Tom Crook

Putting Matter in its Right Place: Dirt, Time and Regeneration in Mid-Victorian Britain

In 1966, Mary Douglas published Purity and Danger, her classic study of rituals of pollution and cleanliness. The study, which spanned both primitive and modern societies, was underpinned by what she termed an ‘older definition’ of dirt as ‘matter out of place’. The universal application of this definition was thus linked to its implication of cultural relativity: namely, that dirt is whatever, within a given society, eludes or threatens order and system. Such an insight has informed a great deal of historical scholarship on the subject of dirt, including Victorian dirt. Dirt in fact is now a well-established part of Victorian historiography and has elicited an impressive body of interdisciplinary research. Cultural historians in particular, drawing on a range of psychoanalytic, phenomenological and anthropological theories, have examined representations of Victorian dirt in parliamentary reports, social investigations and novels. A consistent feature of this literature is a concern to highlight the social and psychological dynamics of dirt and its profound instability as a discursive object. These dynamics have been traced along a number of lines, all of which turn upon its capacity to elicit highly divergent subjective reactions and act as an ambiguous signifier. Arguably, what emerges most strongly is the capacity of dirt to elude neat binary conceptualisations: a product of cultural system, dirt also constantly thwarts it. For example, although Victorian dirt, in accordance with codes of respectability, was regarded with disgust, it was also a protean source of fascination. The excluded object of dirt thus found its way back inside the respectable self, destabilising not only binary codings of desire and repulsion, but also the distinction between subject and object. A recent article by Christopher Herbert on Victorian ideas of money represents the most pointed treatment of the symbolic agency of dirt. Here, Herbert analyses Charles Dickens’ Little Dorrit (1855–57) to

Craft and the Dialogics of Modernity: The Arts and Crafts Movement in Late-Victorian and Edwardian England

Abstract This article seeks to rethink the modernity of modern craft by revisiting one of its first manifestations, the English Arts and Crafts Movement. Current scholarship suggests that the movement was both modern and antimodern. This article argues instead that it embodied an alternative modernity, forged within a broader modernity characterized by a multiplicity of “dialogs” between past, present and future; Europe and the rest of the world; and defining modern processes and counter-processes.

Accommodating the outcast: common lodging houses and the limits of urban governance in Victorian and Edwardian London

This article examines a neglected aspect of British urban history: the governance of common lodging houses in Victorian and Edwardian London. The aim of the article is to detail the multiple ways they exercised the limits of urban governance. Providing cheap, nightly accommodation for the outcasts of urban society, common lodging houses were neither easily conceived, nor easily regulated. It is argued that their governance attests to an abundant metropolitan modernity characterized by ongoing antagonism and multiple points of tension and instability.

POWER, PRIVACY AND PLEASURE: Liberalism and the modern cubicle

This paper examines the establishment and appropriation of a hitherto overlooked space: the modern cubicle. The principal aim of the paper is to develop a political understanding of cubicle space in terms of the everyday practice of liberalism, and in particular Victorian liberalism. The key function it played in this respect was to afford subjects the freedom to operate on themselves in private and effect a moral and physical individuation of the self; part of its novelty as a site of power was the relative intensity with which it bound together various ethical norms, the body and the senses. But the modern cubicle illuminates much else besides. It allows for an exploration of the various cultural values – class, nature, gender, economy, amongst others – that liberalism sought to secure in material terms, and the equally varied spatial, technological and administrative tactics through which it operated. The cubicle, however, was always something of a fragile and indeterminate amalgam of human and non-human agency: civilised indulgence might develop into deviance; and technological fluency deteriorate into breakdown. To this extent, the cubicle also illuminates some of the reciprocities of rule and resistance, power and pleasure that characterise modern liberalism.

Habit as Switchpoint

Building on Mary Poovey’s reflections, this article outlines a two-fold genealogy of habit in the context of the philosophy and practice of liberalism. One aspect relates to the word ‘habit’, which by the 19th century had come to mean the repetitive actions of the body and mind, thus shedding its former association with dress and collective customs. The second relates to how ‘habit’ functioned as a means of mediating the tensions of liberalism, three in particular: between the self and the social; between an individual’s past, present and future actions; and between the role of the state and the role of self-government.

Risk and the History of Governing Modern Britain, c. 1800–2000

In the introduction to the volume, Crook and Esbester critically explore how risk and its governance are characterized and periodized, both by historians and by social scientists such as Giddens, Beck, Luhmann and Ewald. By considering what is meant by concepts such as risk, danger and accident, they also demonstrate the significance of this area for historians of modern Britain and argue that it should be foregrounded as a subject of analysis. Central to this is the importance of governance extending beyond the ‘state’ as often defined. The chapter ends by outlining the volume structure and some of the bigger themes highlighted by the contributors.

Conclusion: governing risks in Britain and beyond

In the conclusion, Mohun, Le Roux, Crook and Esbester draw together the key themes of the volume, demonstrating how risk and risk-related problems are a valuable means of rethinking how Britons have been governed. The conclusion also suggests avenues for further exploration. Central to this are the links made to nations and practices beyond Britain, drawing from and differing to the British experience, and which require further detailed examination. The relationships between governing risk, industrial capitalism and the rise of the modern liberal state are particularly significant in opening up areas for comparative and transnational research. The chapter therefore sets an agenda for future work on Britain and more widely.

Danger in the Drains: Sewer Gas, Sewerage Systems and the Home, 1850–1900

Crook’s chapter analyses some of the contestation surrounding the introduction of large-scale, technologised, water-borne sewerage systems in towns and cities. It focuses on the early installation of water-closets in middle-class homes and the danger of ‘sewer gas’. He argues that these problems were managed in much the same way as other hazards created by urban infrastructural projects: standards were set and revised; inspectors were called in; and technological solutions were implemented and reviewed. Sewer gas is particularly significant because it targeted the home, arousing fear on account of its ability to infiltrate what was supposed to be an inviolable sphere of familial intimacy and safety. Thus, sewer gas was very much a composite risk: a risk defined as much by public fear and dispute as by expert ‘rationality’ and technological savvy.

Price, Kim Medical Negligence in Victorian Britain: The Crisis of Care under the English Poor Law, c. 1834–1900 London: Bloomsbury Academic 248 pp., £65.00, ISBN 978-1-4411-2546-0 Publication Date: February 2015

capitalism. A splinter from a smaller Fascist organization called the League of the National Christian Defense (LANC), the Legion of Archangel Michael won 15.58 percent of the votes during the December 1937 elections under the All for the Fatherland name, with LANC winning 9.15 percent of the votes. One in four Romanians voted Fascist that year. In power briefly between September 1940 and January 1941, the Iron Guard dictatorship was characterized by extreme violence against Jews and political opponents, confiscation of Jewish property, and outright theft. Before being ousted from power in January 1941 during an aborted rebellion against General Ion Antonescu, the head of state, the Iron Guard savagely murdered 120 Jews in a huge pogrom very similar in terms of damage and number of victims to the Nazi Kristallnacht. Roland Clark’s book Holy Legionary Youth is a good, solid study of the main Romanian Fascist organization and is indispensable not only to scholars, but also to the public at large interested in understanding the genesis and history of the Romanian extreme right during the interwar period. In fact, this work goes far beyond the research accomplished in this field by Clark’s main academic mentor. In writing his book, Clark has taken advantage of the rich, recently acquired Romanian records available in the archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, as well as the newly opened secret police archives from Romania. Clark thoughtfully analyzes and richly illustrates the roots of Romanian ultranationalism, in which antisemitism occupied a large part, as well as the ways in which Romanian Fascism—first, LANC and, later, the Legion of Archangel Michael—was born and developed from it. Hooliganism, antisemitism, vigilante justice, and violence are rightfully considered by Clark as the backbone of Romanian Fascist political action, in which students were initially the majority. Clark also correctly describes the social impact of the Legion of Archangel Michael among youth; the working class, the peasantry; the middle class; and, last but not least, intellectuals. He studies not only the activities of the paramilitary death squads of the Legion of Archangel Michael, but also the importance of the propaganda in its activities. The author also understands well the relationship between the Legion of Archangel Michael and the Romanian Orthodox Church, especially the legion’s effort to enlist members of the Orthodox clergy in its ranks. This important and useful book has its shortcomings. Major secondary sources, especially books written by Romanian authors on the LANC and the Legion of Archangel Michael, are too often ignored. More important, in a book of 262 pages, the period during which the Iron Guard was in power is covered by only nine pages, and the author dedicates less than one page to the Pogrom of Bucharest, a major tragic antisemitic event, in which the number of victims is not clearly stated (120 Jews were murdered, and Clark mentions only 84). Finally, the cover of the book is poorly chosen; it depicts wounded Iron Guards and could lead the superficial reader who is glancing only at the cover to view the Iron Guards as victims, rather than perpetrators. Note: This review was written solely in the reviewer’s private capacity and does not represent the views or opinions of any organizations or institutions with which he is affiliated.

Distant Strangers: How Britain Became Modern

The case for the 1970s as the watershed for ‘lost freedom’ is nailed in terms of two key spatial fears: the road traffic accident and the ‘stranger danger’ posed by the figure of the ‘paedophile’. whilst ‘automobility’ has been highlighted in North American contexts, its British effects are only beginning to receive the attention of urban historians. Thomson uses social surveys to show that the promotion of road safety led to a rapid transformation in behaviours. in 1976, 80 per cent of 11-year olds travelled home from school unchaperoned; this had fallen to 21 per cent by 1985 (p. 139). Yet this shift is only partially explained by increased car ownership and deaths on the roads. Perhaps Thomson’s most original contribution lies in his charting of the construction of the ‘paedophile’ as a media folk devil, at a very precise point in the mid-1970s as a direct result of (and backlash against) libertarian campaigns to open up discussion about the age of consent. Yet the 1970s is also presented as a decade of possibilities, with Thomson turning his attentions to the radical criminologists, psycho-geographers and environmental educationalists (including the anarchist ward) who celebrated vandalism as purposive and creative and opposed the tyranny of classroom education. Ultimately, however, this decade of both fear and experimentation is viewed as collapsing into the neo-liberal quagmire of performance management (for school children as much as teachers) that gained ascendancy in the 1980s, signifying the final fracturing of the ‘post war settlement’ (p. 220). Such a brief summary cannot do justice to this complex text, which intersects with a wide range of debates and literatures and speaks to multiple audiences. its limitations are apparent, in that it is largely concerned with commentaries, interventions, and images produced by adults, whilst the action that is discussed relates largely to social policy. The landscape that is invoked is homogenous (and largely urban). it leaves significant gaps – in terms of possible gendered, classed and regionalized variations in the experiences of actual children – for others to fill. Yet Lost Freedom provides an important thesis that is essential reading for all historians of twentieth-century Britain. it is a major contribution to our understandings of the post-war settlement, of the histories of childhood, youth, and sexuality, and, crucially, of current concerns.