This issue of the Journal of British Studies contains eight articles on a wide variety of themes and topics from the seventeenth through the twentieth centuries. Their geographic scope is similarly wide ranging. Todd Butler on seventeenth-century ghost stories, Matthew Roberts on nineteenth-century debates about franchise reform, and Vicky Long on early twentieth-century notions of factory and domestic space all link local and national concerns. The articles by Timothy Alborn and William M. Meier present, respectively, finely nuanced local studies of gold in the Irish county Wicklow in the nineteenth century, and shoplifting in metropolitan London in the early twentieth century. Both Mark S. Dawson and Matthew P. Dziennik remind us of the transatlantic connections within the British world of the long eighteenth century, whereas Julian Hoppit offers an illuminating comparative study of legislation and the constituent nations within the conglomerated eighteenth-century British realms of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales. Hoppit’s salutary reminder that “the British state was multinational and multilayered in ways impossible to mimic” (331) offers a cogent précis of the wide geographic remit for the Journal of British Studies.
We begin with ghost stories. In “The Haunting of Isabell Binnington: Ghosts of Murder, Texts, and Law in Restoration England,” Todd Butler studies the various ways in which a Yorkshire woman’s encounters with a ghost were reported both in print and in manuscript. He also explains how these ghost stories were received by her contemporaries in the early years following the restoration of King Charles II. Binnington’s claims to have received ghostly details of a past murder and a pending plot against the life of the king himself were potentially deeply disruptive. Butler argues that the medium of print offered an alternative means to formal legal proceedings by which the confusing details of Binnington’s ghostly tales could be aired, discussed, and variously understood. While printed stories could prove deeply disruptive by spreading rumors and raising threatening questions about potential threats to the restored monarchy, Butler also shows that print could alternatively function as a “judicial technology” that helped to resolve the very anxieties that it might raise.
Print culture is also the point of departure for Mark S. Dawson’s “First Impressions: Newspaper Advertisements and Early Modern English Body Imaging, 1651–1750,” which examines the language of bodily descriptions found in English newspaper advertisements of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Dawson demonstrates the persistent use and meaningfulness of the language of bodily humors to elaborate on physiognomic differences between people in London newspaper advertisements. He finds little evidence for the emergence of a distinct language of racial difference during this crucial period for English engagement with the transatlantic slave trade. Rather than articulating a sense of racial distinctions based on skin color, Dawson argues that the newspaper advertisements’ vernacular used humoral terms to distinguish between the complexions of the increasingly diverse population of early modern London.
In “The Nation, the State, and the First Industrial Revolution,” Julian Hoppit uses the distinctively multinational character, and sometimes overlapping jurisdictions, of the British state system during the long eighteenth century between 1660 and 1800 to rethink its precocious experience of industrialization and economic growth. A quantitative analysis of patterns of legislation in the Westminster, Dublin, and (pre-1707) Edinburgh parliaments demonstrates that legislative activity in all three was invigorated after the revolution of 1688, but that the relationship of economic interests to legislation passed in each jurisdiction varied. In particular, the access of English interests to obtaining specific Westminster legislation was more marked than was the case for Irish or Scottish interests, and especially for the Scots after 1707. The result is a convincing plea to take the “plurality of Britain’s political economies” (331) into account in understanding its first industrial revolution.
Matthew P. Dziennik’s “Through an Imperial Prism: Land, Liberty, and Highland Loyalism in the War of American Independence” recognizes this British plurality in a transatlantic context. His article revisits the reasons for the remarkable loyalism of recent emigrants from the Scottish Highlands to the American colonies during the War of Independence. Highlander loyalty to the British Crown in America was not the product of a traditional, conservative mind-set and social structure, but rather stemmed from consciously chosen political decisions that reflected the new relationship of these immigrants to the British empire and its transatlantic commercial society. He identifies an aspiration to landholding as the most important motivation for Highlander loyalism in British North America. Thus, the American Highlanders became reconciled to American independence as their fears of losing rights and access to landed property abated.
In the middle of the turbulent 1790s in Ireland, gold was discovered in County Wicklow. The bounty was to prove ephemeral: there was no deep vein to be mined, and no one made a fortune from Wicklow gold. Nonetheless, as Timothy Alborn demonstrates in his wide-ranging analysis, “An Irish El Dorado: Recovering Gold in County Wicklow,” the gold of Wicklow left a lasting legacy in cultural and political if not economic terms. Alborn traces ways in which his subjects sought both to “recover” and to “re-cover” Irish gold. He examines, on the one hand, persistent efforts to find and exploit more gold and, on the other hand, a range of cultural representations of Wicklow gold and its meanings. Alborn brings together economic and cultural history in a rich reading that ultimately reflects on the relationship of Ireland to Britain in the nineteenth century.
In a timely examination of electoral reform, related intellectual debates, and unexpected consequences, Matthew Roberts’s “Resisting ‘Arithmocracy’: Parliament, Community, and the Third Reform Act” asks how and why Britain largely moved to single-member constituencies as part of the franchise reforms of 1884–85. Contrary to scholarly consensus, Roberts argues, this move did not represent a clear shift from the organic to the “mathematic” as the basis for representation. Rather, the struggle over single-member constituencies needs to be placed in the context of late Victorian and Edwardian debates carried out by a nervous elite that did in fact want to continue to represent interests rather than individuals and worried about preserving the organic nature of communities. The article thus contributes to a growing body of thought that sees democratization in the United Kingdom as, in Roberts’s words, a “gradual and uneven development” (383–84), almost always resisted by an elite that tried to salvage as much as possible of the old regime.
Female shoplifting has hitherto been studied, William M. Meier contends, largely in terms of the construction of kleptomania and other ways in which contemporaries understood female criminality, particularly middle-class criminality. In “Going on the Hoist: Women, Work, and Shoplifting in London, ca. 1890–1940,” Meier seeks to move beyond analysis of perception in order to explore the backgrounds, experiences, and motivations of shoplifting women themselves. He focuses in particular on working-class women shoplifters in London from the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. He explores the changing nature of the London female workforce, on the one hand, and the growth of a mass consumer economy, on the other, to argue that shoplifting women were in many ways forcing their way into a consumer economy that was both omnipresent, especially for poor women involved in the production of clothing, and yet often difficult to access. For at least some women—and perhaps particularly for the substantial minority of shoplifters who were professional thieves—shoplifting was a means to craft a defiant identity as a “modern” independent consuming woman.
Vicky Long makes a trenchant contribution to ongoing debate over the fate of separate-spheres ideology in the early twentieth century and its implications for the changing nature of women’s work. Her article, “Industrial Homes, Domestic Factories: The Convergence of Public and Private Space in Interwar Britain,” explores the intersection between the domestic and the industrial in interwar Britain. The industrial welfare movement sought to remake factories as quasi-domestic spaces, often with an eye to placating and educating female factory workers. At the same time, advocates of scientific domestic management and the “industrialization” of domestic space increasingly attempted to make the home more like a factory. The remaking of work space was also reflected in the 1930s drive toward the creation of modernist factories. In all these instances, the blurring of the lines between different forms of space suggests a breakdown in practice of the separation of the “public” world of work and the “private” world of home, despite continued lip service to separate-spheres ideology—not to mention, Long concludes, an effort to remake workspace rather than address workers’ substantive concerns.
The next issue will contain two articles on Ireland’s relationship to the English multiple monarchy in the late medieval and Tudor periods, along with an article on lotteries and state formation in Elizabethan England. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries will be represented by an article on the political trial of an English radical in the 1790s, and another on the political legacy of Robert Burns. Two articles on twentieth-century history—one on popular fiction in interwar Britain and another on consumerist politics and the creation of a national ombudsman in the 1960s—will complete the issue.
