"The Secret of England's Greatness"

The Secret of England's Greatness is a portrait by Thomas Jones Barker of Queen Victoria meeting an African envoy and presenting him with a copy of the Bible. Painted around 1863, it has become an icon of British imperialism in this period and of the justification of colonial expansion in terms of the transmission of the values of the Bible. As such, the portrait appears confident and unambiguous: the secret of England's greatness is unravelled and the truth is exposed. This article seeks to disturb the apparent absence of mystery in this painted encounter and to examine what remains concealed in the meeting between the white sovereign and the black emissary. Moving from Barker's painting to William Mulready's The Toyseller, which was completed in the same years and depicts a black pedlar trying to sell a wooden toy to a white mother and child, the article uncovers, within the language of painting and its surrounding discourses, a different kind of disturbing and exhilarating secret, concerned with racial identity and mid-Victorian desire. Working from a reading of the surface of the paintings to related representations of blackness in nineteenth-century science and culture, the article considers how The Toyseller negotiates the proximity of the figures of the black pedlar and the white mother and child and the significance of the compositional gap between them and suggests that Mulready's painting visualizes many of the issues that were at the heart of British imperialism in the middle of the nineteenth century, following the abolition of slavery

“Red Taffeta Under Tweed”: the color of post-war clothes

In the years following the end of the Second World War and the passing of the 1948 British Nationality Act, the language of color was gradually and steadily harnessed to ideologies of race and nation, as chromatic hue and skin color became utterly imbricated. The relationship between the colors of clothing and skin are explored first through discussion of the naming and standardization of colors from the 1930s to the 1950s by the British Colour Council before turning to an analysis of the 1959 British Film, Sapphire, and its construction of racial identities through the semantics of hue, dress and appearance. These ideas were disseminated not only through visual culture, but also through the expertise of social scientists and in journalism, popular psychology, and many forms of visual media. Choice of clothing styles and colors was believed to expose innate racial traits and preferences, defining both the restrained, neutral look of the white nation and the sexualized and dangerous excesses of the new black African and Caribbean immigrants

Victorian beauty: 1945-1955

This article examines the reworking of Victorian beauty in the visual culture of post-war Britain. Although the work of post-war modernisation and reconstruction was regarded as a symbolic break with the nineteenth-century past, the Victorian age continued to haunt the nation in the years following the end of the war, generating its own distinctive fascination and beauty. Focussing on an historical melodrama, Pink String and Sealing Wax (UK; dir. Robert Hamer, 1945), the article examines the narrative and its star, Googie Withers, in order to examine the role, meaning and appeal of Victorianism and Victorian beauty in the post-war years

Screening genius

Lynda Nead considers the tradition of portraying artists on the big scree

‘As Snug as a Bug in a Rug’: post-war housing, homes and coal fires

This article examines the layers of meaning and value attached to the image of the open coal fireside in the years immediately following the end of the Second World War. Although the open fire has a much longer economic, social and cultural history, it is argued here that after 1945 it took on new, emergent meanings that tapped into pressing contemporary debates concerning the nature of the modern British nation, the home and the family. Whilst writers often evoked the experience of the open fire as a timeless comfort, addressing basic human needs, the fireside of post-war British journalism and illustration was a very modern thing indeed, able to express specific debates arising from the requirements of reconstruction and modernisation. The almost folkloric associations of the open fire made it harder in the 1950s to legislate against domestic smoke than it was to regulate industrial pollution. Vested interests drew on the powerful rhetoric of the coal fire to combat the smoke pollution reports of the early 1950s and the growing inevitability of legislation. The coal fire was part of a post-war chain of being that started with the domestic hearth and progressed to the nuclear family, the self-contained home, the nation, and ultimately to the Commonwealth

Ruth Ellis's suit

On 10th April 1955 Ruth Ellis shot and killed her lover outside a north London pub. She was arrested on the spot and tried for murder in the Number One Court at the Old Bailey; her highly-publicised trial was short and the jury took just over twenty minutes to reach a guilty verdict. She was executed on 12th July 1955 and was the last woman to be hanged in England. This is an article about the suit that Ellis wore to her trial. It was a smart, black, fur-trimmed tailored suit, which she wore with a white, silk shirt and high-heeled black shoes. Her hair was freshly dyed and her make-up was perfect, she intended to look her best for the Old Bailey; and yet, her biographies record that someone in the courtroom was heard to announce that she looked like ‘a typical West End tart.’ What can be learned from the disjuncture between Ellis’s self-perception and the perception of the public? What can a suit tell us about gender, sex and class in post-war Britain? Clothes weave in and out of Ellis’s life story and the story of Britain after the War; they were necessary and desirable, part of a personal and national masquerade

A bruise, a neck and a little finger: the visual archive of Ruth Ellis

Ruth Ellis was the last woman to be hanged in Britain. On April 10, 1955, in front of witnesses, she shot and killed her lover, David Blakely, and was immediately arrested and imprisoned. In so many other ways, however, her life was similar to those of many aspirational women of the working classes in postwar Britain; she achieved notoriety because of the murder and execution. This essay uses archives of press photography to examine the diverse ways in which Ellis constructed her identity and was represented to the public as a sexualized woman. It attempts a feminist encounter with the visual archive—an encounter not only with an individual woman but also, and as importantly, with 1950s sex, sexuality, class, and violence

Victorian Babylon: people, streets and images in Nineteenth-Century London

Book synopsis: In this fascinating and innovative look at nineteenth-century London, Lynda Nead offers a new account of modernity and metropolitan life. She charts the relationship between London’s formation into a modern organized city in the 1860s and the emergence of new types of production and consumption of visual culture. She considers the role visual images played in the creation of a vibrant and diverse urban culture and how new kinds of publics were created for these representations. Shifting the focus of the history of modernity from Paris to London, Nead here argues for a different understanding of gender and public space in a society where women joined the everyday life of city streets and entered the debates concerning morality, spectacle, and adventure. The book draws on texts and images of many kinds—including acts of Parliament, literature, newspaper reports, private letters, maps, paintings, advertisements, posters, and banned obscene publications. Taking a highly interdisciplinary approach, Nead explores such intriguing topics as the efforts of urban improvers to move water, air, traffic, goods, and people in the Victorian metropolis; the impact of gas lighting and glass on urban leisure; and the obscenity legislation that emerged in response to new forms of visual mass culture that were perceived as dangerous and pervasive