This article examines Jane Cobden's campaign for the London County Council (L.C.C.) in 1888–89 and its controversial aftermath. Cobden's effort, a pioneering political venture of British feminism, illuminates late-Victorian concepts of gender. It provides at once an anticipation of, and a distinct contrast to, the militant suffragism of the Edwardian era. In addition, it suggests new ways of thinking about the connection between women's-suffragist and labor politics. Perhaps because the campaign was a comparatively obscure incident when measured against the broad sweep of British political history, however, no scholar has done much more than sketch its bare outline. Hopefully, the fuller depiction provided below will accord it the treatment it really deserves.

This article approaches the subject from a tangent, however. Cobden's campaign was a significant if little-known episode not only in the history of British suffragism but also in the life of a man who went on to play a major role in British politics long after the first county council elections had been forgotten. This was George Lansbury, Cobden's political agent during 1888–89 and secretary of the Bow and Bromley Radical and Liberal Federation. Lansbury eventually became one of the main architects of the socialist movement in East London and a chief male supporter of the militant suffragettes during the Edwardian era (in 1912 he temporarily lost his seat in the House of Commons and went to prison on their behalf). He also became a founder and editor of the quintessential “rebel” newspaper, the Daily Herald (which was designated Labour's official organ after Lansbury left it in 1922), a pacifist opponent of World War I, and, from 1931 to 1935, leader of the Labour party itself.

For students interested in the political history of Britain during the early years of the Great War, Lord Beaverbrook's Politicians and the War, 1914-1916 is now essential reading. This, however, has not always been the case. The historiographical fortunes of this important study, Beaverbrook's modus operandi, and his preoccupations as a historian are the main concerns of this paper. Examination of these issues, combined with a reassessment of of certain key themes and incidents in Politicians and the War allow for a reevaluation not only of the book as a major source for the period but also of that wonderful and partisan fusion of politics and history who was Max Aitken, the first and only Lord Beaverbrook.

Beaverbrook, as A.J.P. Taylor's vast biography makes clear, was a man of many parts. Politics colored almost everything he did. His politics were those of the Unionist (later the Conservative) Party and, as a Canadian colonial who had come to Britain to augment further his considerable fortune, he identified strongly with the Tariff Reform wing of the party in the years before the First World War. He was Unionist MP for Ashton-under-Lyne from 1910 to 1916. Within the Unionist Party his closest friend was Andrew Bonar Law, another Canadian born politician, who in 1911 became Leader of the party and was thus a central figure in the tumultuous events examined in Politicians and the War. Aitken also had a wide circle of friends and acquaintances in the Liberal Party. They, too, provided him with another perspective on the politics of the wartime period; one of them, David Lloyd George, in one of his earliest acts as Prime Minister in December 1916, elevated Aitken to the House of Lords where he took the title of Lord Beaverbrook.

It has long been recognized that British central administration rarely undergoes radical upheaval. Major changes tend to occur in a cumulative or incremental manner, rather than being imposed suddenly as part of a politically-inspired program of reform. Even when the tempo of change in Whitehall has been at its quickest, for example in the two world wars, the dominant pattern has been for ad hoc adaptation of existing practices or for uncoordinated improvisations. All this is in character for a country whose political system is determined less by institutional frameworks or legal codifications than by ever subtly changing codes of practice or conventions. As a result, however, it is not unknown for significant changes in the workings of Whitehall to go largely unnoticed by contemporaries. It is argued here that one such development was the transformation in the inter-war period of the Treasury and of the higher civil service which was presided over by Warren Fisher, Permanent Secretary to the Treasury from 1919 to 1939.

The extent and significance of these changes has tended to be masked even for later historians by the more obvious upheavals in both the work and organization of departments during each of the world wars. However, the changes wrought by Fisher and his associates had repercussions far beyond the confines of the Treasury itself. Five interrelated developments can be traced during this period.

The National Education League came to prominence in the 1870s as the most militant of the pressure groups that spearheaded the so-called “Nonconformist Revolt” from the Liberal Party. The revolt began in 1870, reached its peak in 1873, and contributed to the Liberal defeat in the general election of 1874. It finally petered out in the wake of that defeat and the emergence of a revitalized liberalism during the Eastern Question agitation in the late 1870s. The National Education League was founded in 1869, and disbanded in 1877, in the midst of the Eastern Question agitation. Because its dates are coincident with the revolt, and because it did play a crucial role in that movement, the league's history has been treated as an integral part of the Nonconformist Revolt. The revolt itself has been generally interpreted as a sectionalist attack on the Liberal Party, launched by Nonconformist grievance organizations for narrow, and largely sectarian, aims. According to this view, the revolt ended when the Nonconformists finally accepted the notion of a comprehensive liberalism that transcended their particularist interests; when they recognized that, politically speaking, they were Liberals before they were Nonconformists.

This explanation is misleading because it ignores the generally radical thrust of the Nonconformist Revolt and the agitations of groups such as the United Kingdon Alliance and the Liberation Society. In particular, the rise and fall of the National Education League cannot be understood solely within the context of Nonconformist politics.

The canonization of Thomas More in May 1935 was not greeted with universal approbation. According to one writer, the ceremony “was met by an official boycott in the English press and Parliament as well as in the Universities.” Though such a statement is not wholly justified, it must be granted that in a large segment of the British press, coverage of the canonization was minimal and hostile. The hostility was partly inspired by disapproval in some quarters at More's silence over the issue of Henry VIII's ecclesiastical supremacy. On this score there were charges that he was at best an “unsatisfactory saint” or a “negative martyr.” Typical of this attitude was the moderate statement of Ernest Barker a few months after More achieved Sainthood: “More, in the final trial of his faith, was obstinately silent about his real thoughts …. There is something negative in this attitude …. More died for the right of a free conscience — provided it were silent. But is a free conscience which keeps silent really free?”

For some scholars, however, the doubts concerning More's canonization ran deeper than mere disapproval of his silence on the supremacy issue, and centered rather on his alleged mistreatment of heretics (chiefly in the period 1526-34). Certainly the sixteenth-century Reformers regarded More as a persecutor. The Chronicler Edward Hall described him as “a great persecutor of such as detested the supremacy of the bishop of Rome.” Fox in his Book of Martyrs represented him as “blinded in the zeal of popery” to all humane considerations in the treatment of Lutherans.

By 1190, King Richard I of England (1189-1199) had departed for the Third Crusade and had settled on William Longchamp, royal chancellor and bishop of Ely, as the chief justiciar, the king’s regent during the royal absence. But before Richard had even left the European continent, Longchamp’s justiciarship had provoked a powerful reaction from those subjected to it. The hue and cry lifted against the chief justiciar by leaders of the revolt that ousted him included accusations that Longchamp filled England and its offices with “foreigners and unknown men” and that he ruled without the appares, associates whom Richard had included in the regency to assist the chief justiciar. Recent research has shown that the latter charge is patently untrue but the former, utilizing foreigners and others unfamiliar with England and its government, was fundamentally true, at least with regard to justice and the shrievalties. Does Longchamp’s style of management repeat itself with castles and what were the implications for him, the kingdom, and the king? A cursory glance at events during his justiciarship shows that castles played a large role in the narrative, from the massacre of the Jews at York Castle to the arrest of Archbishop Geoffrey at Dover Castle. Though the evidence is of a more tentative nature than that for judicial activity and shrievalties, Longchamp employed in this critical position men close to him, both personal dependents and tested curial servants, a pattern of appointment markedly different from that of the king. Richard I’s practices benefited the baronage, but the chancellor’s determination to bring as many castles as possible under his direct control worked to alienate the chief justiciar from his subjects and disastrously eroded his power base.

During the later Middle Ages in England both church and state were multiplying their pretensions and powers. The growth of spiritual and temporal administration alike depended upon the availability of bureaucrats willing and able to serve the two powers in the fields of finance, law, administration, and diplomacy. In the absence of cash for paying for services of this kind, popes, prelates, and princes developed means for subsidizing their civil services from sources of revenue to which they were able to invent and enforce claims. This reliance upon the community of the clergy for official service and upon benefices of the church for their maintenance and compensation had the effect of coloring certain ecclesiastical offices down to the Reformation. Prebendal canonries, archdeaconries, and even parish churches came to be viewed more and more as simply sources of emolument — as sinecures to be bestowed upon members of the clergy for the performance of services other than those demanded by the offices given them. For identical reasons English kings, Roman popes, and native prelates laid claim to a variety of ecclesiastical offices and the revenues attached to them in order to obtain the services and skills without which neither church nor state could function effectively in the increasingly complex world of the later Middle Ages. All of this is, of course, well known, and modern scholars have explored rather thoroughly the composition and growth of royal and ecclesiastical administration and the major ways in which each was subsidized.

Looking beyond the notorious “Brideshead” aesthetes and homoeroticism of 1920s Oxford, this article explores the queer sensibilities of the university's male undergraduates and their associates through the 1930s. Steadily through the decade, Oxford's unique brand of queer aestheticism and same-sex love affairs became embroiled with wider debates about the hegemony of socialism and communism and the supposed degeneracy of standards at Oxford. At the same time, the assimilation of medicalized concepts of perversion and homosexuality increasingly made Oxford's aesthetes and same-sex love affairs objects of critical scrutiny, effeminophobia, and homophobia. For many of the university's queer male undergraduates, the Oxford University Dramatic Society provided a safe haven and a platform for queer expression both in Oxford and beyond. A group of images by the Russian émigré photographer Cyril Arapoff provides further insights into the male homoerotics of 1930s Oxford. Situated within the context of Arapoff's life in the city between 1933 and 1939, his extraordinary photographs of nude and seminude young men offer glimpses into the queer lives and loves at Oxford in a period when such experiences were rarely articulated in written form. The images include the spaces the young men inhabited and their interconnections to London's vibrantly queer dance and theater scene. Such insights help establish more firmly interwar Oxford as an important hub of queer modernism, with national and international import for the course of modern queer history.

This article argues that the commercialization of monarchical culture is more complex than existing scholarship suggests. It explores the aesthetic dimensions of regal culture produced outside of the traditionally defined sphere of art and politics by focusing on the variety of royal images and symbols depicted on hanging signs in eighteenth-century London. Despite the overwhelming presence of kings and queens on signboards, few study these as a form of regal visual culture or seriously question the ways in which these everyday objects affected representations of royalty beyond asserting an unproblematic process of declension. Indeed, even in the Restoration and early eighteenth century, monarchical signs were the subject of criticism and debate. This article explains why this became the case, arguing that signs were criticized not because they were trivial commercial objects that cheapened royal charisma, but because they were overloaded with political meaning. They emblematized the failures of representation in the age of print and party politics by depicting the monarchy—the traditional center of representative stability—in ways that troubled interpretation and defied attempts to control the royal image. Nevertheless, regal images and objects circulating in urban spaces comprised a meaningful political-visual language that challenges largely accepted arguments about the aesthetic inadequacy and cultural unimportance of early eighteenth-century monarchy. Signs were part of an urban, graphic public sphere, used as objects of political debate, historical commemoration, and civic instruction.

In modern critical imagination, Richard Steele is almost always seen as Joseph Addison's friend and collaborator, as half of the periodical essay-writing team devoted to the promotion of civility, urbanity, and a moral and well-mannered lifestyle. Scholars focus almost exclusively on the Tatler, the Spectator, and Steele's sentimental drama, The Conscious Lovers (1722), virtually ignoring his substantial canon of party journalism and pamphlets. Partly because of Steele's bitter and extensive quarrel with Jonathan Swift—or because most scholars assume that Swift got the best of him—he is now rarely taken seriously as a political player in late Stuart and early Hanoverian England. This essay focuses on Steele the party writer—and especially on his attitude toward religio-political authority and the sanctity of vox populi. Though Steele is now described as (like Addison) “not so enthusiastic about the potential for public politics,” he was for excellent reasons regarded by contemporaries as a writer not only trying to politicize the people but actually succeeding in doing so. This essay attempts to recontextualize Steele's polemical contributions; he has been read alongside Addison and other Whig wits, but he rarely figures in discussions of the history of political ideas in early eighteenth-century England, in discussions of debates about authority, resistance, and the nature of obligation, about public religion and liberty of conscience, the political implications of heterodoxy, and the use of reason as a challenge to dogmatic clerical authority.

During the First World War, all of the belligerent powers interned both civilian and military prisoners. In Britain alone, over one hundred thousand people were held behind barbed wire. Despite the scale of this enterprise, interment barely features in Britain's First World War memory culture. By exploring the place of prisoner-of-war camps within the “militarized environment” of the home front, this article demonstrates the centrality of internment to local wartime experiences. Forced to share the same environment, British civilians and German prisoners clashed over access to resources, roads, and the surrounding landscape. As this article contends, it was only when the British started to employ prisoners on environmental-improvement measures, such as land drainage or river clearance projects, that relations gradually improved. With the end of the war and closure of the camps, however, these deep entanglements were quickly forgotten. Instead of commemorating the complexities of the conflict, Britain's memory culture focused on more comfortable narratives; British military “sacrifice” on the Western Front quickly replaced any discussion of the internment of the “enemy” at home.

In the late twentieth century, a new justification for the Church of England's establishment emerged: the church played an important social and political role in safeguarding the interests of other religious communities, including non-Christian ones. The development of this new vision of communal pluralism was shaped by two groups often seen as marginal in postwar British society: the royal family and missionaries. Elizabeth II and liberal evangelicals associated with the Church Missionary Society contributed to a new conception of religious pluralism centered on the integrity of the major world religions as responses to the divine. There were, therefore, impulses towards inclusion as well as exclusion in post-imperial British society. In its focus on religious communities, however, this communal pluralism risked overstating the homogeneity of religious groups and failing to protect individuals whose religious beliefs and practices differed from those of the mainstream of their religious communities.

The Annual Bibliography of British and Irish History published for 1991, contains 393 items in section G, “Britain 1714-1815,” a section that excludes works devoted to “long periods” that also cover the period. Of those 393, twenty were in Ga “General,” thirty-six in Gb, “Politics,” eight in Gc “Constitution, Administration and Law,” thirty-two in Gd “External Affairs” and thirty-seven in Ge “Religion.” Though politics is in theory restricted to Gb, in practice it overlaps with these other categories, and, indeed, in part, with the categories Economic Affairs, Social Structure and Population, Naval and Military, and Intellectual and Cultural. Restricting, however, the survey to Gb, the figures for 1988, 1989 and 1990 respectively were fifty-six, fifty-two and fifty-four. It is thus clear that while political history no longer dominates eighteenth-century historiography as it once did, there is still a formidable quantity of it produced. This is not a situation to be regretted, but it does emphasize the subjectivity of any assessment of recent work and of current problems. Such a situation, however, is not simply a question of problems derived from quantity, for any attempt to produce an historiographical account focusing on earlier scholarship would itself encounter many difficulties. The absence of consensus among modern scholars extends to their assessment of historiographical trends. This was demonstrated clearly by Jonathan Clark in 1986. Having, the previous year, in his English Society 1688-1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice during the Ancien Regime (Cambridge, 1985), asserted the strength of conservatism and religious identity and the marginality of reform and radicalism in eighteenth-century England, he offered, inter alia, in his Revolution and Rebellion: State and Society in England in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Cambridge, 1986), a combative interpretation of the methodology and historiography of the period.

A glance at recent publications on the history of theoretical sociology in Europe would reveal that no one has yet attempted to write a full scale history of the early phases of that movement in Britain. There is certainly nothing that compares with Raymond Aron's Main Currents in Sociological Thought for British sociology. Aron's study, in fact, contains only scattered references to British thinkers and attaches little significance to them. Nor does this absence of Britishers result from some slight on Aron's part. While British sociology during the formative years of the discipline, roughly 1850-1930, did make some notable advances in its empirical branches, it produced no individual worthy to stand with theorists like Max Weber, Vilfredo Pareto or Emil Durkheim.

The reasons for this shortcoming on the British part are numerous and diverse. First, British thinking generally was concerned with more practical problems and not with theoretical matters and thus, automatically favored less abstract forms of social science. Additionally, those few British thinkers interested in problems of theory generally failed to recognize the significance of the advances of Continental mental philosophers and psychologists whose work has done so much to enrich twentieth century social theory. Yet there is a deeper and more subtle set of reasons interconnected with those aforementioned for the relative stasis of British social thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Conrad Russell has recently asked, not for the first time, how far the divided allegiances of members of the Long Parliament were anticipated in the parliaments of the 1620s. Many who sat as M.P.s in the third decade of the seventeenth century had died by the early 1640s, while not all those who still survived were either sufficiently vocal before 1629 or politically active after 1641 to be classifiable for the purposes of this exercise. Nevertheless, Professor Russell manages to assemble a small bloc of members whose earlier politico-religious sympathies and civil war alignments are both more or less known. This group of twenty-six men splits neatly 50:50 between Royalists and Parliamentarians. According to Russell, all that distinguished one from the other in the 1620s, and the sole effective predictor of their later allegiances, was religion. More specifically, the crucial variable turns out to be commitment to further godly reformation, strong in the case of future Parliamentarians, weak in the case of future Royalists. But for Russell's explicit rejection of any “supposed correlation between ‘Puritanism and Revolution,’” the casual reader might conclude that something resembling the Puritan Revolution was sneaking back into historio-graphical favor.