Edwardian Britain

These two chapters provide an illuminating political and cultural history of the interior design of India’s presidential residence which was originally designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens to be the house for the British viceroy. They also provides a detailed catalogue of select artworks kept in the house. Rich illustrations reveal how the interiors stand now, and they are contrasted with archival photographs that show how the house has evolved over the past 90 years including previously unpublished plans and sketches for the décor of the interiors of the house some of which date back to as early as 1914—these provide a rare
glimpse into how it was originally intended.
While the architecture of the actual edifice of the Rashtrapati Bhavan may be Lutyens’s most enduring legacy, the interiors of the building preserve a much more versatile history. These chapters trace how Lutyens achieved a stylish interior that accommodated the tastes and needs of various British aristocratic residents, politicians and bureaucrats, but equally had to impress an Indian public—for which, it needed also to incorporate a vocabulary of Indian design ornament. After the independence of India, many symbols of the colonial empire were rendered inappropriate and the interiors of the Rashtrapati Bhavan had to be transformed into the home of the president of a democratic republic with a rich history. This glimpse into the tastes of its different residents and the compulsions that guided them traces a most telling history of a changing world.

By the end of the 1880s, Middlesbrough's sporting culture was flourishing. Though the sporting scene was often dominated by football, a great number of other sports attracted attention from spectators, participants and journalists alike. The large number of clubs in existence embraced a variety of recreational and competitive sports. Whilst for much of the town's working class population, their contact with sport was restricted to spectating at large events or reading about in the local press, those members of Middlesbrough's small lowermiddle and middle class who had sufficient free time and disposable income to do so, maintained memberships of multiple clubs.

Flora Thompson's account of the English countryside during the eighteen-eighties and nineties – Lark Rise to Candleford – continues to be an important source for rural history. In that text the protagonist's mother says that witches had 'all died out', and none had been known in her generation. The informants of late Victorian folklorists sometimes made similar remarks. Historians have taken such statements about witchcraft being a thing of the past at face value, inferring from them that plebeian concern about its influence was disappearing during the final decades of the nineteenth century. This article uses evidence from the English south midlands, and insights provided by anthropological studies of sorcery, to suggest an alternative interpretation. Rather than being a sincere statement of belief, assertions that witches had 'all died out' were part of a strategy to avoid speaking about a dreaded subject. Such pains were taken because it was believed that talking about witchcraft was a dangerous activity that would lead to the bewitchment of anyone with a loose tongue.

This talk, a contribution to an experts' workshop at the University of Lincoln, takes an initial look at what music in the home meant for people in the period 1900-1925, that is, before the generalization of gramophone and radio. It is mor ein the nature of a framework for future research than a report on completed work.

This book deals with the formation of state surveillance and the emergence of institutionalized political policing in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Little has been written on this early formative period for the British security state, which began in earnest as a response to the Fenian dynamite campaign of the 1880s. Based on newly declassified documents, Solomon weaves together separate narrative threads which converge to paint a complex picture of the institutional innovations and personal rivalries that produced Britain's first national political police. The interactions between high-ranking bureaucrats, policemen and politicians reveal how often conflicting ideas on controlling organized radicalism coalesced into a unified counter-subversive strategy. Stressing the distinctness of the early British model of political policing, the narrative goes past the confines of a scholarly account by using source material to flesh out multidimensional characters, ranging from choleric Home Secretaries to remorseful anarchist double agents embroiled in a high-stakes and often unscrupulous combination of espionage, collusion and betrayal.

Since I am so fond of the historical movement called “Women’s Suffrage” occured in England in early Edwardian period, I would like to write a paper and make a presentatiton , titled “God Save The Suffragettes” ,which bounds the groundbreaking incident and literature. I believe that the right to vote and its struggle heretofore have a major role in the process of women’s civil rights and becoming equally democratic in the face of government. Therefore, I strongly think that this real-life progress has affected the term’s and future world of letters regarding its widespread impacts and attitudes toward the gender politics. In addition I would like to higlight this relation between the movement and the literature via a fictional novel named “Falling Angels” by renowned author Tracy Chevalier, known by her famous historical novel “Girl With A Pearl Earring”n first published in 2000.

Liberalism is a term employed in a dizzying variety of ways across the humanities and social sciences. This essay seeks to reframe how the liberal tradition is understood. I start by delineating different types of response – prescriptive, comprehensive, explanatory – that are frequently conflated in answering the question “what is liberalism?” I then discuss assorted methodological strategies employed in the existing literature: after rejecting “stipulative” and “canonical” approaches, I outline a contextualist alternative. On this (comprehensive) account, liberalism is best characterised as the sum of the arguments that have been classified as liberal, and recognised as such by other self-proclaimed liberals, over time. In the remainder of the article I present an historical analysis of shifts in the meaning of liberalism in Anglo-American political thought between 1850 and 1950, focusing in particular on how John Locke came to be seen as a liberal. I also explore the emergence of the category of "liberal democracy". I argue that the scope of the liberal tradition was massively expanded during the middle decades of the twentieth century, such that it came to be seen by many as the constitutive ideology of the West. This capacious (and deeply confusing) understanding of liberalism was produced by a conjunction of the ideological wars fought against “totalitarianism” and assorted developments in the social sciences. Today we both inherit and inhabit it.

The present paper aims at a presentation of the issue of religion in 'Maurice' – both in the text of the novel and in its readings. The text below is the original version presented at the conference dedicated to 'Maurice:, the final version was published in 2020 in the collection Twenty-First-Century Readings of E.M. Forster's 'Maurice'.
Religion is one of the main forces which influence the social and personal life presented in E. M. Forster’s 'Maurice'. Its place is quite naturally second to the influence of the law, and yet it is religious upbringing and a vision of morality rooted in religious teaching that largely shape the way its characters perceive themselves and their own behaviour, guide them in their choices.
The first part of the paper will concentrate on the text itself – offering a close reading of those parts of the text where religion/religions plays a part, stressing their importance in the structure of the novel. The aim is to retrace the influence of religion (predominantly Christianity but also ancient Greek religion) on the main characters’ psychological development and behaviour. The issue will be discussed in the context of Forster’s personal attitude towards organised religion.
The second part will concentrate on various readings of the issue – on the one hand seeking critics’ reactions. On the other hand, however, in attempt to reconstruct the attitudes of modern readers coming from various religious background to the novel in the context of the attitudes of modern religions. At least in part the papers attempts to answer the following question: to what extent has 'Maurice' dated in this particular respect and to what extent it remains a contemporary work for many of its 21st century homosexual readers describing dilemmas which they face in their lives.

Why was exiled revolutionary, Vladimir Lenin lodging with Liberal Candidate Phllip Whitwell Wilson and his family at the height of the first Russian Revolution in 1905 and how did his friend and press colleague, Henry Brailsford get embroiled in an assassination attempt at the Hotel Bristol in St Petersburg that same year? A look at a peculiar turn of events previously overlooked by historians. Press cuttings, maps and pictures relating to this story can be found here:

https://pixelsurgery.wordpress.com/2011/11/30/percy-circus-london/

Please join me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/repeat_the_past

The remit of this dissertation is to analyse Robert Baden-Powell's aim of instilling middle-class notions of masculinity within Edwardian youth through the Boy Scout movement. It will then combine this analysis by looking at the pedagogical methodology which made the organisation so popular. In so doing, this study intends to move the historiography away from its previous tendency to consider the movement's plans for boys' futures without considering the immediate work it was doing. The intention is to utilise existing historiographical debates and instead place them within a framework which highlights the ability for the movement to create a vessel for boyhood. Considering the national anxieties and wider youth culture of the period, this dissertation will highlight the features which allowed the Boy Scout movement to succeed in a manner unparalleled by alternative schemes. Furthermore, by considering how Baden-Powell's ideas were shaped both before and after the movement's inception, the dissertation will aim to show how Baden-Powell's notion of boyhood remained consistent through periods of war and peace, as the movement shifted from an imperial to an international brotherhood.

This is an expanded version of a paper I gave at the March 2015 Enchanted Edwardians Conference in Bristol.

In this paper I explore three visionary poems by the Anglo-Catholic poet Francis Thompson (1859-1907): The Hound of Heaven (1893), Sister Songs (1895) and The Mistress of Vision (1897) as examples of how Thompson poetically expressed, and mythologized, his devout Roman Catholic beliefs combined with elements of Classical and pagan mythology and Victorian Spiritualism. I explore specifically how Thompson achieved this blending in the poetic diction and imagery he used in these poems which fused words, phrases and symbols drawn for the Catholic liturgy, the Latin Vulgate Bible, astronomy, pagan symbolism and even, in one compelling case, the poetic expression of two invented place names, 'Luthany' and 'Elenore'.

My paper suggests that Thompson's use of his poetic diction to blend these different belief systems was not only in line with Thompson's own personal faith, but also reflects a broader tradition established by the Victorian Catholic thinker and writer, Cardinal John Henry Newman (1801-1890). Through his teachings and sermons Newman sought to return Roman Catholicism to its pre-Reformation state which included belief in mysticism, spiritual agencies, the powers of nature, angels - and even Elves. I conclude this paper by demonstrating how Francis Thompson's blending of Christian, pagan and spiritual elements in his visionary works served as a model for another emerging Edwardian poet, and budding myth-maker, J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973). Tolkien read Thompson's works from an early age and gave a literary paper on Thompson's poetry when he was an undergraduate at Exeter College, Oxford in 1914 – a report of which I have analysed in my postgraduate research PhD thesis on 'The Genesis of J.R.R. Tolkien's Mythology'.

“If I Had to Choose” – E. M. Forster and the Idea of Friendship” in: Kusek, Robert and Ewa Kowal (eds.), Politics and Poetics of Friendship, Kraków: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego, 2017, pp. 113-126.  E. M. Forster famously wrote in his 1938 essay „What I Believe” „if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend I hope I should have the guts to betray my country”. This striking statement captures the attitude with which Forster approached friendship. The paper aims at reconstructing the role of friendship in the writer’s biography as well as his works. It will further present various functions of friendship in Forsterian fiction – such as the ability of friendship to break through social and national barriers - from Forster’s first short story “The Story of a Panic” to his last novel "A Passage to India".
Paper presented at the "Politics and Poetics of Friendship" conference in Kraków (Uniwersytet Jagielloński) on the 27th of October, 2016. In preparation for publication.

In the first decade of the twentieth century, a rising generation of British colonial administrators profoundly altered British usage of American history in imperial debates. In the process, they influenced both South African history and wider British imperial thought. Prior usage of the Revolution and Early Republic in such debates focused on the United States as a cautionary tale, warning against future ‘lost colonies’. Aided by the publication of F.S. Oliver’s Alexander Hamilton (1906), administrators in South Africa used Hamilton and George Washington, the Federalist Papers, and the drafting of the Constitution as an Anglo-exceptionalist model of modern self-government. In doing so they applied the lessons of the Early Republic to South Africa, thereby contributing to the formation of the Union of 1910. They then brought their reconception of the United States, and their belief in the need for ‘imperial federation’, back to the metropole. There they fostered growing diplomatic ties with the U.S. while recasting British political history in-light-of the example of American federation. This process of inter-imperial exchange culminated shortly after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles when they publicly presented the Boer Generals Botha and Smuts as Washington and Hamilton reborn in the Round Table journal.

Inspired by the ideas of the American popular economist Henry George, a small group of Radical Liberal MPs, supported by enthusiasts throughout Britain, tried to persuade the Liberal Government of 1906-1914 that a tax on the value of land would bring social justice whilst avoiding the inevitable loss of personal freedom which would come with New Liberal collectivist policies.

H. G. Wells was one of the most celebrated writers in the world during the first half of the twentieth century. Famed for his innovative fiction, he was also an influential advocate of socialism and the world state. What is much less well-known is that he was a significant contributor to debates about the nature of social science. This article argues that Wells’s account of social science in general, and sociology in particular, was shaped by an idiosyncratic philosophical pragmatism. In order to demonstrate how his philosophical arguments inflected his social thought, it explores his attack on prevailing theories of race, while also highlighting the limits of his account. The article concludes by tracing the reception of Wells’s ideas among social scientists on both sides of the Atlantic. Although his programme for utopian sociology attracted few disciples, his arguments about the dynamics of modern societies found a large audience among social scientists and political thinkers.

H. G. Wells was one of the most influential writers of the first half of the twentieth century. Most famous today as a founder of modern science fiction, he was once known throughout the world as a visionary social and political thinker. Questions of global order were central to his work. From the opening decade of the century until the close of the Second World War, he campaigned tirelessly for the creation of a world state, characterised by universal peace and justice. Yet scholarship on Wells has paid insufficient attention to the complex and conflicted nature of Wells’s early views about how to build a world state, and in particular the tensions between his advocacy of a New Republic, formed by the unification of the English-speaking peoples, and his support for liberal imperialism. In this essay I analyse the development of this key theme in Wells’s political thinking. I demonstrate how his views on race, empire, and Anglo-American union shifted over time, show how his political arguments connected to his underlying views about social explanation and language, and highlight how his interpretation of the United States had a profound influence on his ideas about world order.

Read throughout the world, H. G. Wells was one of the most famous political thinkers in the early twentieth century. During the early 1900s he elaborated a bold, idiosyncratic, and controversial cosmopolitan socialist vision. In this article I offer a new reading of Wells’s political thought. I argue that he developed a distinctive pragmatist philosophical orientation, which he synthesised with his commitments to evolutionary theory. His pragmatism had four main components: a nominalist metaphysics; a verificationist theory of truth; a Jamesian “will to believe”; and a vision of philosophy as an exercise oriented to improving practice. His political thought was shaped by this philosophical orientation. Wells, I contend, was the most high-profile pragmatist political thinker in the opening decades of the twentieth century. Such an understanding requires a re-evaluation of both Wells and the history of pragmatism.

Plans to refurbish and replant an important rock garden that was developed in the late Victorian and early Edwardian period have stimulated the first serious study of its layout and history – and the influential innovations trialled at the site.

This paper examines the range of formative influences, within their educational experience, that helped to propel public schoolboys towards volunteering for military service upon the outbreak of the First World War. (Note that in the UK, “public schools” are, confusingly, institutions that are fee-paying and are thus frequented by students born into the upper and upper middle-classes). Based upon research conducted at second-tier English public schools, the work examines the scholastic factors and teaching methods that moulded boys’ characters and attitudes to the extent that responses to a strident call to arms in 1914 were almost universally positive. The areas explored in depth include: the influence of the schools as austere total institutions in the furtherance of manliness and muscular Christianity values; the classroom curriculum – specifically, the indoctrination of national supremacist values and the socialization of positive feelings as to war and ‘glorious death in battle’; the ubiquitous focus upon character development through competitive sports; the effects of religious teaching upon boys’ attitudes to subsequent volunteering; the militaristic impact of the 1908 Officers’ Training Corps scheme.

Throughout, the thesis forms connections between deliberately embedded public school character and attitude traits with the requirement, by military recruiters, for similar attributes within their intake of junior officers during the early months of the First World War. Several broad questions are dealt with: for example, how appropriate were sports-embedded qualities to practical subaltern officering? What made the recruitment campaign so successful in securing ex-public school volunteers? How did key elements within the public school environment (e.g. authoritative hierarchy, rules and discipline, monasticism, indoctrinated beliefs) result in volunteering enthusiasm? To help address these (and other) relevant questions, the thesis draws upon the works of specialists within related fields - notably sociologists, linguists and educational experts.

In conclusion, the thesis confirms the fact that, and determines how, thousands of ex-public schoolboys were  engineered, from an early age,towards serving their country in wartime.

Keywords: WW1, "First World War", "Great War", volunteering, recruitment, education, "public schools", OTC, history, geography, classics, athleticism, manliness, "elective reading", Edwardian

"The decade preceding the outbreak of the First World War saw Great Britain engaged in a naval arms race of unprecedented expense against the German empire. The spiralling cost of armaments proved politically problematic for a Liberal ministry ostensibly committed to ‘Peace, Retrenchment, and Reform’. Outside the government, however, an organized navalist lobby agitated enthusiastically for ever greater levels of defence preparedness. Groups such as the Navy League have typically been regarded as bastions of the radical right. In fact, as this article demonstrates, Liberal engagement with and participation in the navalist lobby was far greater than historians have realized. Liberal MPs accounted for a significant portion of the Navy League’s support within Parliament, and Liberals held many leadership positions in the organization. These men were motivated by considerations of national defence, but they also identified their navalism as belonging to a coherent Liberal political tradition. The navy had long been associated with progressive political causes, above all with the maintenance of free trade, and was regarded as being free from the more regressive forms of militarism associated with standing armies. In this sense, navalism was not simply a phenomenon of the radical right; it also represented a distinctly Liberal form of militarism.
"

My contribution to the body of knowledge consists of a delineation of representations of the German as temporally and spatially Other, as different in Time and Space, in literature, travel writing, and political cartoons, 1870-1914. I utilise the frameworks of imagology, semiotics, and the theory of temporalisation outlined by Johannes Fabian, in order to show how these literary and visual representations constructed the stereotypical German national character as existing in a different, more primitive Time than the civilised English. Additionally, I map how this projected national stereotype became, to use the terminology of Jean Baudrillard, hyperreal, i.e. perceived to be more real than the German individuals who supposedly possessed the imagined national character. This development was, I argue, achieved through the production and dissemination of national stereotypes through different mediums of late nineteenth and early twentieth century print media. The different modes of representations, I argue, were used as temporalising devices in order to encapsulate and contain the German in the Past, in a different Time. Before the German unification in 1871, Germany had been perceived as a backward, yet admirable culture, economically, politically, and colonially lagging behind Britain. However, the unified nation state’s subsequent economical and industrial prosperity, as well as its naval and colonial expansion, enabled Germany to emerge as a political rival to Britain, alternating between the role of ally and a viable threat. In order to neutralise such a threat, the perceived German national characteristics of efficiency and organisation, subservience to authority, and excessive militarism, were interpreted as symptoms of temporal distantiation. To the British observer, the German was no longer confined to a different Time, constantly lagging behind the Time of the English, but had reached and intruded into the present, posing a temporal invasion.

In January 2009, 9 (20 x 20m2) geophysical RM15 Resistance Meter surveys were conducted at Battery Point, Portishead, North Somerset. This site according to documentary evidence has been occupied at least since the Elizabethan period, with successive fortifications constructed during the English Civil War, Napoleonic, Victorian, Edwardian and Second World War eras. The geophysical survey only located evidence of a ditch/path? probably dating from the construction of the 1903 battery. A photographic survey identified possible remains of a Second World War platform not noted on the SMR. Additions to current SMR’s can be consulted in the Appendix X.

During the final quarter of the twentieth century, the democratic peace thesis - the idea that democracies do not fight one another - moved to the centre of scholarly and political debate throughout the Western world. Much of this work traces its origins to the European Enlightenment, and especially on Immanuel Kant. However, this historical narrative misses much of the subsequent discourse about democracy and war. In this essay I focus on some prominent, though now largely forgotten, strands of political thinking in the United States and Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular, I dissect fin de siècle debates about democracy, empire, race, and interstate conflict. Section I delineates four popular visions of peace that circulated during the nineteenth century: structural-liberal, radical-liberal, socialist, and republican. Section II introduces what I call the ‘democratic war thesis’ and the ‘democratic empire thesis.’ The former identified the linkages between democratic political structures and inter-state conflict, the latter suggested that vast empires could co-operatively govern the world and abolish war.  Section III anatomises the racial peace thesis, which was propounded by a range of prominent figures,  including Andrew Carnegie, Cecil Rhodes and H. G. Wells. They argued, from different points on the political spectrum, that the 'Anglo-Saxon race' held the key to perpetual peace.

This essay maintains that child-centered art was integral to Anglo-American mass culture in the period from 1880 to 1920 and argues for a redefinition of this “cult of the child.” Rather than limiting our focus to English authors and making gender and sexuality the central terms of our analysis, scholars of literature, drama, and film should regard the cult as a transgeneric, transatlantic phenomenon that coincided with the rise of consumer capitalism and registered a wide array of contemporary anxieties, including concerns about class stratification and racial tension. The allure of crowd-pleasing child protagonists such as Little Lord Fauntleroy, the Little Colonel, and Peter Pan often derives not from their perfect purity, but from their ability to oscillate between identity categories and, in so doing, help others more “set in their ways” to follow suit and become less committed to the norms and prejudices belonging to their sociocultural position.

Francis Newbery, Director of the Glasgow School of Art 1885 and1918, produced a painting which depicted the deliberations of the School’s governors as they commissioned the building of new school premises designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh. The painting was acquired by the School in 1914 and hung in the Board Room. A mixture of deliberate technique and fortuitous circumstance in the creation of this work seems to have made for a canvas saturated with meaning in the evidently discordant complexity of its representations of time and space. An examination of the painting is used critically to engage with the story of the creation of Mackintosh’s masterwork, and to contextualise the process in which the latter was produced as a significant work of art.

In the years that immediately preceded the outbreak of the First World War, a willingness to die, and die well, in pursuit of a noble objective was lauded as the ultimate act of courage by a diverse range of commentators across the United Kingdom. The story of the deaths of Captain Robert Falcon Scott and his companions on their return from the South Pole in 1911 inspired effusive references to medieval chivalry and Christian sacrifice, and seemed to offer welcome proof that an ancient form of British courage was still very much alive in the twentieth century. This article explores British conceptions of combatant courage during the First World War as understood by the civilian population on the home front and the junior officers and men who bore the brunt of the fighting on the Western Front. Drawing on often overlooked sources that shed light on troop culture, it argues that while neither group rejected the pre-war paradigm, each embraced a conception of courage that was informed by its own distinctive needs and experiences. Chivalry and dignified self-sacrifice resonated strongly with civilians who suffered unprecedented levels of bereavement and understood their nation’s role in the war as righteous and just. For the soldiers who served in the front lines of an attritional trench war in which personal agency was greatly reduced, a robust rejection of victimhood and an emphasis on perseverance, articulately expressed through humour, became the new ideal of courage.

The Piltdown forgery was an attempt to fabricate an ancient human ancestor, as well as the world that it came from. An important part of substantiating that world was to fabricate the material culture of Eoanthropus dawsoni, the Piltdown Man. This paper looks at the flint tools from the Piltdown site. They reveal important clues as to how the forger perpetrated the hoax, and why certain types of artefact were included, while others were omitted. This is the first time the lithics from the hoax have been comprehensively examined since the exposure of the forgery.

I discovered the source for a quote in "Birds on the Western Front," a story by Saki (H. H. Munro), which was announced to appear in the October 14, 1916 issue of The Westminster Gazette (but never did). The quote was taken from Niva, a Russian magazine, in particular from its issue published on April 30, 1916.

Over time the RMS Titanic which was a revolutionary development in shipbuilding has become a symbol for loss and calamity, completely losing its glamour as a state-of-the-art ocean liner. While it is easier to recall these memories of its tragedy over ones of it as a separate entity from its demise, it is imperative to reflect back on what the past has to offer, lest history turns into lost memory. Through various forms of documentation and recollection, the Titanic proves that it is, and always has been, in a class of its own.

Co-edited by Ailise Bulfin and Harry Wood. Two related special editions on the alarmist popular author, journalist, and amateur spy William Le Queux and his relationship to the culture of the period before, during and after the First World War. The aim is to assess the reciprocal relationship between Le Queux’s fictional and propaganda texts and contemporary social concerns, particularly those surrounding urban decay, Russian tsarism, invasion and spying. The special editions are based on the findings an interdisciplinary workshop held in June 2015 at Trinity College Dublin, entitled 'Master of Misinformation: William Le Queux, Invasion Scares and Spy Fever, 1880-1930' organised by the Invasion Network.

This article discusses E. Nesbit's urban fantasies and her educational ideas in Wings and the Child (1913). I focus particularly on her portrayal of London, as well as her portrayals of ancient and imaginary cities. Novels discussed in this article include The Story of the Treasure Seekers (1899) (with brief references to its two sequels); The Psammead Trilogy, including Five Children and It (1902), The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904), and The Story of the Amulet (1906); The Enchanted Castle (1907); The House of Arden (1908); Harding's Luck (1909); and the Magic City (1910). The definition and introduction for the sixteen-page article follow below:

Definition
Nesbit’s portrayal of London and other cities in her late-Victorian and Edwardian children’s novels united original, humorous and, at times, fantastic writing with Fabian socialism.

Introduction
E. Nesbit (1858–1924) (married name Edith Bland) is best known for the children’s novels she published in her 40s and 50s, starting with her innovative breakthrough novel, The story of the treasure seekers (1899), episodes of which were published from 1894 onward in various periodicals, including Nister’s Holiday Annual; the Illustrated London News and its Christmas supplement, Father Christmas; Pall Mall; and Windsor (Nelson 2013: xviii). The novel provides a humorous child’s-eye view of London from a protagonist living in the Lewisham Road, who confidently accords his semi-detached home a place in well-crafted literature:

I have read books myself, and I know how beastly it is when a story begins, “‘Alas!’ said Hildegarde with a deep sigh, ‘we must look our last on this ancestral home’”—and then some one else says something—and you don’t know for pages and pages where the home is, or who Hildegarde is, or anything about it. Our ancestral home is in the Lewisham Road. It is semi-detached and has a garden, not a large one… . It is one of us that tells this story—but I shall not tell you which: only at the very end perhaps I will. While the story is going on you may be trying to guess, only I bet you don’t. (Chap. 1)

The narrator’s story, with exact details about south-east London, is superior to a “beastly” literary tradition with which he is familiar, which offers no such details. While this narrator (and many other Nesbit characters) cares very much about the loss of ancestral homes, the fictional Hildegarde’s loss troubles Nesbit’s (equally fictional) narrator because the story does not pay adequate attention to place or persons, a fault he means to remedy in his own writing.

What makes Nesbit’s writing about the city unique is her clear consideration of the city (and, particularly, London) either from the child’s point of view or on behalf of the child. As Lee Garver writes about Nesbit’s Fabian nonfiction in The New Age, Nesbit’s work demonstrates “that a concern for child welfare … can be every bit as revolutionary, every bit as concerned with making things new, as a concern with the male world of work and labour” (2019: 351). Likewise, Suzanne Rahn notes that Nesbit’s Story of the Amulet, “in general … has more to say about education in her one chapter than [H. G.] Wells in his whole book [A modern utopia], and her description, brief as it is, sounds far more practical than the hit-or-miss system advocated by [William] Morris [in News from Nowhere]. Indeed, she went on to develop her ideas in Wings and the child” (1985: 135).

Nesbit’s concern about children’s experiences in cities often leads to negative commentary, particularly in Nesbit’s authorial intrusions, but also in remarks by her characters. At the same time, the adventures recorded in the Bastable trilogy (1899, 1901, 1904b), the second two books of the Psammead trilogy (1904a, 1906b), and Harding’s luck (1909) are unimaginable without their London backdrop. However much better the country is for children, according to Nesbit, her London middle-class children manage to enjoy themselves (and to learn) with the aid of their active, well-read imaginations, with the “heaps of things you can see in London without paying for them,” and, at times, with magic (Amulet 1906b: Chap. 1). London’s potential is also an important theme in Nesbit’s writing, and this potential is defined by her Fabian socialist ideals: She imagines utopian cities for children (and adults) and maintains that city-building is in itself a healthy imaginative exercise.

(Please see the doi (https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62592-8_348-3) or contact me if you need the remainder of the article. Thank you.)

This paper considers the persistence of the Renaissance pageant in modern and post-modern culture, both as a recurrent metaphor for history in general and as a feature of stage, cinematic and communal representations of early modern history in particular. After examining the status of public processions in Renaissance London as conscious revivals of the Roman triumph, indebted at the same time to aspects of the medieval mystery plays, the essay examines the English historical pageants of the Edwardian and inter-war years as themselves revivals of both Renaissance pageantry and aspects of the Shakespearean history play. It looks in particular at their emphasis on the Tudor monarchs and on the ethnic origins of Englishness, identifying the fading of the pageant as a genre in the post-war years with the collapse of certain ideas about English exceptionalism and historical continuity.

In her recent books, Lou Taylor has highlighted the connection between the collecting of dress by late-Victorian and Edwardian genre painters and the later inclusion of their collections in museums
of decorative arts such as the Victoria and Albert Museum (V & A) and the London Museum in the early-twentieth century. Drawing on this preliminary work, and using contemporary periodicals and archival sources, the histories of four specific collections are highlighted: at the London Museum the
John Seymour Lucas, Edwin Austin Abbey and Ernest Crofts collections and at the V & A the Talbot Hughes collection, all acquired in the period 1910–14. The investigation aims to explain why dress, so often at that period derided as ephemeral and frivolous, was finally accepted as a legitimate subject for museum collections and focuses on the changing meanings of the dress object as it moved from the private to the public sphere.

The Imperial Maritime League was one of the more prominent patriotic leagues which orbited the Edwardian Unionist party. It is frequently mentioned in studies of the period and is often cast as extremist. This article is the first to examine the league in detail. It utilises its substantial archives, contemporary journalism, and the publications of rival navalist organisations. The article revises previous interpretations, and adds new detail to our understanding of Edwardian patriotic leagues, by highlighting the relevance of radical right ideology to the Imperial Maritime League’s political outlook and campaigns. In spite of its short life, and lacking a mass membership, the league’s media reliant approach to campaigning attracted considerable attention and prefigured twenty-first century internet petitions. It articulated and channelled extra-parliamentary sentiment into specific navalist causes, yet it also represented and amplified radical right discontent with parliamentary politics. It worked closely with likeminded newspaper editors and naval officers to challenge the Unionist leadership, Admiralty and Navy League. The Imperial Maritime League sought to recast organised navalism by dedicating it to a radical right approach to politics. It failed to win over significant numbers of Navy Leaguers because they rejected its narrow radical right outlook, nor could it offer ordinary members social inducements. The Imperial Maritime League’s difficulties were compounded by the Navy League’s decision to revise its structures and strategy, and resulting success in increasing its membership and political patrons. The Imperial Maritime League succeeded in transforming organised navalism to the benefit only of the Navy League.

The paper deals with British russophobia of XIX century as a tool of international relations building. The anti-Russian pamphlets used the entire arsenal of tools of influencing, described by R. Cialdini. They needed for the formation of public opinion, the adoption of certain foreign policy decisions and organization alliances. A very important role belonged to used by pamphleteers binary oppositions, involved in the formation of positive and negative identities of Great Britain and its allies and justify the bipolar system of international relations.
В статье британская русофобия XIX в. рассматривается как инструмент выстраивания системы международных отношений. В антироссийских памфлетах выявлен весь арсенал средств влияния, описанных Р. Чалдини. Они были необходимы для формирования общественного мнения, принятия определенных внешнеполитических решений и организации альянсов. При этом важную роль играли используемые памфлетистами бинарные оппозиции, участвовавшие в формировании положительной и отрицательной идентичности Британии и ее союзников и обосновывавшие биполярную систему международных отношений.

British politics between the 1880s and 1914 was mediated by the multinational nature of the United Kingdom. A sense of national identity emerged in Ireland, Scotland and Wales that, in different ways, translated into nationalist demands on the state. This essay examines some aspects of these demands but also seeks to highlight forces that held the Union together in this turbulent period.
The essay is published in History, Nationhood and the Question of Britain, edited by Helen Brocklehurst and Robert Phillips, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.