From Sawney Beane to Sweeney Todd: Murder machines in the mid-nineteenth century metropolis

This article traces the changes and continuities in fictional stories of serial murder in London from the late-seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century. In particular, it shows how changes in the primary audience for metropolitan popular culture necessitated dramatic shifts in the tale of serial killing and narratives of violence. Thus, by the nineteenth century, as the lower classes had become the main supporters of both traditional and new genres of entertainment in popular culture, their experience of and fears and anxieties about urban change became intertwined with myths about serial killing and reflected in a new character of the public nightmare, Sweeney Todd, the barber of Fleet Street, who set out to effectively depopulate the capital with his ghastly murder machine

Mr and Mrs Punch in Nineteenth-Century England

This article examines the changes and continuities in the depiction of the violent relationship between the popular glove puppets, Punch and Judy, over the course of the nineteenth century. While the puppet show emerged as a low-brow street entertainment during the first decades of the nineteenth century, by 1850 it had been hijacked by the middle and upper classes, and began to appear with increasing frequency in fashionable drawing rooms. At the same time, the relationship between the two central characters, Punch and Judy, was substantially modified. On the streets, during the first half of the century, the Punches' marriage had both reflected the continuing popularity of the early modern theme of the 'struggle for the breeches' and encapsulated familial tensions that resulted from the pressures of industrialisation and urbanisation. However, from 1850 the middle classes attempted to reshape the relationship into a moral tale in order to teach their children valuable lessons about marital behaviour. Yet, at the same time, the maintenance of violence in the portrayal of the Punches' conjugal life exposed crucial patterns of continuity in attitudes towards marriage, masculinity, and femininity in Victorian England

Review Essay: Reading the Victorian Underworld

At the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, there is no denying that new digital technologies have dramatically reshaped the way we conduct research, not least in the reproduction of large numbers of primary sources online, including many that were previously difficult for scholars to access. An unprecedented range of key resources in the history of nineteenth-century crime can be viewed by almost anyone, anywhere, at any time. Furthermore, advances in scanning technology have..

L’éducation populaire au XIXe siècle dans les îles Britanniques

À travers la création d’écoles financées par les fonds publics et l’expansion de la surveillance étatique sur les programmes et l’assiduité, le XIXe siècle fut témoin de l’officialisation croissante de l’éducation destinée à la classe ouvrière. Pourtant, ce processus ne fut pas vécu de la même manière dans les quatre nations (Angleterre, Pays de Galles, Écosse et Irlande). Il existait d’importantes différences culturelles, et les nationalismes rivaux influencent les récits des contemporains c..

Comprendre la Grande-Bretagne du xixe siècle à travers le prisme changeant de l’histoire culturelle

Cet article examine l’émergence, dans les années 1980 et 1990, d’une nouvelle école d’historiens du culturel dans le domaine de l’histoire britannique du XIXe siècle. L’intérêt porté à la configuration culturelle et aux productions sociales n’était, bien entendu, pas complètement « nouveau ». Les passe-temps, les loisirs et les coutumes du peuple avaient déjà attiré l’attention des universitaires historiens du social une vingtaine d’années plus tôt. Cependant, à bien des égards, ce que l’on nomme le « tournant culturel » (cultural turn) des années 1980 a clairement marqué une rupture, alors que les nouveaux historiens du culturel, abordant désormais l’histoire britannique sous un angle plus large et plus interdisciplinaire, adoptaient une définition beaucoup plus vaste de la « culture » et s’éloignaient des méthodologies plus traditionnelles. La nature éclectique de la nouvelle histoire culturelle s’est cependant révélée être une source de faiblesse autant que de force et les inquiétudes importantes exprimées à propos du caractère désordonné et incohérent de la pratique de l’histoire au début du XXIe siècle indiquent que nous avons à nouveau atteint un autre tournant critique dans ce domaine.This article examines the emergence of a new school of cultural historians in the field of nineteenth-century British history during the 1980s and 1990s. Interest in the cultural make-up and artefacts of society is not, of course, entirely “new”. Pastimes, recreations and customs especially of the ordinary people had captured the attention of social historians in the academy around twenty years earlier. However, the so-called “cultural turn” of the 1980s did, in many ways, signal a decisive break, as the new cultural historians, now approaching British history from a wider, more interdisciplinary basis, embraced a much more all-encompassing definition of “culture” and distanced themselves from the more traditional methodologies. However, the eclectic nature of the new cultural history has proved to be as much a source of weakness as of strength, and the loud concerns about the haphazard and disjointed practice of history at the turn of the twenty-first century mean that we have again reached another critical juncture in this field

Education in the working-class home: modes of learning as revealed by nineteenth-century criminal records

The transmission of knowledge and skills within the working-class household greatly troubled social commentators and social policy experts during the first half of the nineteenth century. To prove theories which related criminality to failures in working-class up-bringing, experts and officials embarked upon an ambitious collection of data on incarcerated criminals at various penal institutions. One such institution was the County Gaol at Ipswich. The exceptionally detailed information that survives on families, literacy, education and apprenticeships of the men, women and children imprisoned there has the potential to transform our understanding of the nature of home schooling (broadly interpreted) amongst the working classes in nineteenth-century England. This article uses data sets from prison registers to chart both the incidence and ‘success’ of instruction in reading and writing within the domestic environment. In the process, it highlights the importance of schooling in working-class families, but also the potentially growing significance of the family in occupational training

Reappraising Victorian literacy through prison records

Since the Registrar General began to count the signatures and marks made by brides and grooms in parish registers across England in 1839, contemporaries and later historians have used this data to describe rates of literacy during the Victorian period. Evidence from the marriage registers only tells us about the literacy of the marrying population at any given point in time. Moreover, by distinguishing between those who could read and write and those who could not, the marriage registers have helped to draw an artificial line between those who were literate and the rest of the population, ignoring the large number of semi-literates who played an important role in a society progressing towards mass literacy. This article uses data collected on the separate skills of literacy and the experience of schooling of those men, women and children who passed through the criminal justice system between c.1840 and c.1870 in an attempt to reconstruct patterns of skills acquisition among the lower classes during the Victorian period. Not only does this evidence further dispel myths about the existence of a so-called 'criminal class' with specific characteristics in Victorian England, but, even more importantly, it shows that the path towards mass literacy was uneven, far less predictable than previously allowed, and often only loosely tied to developments in formal schooling

Literacy

Critical to an understanding of Victorian literature is an awareness of the participants in literate culture. Hence the importance of the study of literacy. Moreover, the 19th century marked the period when many Western states, including the United Kingdom, achieved mass literacy. This process was far from homogeneous or straightforward. Yet its consequence produced the transformation and unprecedented expansion of literate culture and a revolution in communication. Literacy comprises two skills: the ability to read and the ability to write. An awareness of these two components is important because even well into the 19th century, the skills were taught separately and sequentially. The existence of large numbers of readers has complicated definitions of literacy and attempts by historians to measure its presence in society. Moreover, closely related to literacy is numeracy, or the ability to count and do basic arithmetic. As the 19th century progressed numeracy gained increasing prominence in drives to educate the masses as arithmetic was joined with reading and writing to form the triumvirate of the 3Rs. However, the study of numeracy is not included in this article, in part because, at the present time (2015), numeracy has received scant attention from scholars and also because the skills of reading and writing dominated the attention of 19th-century commentators and policymakers and were used to establish a dividing line between the ignorant and the civilized. The study of literacy in the 19th century has occupied scholars from a range of disciplines (including the social sciences, education, literature, and history) as well as subdisciplines (including social and cultural history, book history, the history of reading, and the history of writing). Because of this multidisciplinary interest, a diverse range of methods has been employed to uncover the scale and assess the impact of the expansion of literacy between c. 1750 and c. 1950. The broad interest is also reflective of the importance of literacy as a field of study in its own right. Scholars have shown how the study of literacy helps us to understand the growth of the state, the nature of the state’s relationship with its citizens, the operation of agency by individuals, and the nature of the emergence of modernity. Furthermore, David Vincent in “The Invention of Counting: The Statistical Measurement of Literacy in Nineteenth-Century England’ (Vincent 2014, cited under Alternative Perspectives on Counting) and Harvey Graff in Labyrinths of Literacy: Reflections on Literacy Past and Present (1995) demonstrate the usefulness of studies of 19th-century literacy to debates about literacy today: The 19th century not only provides a laboratory for learning about literacy (Graff), but also creates a legacy of counting and language of assessment that continues to shape public policies (Vincent)

Cries of Murder and Sounds of Bloodshed: The practice of reading cheap fiction in working-class communities in early Victorian London

About the book: US: $79.99 This book is composed of a selection of papers presented at a conference in Cambridge in December 2005. Cultural history is a relatively new sub-discipline. Over the past few decades, it has become increasingly apparent that a new generation of historians has emerged. These scholars have become concerned with research, sources and questions traditionally beyond the scope of the discipline of history. Indeed, recent monographs in history have demonstrated a growing awareness of the cultural imagination in analyses of patterns of change and continuity in the past. Such a movement has also encouraged the development of new networks between different disciplines in the Arts and Social Sciences. The authors of these chapters come from a wide range of academic backgrounds. While all are concerned with crucial issues of the past, they represent a substantial variety of disciplines. In addition to the historians are those trained and working in literary studies, art history, design, music and science. As early-career scholars, the research they present is cutting edge: these contributions represent the very latest trends in cultural studies and demonstrate the attempts of new researchers to answer the most current and challenging questions that are being proposed in this field