Three riots closed out the year of racial violence. Two occurred in the South, the other in the upper Midwest. The riots shared a significant trait: the violence directed against African Americans originated in the exploitation of agricultural or industrial laborers. To be precise, the violence was a response to black-led or biracial resistance to economic exploitation. In late September, a coalition of white businessmen and planters moved to destroy a newly formed black sharecroppers’ union in Phillips County, Arkansas. The sharecroppers’ armed resistance resulted in a pogrom with a death toll that rivaled – most likely even exceeded – that of Chicago’s. In October, black workers in Gary, Indiana, refused to be scapegoated during a massive strike that idled the city’s steel mills and factories. Meanwhile, in Bogalusa, Louisiana, black lumber workers joined forces with their white co-workers to fight for improved conditions and wages.

In all three places, corporate and municipal authorities used armed vigilantes to suppress laborers’ efforts to improve their economic standing. In Arkansas, U.S. Army troops joined force with these vigilantes. In Gary, federal troops were deployed under the command of General Leonard Wood. True to his statement in Omaha, Wood enthusiastically accepted the help of Gary’s paramilitary voluntary associations to quell the civic disorder brought by the strikes. In Bogalusa, similar organizations worked with corporate guards (in effect, a company police force) to threaten, beat up, and, eventually, murder black and white union organizers.

During the Great War, the 372nd Infantry Regiment, Ninety-third Division, faced two enemies: its white officers and the Germans. The regiment was formed from four existing black National Guard units, including the First Separate Battalion of the District of Columbia. Arriving in France in mid-April 1918, the 372nd soon found itself in the trenches of the Western Front, first in the Argonne West sector. The regiment took part in the Meuse-Argonne offensive, going “over the top” on September 28, with artillery shells “falling like hail.” The 372nd helped force a German retreat, capturing sixty enemy soldiers and many artillery cannons. It stayed on the front for more than a week, until its relief by a French regiment.

Whether in or out of the trenches, the black enlisted men and officers of the 372nd chafed under their white command. In a breach of military protocol, Colonel Glendie Young ordered the officers to eat with enlisted men. “I wouldn’t make a god-damned one of these black sons-of-a-bitch an officer if I didn’t have to,” Young complained to other white officers. No wonder Rayford Logan, a newly commissioned black officer, called the colonel a “Negro-hater.” Young was soon transferred, but his replacement promptly asked General John J. Pershing to remove the regiment’s black officers, claiming that “racial distinctions which are recognized in civilian life naturally continue to be recognized in military life.” Although Pershing rejected the request, the regiment’s deteriorating morale alarmed French general Mariano Goybet, who questioned the unit’s combat readiness due to these racial tensions.

Aaron Gaskins was fed up. Never again would he submit to the pressure to buy Liberty Loans. Not one day more would he sit meekly at the back of the electric train during his morning commute from Alexandria, Virginia, to Washington, D.C. And no longer would he keep quiet about these indignities. On October 9, 1918, as his train crossed the Potomac River, Gaskins strode to the front and announced to the startled passengers: “I am as good as white people riding in this car.” Gaskins, a tall black man with a scar on his cheek, loudly asked why he could not have the same rights as whites. Every morning he boarded the train with them in Alexandria and yet, because of the color of his skin, had to sit in the back until the car entered Washington. And this in the country that, Gaskins said, had just forced him to buy a bond for the war to make the world safe for democracy. “After this war is over,” he proclaimed, referring to World War I, “we are going to get our rights – we will have a race war if we don’t.”

Gaskins’s statement alarmed engineer William Smith. The federal government had warned Americans that the enemy, Germany, would try to damage homefront morale. To Smith, a black man demanding his rights in public seemed just the sort of trouble Germany might stir up, and he promptly reported the incident to the War Department’s Military Intelligence Division. It dutifully investigated but found no evidence that German propaganda had swayed Gaskins. He led a modest life, worked at Washington’s Union Station, and boarded in a house in Alexandria. The war ended a month later, and investigators dismissed the incident as the outburst of one angry black man.

John Howard Payne's The Fall of Algiers (1825) for Drury Lane, with its captivity narrative sceptic, Timothy Tourist, was staged towards the end of a discrete phase of dramas in Britain and America written about Islamic north Africa. In one way or another, they were all concerned with the continuing problem of Barbary coast piracy. While, as discussed in the previous chapter, a long period of warfare leading up to Tippoo Saib's demise in 1799 produced quite distinctive phases of response and eventual reversals of sentiment in the 1810s, Britain and America's relationships with Barbary were subject to intermittent, inconclusive and often unpredictable military and diplomatic skirmishes, and consequently had different results. Whereas British drama developed a certain equanimity or comic fatalism with regard to piracy and enslavement, for the newly independent United States the experiences were much more profound, vigorously debated as aspects of foreign policy as well as in the theatre and other works of fiction. In particular, American dramas about Barbary became vehicles for a number of patriotic registers concerning natural rights, while remaining immune to the rights of black slaves. The result is an untidy sequence of dramas and spectacles, quite distinctive according to their location on either side of the Atlantic, but presenting a considerable body of evidence as to the role of drama in reflecting contemporary opinion. Not least, in American writing about Barbary, including the performed dramas, arise embryonic notions of military intervention and occupation.

In January 1962, a general practitioner, D. C. Morrell, wrote the above letter to the British Medical Journal (BMJ) articulating his concerns about the current system of classification for depressive and anxiety states. He went on to express deep concern about the ways in which powerful drugs ‘which were by no means devoid of side effects’ were being used widely without the existence of uniform, precise diagnostic criteria. The difficulties highlighted by Morrell in his letter reflect some of the concerns that developed during medical debates of the 1960s about the diagnosis and treatment of minor affective disorders. This chapter will draw on contemporary clinical research to examine the medical theories and treatment of neurotic and depressive states during the late 1950s and 1960s.

In The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), Friedrich Engels offered a powerful account of current agricultural conditions, noting in particular how competition and large-scale farming operations now obliged the field-workers ‘to hire themselves as labourers to the large farmers or the landlords’. The ending of the Napoleonic Wars led to a lowering of wages and consequent agricultural distress which was scarcely mitigated by the new Corn Laws. The symbiotic and patriarchal relation between master and man (and woman) disappeared, with the result that, as Engels writes, ‘farmhands have become day-labourers’, being employed ‘only when needed’ and thus often remaining unemployed ‘for weeks together, especially in winter’. The inception of the harsh New Poor Law, together with ‘the constant extension of farming on a large scale’ in the wake of enclosure, the introduction of threshing and other machines, and the employment of women and children, would lead to a widespread ‘disorganization of the social fabric’. Engels's diagnosis inevitably focused upon the 1830s, the period of the incendiary ‘Swing’ riots and anti-Corn Law agitation; whilst there was an economic recovery in the countryside after this critical juncture, the 1870s saw the onset of the Great Depression which would stretch into Edwardian times. A succession of wet summers in the 1870s and early 1880s affected harvest yields and promoted pneumonia in cattle and foot rot in sheep, whilst refrigerated shipping began to bring imports of wheat and mutton, cheese and bacon, which affected the domestic market.

The Findlater sisters, Mary and Jane, published much of their poetry and fiction at a specific interlude in the advance of modernity in Scotland, between 1895 and 1921. As attention to their co-authored novel Crossriggs (1908) and to short stories by Jane authored in the aftermath of the First World War will show, their ambivalent responses to the changing times informs writing which, although conventional in form and traditional in its focus on rural and domestic settings, expresses the challenges and opportunities afforded by new forms of subjectivity available for women in the early years of the twentieth century. Recent scholarship on the Findlater sisters has drawn attention to this ambivalence: Sandra Kemp, Charlotte Mitchell and David Trotter describe Crossriggs as both a ‘lightly told vignette of Scottish village life’ and a ‘despairing exploration’ of one woman's ‘lonely situation’, while Douglas Gifford has explored how in various ways, the Findlaters were aesthetically, politically and emotionally ‘Caught Between Worlds’ (the title of his essay on the sisters). In this chapter, I will contribute to current (and by no means extensive) scholarship on the Findlaters by suggesting how significant their characters' responses to rural space are in their explorations of some of the most pressing emotional and material frustrations of rural women's lives in early twentieth-century Scotland.

Meanwhile, some of the Georgian playhouses, and the dramas performed in them, were moving into a position where, in October 1825, they could accommodate Ira Aldridge onto a British stage. There can be no doubt as to the historical significance of a coloured man's repeat appearances in a London playhouse. Of course, as Donald M. Morales has argued, black American actors and playwrights – perhaps with the sole exception of the New York African Theatre of the early 1820s – have failed to prosper within their own country in comparison to poets or novelists. What has not been commented on before is the significance of Aldridge having elected to perform in one of London's most progressive non-patent theatres, even if it was, inevitably, within a regulatory system excluding him from performing Shakespeare and spoken drama.

Overviews of Aldridge's appearances in Britain, including the evidence afforded by contemporary reviews and the significance of his performing Oroonoko, the Royal Slave, have been given by Hazel Waters and Felicity Nussbaum. Waters's analysis of the first Times review gives a clear indication of its racist language, how it was replete with references to a monkey and a crossings' sweeper, and condemnation for his having a skin lighter than the colour of his black worsted stockings (‘little darker than the dun cow’). Indeed, the constant allusion in the review to his ‘complexion’ emphasizes important aspects of contemporary attitudes about race amongst the patrician class. One of the terms repeated by The Times reviewer is that Aldridge was a ‘theatrical novelty’, a ‘novelty of … spectacle’.

The economic conditions generated by the Civil War and Reconstruction drove rural white pregnant women out of their isolated communities and enabled privileged white women in the cities to assume responsibility for them. United with the rural women by race but divided from them by class, the privileged women challenged the white male prerogative to protect white women and to determine the absolute importance of their chastity. In doing so, they created a space in which the rural women could adapt to city life and be trained in the middle-class standards so necessary to upward mobility in the city. Although the privileged women asserted their right to redefine honour for themselves and their white sisters, they did not challenge the racial hierarchy. Facing an increasingly militarized and masculinized racism and unable or unwilling to confront it, within little more than a decade the privileged women dropped their challenge to male authority and, with it, the opportunity they had offered to pregnant rural women.

The Civil War brought devastation to much of the Tennessee countryside and decimated Tennessee's male population. Close to 200,000 Tennesseans fought on one side or the other during the war. The casualties were so high that according to one historian, ‘a large percentage of families (were) without men, or at least without men able to work’. Even where men were available, the war disrupted their planting and harvesting or destroyed their crops.

Henry James was captivated by Venice for forty years. The city is the setting for some of his more notable shorter fiction, namely The Aspern Papers, and for a substantial section of his novel, The Wings of the Dove. As well as providing inspiration for his fiction, James opens his collection Italian Hours with several essays on Venice; and, even though Italian Hours explores almost twenty cities, the section on Venice constitutes about a quarter of the book's length. These essays, written over a period of thirty years (between 1872 and 1902), celebrate a familiarity with Venice's idiosyncratic beauty. In his longest essay on the city, simply entitled ‘Venice’ (originally published in 1882), James rhapsodizes about the place in uncharacteristically erotic terms: ‘You desire to embrace it, to caress it, to possess it; and finally a soft sense of possession grows up and your visit becomes a perpetual love-affair’.1 However, such adoration is often combined with painful recollections and fears for the future. The city evokes feelings of melancholy and foreboding, as a golden age slips into a past that is only retrievable through reminiscence while tourists taint the vestiges of a former splendour. What emerges as a constant for James is the magnetism of Venice's architecture – with St Mark's as ‘a great hoary shadowy tabernacle of mosaic and marble … an immense piece of Romanticism’ – and, even more importantly, the lasting impression of its art.

This study has demonstrated the complexity of Victorian attitudes to prostitution. It has not been my intention to deny that early Victorian studies of prostitution constructed and reproduced what would become a stereotypical and influential body of images and representations. I have sought rather to challenge the alleged codification and stability of these representations. The myth of the prostitute's downward progress and the tropes of disease and death that characterized her remained popular in much Victorian discourse on prostitution. But these features were not the only narrative, and they did not go unchallenged. One of the central themes of this book has been the ways in which contemporaries struggled to define the multi-faceted issue of the prostitution in their midst. The ambiguities and malleability of many of these definitions destabilize the notion of a singular or crystallized myth of the Victorian prostitute, and suggest the necessity of revisiting and refining our readings of even the most official and canonical texts. That traditional motifs and narratives of prostitution were present in many of the texts analysed here – yet were reformulated, challenged or directly rejected – also speaks to a larger fluidity of contemporary ideologies.

The network of theatres in Georgian English market towns, cathedral cities and newly industrial regions is indicative of the pervasive presence of drama. It represents the tangible physical infrastructure providing the precondition for drama's dissemination. Unlike the circulating libraries, the playhouses could influence those who were illiterate or, in the case of pantomime, didn't understand English. Outside of London, the provincial playhouses and players accumulated exponentially larger audiences. The social and built environment of towns and cities provided the means by which actors could engage in their profession and present the contemporary dramatic repertoire to the general population. By 1800, in Georgian England a network of provincial playhouses had developed, often in places now little visited by drama. It is important to remember that, certainly as far as the built environment is concerned, there were probably far more Georgian playhouses than there are regular theatrical venues in Britain today. Very few of today's market towns can boast a theatrical season of between one and three months entirely dedicated to live drama performed by a regular company. However, the vestiges of these theatrical environments are fairly easy to find. In a few cases, such as Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, Stamford in Lincolnshire and Richmond in North Yorkshire, much of the Georgian interior or exterior – and even some scenery – has survived intact. Elsewhere, as at Grantham, Lincolnshire, the basic structure of the building survives but has been adapted to a modern purpose.

For many people Venice is the place most closely associated with Turner. He made definitive contributions to the iconography of other cities, notably Oxford, Paris and Rome; of wildernesses such as the mountains of Snowdonia and the Alps; yet the vaporous luminosity of the Venetian lagoon, the fluid evanescence of the shadows on its crumbling palazzi and canals, seem uniquely fitted to his celebrated skills as a painter of light and colour. And it would appear that Turner himself felt something of the same as it were instinctive rapport. Yet knowing his creative psychology one must conclude that he found Venice above all a place, not so much of easy and cosy symbiosis, but one where he could stretch his abilities, teach himself more about his own expressive tools and language.

It is reasonable to suppose that a young artist will make every work he produces a learning exercise; but Turner's capacity to do that was remarkable. He was lucky: circumstances conspired to enable him to experience landscape – the principal subject of his creative endeavours – in progressively challenging forms throughout his youth. The conformation of the British Isles meant that a London boy would quite logically progress from the pastoral landscape of the south-east – England's ‘home farm’ – to the hills of South Wales and the Pennines, and from there to Snowdonia, and on to the Scottish Highlands.

‘Walter’ – the anonymous author of this statement – spoke from experience. His erotic memoir, My Secret Life (c. 1890), stands out amid the discursive context of Victorian English pornography in terms of uniqueness, complexity and sheer size. As a catalogue – fictitious or not – of a lifetime of sexual exploits by its author, it has been largely disregarded or marginalized as a valid historical resource. However, pornography has come into its own as an area of study in recent years, not least because it reveals much about the social, cultural and historical contexts in which it is produced. My Secret Life is a valuable text in many ways. It is part of a genre with its own cultural history, but it can also be used as a text with which to enter the cultural world of its production – even if that world is the ‘Victorian erotic imagination’. As an eleven-volume text which recounts a lifetime of sexual exploits by its upper-class author, it provides a mine of information on Victorian sexual practices, attitudes and ideologies. The fact that most of the women in the text were paid for their role in the various sexual encounters makes My Secret Life indispensable for the study of prostitution. But it is more complex than this.

Frequently represented in our cultural imagination as the regal ruler of the Adriatic, Venice's enticingly precarious architectural and cultural triumphs arise effortlessly from the natural powerful motion of the ocean's waves, which both sustain and constantly threaten to engulf the city's many splendours. Her existence traverses those normative boundaries between land and sea, between culture and nature, between civilized order and chaotic natural forces, between Apollonian reason and Dionysian passion, between the city's resplendent myth and her darker treacherous reality. Mirroring the topography of dark streets and bright squares, Venice is already a city of sublime and cultural enlightenment as much as it is a place of clandestine plots, betrayals and intrigues in the imaginations of her many expectant tourists. Romantic and post-Romantic responses to the city share in and invert past and present visitors’ wonder at winding through crisscrossing, narrow and darkened vennels to emerge, suddenly, into a sunlit piazza; or the magnificence of the Basilica of San Marco; or an unexpected vista of the shimmering Grand Canal. Attuned to the turbulent political and historical fortunes of the subjugated Venetian Republic, those Romantic and post-Romantic imaginings and reimaginings of Venice found that the city's own self-perpetuated, incandescent, eternal myth cast its own shadowy anti-myth of ruin and decay.