Julie-Marie Strange

'She cried a very little': Death, grief and mourning in working-class culture, c . 1880-1914

Working-class attitudes towards death and bereavement in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain have overwhelmingly been discussed in terms of the respectable and the pauper funeral. Analyses of the culture of grief (that is, the emotional responses of the working classes to bereavement) have been reduced to an assumption that material insecurity blunted sensibility. This article argues that the reduction of working-class responses to death to a dichotomy between respectable and pauper funerals has overlooked the cathartic function of the funeral, negated the potential for individuals to invest burial rites with personal meaning, and failed to consider responses to death outside public mourning rites. I contend that languages of grief adopted many verbal and symbolic signs that were often ephemeral to the external observer. Moreover, material anxiety did not limit sensibility; it necessitated flexibility in the articulation of emotion. In conclusion, I argue that the emotional underpinnings of the working-class family need to be re-examined, using a definition of sensibility which acknowledges the mutability of feeling and the malleability of its expression.

Tramp: Sentiment and the homeless man in the late-Victorian and Edwardian City

The recent rehabilitation of sentiment as a topic worthy of scholarly engagement tends to focus on the work of Adam Smith and early to mid-Victorian visual and literary cultures. Focusing on the League of Welldoers, a Liverpool charity that catered for houseless men, this essay considers sentimentality as a tool for stimulating compassion for one of the most controversial and potentially unsympathetic groups among the outcast poor. The essay identifies how late-Victorian and Edwardian philanthropy deployed sentiment as a tool to motivate practical compassion and demonstrate the ways in which sentiment could be politically charged. The essay examines the Leagues attempts to imagine the tramp in sentimental terms in a political and social context that regarded male vagrancy as a ‘problem’ and understood able-bodied men as breadwinners. It highlights continuities in the sentimental tradition from the heady days of Dickenss fiction: the emphasis on physiological sensation to advance a notion of common human...

Fatherhood, furniture and the inter-personal dynamics of working-class homes, c. 1870-1914

Drawing on life stories, this article considers the relationship between urban working-class men and domesticity. Focusing on the spaces, objects and rites of mens homecoming, it questions perceptions of working-class men as peripheral to the inter-personal dynamics of family life and assesses how mens occupation of domestic space and time could be invested with emotive meaning by adult children. The article suggests that fathers were not simply figures of authority or masculine privilege but, rather, that the domestic interior was a space where men and their children navigated family roles and filial obligations to enjoy nurturing and intimate relationships more commonly associated with mothers. In doing so, the article stakes a claim to reconsider the idea that working-class homes were ‘a womans place’ and view them more dynamically as inter-personal domains.

Where Angels Fear to Tread: Academics, Public Engagement and Popular History

Academic researchers are under growing pressure to disseminate their scholarship and demonstrate its impact beyond the academy. In Australia, Europe and the UK, higher education and research councils are taking increasing account of knowledge exchange and public engagement in their allocation of funding. In this issue of Victorians Beyond the Academy, Julie-Marie Strange reviews The Gangs of Manchester by Andrew Davies and the play it inspired, Angels with Manky Faces by MaD Theatre Company. Strange and Davies then discuss the opportunities and challenges involved in working with artists and performers, and reaching readers and audiences, outside the university sector.

Dogs and modernity: dogs in history and culture

In 2011, the biologist John Bradshaw reflected that dogs had been ‘man’s best friend’ for thousands of years. Versatile and companionate, dogs had adapted to the myriad roles humans had assigned them over time: dogs and humans had ‘rubbed along pretty well’, despite not entirely understanding each other. As the senior partners in the relationship, Bradshaw charged humans with responsibility for safeguarding the human–canine relationship in the future. The on-going revisions of canine science, disseminated through academic and mainstream media, will be incorporated into the ‘folk psychology’ of dog keeping. Human understanding and misunderstanding of dogs has sprung, argued Bradshaw, from attempts by scientists from the late nineteenth century onwards to explain and regulate the dog. Of course, biology and canine science can only take us part of the way. In order to comprehend the ways in which we have lived, and indeed continue to live, with dogs we must scrutinise the broader contexts in which these inter-species relationships were established, performed, experienced and/or represented. This special dossier will suggest that the polyvalent forms and meanings of the human–dog bond were subject to change in ways that can be understood historically and that illuminate many aspects of the social, cultural, scientific and political history of the modern period. This special dossier traces some of the shifts in human understandings and manipulation of dogs from the late nineteenth century to track the changing dynamics of human–dog relationships in the modern period. Since Harriet Ritvo’s ground breaking Animal Estate: the English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (1987), there has been an ‘animal turn’ in social and cultural history. Historical accounts of nineteenth-century animal–human relationships often characterise the relationship between animals and urban space in terms of increasing degrees of separation, changes which, it is argued, endangered new ways of seeing ‘nature’, in particular the notion of the urban as a purified space of ‘culture’ rather than nature. As they have been primarily written with livestock in mind, rather than dogs, historians often speak of how the nineteenth century witnessed the ‘de-animalisation’ or ‘Great Separation’ of urban spaces: in which animal populations were removed, disciplined or re-ordered. Aside from work by scholars such as Harriet Ritvo, Kathleen Kete and Grier, historians have tended to overlook dog–human relationships, perhaps, not seeing these relationships as reliable registers of cultural and social norms and identities. Taking a broad view across animal issues in the nineteenth century, Ritvo assessed the location of animals within human aspirations and social structures, while Kathleen Kete explored pet-keeping among bourgeois Parisians. Analysis of dogs within the Victorian

Humanitarian accountability, bureaucracy, and self-regulation: the view from the archive.

This paper contains a systematic exploration of local and national archives and sources relevant to charities and humanitarian fund appeals of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras (1870-1912) in Great Britain. It shows that the charitable world and humanitarian work share the same matrix and originate from the same roots, with considerable overlap between fundraising for domestic charity and overseas relief. These campaigns engaged in crucial self-regulatory processes very early on that involved concepts such as formal accountability and the close monitoring of delivery. Far from lagging behind in terms of formal practices of auditing and accounts, charities and humanitarian funds often were in the pioneering group as compared with mainstream businesses of the period. The charitable sector, notably through the Charity Organisation Society in cooperation with the press, developed and delivered accountability and monitoring, while the state and the Charity Commission played a negligible role in this process.

Henry Mayhew at 200 – the ‘Other’ Victorian Bicentenary

The New Agenda introduction puts forward the case for a much-needed revision of the scholarship devoted to Henry Mayhew – journalist and wit, playwright, co-founder of Punch, educational writer, novelist for children, travel writer, hack, social explorer and author of London Labour and the London Poor. It argues for a more intertextual and contextual reading of his major and minor works, and presents the articles contained in this new agenda special issue. The complex publishing history of Henry Mayhews work and of London Labour and the London Poor in particular are explored in part one. The second part surveys the scholarship so far devoted to Mayhew and sketches out a new agenda for research based on a wider intratextual and intertextual approach to Mayhews corpus. It is time, the introduction urges, for Victorianists to revisit Henry Mayhew.

Book Review: Representations of death in nineteenth-century US writing and culture.

Like many scholarly works on death in the nineteenth century, Lucy Frank foregrounds the introduction to this diverse and engaging collection of essays with reference to Phillipe Ariess pioneering text The hour of our death (1981). As Frank notes, Ariess attempt to write the history of death in western culture from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century necessitated a degree of generalization even though he acknowledged historical and national differences. Thus, while Aries cast American attitudes towards death as an extreme example of western morbidity, he failed to engage with the multiple cleavages within, and complexities of, US society. This volume seeks to redress Ariess omission by extrapolating and understanding marginal and contested cultures of death in nineteenth-century America. The volume is divided into three parts. Part One examines the relationship between political agency and discourses of death, mourning and remembrance. Most of the essays emphasize the distance between an African-American politics of mourning that sought to remember the losses and deathly effects of slavery and a notion of a “national” culture of loss, a difference exemplified in Dana Lucianos chapter on responses to the death of President Lincoln. Similarly, discussion of racial differences in modes of mourning is underscored by analysis of the flimsy value attached to African-American mortality by white writers and attempts to challenge perceptions of black mortality by commentators such as W E B Du Bois and Charles Chesnutt. Despite the emphasis on difference in this section, an examination of the legendary speech by Native American Chief Seattle argues for recognition of liminal texts of loss that serve as a middle ground between diverse cultures of mourning and sensibility. Part Two focuses exclusively on poetical works and is concerned primarily with gender and loss. Two engaging chapters on child mortality offer critical reflections on the assumed feminization and mawkishness of mourning in the nineteenth century and the difficulties of negotiating Evangelical models of bereavement. Part Three considers the social rituals and popular discourses surrounding death, such as the use of mourning wear to perform grief, and the appeal of the supernatural to an audience saturated with death in the Civil War. The literary and cultural emphasis of the essays will appeal to inter-disciplinary interests. Whilst there is little by way of “medical” history, contributions on suicide in the social realist novel, the deathly sexuality of femininity, perceptions of mortality rates and responses to bereavement and the afterlife provide informative and critical contexts for consideration of the social meanings attached to dying, death and grief. The emphasis on the specificity of US cultures of death will hold obvious appeal to scholars of American history and many of the chapters assume a degree of pre-existing knowledge. None the less, the relevance of this volume extends beyond the US. Evaluations of reformist agendas on death and social class have a broad relevance to considerations of death in other industrial societies. Likewise, the essays repeatedly situate cultural modes of mourning in relation to the Civil War. Given that the relationship between the Great War and European cultures of death has received so much critical attention, reflections on the impact of the Civil War on US cultures of death offer some revealing comparisons on modern societies’ commercial, cultural and emotive responses to mass bereavement and new technologies of killing. Similarly, in privileging marginal stories, the volume addresses questions concerning identity and the universality of grief. As the essays indicate, an individual loss often provides a base from which to claim sympathy with the mourning of others. Yet race, class and gender consistently feature as obstacles to empathy as some deaths and sensibilities are valued more than others. In turn, cleavages in cultures of feeling reinforce and perpetuate the differences that languages of universal loss and national cultures of death would seek to deny.