Recently one of the most distinguished historians of Tudor and Stuart England, Lawrence Stone, distilled his extensive study and careful analysis of this era into a compact, persuasive, up-to-date account of The Causes of the English Revolution, 1529-1642. Abounding in shrewd insights, it appears destined to became the standard short introduction to the background of that event and a popular starting point for comparative studies. For these reasons, the framework of historical interpretation expounded in the Causes bears careful, explicit examination and assessment. Stone himself stressed the need for such inquiry and indicated its direction by pointing out that “the main thing which distinguishes the narrative from the analytical historian is that the former works within a framework of models and assumptions of which he is not always fully conscious, while the latter is aware of what he is doing, and says so explicitly.” One must add that the analytical historian rarely escapes from the category reserved for his narrative colleague. However, the Causes opens the way for reappraisal of a whole historiographical tradition precisely because Stone explicates portions of his explanatory framework.

Normally most historians operate from hidden assumptions which enclose the perimeters of an historiographical tradition and provide it with needed stability. While excluding other approaches, these presuppositions make detailed research possible by singling out particular hypotheses, problems, and even evidence as especially significant or legitimate. From the days of Samuel Rawson Gardiner to the present, historians as different as Gardiner and Stone have shared a set of basic assumptions about the movement of history in general, about the long term causes of the “English Revolution”, and about its nature and timing.

The period between the early 1880s and the First World War marked the heyday of the British anarchist movement. Anarchism was then a popular topic of discussion. Various newspapers and periodicals expressed interest in the whereabouts and activities of anarchist supporters. Dictionaries and encyclopedias provided detailed information about the anarchist movement. Novels and short stories focused on anarchist figures, while the subject of anarchism arose in parliamentary debates and public speeches.

This extensive interest was not, however, beneficial to the movement. Discussions of anarchism usually took place in a hostile context and references to it were abusive. The movement was described as “a malignant fungoid growth … on the body politic,” and its members as “the very dregs of the population, the riff-raff of rascaldom, professional thieves [and] bullies.” Their humanist motivation was either ignored or denied. Violence appeared to be the characteristic mark of both the theory and practice of anarchism. The anarchist golden age “is to be ushered in … by bomb explosions and dynamic outrages … by inflammatory harangues and attempts at ‘expropriation,’ “ claimed the author of the entry “Anarchists and Anarchy” in the 1894 edition of Hazell's Annual. Anarchism was repeatedly defined as “another name for organised crime,” and its promoters were portrayed as “a pack of bloodthirsty and ferocious criminals who prey upon their fellows for their own gain.” Other references lumped all anarchists together as terrorists and denied that they had any program “but murder.” The style varied from rational analysis to emotional outbursts, but the message was the same: anarchism was society's worst enemy and anarchists the “most noxious beasts that have ever threatened civilised society.”

The main force shaping English institutional development during the late middle ages was the intermittent but seemingly endless war with France—a war that was occasionally expanded to include the struggle with France's enthusiastic Scottish ally. Hardly an aspect of English society remained unaffected by these conflicts: the crown was obliged to organize and manage the war effort; the nobility and many freemen had to fight; and most of the population, with few exceptions of class or status, bore the cost. Even if the average Englishman had been able momentarily to forget the continuing state of emergency prevailing in his country, such things as commissions of array, requests for subsidies, seizures of goods and services, alerts and alarms against invasion, and barrages of propaganda and counter-propaganda would have reminded him of the burdens of war. Especially after the formal beginning of the Hundred Years War in 1338, enormous pressures were placed on the institutions of English public administration by the demands of a war waged simultaneously on several fronts.

Associated with the expansion of the wartime activities and needs of royal government was the emergence both in England and France of an official mentality attuned to the importance of public opinion for facilitating the exploitation of community resources for military purposes. The inherent nature of feudal monarchy, which was heavily dependent on the cooperation and voluntary service of the governed, had always obliged medieval kings to recognize and respect the vox populi; but official awareness of the value of favorable publicity for conducting the domestic and foreign affairs of the crown increased notably from the late thirteenth century as a result of the French and Scottish wars.

“The biscuit is certainly exceedingly dry; but at any rate there are no weevils in it,” Lytton Strachey wrote, praising slightly one “scientific” historian that he might more thoroughly attack another. Strachey's amusing, contorted, perceptive, and sometimes ignorant burlesques of Victorian behaviour have lost favor; but they remain, more brightly outlined and self-mocking versions of common prejudices. Certainly the belief that the “scientific” historians produced dry biscuit is still commonly held even among those who one would suppose had read them; and the belief is probably held more clearly and widely about William Stubbs than about either Mandell Creighton or S. R. Gardiner, because as an historian his name is more eminent, more people have heard of him, or more people who have heard of him know that he is a “scientific” historian from the authoritative, the “dry” period. He was born in 1825 and died in 1901.

In fact the problem with Stubbs is in quite a different direction. Stubbs is more compelling than his evidence demands and more fascinating than his subject would predict. F. W. Maitland, before he was forced by profession to that sort of reading, found Stubbs's Constitutional History “in a London club, and read it because it was interesting.” Even at his weakest and dullest Stubbs is interesting; at his strongest and most flamboyant, as in his Benedict of Peterborough and Walter of Coventry introductions in the Rolls Series and in parts of his Constitutional History, he is dazzling. The problem is not overcoming Stubbs's dullness but explaining his brilliance.

The key question posed by this essay is why historians' interest in Britain's imperial past has increased rather than diminished in recent decades. It argues that this interest has been sustained in part by a preoccupation with certain contemporary social and political issues, and differences of opinion about these issues have helped fuel the “imperial history wars.” The nature of the debate has differed for American- and British-based historians. For the former, British imperial history has served as an analogy for thinking about America's racial politics and its role as a global power. For the latter, it has served as a focal point for contending claims about Britain's past and deepening anxieties about its future. The essay concludes by urging historians to be more self-reflexive about their own practices and more rigorous in exposing presentist claims about the past.

Public parks offered many attractions to Victorian Londoners: natural beauty, healthful fresh air, facilities for sports and socializing, and grounds for civic pride. The efforts of individuals, private groups, and government officials increased the number of public parks in the metropolis from about a dozen at mid-century to more than 200 in 1898. Parks became integral parts of city life and stimulated the development of a diverse community of park users. These citizens did not hesitate to express their views about appropriate behavior for public space, demonstrating their role in the public sphere. While park users differed in class, gender, age, religion, and politics, most agreed that the city's public spaces should encourage “respectability” and good citizenship, especially as an example to children. When these values, vaguely defined though they were, seemed threatened by specific park behaviors, the community displayed a remarkable consensus. Two particular types of park use—public displays of affection by “courting couples” and the presence of “verminous persons” (mostly vagrants)—aroused public opinion in the 1890s and early 1900s to moral panic. Reluctant royal and municipal park authorities were pressured into passing more restrictive park laws in both cases, though the “problems” themselves did not disappear.

This article explores how these crises developed and why public reaction to them was so vehement. The material reality behind the “courting couples” and “verminous persons” crises, as far as can be determined, seems not to justify the level of outrage that occurred. The strength of public reaction must reflect the extreme sensitivity of a culturally unstable community in the process of redefining itself and its values. Public parks changed patterns of social interaction in the late Victorian city, bringing diverse citizens into proximity by creating new common spaces. Early nineteenth-century class discrimination against workers and the poor in public space then gave way to a new form of exclusion that emphasized individual behavior rather than inherited status.

In the West, sexuality has always been viewed with suspicion and sexual acts which, on the surface, seem harmless have represented attacks of a most profound sort on society. At least until the nineteenth century, when masturbation moved to center stage, sodomy was probably the major taboo. The reasons for this fear are complex. On the symbolic level, sodomy was linked with death and evil. The sodomite was wedded to the bowels and thus to the bowels of the earth where men rotted and decayed. Further, because of the enormous power of the Sodom and Gommorah story in the Old Testament, few doubted that sexual acts had social repercussions. The sodomite was dangerous. Once before in history, sodomites had caused the destruction of two cities by defying the moral code of the Lord. While fear of fire and brimstone may have faded, there were innumerable other catastrophes which the Lord might visit on those who sinned. In the pre-nineteenth century world, where the idea of mastering nature was tempered by respect for its power, sodomy was a cause of grave concern. Sodomites were often executed because to allow them to live was to court disaster.

When disaster did strike, it was common for clergymen and other societal spokesmen to blame licentiousness and specifically homosexuality. After the relatively mild earthquakes that shook London in 1750, the Bishop of London stressed that “Blasphemous language was used openly in the streets. Lewd pictures illustrated all the abominations of the public stews, and were tolerated. There was much homosexuality.” A poet compared the London quakes with a similar disaster in Jamaica.

How and when did society first recognize women's homoerotic bonds? Were these romantic friendships fully accepted, or were they seen as problematic? Did the women involved see themselves as lesbians? These and other questions have been raised over the past twenty years by historians of lesbian sexuality. When Lillian Faderman in her pioneering survey of European and American lesbians declared the nineteenth century as the golden age of unproblematic romantic friendships, historians quickly responded with evidence to the contrary. Much of this debate has been focused on whether or not women could be considered “lesbian” before they claimed (or had forced on them) a publicly acknowledged identity. But the modern lesbian did not appear one day fully formed in the case studies of the fin-de-siècle sexologists; rather she was already a recognizable, if shadowy, subject for gossip among the sophisticated by at least the 1840s and 1850s. By examining closely a single divorce trial, I hope to show that literary and legal elites acknowledged lesbian sexuality in a variety of complex ways. Their uneasy disapproval encompassed both a self-conscious silence in the face of evidence and a desire to control information, lest it corrupt the innocent. Yet who can define the line between the ignorant and the informed? The very public discussion of the Codrington divorce, and most especially the role of the feminist, Emily Faithfull, in alienating Helen Codrington's affections from her husband, demonstrate the recognition of female homosexual behavior.

Discussions of the unreformed English electoral system usually revolve around its three major flaws: the control of borough seats in the Commons by individual patrons, the general lack of opportunities for popular participation, and electoral corruption. The standard examples of Old Sarum (for patronage), the election of 1761 (for the lack of participation), and the Oxfordshire election of 1754 (for corruption) have been cited so often that certain bits of disparaging information, such as the 20,000-pound Tory expenditure in Oxfordshire in 1754, are permanently imbedded in the secondary literature and have resulted in dismissals of eighteenth-century popular politics as unworthy of serious consideration. Instead of using such extreme examples to illustrate the depths to which electoral politics could sink, this more systematic inquiry into the nature of electoral politics enumerates both electoral patronage and electoral participation over the entire eighteenth century, and considers electoral corruption in a necessarily more speculative fashion. From this broader perspective, it is clear that the dismissals of popular politics in England before the Reform Act are unwarranted. Electoral politics played an increasingly important role in the political system during the reign of George III, and to neglect its importance is to misinterpret the political environment of unreformed England.

“During the late 1830's and 40's two forms of class consciousness were being forged in Britain, not one — middle-class consciousness and working-class consciousness.” Asa Briggs's belief is shared in all its starkness by many students of early Victorian Britain, including R. K. Webb, who has even referred to “the working class point of view,” which middle-class men could adopt only by becoming “traitors to their class.” Such statements have been severely taken to task by various historians, and from the beginning Briggs has seen the need to admit important qualifications. Quoting the nineteenth-century economist W. T. Thornton, he has agreed that “the labouring population … spoken of as if it formed only one class” was “really divided into several,” each distinguished from the other by wage rates, social security, regularity of earnings, climate of industrial relations, status in the local community, prospects of future advancement, and sophistication of political attitudes.

Unfortunately these qualifications are productive of confusion: it is by no means obvious why Briggs's readers should believe that only one form of working-class consciousness existed in such conditions of diversity. Nor is it obvious why similar qualifications should not be made concerning the middle classes. Was the gulf between William Lovett and those whom he called the “vicious many” not similar in extent to that between most members of the Leeds middle classes and their fellow citizen J. G. Marshall, “a millionaire mill-owner, a man aristocratically allied, and the manager of the largest factory in the world”? Nor is it necessary to rely on such an extreme example, if one believes Gibbon Wakefield, who detected the existence of an “uneasy class,” the product of a division within the ranks of the professionally qualified:

English landed society after the Restoration, and especially after the Glorious Revolution, has an historical reputation for stability, and even if this has sometimes been exaggerated by those who have commented upon it, it is clearly merited if comparison is made with the century before 1640. Possession of a great estate undoubtedly gave the aristocratic families of the age a massive economic strength, and the period is generally portrayed as one in which the ownership of property tended to pass increasingly into their hands. So perhaps it did, although any measurement is not, and may never be, possible. Yet it is certain that there remained an extremely active land market, and no contemporary observers of the land market whose correspondence has yet been studied ever complained that there was any shortage of property for sale. Moreover an examination of the title deeds of any estate built up at this time will reveal that the supply of land for sale came not only from the lesser squires and yeoman farmers, to whom the economic climate and fiscal exactions of much of this period were notoriously unkind, nor yet only from town dwellers who had inherited country estates in which they had no real interest. The substantial gentry and great landed magnates, too, are frequently found selling land, often in very considerable quantities. It is not the intention of this article to argue that, contrary to all other appearance, this is evidence that in any sense the greater proprietors were a “declining” class, for clearly they were not.

On October 10, 1800, a group of whigs and radicals met in the Shakespeare Tavern to celebrate the anniversary of the first election of Charles James Fox for the city of Westminster. But there was little to be festive about. The speeches, toasts, and songs betrayed a sense of despair tinged with nostalgia. Fox and the Lord Mayor, Thomas Erskine and Lord Bessborough, all toasted “the Memory of the Liberty of the Press” and joined in a song, written for the occasion, which reflected the general disillusionment:

HOW chang'd are the times, and our people of late,
When my brother John Bull has no use for his pate?
A head without tongue ev'ry wise man maintains,
Is just as absurd as a tongue without brains.
Sing ballinamona or a,
No head without tongue then for me.
Fine laws have been made, for the good of the land,
And our heads are now placed where our heels us'd to stand,
Topsy-turvy's the word where fair Order and birth,
And this once land of plenty's now chang'd to a dearth.
Sing ballinamona, &c.
No plenty of starving for me.
But still it is some consolation to think,
How little we need either victuals or drink,
For the Minister's able, who fram'd these wise laws,
Has given to a Justice the key to our jaws.
Sing ballinamona, &c.
No justice to lock jaws for me.
When enslav'd thus the People, the Ministers then
Send to Botany Bay all who dare to complain,
And religion they mock, when we've scanty of meat,
For they publish a Fast, when there's nothing to eat.

The film era in Britain commenced in early 1896, but its moral impact on viewers was not considered very much during its first decade. This was primarily because film was dispersed in a variety of venues like music halls and fairgrounds where other entertainment was provided, or in unused shops and other premises that were temporarily rented. Film thus had no permanent, separate identity as a leisure activity that took place in one particular type of public space, hence it was difficult for moralists to recognize, much less discern and evaluate its moral influence. Moreover, many of the middle class (from whom most moralists came) dismissed the early film industry as a passing, vulgar fad of the working class that need not be taken seriously.

But moralists did begin to notice the impact of the industry when film acquired a conspicuous new identity of its own in the years after 1906 when thousands of purpose-built cinemas were constructed. The tremendous growth of both the cinemas and their mostly working-class, youthful audiences led some middle-class moralists to focus their attention on film for the first time. They soon concluded that the cinemas undermined the morality of their young audiences and launched a crusade against the film industry. The general outlines of the campaign are well known. Moralists charged that the darkened cinemas provided cover for couples to court and for some men to abuse children. They also asserted that many films were sensational ones about sexual indecency, crime, and violence. Such fare, they contended, encouraged immorality and incited juvenile delinquency among youth who imitated the crimes they saw enacted on screen. The moralists therefore demanded censorship of the films, brighter lighting in the cinemas to discourage sexual misbehavior, and police action against indecency. Moreover, Sabbatarians opposed the opening of the cinemas on Sundays as a further desecration of that holy day of rest.

Late eighteenth-century London was a center of political debate, expressed variously in countless pamphlets, in coffee house discussions, and in extra-parliamentary political organizations. Intellectuals and political activists who argued about the problems of ministerial corruption and relations with the colonies had great faith in the power of reasoned discourse and the development of knowledge to improve the human condition. Most of them were interested in science and religion as well as politics. They were part of that broad intellectual ferment that we call the Enlightenment; yet for all the originality of some of their ideas and the radicalism of their political thinking, they owed a great deal to longstanding English political and religious traditions. They were rationalists who believed in God, and radicals who believed in history.

Catharine Macaulay was one of these intellectuals; she was surely not a particularly original thinker, but was unique in using history as her primary medium of political debate, and in being a woman tolerated in male intellectual circles. Macaulay and her associates owed a great intellectual debt to earlier radical thinkers, the “commonwealthmen” of the seventeenth century. What is perhaps less well understood is the extent to which their ideas were informed by religious beliefs as well as political ideology. Beliefs in both the ancient rights of Englishmen and in millennial perfectionism provided the basis for the particular brand of political radicalism espoused by Macaulay and her associates. History was an important part of their political thinking, both because the rights of Englishmen were rooted in historical experience and because the process of history was part of the ultimate achievement of perfection.