Lucinda Matthews-Jones

'Oxford House Heads and their Performance of Religious Faith in East London, 1884-1900'

This article considers how lecturing in Victoria Park in the East End of London allowed three early heads of the university settlement Oxford House to engage local communities in a discussion about the place of religion in the modern world. It demonstrates how park lecturing enabled James Adderley, Hebert Hensley Henson and Arthur Winnington-Ingram, all of whom also held positions in the Church of England, to perform and test out their religious identities. Open-air lecturing was a performance of religious faith for these settlement leaders. It allowed them to move beyond the institutional spaces of the church and the settlement house in order to mediate their faith in the context of open discussion and debate about religion and modern life. The narratives they constructed in and about their park sermons reveal a good deal about how these early settlement leaders imagined themselves as well as their relationship with the working-class men they hoped to reach through settlement work. A vivid picture of Victorian religious and philanthropic life emerges in their accounts of lecturing in Victoria Park.

‘Granny thinking what she is going to write in her book’: religion, politics and the Pontefract by-election of 1872 in Josephine Butler’s Personal Reminiscences of a Great Crusade (1896)

ABSTRACT Josephine Butler’s Personal Reminiscences of a Great Crusade (1896) has long been considered as one of the crucial pieces of evidence for the campaign against the Contagious Diseases Acts. Yet few scholars have examined this text to consider what Butler’s only explicit autobiographical publication tells us about how she represented and sought to represent her role in the repeal movement. Scholars have instead preferred to explore how Butler revealed the ‘auto/biographical I’ in the biographies of her father, sister and husband, as well as in her hagiographical writings. This article argues that Personal Reminiscences enabled Butler to reinforce a religiously informed identity. It does so by unpacking her account of the Pontefract by-election of 1872. Both biographers and historians have been drawn to her account of the by-election, especially her description of the terrifying events in the hayloft.

Peter K. Andersson’s ‘How Civilized Were the Victorians?’: An Introduction

We are excited to be publishing this roundtable, a response to Peter K. Andersson’s recently published Journal of Victorian Culture article ‘How Civilized Were the Victorians?’. Andersson’s piece invites scholars of the nineteenth century to rethink the ‘civilizing process’ and to reconsider the disciplinary parameters of Victorian Studies more generally.1 We have been overwhelmed by the number of people who have engaged with this article. To date, over 3600 people have downloaded it, making it our most read article of 2015–16.2 This roundtable captures some of the dialogue that has emerged in response to the article. Many of the pieces that appear in this roundtable were first published on our accompanying site, the Journal of Victorian Culture Online.3 Invited respondents have been asked to expand their initial replies. Taken together, the essays offer an interdisciplinary conversation around the constitution of Victorian Studies, a conversation that we at the Journal of Victorian Culture have been proud to promote in our journal’s pages. Andersson’s article comes at an important juncture in Victorian Studies. As a field, we are increasingly trying to consider how we should study our Victorian past. We are engaging with an increasingly vibrant public interest in the past which is introducing new audiences to Victorian Studies. At the same time, there is a growing unease around the value of the humanities in universities and more widely in both the US and UK. A bold (and at times controversial) assertion from the US-based Victorian Studies collective V21 tells us that we should move in the direction of a more theoretical and politicized Victorian Studies.4 The thought-provoking pieces in this roundtable invite readers to think more about the direction and future aspirations of our field. Rather than seeing Victorian Studies in flux, these stimulating and wide-ranging reflections point to the successes and methodological diversity of our subject area. The publication of Andersson’s article also coincides with a wider aspiration we have to unite our digital activities with our journal’s printed content. By asking authors to

The English in love: the intimate story of an emotional revolution

Claire Langhamer’s The English in Love: The Intimate Story of an Emotional Revolution is a fascinating study of how people experienced love in the twentieth century. Langhamer joins a number of scholars, including Marcus Collins and Lisa Appignanesi, who in recent years have greatly improved our understanding of how love was represented and imagined in modern Britain. Langhamer’s study in many ways goes further than this, however. She sheds new light on the ways in which people articulated and fashioned their selfhoods through romantic love. She provides not only a nuanced interpretation of this twentieth-century emotion, but also responds, impressively, to the call for historians to take seriously embodied and psychological experiences of gender. The English in Love uses an array of primary sources to uncover the intimate experiences of love in the twentieth century. At the heart of the book is the use of life histories drawn from the Mass Observation Archive at the University of Sussex. Founded in 1937, Mass Observation had a fascination, as Langhamer notes in her opening section, ‘with the minutiae of daily life’ (xv). Collecting the day-to-day thoughts and feelings of its informants, Mass Observation offers us, as Langhamer puts it, ‘a window on intimate worlds and subjective feelings’ (xviii). Material from Mass Observation is enhanced by Langhamer’s use of a number of cultural sources (films, novels and magazines), together with published social studies, as well as autobiographies. The English in Love is divided into three sections: ‘Love’, ‘Courtship’ and ‘Commitment’. In the first section, Chapter one charts the emergence of a discourse of romantic love in modern Britain. As practical considerations relating to courtship and marriage gradually became outdated or lost their former urgency, Langhamer argues that cultural sources such as films and magazines created new ‘fictional scripts’ for romantic love. She insists that ‘individual love’ and the ‘cultural meanings’ of love should be understood in tandem in the twentieth century (p. 29). Yet the new culture of love was not always approved of by social commentators, as Langhamer shows. This emotional revolution was unstable, messy and contested. Chapter two explores the physical meanings of love. Married love was increasingly perceived to be linked to sex, and increasingly to female sexual pleasure, according to Langhamer. The notion of physical and sexual attraction gained increasing currency in the twentieth century. Chapter three builds on this to explore how cultural scripts developed to succeed’ (p. 94) could easily be interpreted as a mass scale phenomenon – and Hoare himself warns that this was not the case, at least not until later in the war. However, the book offers a much-needed and nuanced balance between the microand macrohistory of Bosnia and Herzegovina and its impact on Yugoslavia, which might prove equally useful not only to experts, but to a wider readership as well.

Sanctifying the Street: Urban Space, Material Christianity, and the G. F. Watts Mosaic in London, 1883 to the Present Day

The Windermere clergyman, Hardwicke Drummond Rawnsley, wrote this sonnet shortly after attending the 1885 unveiling of an outdoor mosaic attached to the clock tower of St. Jude’s Anglican Church in Whitechapel, East London. The mosaic was a reproduction of G. F. Watts’s allegorical painting, Time, Death and Judgement (1870). Watts later donated versions of this painting to be hung in St. Paul’s Cathedral and at the Tate Gallery, but what excited Rawnsley was the prospect of exhibiting such an artwork on the street, and especially on a “grim, unlovely” street. He saw great spiritualizing potential in the public art object, as did the vicar of St. Jude’s Church, the Rev. Samuel Barnett. This chapter considers how and why Barnett—also founder of the university settlement movement, a residential organization established to reconnect graduates with their poorer urban brothers, and of the prominent East London settlement house, Toynbee Hall—sought to sacralize the streets of his Whitechapel parish through the public display of objects such as the Watts mosaic. Along with his wife, Henrietta, Barnett proposed that religious images and objects should be brought to East London so that the urban poor might rediscover their spiritual selves. In the early 1880s, he founded the yearly Whitechapel Fine Art Exhibitions, forerunner of today’s Whitechapel Art Gallery, to bring well-known artists’ work to the East End. Historians have commented on the connection between art and religion in Barnett’s philanthropic work, but this scholarship has focused on the images themselves and on their display in indoor exhibition spaces such as St. Jude’s School, host to the Whitechapel Fine Art Exhibitions.2

Introduction: Materiality and Religious History

On September 9, 1872, retired soldier George Yeofield cut out a small disc of paper to wrap around a gold sovereign. On the outside of the disc he wrote out the Lord’s Prayer, his handwriting cramped and snaking around the paper. On the underside he wrote his name, age, the place, and his occupation, before signing off with an “Amen.” We do not know why Yeofield did this, or why this coin was later worn by another soldier during the First World War. The wrapped coin ended up in the collection of Edward Lovett, a City of London banker and an amateur collector of charms and amulets. Lovett was fascinated by working-class superstition and roamed the streets of London in search of trinkets invested with religious or folkloric meaning. Lovett’s collection, now housed at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, is a treasure trove for scholars interested in popular belief.1 Yet all too often scholars of religion have overlooked or devalued material objects such as Yeofield’s coin. In this case, an object with specific economic meaning was transformed into a sacred object for everyday reverence. We can only imagine that it was intended to connect its holder to the spiritual world beyond. In their general reluctance to move beyond traditional written sources, scholars of religion run the risk of missing the insights that a study of such objects might offer. This book seeks to redress the balance by asking two interrelated questions about material religion. Firstly, why should scholars of religion and spirituality study objects? And, secondly, how can a study of objects inform our understanding of Britain’s religious and spiritual landscape in historical and contemporary contexts?

Residential Institutions in Britain, 1725–1970. Edited by Jane Hamlett, Lesley Hoskins and Rebecca Preston

and understandings of love and self-fulfilment in the mid-century, it also makes a significant contribution to the history of emotions. Extensive use is made of the MassObservation Archive to explore the witting and unwitting testimony of those who wrote diaries and responded to directives for this ‘anthropology of ourselves’. MassObservation is not without its methodological drawbacks – those who kept diaries and responded to directives were self-selecting, at least reasonably literate and cognizant of the project they were contributing to – but there are few alternatives in terms of largescale collections of individuals’ reflections and experiences in this period. Beyond MassObservation, Langhamer’s sources cross the cultural with the social scientific and the political: films, magazines, television programmes, sociological studies/surveys and the reports of public enquiries are used. In methodological terms, The English in Love should inspire historians of emotion (and historians generally) to explore the use of such sources. In more theoretical terms, Langhamer explores the tension between the intense, individual experience of intimacy and its importance to public life: shifts in ideas about love and marriage reflect not only changes in ideas about morality, but also the bigger pictures of the law and politics. Expectations of marriage are shaped by, and in turn shape, the economic context in which individuals live. Whilst the history of emotion is a valid area of study in itself, The English in Love shows the potential of this approach to prompt new insights in many other areas of historical enquiry. But most of all, the book provides a valuable, refreshing and engaging insight into English society in the mid-twentieth century.

Borderline Citizens: women, gender, and political culture in Britain, 1815–1867 KATHRYN GLEADLE

Borderline Citizens is an intellectually-rigorous and engaging study of middleclass and elite women’s involvement in formal and informal politics. The wide range of sources from which Gleadle draws is particularly impressive, and includes diaries, letters and newspapers together with more unusual sources such as electoral ephemera and poems. The book provides not only a rich account of women’s political involvement in nineteenth-century Britain, but also biographical accounts of lesser known and marginalised female political actors. Central to Gleadle’s study is the assertion that women were ‘borderline citizens’. In her introduction, she notes how ‘[T]heir status as political actors, as well as their own political subjectivities, were often fragile and contingent. They might be conceptualised (and feel) integral to the political process at one moment—but this could quickly evaporate in the face of other cultural pressures’ (p. 2). Benjamin Haydon’s painting, The Anti-Slavery Society Convention, 1840, provides a visual depiction of Gleadle’s concept and is used as the cover illustration. In comparison to the centrality of male members of the anti-slavery movement, women are present only on the edges of this painting, or as Gleadle puts it, ‘they were situated-as literally-borderline figures’ (p. 257). The visibility of female abolitionists, such as Anne Knight and Elizabeth Pease, nevertheless demonstrates the significant role British women played in nineteenth-century political culture at the national, local and parochial level. The bonnets and dresses in Haddon’s picture, nevertheless, raise questions about how historians should use her concept of ‘borderline citizens’. Her study is confined to middle and upper class women and whilst she illustrates how this group of women were on the periphery, we do not know how working-class men or women fit in. Did experiences of borderline citizenship differ lower down the social hierarchy? If there is to be one criticism of Gleadle’s book, it is that she fails to deal with this question. Women’s History Review Vol. 21, No. 3, July 2012, pp. 497–521