthropic societies in England. The Society for Bettering the Condition of the Poor (SBCP), formed in London in 1796, spawned provincial auxiliaries and promoted a range of related reforming bodies. The extension of the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS) (from 1804), the establishment of monitorial and Sunday schools and a range of societies designed for the reform of the English poor, and the arrival during the 1810s of the auxiliary denominational missionary societies saw the consolidation of a popular missionary philanthropic movement. As I have shown in Chapter 1, domestic philanthropy was from the outset intimately connected with overseas missions. Frequently inspired by the commitment of missionaries to taking the gospel overseas — sometimes as a reaction against the perceived neglect of the ‘heathen’ at home, and often self-consciously promoted as part of the same global project — domestic philanthropy was acutely informed by the global civilising mission.

Trembling Philanthropists? Missionary Philanthropy under Pressure

Missionary philanthropy provided a cohesive identity for the early-nineteenth-century middle class, but not all aspects of the movement were supported evenly and in equal measure. From their inception in the 1790s, there had been vociferous critics of overseas missions in the pro-slavery and anti-evangelical lobbies who questioned the capacity of ‘heathen’ peoples to receive God’s grace and challenged the authority of missionaries to preach the gospel. Most famous is editor of the Edinburgh Review Sidney Smith’s dismissal of William Carey and his colleagues as ‘little detachments of maniacs’. As discovered by Carey, the ‘consecrated cobbler’ of Serampore, this antagonism was sometimes as much about social class as about nonconformist irregularity.1 These criticisms tended to be voiced by individuals rather than movements until the 1820s, when a sustained critique of overseas missions developed, as radicals contested the focus on overseas at what they perceived to be the expense of the poor at home.

‘Bringing about the World’s Restoration’: Missionary Women and the Creation of a Global Christian Community

Heathenism and savagery were bound up in the evangelical imagination with domestic cruelty and women’s oppression, and the necessity for domestic reform was in evidence all over the globe. In India, home to the first mission station of the Baptist Missionary Society (BMS) and the destination of the pioneering independent female missionaries of the 1820s and 1830s, the low status accorded to women was believed to prevent social change. As suggested by Jemima Thompson in her ‘Survey of the condition of woman in heathen countries’ (1841), missionaries identified child marriage, the despotic power of the mother-in-law, a lack of regard for the mother among her sons, female infanticide and sati as obstructive to social and religious progress, while their seclusion in the zenana made Indian women especially inaccessible to male missionaries. In China, polygamy, poor education, foot-binding, female slavery and the sale of widows underscored the savage core of an otherwise cultured and lettered people. Women in the South Pacific, like those in North America, were believed to need guidance into the home.