̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Victorians

̽��ֱ��forgotten poet of Fordham

sjr81 — Tue, 10 Dec 2019 11:45:15 +0000

Handwritten verses from a nineteenth-century Cambridgeshire poet – who died destitute despite royal patronage – have been saved by Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Library.

Online atlas explores north-south divide in childbirth and child mortality during Victorian era

sc604 — Tue, 15 May 2018 07:36:56 +0000

̽��ֱ��Populations Past website is part of the Atlas of Victorian Fertility Decline research project based at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, in collaboration with the ̽��ֱ�� of Essex. It displays various demographic and socio-economic measures calculated from census data gathered between 1851 and 1911, a period which saw immense social and economic change as the population of the UK more than doubled, from just under 18 million to over 36 million, and industrialisation and urbanisation both increased rapidly.

̽��ֱ��atlas allows users to select and view maps of a variety of measures including age structure, migration status, marriage, fertility, child mortality and household composition. Users can zoom in to an area on the map and compare side-by-side maps showing different years or measures.

̽��ֱ��maps reveal often stark regional divides. “Geography plays a major role in pretty much every indicator we looked at,” said Dr Alice Reid from Cambridge’s Department of Geography, who led the project. “In 1851, more than one in five children born in parts of Greater Manchester did not survive to their first birthday. In parts of Surrey and Sussex however, the infant mortality rate at the same time was less than a third that number.”

While there are broad north-south divides in most of the maps, patterns at a local level were more complicated: in the northern urban-industrial centres such as Manchester, infant and child mortality were high, while many rural areas of the north had mortality rates as low as rural areas of the south. And in London, there is a sharp east/west divide in fertility, infant mortality, the number of live-in servants, and many other variables.

̽��ֱ��researchers also found that different types of industry were often associated with different types of families: in coal mining areas where there was little available work for women, women married young and often ended up with large families. In contrast, women in the textile-producing areas of Lancashire and Yorkshire had more opportunities to earn a wage, and perhaps consequently, had fewer children on average.

There are also big differences over time. ̽��ֱ��period saw a sharp drop in the number of women who continued to work after marriage, for instance. In 1851, more than a third of married women were in work across large sections of the country, but by 1911, only a tiny fraction of married women worked outside the home, apart from the textile-producing areas of the Northwest.

“This might be associated with the rise of the culture of female domesticity: the idea that a woman’s place is in the home,” said Reid.

Across the Western world, fertility rates have declined over the past 150 years. Gaining a historical perspective of how and why these trends have developed can help improve understanding of the way in which modern societies are shaped.

Between 1851 and 1911, England and Wales changed from countries where there were variable fertility and mortality rates to countries where rates for both were low. Child mortality and fertility fell from the 1870s, together with a fall in illegitimacy, but infant mortality did not start to fall until the dawn of the twentieth century.

As part of the project on fertility decline, the researchers have investigated fertility in more detail. For the first time, they have been able to calculate age-specific fertility rates for more than 2000 sub-districts across England and Wales during this era, and their results challenge views on the way that fertility fell.

“It’s long been thought that the fall in fertility was achieved when couples decided how many children they wanted at the outset of their marriage, and stopped reproducing once they had reached that number,” said Reid. “While this may have happened in more recent fertility transitions, such as in South-East Asia and Latin America, when reliable contraception was widely available, it was not a realistic scenario in the Victorian era.”

“We don’t find age patterns of fertility which would be produced by this type of ‘stopping’ behaviour during the Victorian fertility decline,” said Reid’s collaborator Dr Eilidh Garrett from the ̽��ֱ�� of Essex. “Such behaviour would show up as a larger reduction of fertility among older women, but instead, women of all ages appear to have been reducing their fertility.”

As well as the interactive maps, the Populations Past site provides a variety of resources for researchers, teachers and students at all levels. ̽��ֱ��research was funded by the Economic & Social Research Council and the Isaac Newton Trust.

A new interactive online atlas, which illustrates when, where and possibly how fertility rates began to fall in England and Wales during the Victorian era has been made freely available from today.

In 1851, more than one in five children born in parts of Greater Manchester did not survive to their first birthday. In parts of Surrey and Sussex however, the infant mortality rate at the same time was less than a third that number.

Alice Reid

Populations Past

Early childhood mortality rates in 1851 (left) and 1911 (right). ̽��ֱ��highest rates are in red and the lowest in blue.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Cutting welfare to protect the economy ignores lessons of history, researchers claim

tdk25 — Fri, 02 Dec 2016 06:00:14 +0000

Cutting welfare and social care budgets during times of economic hardship is an “historically obsolete” strategy that ignores the very roots of British prosperity, a group of Cambridge academics have warned.

Writing in the leading medical journal, ̽��ֱ��Lancet, a team of researchers argue that squeezing health and welfare spending in order to reduce taxes, and on the basis that these are luxuries that can only be afforded when times are good, overlooks a critical lesson of British history – namely that they are central to the nation’s economic success.

̽��ֱ��authors are all part of a group based at St John’s College, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, which is studying the causes of health inequalities and looking at how research in this area can be used to inform policy interventions.

Drawing on recent research, they argue that the concept of a British welfare state, widely thought to have begun after the Second World War, actually dates back to a “precocious welfare system” forged during the reign of Elizabeth I, which was fundamental to England’s emergence as “the most dynamic economy in the world”.

While the Chancellor of the Exchequer has said that there will be no further welfare savings during the present Parliament beyond those already announced, the paper is directly critical of the continuation of those existing policies, which have reduced welfare spending overall in the name of economic austerity.

Referring to the statement made by the former Prime Minister, David Cameron, that “you can only have a strong NHS if you have a strong economy”, the authors argue: “ ̽��ֱ��narrow view that spending on the National Health Service and social care is largely a burden on the economy is blind to the large national return to prosperity that comes from all citizens benefiting from a true sense of social security.”

They continue: “There are signs that Theresa May subscribes to the same historically obsolete view. Despite her inaugural statement as Prime Minister, her Chancellor’s autumn statement signals continuing austerity with further cuts inflicted on the poor and their children, the vulnerable, and infirm older people.”

By contrast, the paper argues that a universalist approach of progressively-funded health and welfare spending is an integral part of economic growth, and something that modern states cannot afford to do without. That conclusion is echoed in a new educational film, developed from work by Simon Szreter, Professor of History & Public Policy at Cambridge and a co-author of the Lancet piece.

“We are arguing from history that there needs to be an end to this idea of setting economic growth in opposition to the goal of welfare provision,” Professor Szreter said. “A healthy society needs both, and the suggestion of history is that they seem to feed each other.”

Perhaps surprisingly, the paper traces that feedback loop to the Tudor era, and specifically the Elizabethan Poor Laws in 1598 and 1601. These enshrined in law an absolute “right of relief” for every subject of the Crown, funding the policy with a community tax and applying both through the local Parish.

̽��ֱ��authors say that this not only represented the world’s first social security system, but also made the elderly less reliant on their children for support, increased labour mobility, enabled urban growth and eased Britain’s transition to an industrial economy. ̽��ֱ��system also maintained a level of demand by supporting the purchasing power of the poor when food prices rose.

Rather than stifling Britain’s economy, the paper argues that the system was therefore essential to helping the country to become the most urbanized society in the world, and the world’s leading economy, between 1600 and 1800. Although the population more than doubled during this time, key indicators of prosperity - such as life expectancy - actually improved.

“Overall, it facilitated the most sustained period of rising economic prosperity in the nation’s history,” the authors observe.

̽��ֱ��authors go on to link the economic growth that the nation experienced under the welfare state after 1945 with similar universalist principles of progressively-funded health and welfare provision, arguing that these stimulated a dynamic period of per capita economic growth, and cut the rich-poor divide to an all-time low during the 1970s.

Conversely, they argue that the economy has stagnated when such principles have been abandoned. ̽��ֱ��Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 overhauled the earlier Elizabethan Laws in an effort to prevent abuses of the system that were felt to be draining the pockets of honest taxpayers. Infamously, this involved providing relief through workhouses in which the appalling conditions, seared into social consciousness by authors like Charles Dickens, were so bad that only the truly destitute sought their help.

̽��ֱ��study suggests that there is no evidence that this approach, which came close to criminalising the poor, actually brought about much economic benefit. In fact, British growth rates gradually fell behind the country’s rivals’ after 1870 - and only recovered after 1950, in the postwar decades of the revived, universalist welfare state.

̽��ֱ��authors also point out that to cut welfare budgets because this will relieve taxation on “hard-working families” implies that those who need welfare are somehow unproductive. Just as the Victorian 1834 measures attempted to address a perceived problem with the “idle poor”, current strategies often dub benefits claimants, directly or indirectly, as “scroungers”.

“ ̽��ֱ��interests of the poor and the wealthy are not mutually opposed in a zero-sum game,” the authors conclude. “Investment in policies that develop human and social capital will underpin economic opportunities and security for the whole population.”

̽��ֱ��paper, Health and welfare as a burden on the state? ̽��ֱ��dangers of forgetting history is published in ̽��ֱ��Lancet.

Amid ongoing welfare cuts, researchers argue that investment in health and social care have been integral to British economic success since 1600.

There needs to be an end to this idea of setting economic growth in opposition to the goal of welfare provision. ̽��ֱ��suggestion of history is that they seem to feed each other.

Simon Szreter

Peter Higginbotham via Wikimedia Commons

Dinner time in St Pancras Workhouse, London, 1911. Workhouses, established under the Poor Law Amendment Act, were part of a Victorian programme that cut universal welfare support and stigmatised many poor people as “unproductive”.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Infant bodies were ‘prized’ by 19th century anatomists, study suggests

fpjl2 — Fri, 01 Jul 2016 07:23:45 +0000

A new study of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge anatomy collection suggests that the bodies of foetuses and babies were a “prized source of knowledge” by British scientists of the 18th and 19th centuries, and were dissected more commonly than previously thought and quite differently to adult cadavers.

Historical research combined with the archaeological assessment of collection specimens shows that foetus and infant cadavers were valued for the study of growth and development, and were often kept in anatomical museums.

Researchers say that socio-cultural factors and changes in the law, as well as the spread of infectious disease during the industrial revolution, dictated the availability of these small bodies for dissection.

̽��ֱ��study, conducted by Jenna Dittmar and Piers Mitchell from Cambridge’s Department of Archaeology and Anthropology, is the first to look specifically at how British scientists investigated the changing anatomy of childhood during the 1800s. ̽��ֱ��findings are published today in the Journal of Anatomy.

̽��ֱ��researchers undertook studies of the skeletal collection retained from the former dissecting room of Cambridge’s department of anatomy, with specimen dates ranging from 1768 to 1913.

While the bodies of adults typically underwent a craniotomy - opening of the top of the skull using a saw - the researchers found that anatomists generally kept the skulls of foetuses and young children in one piece. From a total of 54 foetal and infant specimens in the collection, just one had undergone a craniotomy.

Careful study of the bone surface revealed that soft tissues had been gently removed using knives and brushes in order to preserve as much of the bones of the head as possible, although surgical instruments would have been similar to those used on the fully-grown. Tools for other purposes in adults, such as ‘bone nipper’ forceps, were likely used for dividing diminutive ribcages.

̽��ֱ��research suggests that anatomists kept the skeletal remains of foetuses and infants for further study and use as teaching aids, whereas adults were frequently reburied after dissection.

“Foetal and infant bodies were clearly valued by anatomists, illustrated by the measures taken to preserve the remains intact and undamaged,” says Dittmar.

“ ̽��ֱ��skulls appear to have been intentionally spared to preserve them for teaching or display. This may explain why so few children with signs of dissection on their bones have been recovered from the burial grounds of hospitals or parish churches, compared with adults.”

Literature from the late 18th century shows that the size of infant bodies made them preferable for certain ‘anatomical preparations’ in teaching, particularly for illuminating the anatomy of the nervous and circulatory systems, which required an entire body to be injected with coloured wax and displayed.

“ ̽��ֱ��valuable and unique knowledge that could only be obtained from the examination of these developing bodies made them essential to the study of anatomy,” says Dittmar.

“During much of the 18th and 19th century, executed criminals provided the main legal access to cadavers, and it was previously thought that dissection of young children was relatively rare. However, changes in the law may have resulted in infant dissections becoming more common.”

̽��ֱ��Murder Act in 1752 gave the judiciary power to allow executed murderers - almost entirely men - to be used for medical dissection. These felons hardly made a dent in the growing demand for bodies, and a black market flourished.

Bodies acquired (often grave robbed) by gangs of ‘resurrectionists’, or body-snatchers, were usually sold by the inch, so those of infants were not very profitable, although there are records of ‘smalls’ being traded.

̽��ֱ��Anatomy Act of 1832 allowed workhouses and hospitals to donate the bodies of the poor if unclaimed by family, in an attempt to abate the resurrectionists. Infectious diseases such as cholera and tuberculosis were common killers during the industrial revolution, and a major cause of infant death in hospitals and beyond. Workhouses were desperate places, and nearly always lethal to infants.

Until 1838, a legal loophole did not require a stillborn baby to be registered, and a body could be easily sold to an anatomist through an intermediary. But the New Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 may have had the most significant repercussions of any law for infant material in anatomy collections, say the researchers.

̽��ֱ��Act ended parish relief for unmarried women and the availability of assistance from the father of an illegitimate child. Part of Victorian society’s attempt to curtail the illegitimate birth rate, the law succeeded only in contributing to dire situations for poor unwed women, mainly in service positions, who fell pregnant.

“This left very few options for these women: the workhouse, prostitution, abortion and infanticide - all of which were life-threatening,” says Mitchell. By the 1860s, infanticide in England had reached epidemic proportions.

“Our research shows that the major sources of the bodies of very young children were from stillborn babies of destitute mothers, babies who died from infectious diseases, those dying in charitable hospitals, and unmarried mothers who secretly murdered their new-born to avoid the social stigma of single parenthood,” says Mitchell.

“Poor and desperate women at the time of the industrial revolution could not only save the cost of a funeral by passing their child’s body to an anatomist, but also be paid as well. This money would help feed poor families, so the misfortune of one life lost could help their siblings to survive tough times.”

Top inset image: the only foetal skull in the Cambridge to have undergone a craniotomy.

A study of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge anatomy collection dating from the 1700s and 1800s shows how the bodies of stillborn foetuses and babies were valued for research into human development, and preserved as important teaching aids.

Foetal and infant bodies were clearly valued by anatomists, illustrated by the measures taken to preserve the remains intact and undamaged

Jenna Dittmar

Dissected foetal skull dating from the 1800s, originally held in the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge Anatomy Museum

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

̽��ֱ��archaeology of childhood

sjr81 — Sat, 30 Jan 2016 00:41:49 +0000

Hide and Seek: Looking for Children in the Past opens today and runs until January 29, 2017, at Cambridge ̽��ֱ��’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, bringing together collections held by the ̽��ֱ�� and Cambridgeshire County Council.

Unprecedented in its scope and ambition, Hide and Seek examines why so little is known about the life of children when children have outnumbered adults for most of human history.

Some of the objects on display will be familiar: Roman and medieval dolls are exhibited next to a children’s sledge and a Roman baby’s feeding bottle. Other exhibits, however, are not immediately recognisable as children’s objects at all: pots with small fingerprints, a tiny handmade axe made 400,000 years ago, gold-work as fine as a human hair; each have stories to tell about the children whose lives were intertwined with the objects now on display in the 21st century.

By looking carefully at all of this evidence, exhibition curator Jody Joy hopes the year-long show will redress our paucity of understanding about the ways in which youngsters interacted with both the adult and childhood worlds around them.

“Hide and Seek looks for glimpses of children’s lives in East Anglia and across England, from a child’s footprint made one million years ago, to toys and artefacts from the 20th century,” said Joy. “Children’s stories so rarely feature in the narratives that museums present. This exhibition aims to redress the balance.

“It is difficult to find children in the past, but not impossible. Throughout the show we present new research and interpretations to help provide a better understanding of children’s lives and to challenge our own assumptions about children and childhood.

“14th century illustrations from an illuminated manuscript show us that children in the 1300s enjoyed sledging and skating just as much as we do now. But we also want to show that evidence for the lives of children can be found beyond the obvious.”

To that end, the exhibition also looks past the artefacts of childhood such as toys, children’s clothes and burials. Local crime records, for example, reveal the sorry tale of 13-year-old Thomas Bradley from Burwell in Cambridgeshire, who in 1843 was sentenced to 15 years’ transportation to Australia for setting fire to stacks of corn and straw.

Likewise, an indenture document for ten-year-old Amey Basin, signed on May 11, 1764, outlines her apprenticeship to Thomas Wayman Sr, a dairyman, until she reached 21 or was married; and explains the responsibilities and expectations of apprentices and their employers in 18th century England.

Other exhibits, such as a pair of 19th century children’s handcuffs and a coroner’s report regarding the death of three-year-old Michael Higgins in 1837, illuminate the innumerable perils facing children throughout history.

“It was dangerous being a child in the past,” added Joy. “From prehistory until the Victorian period, 30-50 per cent of children did not survive to adulthood. Disease, germs and household accidents all took their toll.”

Perhaps some of the most challenging and uncomfortable exhibits in display are the artefacts speaking of the death and burial of children.

In 1990, the grave of a one-year-old Roman child was found in Cambridgeshire. Now on display at the museum, the body had been carefully placed in a lead coffin much too large for the infant inside. A wooden box full of ceramic figures was placed on top of the coffin before burial, although it is unknown whether these were intended as toys or religious items. Sometimes, the evidence on display raises more questions than answers.

Concluding the exhibition, the remains of an Anglo-Saxon girl (hidden behind a partition), challenges visitors to consider the often grey area between childhood and adulthood.

In 2010, the body, believed to be aged between 12-15 years old, was unearthed alongside the finest grave goods from an extraordinary 5th-6th century burial site. It is rare to find child burials from the Anglo-Saxon period despite children outnumbering adults and despite the high infant mortality rate. Archaeologists think children may have been buried in different ways to adults, and the fragile bones of infants do not survive long in the soil.

̽��ֱ��burial site was discovered in Oakington, just north of Cambridge. Excavators were surprised to find an exceptionally high proportion of child burials. Nearly half of the burials discovered belonged to individuals under the age of 12, and 27 per cent of the 128 burials were children under six; many containing small vessels which researchers are now analysing to identify their contents and understand more about the young children who were buried with them.

Added Joy: “ ̽��ֱ��skeleton is of an individual we would regard as a child, but she has been buried as if she were an adult. Ongoing research, new discoveries and excavations help us develop our understanding of children’s lives. Each new discovery can enrich our understanding of what life was like for children in the past.”

Other key exhibits include:

Baby feeding bottles from the Roman and Victorian periods
A bracelet for a Roman child
19th century samplers, stitched by three generations from the same family
Some of the oldest marbles ever found in England

Hide and Seek: Looking for Children in the Past runs from January 30, 2016 to January 29, 2017. ̽��ֱ��exhibition has been funded by a generous grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund. It is a joint project between Cambridgeshire County Council and the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Entry is free.

A sledge made from a horse’s jaw, the remains of a medieval puppet, the coffin of a one-year-old Roman child, and the skeleton of an Anglo-Saxon girl will all go on display in Cambridge today as part of a unique exhibition illuminating the archaeology of childhood.

It was dangerous being a child in the past. From prehistory until the Victorian period, 30-50 per cent of children did not survive to adulthood. Disease, germs and household accidents all took their toll.

Jody Joy

Chatteris Museum.

Tin toys from the 1930s–1950s.

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Licence type:

Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike

Are you a dog-person, a cat-person, or a bear-person?

amb206 — Wed, 16 Sep 2015 08:50:09 +0000

Scroll to the end of the article to listen to the podcast.

̽��ֱ��scale of contemporary pet keeping is remarkable. In the US, ‘fur babies’ outnumber human babies. In the UK, almost a quarter of households have a dog and almost a fifth owns a cat. Fish (often listed among pets) are even more popular.

̽��ֱ��keeping of these pets is one of the most significant of all human-animal relationships. ̽��ֱ��majority of pets live as part of the family. At the same time, many are poorly treated and animal activists have called into question the legitimacy of keeping pets at all.

What is a pet? ̽��ֱ��answer may seem straightforward: they are animals kept in the home for pleasure and companionship. But our interactions with pets are far more complex, rooted as much in ownership and domination as in sentimentality and affection.

In his recent book At Home and Astray, cultural geographer Dr Philip Howell explores the ways in which the Victorians brought favoured animals in from the cold, to enjoy a place at the centre of the domestic sphere, while relegating unwanted others to shelters and inevitable destruction.

Here Howell engages in a broad-ranging conversation about pets with PhD student Makoto Takahashi. They begin with a discussion about pets at their most extreme: the English poet Byron kept a bear at Cambridge and the French poet Gérard de Nerval walked a lobster on a silk ribbon. They go on to examine both the lighter and darker sides of pet keeping as a national obsession.

Next in the Cambridge Animal Alphabet: Q is for a creature that has seen a dramatic decline in the past 80 years, with two of the UK’s 26 species now extinct.

Have you missed the series so far? Catch up on Medium here.

The Cambridge Animal Alphabet series celebrates Cambridge's connections with animals through literature, art, science and society. Here, P is for Pet. Cultural geographer Dr Philip Howell and PhD student Makoto Takahashi examine both the lighter and darker sides of pet keeping as a national obsession.

Wikimedia Commons

A toy spaniel, a Pomeranian and a Maltese terrier at a basket – Oil on Canvas by Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Wegener 1855

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

Yes

Past versus present in an age of progress: the Victorians

lw355 — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 12:00:33 +0000

It was the age of industrialisation and political revolution, compulsory education and the dominance of the novel, the start of the postal service and the invention of the train, the excitement of evangelical Christianity and the critical challenge to the authorities of the past. Above all, it was an era that knew it was a time like no other, a time of radical progress and visionary reform. As the Victorians were forging remarkable economic and technological innovations, they were also obsessed with understanding their own history. In archaeology, geology, history, theology and evolutionary biology, how the past was understood was revolutionising the present – and shaping the future in which we now live.

For the past five years, a project funded by the Leverhulme Trust has taken a fresh look at the development and impact of the competing views of the past in 19th-century Britain. ‘Past versus Present: Abandoning the Past in an Age of Progress’, a project carried out by the Cambridge Victorian Studies Group, has broken new ground in transcending the disciplinary boundaries that are themselves an intellectual legacy of the Victorians.

It has proved to be a wonderful experience for all concerned, and a model of how productive and exciting a long-term interdisciplinary project can be. Each member of the project has found their work developing and expanding its horizons, and the group has provided a remarkably supportive space for exploring the richness of Victorian culture. Historians of modern Britain (Professor Peter Mandler) have been brought together with historians of science (Professor Jim Secord), and classicists (Professors Mary Beard and Simon Goldhill) with experts in literary criticism (Professor Clare Pettitt), along with eight postdoctoral fellows and three graduate students, to explore the full range of the Victorian experience, representation and comprehension of the past.

Central to the group’s activities was the weekly meeting where we read and discussed Victorian material, secondary sources and our own research in progress. These were generous but heated debates, where each member had something different to bring to the table. ̽��ֱ��varied ranges of knowledge and approaches were thrashed out, sometimes painfully. These led to regular workshops with invited guests from around the world, which in turn produced editions of journals and other publications (see below for the two most recent books).

Our projects looked at major defining questions of Victorian culture that can be properly treated only by a multidisciplinary team: from what the Victorians learned in school and university, to the poetry or novels they wrote; from how the new technologies of archaeology transformed biblical scholarship, to how imperial administrators changed policies from conquering and looting to ruling and maintenance of national cultural heritage; and from explorations of contemporary political violence to explorations of the influence of the ancient world on contemporary political idealism.

̽��ֱ��project has left a mark in the field of Victorian studies. It has raised the profile of hitherto neglected bodies of knowledge which the Victorians took for granted but which we do not, largely because of our different disciplinary map. We have gained a new appreciation of the paramount significance for the Victorian imagination of classical languages and archaeology, of Egypt and the Far East, of geology and the Biblical texts.

Although the project inevitably calls itself by the buzzword ‘interdisciplinary’, we were actually studying a period when the disciplines were just beginning to be formed and professionalised. In effect, much of the work was not so much interdisciplinary, as learning to reach back behind the disciplines to different regimes and organisations of knowledge. In exploring the Victorian attitudes to the past, we were exploring how the current scholarly map was formed. In investigating a Victorian sense of heritage, we were discovering the intellectual heritage that all modern academics share.

Interdisciplinary research has to be the answer when it comes to understanding the Victorians, writes Professor Simon Goldhill, one of the researchers involved in a £1.2 million project on Victorian Britain that is reaching the end of its five-year programme.

Professor Simon Goldhill

Dr Sadiah Qureshi

From Illustrated London News, September 16, 1845

Victorian appetites

A fascination for imported Zulus and the living curiosities of the modern world, an obsession with the beauty and perfection of ancient Greece and Rome – two very different sides of Victorian appetites, and the subject of recently published books by members of the Cambridge Victorian Studies Group.

In 1853, 13 Zulus were brought and displayed as “the savages at Hyde Park Corner” (where Dickens saw them), to perform dances, rituals and songs for a public of gazing English men and women. At first, such shows tended to be small-scale entrepreneurial speculations of just a single person or a small group. By the end of the century, performers were being imported by the hundreds and housed in purpose-built “native” villages for months at a time, delighting the crowds and allowing scientists and journalists the opportunity to reflect on racial differences, foreign policy, slavery, missionary work and the empire.

In the recently published Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire, and Anthropology in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Dr Sadiah Qureshi provides the first substantial overview of the Victorian penchant for exhibiting live human beings, especially those from exotic foreign climes.

̽��ֱ��book is full of startling stories and stunning images, but what makes it so interesting and important is its revelation of how science and popular culture developed hand in hand where race, anthropology and geography are concerned. We are still inheriting the impact of the Victorian fascination with race, and this book reveals that history with vibrant and incisive insight.

If Dr Sadiah Qureshi explores how the Victorians looked at the exotic, disturbing and denigrated ‘others’ of Victorian thinking – the natives, the savages, the racially inferior – Professor Simon Goldhill looks at the Victorians’ projection of an ideal, glorious origin for Western culture in classical antiquity. Just as the Victorians stared with horrified distance at “the savages”, so they wondered at the perfection of Greek bodies, the order of the Roman Empire, the beauty and profundity of classical poetry.

Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity: Art, Opera, Fiction, and the Proclamation of Modernity demonstrates how classics made up the furniture of the mind for Victorians, educated, as they were, in Greek and Latin and surrounded by classical imagery.

But, more significantly, this book also shows how classics became the way of enacting the most pressing cultural anxieties of the period. Whether it was Oscar Wilde and his chums looking back to Greece for sexual liberation, or painters turning to classical nudity to ground their aesthetic vision, or historians and novelists arguing the politics of democracy or the role of the early church, it was always a detour through the ideal of classical antiquity that framed their thinking.

̽��ֱ��Victorians prided themselves, anxiously, on being an age of progress, but progress was often judged and understood according to the ideal model of the ancient past – the Greece, as Nietzsche paradigmatically put it, which is the only place where we are truly at home.

These newly published books show how complex a business Victorian self-definition and self-understanding is: between public shows and grand opera, anthropology and history, religion and novels, science and painting, an image of what Western culture is, and should be, was being forged – and we are all still the heirs of this work of historical self-consciousness. Both books are the product of many years of research – and both have been fundamentally affected by their gestation within the interdisciplinary milieu of the Cambridge Victorian Studies Group.

Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire, and Anthropology in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2011) by Dr Sadiah Qureshi is published by ̽��ֱ�� of Chicago Press

Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity: Art, Opera, Fiction, and the Proclamation of Modernity (2011) by Professor Simon Goldhill is published by Princeton ̽��ֱ�� Press

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.

Yes

‘What have the Victorians ever done for us?’

tdk25 — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 00:00:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��19th century has also given us almost all our most familiar institutions, our ideas about ourselves and our history, and the very fabric and rhythm of our lives.

From the rituals of royal celebrations, through Sunday afternoon museum-visiting to our unquestioning assumption that the hour of the day will be the same in all parts of the country – all these and more were the brain-children of those ever resourceful Victorians. Before the late 19th century ceremonials such as coronations and royal funerals were tawdry and often badly-organised affairs; the pomp and pageantry we now enjoy is no throw-back to some distant ‘Merrie England’ (indeed Merrie England itself was a Victorian invention), but to the modernizing court of Victoria and Albert. Likewise the idea that twelve o’clock should strike at the same hour in Glasgow or Exeter as it did in London hardly seemed pressing until the demands of railway timetabling made it so.

To take this from a Cambridge perspective, many of the subjects we now study (from philosophy to engineering) were first defined by energetic Victorian reformers. So too was the division of the Tripos into two parts, the basic university career structure, the idea that undergraduates should all follow the same terms between the same dates, the possibility that dons could marry or that women could study. There is a good chance that restricting the pleasure of ‘walking on the grass’ over college lawns to fellows only was also a Victorian innovation.

A group of Cambridge researchers has recently been awarded more than a million pounds from the Leverhulme Trust for a five-year project to investigate Victorian Britain – and particularly how the Victorians created such a radical version of the future, at the same time as they agonized over their relations with the past.

Entitled ‘Past versus Present: Abandoning the Past in an Age of Progress’, the project has taken as its logo a wonderfully evocative engraving of the 1870s by Gustav Doré, itself illustrating an earlier whimsy by Lord Macaulay. In 1840 Macaulay had imagined, far into the future, that ‘a traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St Pauls.’

It is an image that captures the nuance and sophistication of Victorian thinking about the passage of time. Not only does it conjure up a future in which the present will have become the ruined past, but it heralds too the possibility of staggering geo-political change. For here the erstwhile imperial subject from the distant colonies is treating the wreckage of London’s past imperial greatness as a suitable theme for some dilettante sketching – much as the 19th-century elite would themselves take pleasure in sketching the ruins of (say) ancient Greece or Rome.

̽��ֱ��project will be exploring different avenues across the whole range of Victorian engagements with the past, and trying to make connections between them. At its heart is an intriguing paradox. For, at the same time as 19th-century technology and economic developments were raising the prospect of a giant leap into the future, exactly the same tools and processes were opening up – through archaeology, geology, education, biology – all kinds of new pasts in incredible profusion and vexingly contradictory detail. Darwin was controversially theorizing the origin of mankind, at the same moment as archaeologists in the ‘Near East’ were digging up material traces of the biblical past and Heinrich Schliemann was claiming that he had found proof that the stories of the ancient Greek Homeric epics were actually true – attracting in the process a fan club that extended as far as Prime Minister William Gladstone.

How did people accommodate all these different pasts – and possible futures? It was a problem that engaged not only the elite of Victorian society, but – in an increasingly democratic world that was generating ‘popular history’ in large quantities for the first time – a wide spectrum across all social groups. Big questions were debated. What was the fate of empires (one vivid answer was of course provided by the Doré engraving)? What was the history (and future) of socialism? But these questions were raised in other forms too. What deserved to be in the local museum? Should old buildings be demolished to make way for ‘improvements’? What did fossil-collecting reveal about the country’s past? Should endangered animals or people be preserved?

Hasn’t all this been done before? Not in this way. Of course, there are all kinds of distinguished scholarly studies of parts of this agenda, and the project inevitably builds on those. But what the generous grant makes possible is some new, interdisciplinary ‘joined up thinking’ about the Victorian period. In a new designated research space in the midst of the main Arts’ Faculty site, the project brings together researchers from different disciplines, each with a stake in the 19th century. This means not only historians in the strict sense of the word (Peter Mandler of Caius provides the lead here) and historians of science (with Jim Secord, of Darwin fame), but also literary critics (headed by Clare Pettitt of Newnham and Kings College, London) and crucially classicists (Mary Beard and Simon Goldhill of the Classics Faculty, both of whom work on the history of classical scholarship). So far they have been joined by three post-doctoral fellows and three more are in the process of being appointed.

̽��ֱ��aim of this project is to transcend the boundaries that now tend to divide those working on the Victorian period, putting classics and theology – burning concerns to almost all of the Victorian elite – back into the centre of the picture. By thinking about what history meant to the 19th century, we may also become clearer about what it means to us.

For more information, please contact Professor Mary Beard atmb127@hermes.cam.ac.uk or any member of the group; details atwww.victorians.group.cam.ac.uk

Modern Britain was invented sometime between 1830 and 1900. It's not just a question of industrialization, compulsory education, the right to vote (at least for men) or the growth of towns, important as all those particular processes were.

̽��ֱ��project will be exploring different avenues across the whole range of Victorian engagements with the past, and trying to make connections between them.

Professor Mary Beard

brizzle born and bred from Flickr

match making

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. If you use this content on your site please link back to this page.

Yes