Current approaches to the history of early modern population thought focus on the state and secular governance, while standard treatments of Restoration and Augustan “political arithmetic” emphasize its economic or social-scientific content. This article recovers nonsecular uses of demographic quantification, excavating the use of political arithmetic in religious polemic between ca. 1660 and ca. 1750. As a form of empirical natural philosophy, political arithmetic suited the polemical needs of latitudinarian Anglicans and others combating deism, atheism, and preadamism; the demographic regularities it revealed furnished evidence of providential solicitude, while the history of population growth was a potential prop for scriptural chronologies. A strand of “sacred” political arithmetic thus contributed to natural theology while modeling—albeit inconsistently—new historical applications for empirical methodology. The article concludes by considering possible causes for the decline of this “sacred” strand of demographic quantification, while suggesting connections between it and better-known secular forms of Enlightenment-era population thought.

Despite an established literature on gender, consumerism, and dress, there is almost no research on fashion and the life cycle. Meanwhile, the historiography on aging has addressed stigma, physicality, and sexuality, though only tangentially the manufacture of femininity through clothes. This article links the two separate historiographies. It is concerned with the ongoing fabrication of mature femininity through fashionable clothes, and the paradoxes inherent in that performance. The misogynist attack on dressy older women was pungent, but mature women still had to clothe themselves. Accusations of frolicking in a lamb fashion were mortifying, but keeping up appearances was vital too. This article examines the interplay of age and fashion, re-creating the distinctive way women of the middling ranks and lesser gentry negotiated the pitfalls of dressing past their prime, charting a perilous course between indignity and scorn on the one hand and invisibility on the other. Perceptions of age and aging bore unevenly on women and men. Nevertheless, conviction about the decorum of female sartorial retirement once the blush was off the peach and savage portrayals of hideous physical decline were counterbalanced by the blandishments of the market itself. Cumulatively, the Georgian marketplace tended to endorse the public profiles of older women, suggesting a galaxy of imagined performances that overwhelmed the misogynist discourse arguing for their obliteration.

Violence was an important part of the educational experience of many British children during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It principally took the form of playground fights, in which children competed in displays of physical prowess to win the accolade “cock of the school,” the term attached to the best fighter. This article examines the background to these fights using autobiographical accounts produced by individuals educated between 1890 and 1940. Working from common themes in these accounts, it explains the structure and context of schoolyard fights. In particular, it examines the manner in which contemporary notions of masculinity influenced the conduct of children. Fighting was a means by which a schoolboy could act out a fantasy of manhood and, through this, relate to his peers and the school environment.

The necessity of adopting or redefining illiberal measures—such as torture, internment, or targeted-killings of terrorists—to protect states places burdens on the meaning of liberalism around the world. After 1969, liberal intellectual responses to the so-called Troubles in Northern Ireland identified two conflicted groups of Irish liberals. Then academic and politician Conor Cruise O'Brien attempted to reduce responses to the crisis to the choice between supporting the state and condoning terrorism. “Consenting liberals” compromised professional practices in the law, journalism, broadcasting, and academia to support the state's counterinsurgency. Alternatively, “dissenting liberals” defended their “neutrality” alongside the freedom to criticize the counterinsurgency. Justifying infringements on individual freedoms, O'Brien and others said the democratic state was imperiled. But, anomalously, freedoms were sacrificed in defense of the Irish state, which in security terms did little to defend itself. Nevertheless, the counterinsurgency became an organizing principle in intellectual life, and over forty years colored self-perceptions of Irish society, past and present.

How adequate was the mid-Victorian workhouse diet? Basing their arguments on modern nutritional analyses of dietary tables, some historians have concluded that the workhouse diet fulfilled the basic nutritional needs of inmates and that the idea that workhouse dietary regimes were inadequate is the result of a “mythology” created by contemporaries—including Charles Dickens. In these accounts, Dickens's infamous scene where Oliver Twist becomes so overwhelmed with hunger that he asks for more food is construed as an exaggerated rendering of workhouse life. This article argues that efforts to impose modern nutritional techniques onto past configurations can produce misleading results and generate simplistic historical interpretations. The cultural categories historically surrounding food demand thorough attention and must be reconciled with modern scientific approaches if the boundaries between workhouse realities and mythologies are to be rendered less obscure.

In the early years of the New Poor Law, workhouses were explicitly prohibited from serving roast beef and plum pudding to inmates. Historians have recently begun to focus increased attention on the cultural meanings invested in specific food products and the politics of their production, distribution, and consumption. Unpacking the contentious disputes between local and central Poor Law authorities over the provision of roast beef to workhouse inmates similarly reorients the discussion of the pauper diet to address, not the amount or quality of food provided, but rather the cultural politics of what exactly a pauper was allowed to eat. A study of when and why paupers were and were not furnished with a festive meal of what was often termed “Old English Fare” provides a way of rethinking the place of the poor within local and national communities at a moment when attitudes toward poverty were undergoing profound changes.

This essay argues that the strict branch of the temperance movement helped create and spread an idea of a sober consumer culture in early Victorian Britain. It specifically examines the material and gustatory, political, and religious culture of the mass temperance tea parties that emerged in the 1830s and the 1840s. Supported by middle- and working-class followers, evangelicals, and liberals, the strict branch of the temperance movement insisted that the consumption of tea, sugar, and wheat-based baked goods in a heterosocial setting would demonstrate the rewards of a religious and sober life. Mass tea parties disciplined consumers through satisfying the body and encouraging pleasurable cross-class and mixed-gender interactions. Temperance advocates hoped that the behaviors and values inculcated at the tea table would radiate to the home, the factory, and the marketplace. The temperance movement thus contributed to the notion that drinking tea produced well-behaved and energetic workers, as well as rational consumers.

This essay brings together aspects of the history of science, food, and culture, and applies them to the study of Anglo-German relations and perceptions by examining how between 1850 and 1914 the German sausage was used as a metaphor for the German nation. The essay shows how the concerns that became attached to German sausages not only provide a way of understanding Britain's interaction with Germany but also reveal further dimensions to popular anti-German sentiment. Alarm about what went into German sausages formed part of a growing strand of popular opposition to Germany, which drew on increasing insecurity about Britain's position on the world stage and the perceived economic threat that Germany and German immigrants presented. Such sentiment was translated into how Germans were caricatured and onto material objects—in this case, the “deadly mysteries” that were feared to go into German sausages. Cultural and gastronomic stereotypes overlapped in a discourse that linked Germany and Germans to their national diet and aggressive nature, as well as associated German sausages with fears about diseased meat, adulteration, and the risks that eating them entailed. The result was that the German sausage was used as a staple for satirical comic representations of Germany, as representative of dishonesty in food production, and as a xenophobic slur. Around the German sausage, anti-German sentiment and questions of food safety merged and became mutually reinforcing.