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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Race—as a category—has commonly been understood as a response to difference. In the first instance, race offered a means of ordering unfamiliar peoples, whether encountered in the empire or at home. In the European historiography, the notion of “biological” race, defined by an inherited set of characteristics passed through the blood, possesses a particular genealogy: its roots can be found in the eighteenth century, its fullest articulation came in the late nineteenth century, and its twentieth-century decline was hastened by the Holocaust.

This article sets out a different, if not completely incompatible, thesis. It takes the case of British Jews to argue that racial categories could arise as a response to the apparent similarities, as well as the perceived differences, between Jews and other Britons. Put differently, in the late nineteenth century, Jews came increasingly to be identified as a race precisely because they were difficult to differentiate from their fellow citizens. Class proved a critical determinant. Jews became ever more invisible as they scaled the social ladder. “East End” Jews—poor and newly immigrated—might be readily detectable, but their middle- and upper-middle-class “West End” counterparts confounded observers. Notions of race, I will argue, emerged in part as a consequence of assimilation, delimiting difference in a nation where formal legal barriers to Jewish integration had been eliminated and social obstacles largely overcome.

Race was a staple term of the late nineteenth century. It proliferated throughout the language of the time.

World War One and its aftermath restored the empire to a central place in the considerations of Whitehall. Not only did the war open new vistas for imperial ambitions and drive home the benefits to be drawn from the established dominions, notably in terms of manpower and materiel: it also brought into seats of power the likes of Lords Milner and Curzon, men whose careers had been devoted to the maintenance and expansion of Britain's imperial realm. Though their autocratic style ill-suited democratic politics, it did serve the needs of a modern state at war, where all sectors of society were subordinated to central command. It can be argued that these imperial bureaucrats had a more sophisticated appreciation for the power of the state than their domestic counterparts, who still labored under the lingering constraints of laissez-faire doctrine. They understood from colonial experience the state's potential for engineering social change. And they saw change as vital to Britain's future. Deeply imbued with a social Darwinist world-view, they regarded the war as evidence that national survival would require a more integrated, self-contained, harmonious imperial system, directed with greater deliberation and rigor from above. They were, in effect, social imperialists. Although this doctrine had taken shape in the Edwardian years, it was the war that eroded much of the resistance to its implementation. Yet how far could these gains be extended into the critical post-war period?

As Keith Williams has argued in his valuable dissertation, an important feature of social imperialist doctrine concerned migration: here the bonds between Britain and the empire were those of culture and blood.

Soon after her husband of thirty-three years died leaving her a wealthy widow of sixty-two with an estate worth some £6,000, Anne Elsdon met Tobias Audley, a widower of twenty-five and keeper of a tobacco shop, whom one witness later described as “a most lewd person, and of no worth.” On July 21, 1624, Audley took the Widow Elsdon and her friend, Martha Jackson, to the Greyhound Tavern in London, where they met Mary Spencer, Margery Terry, Frances Holiday, and Nicholas Cartmell. The first two were common prostitutes, the second two ministers, though, presumably, not of the burning puritan brand. For the next three days all of them plied the Widow Elsdon with some £25 worth of liquor, staggering from tavern to tavern and eventually ending up at the Nags Head in Cheapside. In that appropriately named hostelry Anne consented to marry Tobias Audley. A special license was hurriedly obtained, but not before Widow Elsdon had passed out. So, after trying to revive her with slaps around the face, Mary Spencer, the common whore, said the marriage vows for her. The Reverend Cartmell pronounced Tobias and Anne man and wife, and off the widow was carried to a Blackfriars tavern for her wedding night. After stripping her, Tobias Audley proceeded to strip her estate. He took plate from her house worth £140, and bonds and deeds valued at £3,000, and largely as a result of her traumatic experiences the widow died two years later.

Boyle's natural philosophy as it evolved in the 1660s was the product in part of some competing philosophies and theologies. Since he defined his own thought in terms of these others, one of the best ways of understanding it and its origins would seem to be to study it in relation to this context of competing ideas—especially as this has never before been done for Boyle. This was no mere battle over philosophical and religious ideas; beneath the surface lay extreme ideological differences; the nature of society and government was at stake just as it was in Boyle's dialogue with the sects in the late 1640s and the 1650s. Indeed some of his opponents in the 1660s still represent positions against which he argued before the Restoration, and these are the ones I wish to consider here.

In 1665 or 1666 Boyle wrote A Free Inquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature. By “the vulgarly received notion of nature” he means the conception deriving from ancient Greek philosophy, both Platonic and Aristotelian, that there is a governing agency in nature apart from God which cannot be reduced to the mechanical principles of matter and motion. This agency is called variously plastic nature, the astral spirits or the soul of the world, and as Boyle says is conceived by “the schools” as “a being that…does always that which is best.” Boyle's intention is to show that his own idea of nature is preferable to this Peripatetic and Platonic one because his goes further than its rival towards a proper understanding of the relations between Creator and creation.

Midway through his account of the reign of King Edward III, John Speed paused to remind his readers of what had gone before, an account of Edward's wars in France, by way of leading into his next subject, the king's godliness. “You have heard a part of great king Edward's victorious fortunes in battle, both by land and sea; be not ignorant of his pietie.” Speed's choice of language is striking: “You have heard.” Many early modern authors employed this same peculiar device. In 1600, Thomas Danett commenced a chapter of his A continuation of the history of France with the sentence, “You have heard how a truce for five years was concluded betweene the kings of Fraunce and Spaine.” Thomas James, translating a French work on the Stoics, wrote, “You have heard discoursed unto you the principall lawes which the Stoickes thincke expedient….” To justify the printing of a quotation from a medieval manuscript, William Camden urged his reader to “heare the verie words out of that private historic” Richard Verstegan directed the reader to “heer the testimony of sundry ancient and approved authors.” The anonymous author of The historie of Mervine (1612), a chivalric romance, reminded the reader of an earlier event with the remark: “the childe (as you have heard) was baptized….”

As historians, we have all had occasion to refer the reader back to earlier points in our articles, theses, and books. As a rule, such passages begin with a phrase like “we have seen,” or “it has been shown,” not “you have heard.”

“I am innocent of poisoning Cook by strychnine.” With these words, Dr. William Palmer went to the scaffold, convicted of having perpetrated precisely the crime he denied to the last. Palmer's twelveday trial in May 1856, among the most celebrated English murder cases of the century, had received massive press attention, and his execution was no less scrutinized. Scaffold speeches being traditional opportunities for achieving closure on a case (preferably, though not exclusively, by confession and repentance), press reports devoted a good deal of space to the concerted efforts made to convince Palmer to comply with these expectations: “From the time of his sentence to the very moment when he ascended the scaffold,” one correspondent observed, “Palmer was persuaded, entreated, implored day by day, almost hour by hour, to confess his crimes, not to God, but to man.”

Interrogated to the last, Palmer offered instead of closure a riddle, neither directly denying his guilt nor ratifying the grounds upon which his conviction rested. In doing so he seemed to take aim at the most contentious part of the trial, namely, the scientific evidence that had attributed the death of John Parsons Cook to strychnine poisoning. By disavowing strychnine as the agent of Cook's death, he at once repudiated the prosecution's fundamental contention and left open the possibility that, although he had been justly condemned as a murderer, his conviction was based on fallacious medico-legal grounds.

Palmer's dying words became the subject of widespread concern.