In recent decades, several historians, including myself, have argued that many nineteenth-century British urban elites were akin to a sort of new squirearchy. The intention of this article is to explore how far this idea enables us to better understand the role, power, and style of urban leadership, and the political, social, and economic context in which it existed. Given that the termination point is 1914, it also examines how much the notion has to say about political change in the rapidly expanding urban context after around 1850. The notion of a “new squirearchy” implies two things about nineteenth-century local leadership and the nature of its power: first, that urban elites aped and importantly resembled their rural “old” squirearchical counterparts in both substance and style; second, in so doing, such elites were calling up (whether intentionally or not) rural patterns of behavior to try to resolve problems of order, authority, legitimacy, and power in a situation where they did not naturally have easy and economical access to the means of producing any of these things. With this in mind, and after some preliminary clarification of terminology, the article will divide into three broad sections. In the first, it explores the utility of the squirearchical model to understanding the character and power of urban elites in the period up to around 1880 when local leadership in many industrial towns seemed most generously endowed with attributes to which the model might apply. The not very astonishing conclusion will be that the model is helpful in some ways, less so in others, all of which stem from the urban and industrial context in which leaders were operating. The second section will focus on the years up to around 1918 when “men (and women) of property and station” were withdrawing from active participation in the urban and industrial scene. Here, the argument will be that, at least in those northern towns under particular scrutiny, elements of the “new squirearchical” style proved remarkably resilient in spite of the withdrawal of many of those who practiced it—and may well have much to say about how the transition from one sort of leadership to another was managed, or at least took place. The final section will be concerned with the consequences of withdrawal for the power of urban leaders who remained. It will suggest that, just as property and station was no more than a partial predictor of power in the period when it was most abundantly in evidence, so its decline after 1880 was only one among many factors explaining what happened to the ability of local leaders to achieve intended effects. In fact, for various reasons, again heavily connected with the urban context in which leadership was exercised, the power at least of local political leaders in important respects increased.

Walter Bagehot divided the English constitution into two parts, the “dignified” and the “efficient.” The sovereign and the House of Lords were the dignified or the showy parts, imposing spectacles designed to serve as reminders of a glorious past and to impress an uneducated populace with the authority of the state. The cabinet and the House of Commons were the efficient parts, where the real work went on, where men of business transacted affairs of state using the authority obtained by the dignified parts. So he wrote in the years preceding the second Reform Bill, when it was conventional to speak of the rudeness and unruliness of an uneducated people and of the hazards of admitting them to the franchise. Yet his book, animated in such large measure by the debates on parliamentary reform of the late 1860s, remains a much-quoted authority on the English constitution today.

Perhaps one among the reasons for its enduring popularity is that he expressed so neatly a notion that certainly existed before as well as in his time and that survives today, namely, that governmental activity can be divided into ceremonial and political parts. The one is opposed to the other as pleasure is to business, as emptiness is to substance, as illusion is to reality, as artifice is to plain speaking. In affairs of state, the adjective “ceremonial,” when attached to words like “head of state” or “official,” has come to mean empty figurehead or powerless placeholder. Ceremonies of state—coronations, jubilees, openings of Parliament—are picturesque and pleasant but essentially ephemeral, devoid of anything powerful other than that which is powerfully sentimental, colorful, and evocative.

Between May 26 and June 5, 1784, five concerts were given in Westminster Abbey and a West End entertainment palace to mark the death of George Frideric Handel twenty-five years before. The event became a legend in its own time. The scale of the commemoration festival of 1784 was unparalleled among musical events: 4,500 people gathered in the abbey to hear 525 performers render Handel's Messiah, and, as European Magazine put it, “so extraordinary a spectacle, we believe, never before solicited the public notice.” This novel festival to a German-born composer captured public attention all around the Western world but in Britain made Handel's music into a national tradition. The commemoration was indeed a political event. It came on the heels of constitutional crisis—the dispute over the authority of crown and Parliament, the Fox-North ministry of 1783, and the turbulent election of 1784. Nobody planned the commemoration for political reasons, but that is what it became, willy-nilly, celebrating the end of the crisis and the hope for a harmonious new order.

The commemoration put in ritual form the culmination of the country's political development over the previous three decades. The new harmony seen in the grand event suggested the reunion of Tories with Whigs in government and the growth of a new political community—a kind of establishment—that, despite the conflict over the war and the constitution, was broad-bottomed in its inclusion of faction and opinion. Yet that does not mean that the commemoration was unanimously supported or was truly nonpartisan, any more than was this establishment itself.

Between 1945 and 1967, England's town and city centers were reconstructed. This article argues that this process of civic redevelopment transformed working-class people's experience of urban life. Frequently represented as a social problem or simply ignored by prewar planning and political rhetoric on civic participation, working-class people were treated as vital to civic life in postwar England. This change had profound implications for people's experience of civic life and for class identity. However, historians of urban change have focused on planners and politicians, while the few histories of postwar working-class life that exist concentrate on selfhood, home, and neighborhood life. Drawing on personal testimonies, press reports, and planning documents this paper argues that working-class people were active agents of change in England's civic centers. Moreover, the experience of civic reconstruction encouraged the development of a sense of entitlement for a more secure and fuller life than earlier generations had experienced. The rebuilding of the civic centers was widely recognized as an achievement of ordinary working-class people, and the rebuilt centers were understood as places that should and could provide for their needs.

This article makes three points about the death throes of convict transportation. First, the quarrel over transportation shows the double-edged nature of the moral critique of empire in the early Victorian era. Metropolitan criticism of transportation had its roots in the same effort to moralize the empire that was seen in the almost contemporaneous assault on slavery. But transportation was deemed too convenient a means of getting rid of criminals for Britons safely to do without it. Second, the Whig government of 1846–52 sought to save transportation by moralizing the convict before shipping him off. By this point, however, the moral objections to transportation in eastern Australia had become so strong as to make the plan untenable. Third, colonial opposition to transportation ultimately left the British government with no choice but to replace it with penal servitude at home, and the debate over crime and punishment that played out over the next decade revealed a waning of faith in convict rehabilitation that manifested itself in a harsher prison regime. In necessitating the rise of penal servitude, the end of transportation makes it clear that the empire mattered very much indeed to the reshaping of British penal policy in the mid-Victorian era.

On March 9, 1623, ten English merchants were beheaded on Amboyna in Indonesia by order of Harman van Speult, the Dutch governor of the island. They died accused of plotting to seize control of Fort Victoria, the island's stronghold, in order to take over the local spice trade. Considering the number of lives lost in the centuries of conflict between Dutch and British merchants in the East Indies, the incident on Amboyna seems in hindsight to have been a rather insignificant affair. Yet the occurrence played an important role in English politics under the early Stuarts, and influenced English/Dutch relations for a century.

News of the incident, which the English came to know as the Amboyna Massacre, reached England on May 29, 1624, and caused a diplomatic dilemma. James I, who was negotiating an alliance with the Netherlands against Spain, chose to deal with the situation through diplomacy rather than military reprisals, a position his son supported. It was a decision for which neither the Stuarts' contemporaries nor their modern chroniclers would forgive them. John Chamberlain, the friend and correspondent of many important court figures, wrote in July 1624 that he hoped James would “say lesse so he would do more” to make the Dutch pay for insulting English honor. By February of the next year, he was lamenting that he had “knowne the time when they [the Dutch] durst not have offered the least of those indignities we have lately swallowed and indured.” Chamberlain's belief that James's policy consisted primarily of inaction, and that it played into the hands of the Dutch, has been a popular theme in modern accounts.

Historians differ widely in appreciating the fiscal grievances of the Lincolnshire Uprising and the Pilgrimage of Grace. Following the Dodds, some dismiss them as a marginal concern, while others regard them as a major cause of revolt. No matter where they stand, historians have handled these grievances without careful analysis. This seems to stem from a debate that has dogged both rebellions. The complexity of the rebels' complaint is obscured by a simplistic desire to show that the revolts were primarily of religious provenance, notwithstanding the variety of causes evident in the rebels' demands. Furthermore, the two main advocates of secular motivation, A. G. Dickens and R. R. Reid, perversely mention the fiscal grievances only in passing. Yet they were there, firmly declared in the rebels' bills, petitions, and songs. A pervasive force affecting the whole range of society, they sustained the rebel view that the government had to be checked not only to prevent the subversion of the Church but also the decay of the commonwealth. They were also present in the revolts of 1537 as northerners rose again, this time to protest against a breach of promise committed by the government's attempt to collect the lay subsidy and clerical tenth before the York Parliament had met to determine whether or not they should be collected.

“Social Darwinism” means almost as many things as there are people who have written on it; but this paper takes it to be a generic term for theories of human social development and maintenance which are in some way inspired by biological evolutionary theories—this “inspiration” could take the form of seeing human sociality as a straight extension of the animal (and perhaps plant) domain, or it could involve some sort of analogy. In discussion of the roots of social Darwinism two names invariably appear—that of Charles Darwin himself, obviously, and that of Herbert Spencer. Here, however is the end of agreement. Who was the more important and influential, divides scholars right down the middle; as also do the questions of who really came first and whether their doctrines were essentially the same.

Because there is so much disagreement, no one has yet adequately argued to precisely the right conclusion. To anticipate, this paper argues that both Darwin and Spencer represent fundamental advances (or, less normatively, shifts beyond) their common major source, Thomas Robert Malthus; and that although there was overlap (and undoubted mutual borrowing) their positions were fundamentally dissimilar. Consequently, a search for the roots of Social Darwinism yields two sources, Darwin and Spencer respectively, and that what came from these sources was different. This essay begins with a brief discussion of Malthus's views, paying special attention to his relevance to social Darwinian lines of thought, considers the views of Spencer and Darwin on human social structures, and concludes by comparing the two thinkers, noting their similarities, but arguing that these are far outweighed by their differences.

So began Lady Sarah Cowper's sixteen-year enterprise in self-justification. Between 1670 and 1700 this English gentlewoman had already filled a dozen commonplace books with extracts from poems, sermons, scripture, and essays, consciously searching for an emotional and intellectual outlet. But in July of 1700 with the added impetus of family scandal alongside long-term marital friction and financial instability, Lady Sarah started keeping a diary in which she reacted to her position—initially middle-aged and unhappily married, then elderly and widowed—and to events in her world. When she finally stopped writing because of ill health in September 1716, her daily entries totaled roughly 2,300 pages in seven volumes. This remarkable diary offers a specific link between the ideologies that institutions and authorities were concerned to promulgate and the outlook of the individual.

Most of Disraeli's recent biographers have drawn attention to the anti-Semitism which he experienced as a schoolboy and as an aspiring politician at the raucous free-for-all of the early Victorian hustings. But the barrage of anti-Semitism directed at him when he was prime minister between 1874 and 1880 has not received the same scholarly attention. Lord Blake, for example, in a work of almost 800 pages, devotes only three short sentences to the anti-Semitism of this period. To some degree it is easy to see why this is so. Although Disraeli was baptized into Christianity just before he turned thirteen, he was so harangued and ridiculed as a Jew during his early election campaigns that the anti-Semitic mood of the public could not be ignored, either by contemporary observers or by historians. The anti-Semitism he faced as prime minister, however, was not literally thrust in his face, and it did not intrude on his public appearances. It is perhaps understandable then that historians, contemplating the marked contrast between the vigorous Jew baiting of Disraeli's early elections and the absence of it in his later ones, would assume that, whatever prejudices might lurk in private diaries, letters, and memoirs, expressions of anti-Semitism in that most public of all arenas, the world of politics, were now unacceptable. Increasing political decorum, the triumph of liberal and nonconformist ideologies, the Emancipation of the Jews in 1858, their continuing acculturation and assimilation, their greater role in public life, and of course Disraeli's own prominence as leader of the “national” party combined, it might be argued, to create a political and social climate in which public expressions of anti-Semitism were neither profitable nor respectable.

The Reformed Kirk of Scotland has a reputation for vigorous repression of festivity hardly to be surpassed by any other Protestant church. From 1560 on, the authorities of the kirk from local session to General Assembly waged a stern and unremitting campaign against the celebration of Yule, Easter, May Day, Midsummer, and saints' days; against feasting, whether at marriages or wakes; against Sunday sports and dancing and guising—in short, against anything that might distract newly Reformed laity from the central Protestant focus on the sermon, the Bible, and the godly life of moral discipline and prayer. Their goals were both negative and positive. They were intent on quashing popish superstition in part because they were convinced that its persistence helped to explain the recurrence of plague, famine, and other divine judgments on the land. In a more positive sense, they were trying to clear the way for construction of a new vision of the good life—one that exalted word over image and discipline over ritual, and in which community cohesion was achieved by a shared Protestant identity and the common goal of a devout and orderly society. Modern observers generally credit their campaign with remarkable success; certainly the popular image of Scotland after the Reformation is grim and joyless—and with some reason. Days of fasting and humiliation under presbyterian rule came close to outnumbering the old saints' days, and they vastly outnumbered new days of thanksgiving. Official policy on the matter of festivity was exemplary for a Reformed nation.

Between the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, the security of British navigation in and around the corsair-infested waters of the Mediterranean depended on indented parchment passports—Mediterranean passes. This article recovers the history of the Mediterranean pass and traces the development of the Mediterranean pass system from its origins in England's mid-seventeenth-century treaties with the North African regencies to its role in the emergence of Britain's Mediterranean empire over the course of the long eighteenth century. At its inception, the Mediterranean pass system formed an interstate regulatory regime that mediated between North African and British naval power by providing a means to identify British vessels at sea and to limit the protection of Britain's treaties to them. During the eighteenth century, however, foreign merchants and shipowners, especially from Genoa, sought out the security of British passes by moving to Britain's colonies at Gibraltar and Minorca. The resulting incorporation of foreigners into the British pass system fundamentally altered the nature and significance of the pass and contributed to the development of Britain's imperial presence in the Mediterranean. This article reveals how the growth of British power and the interactions of British consuls and imperial officials with mariners and merchants from around the Mediterranean transformed the pass from a document of identification into an instrument of imperial protection that helped sustain Britain's Mediterranean outposts in the eighteenth century and make possible the dramatic expansion of the British Empire further into that sea at the start of the nineteenth.

This article explores the cultural dynamics of branding and mass consumption in Britain during the 1920s and 1930s. It focuses on Penguin Books’ cartoon mascot, which appeared on all of the firm's paperback covers and in-store promotional material from 1935. A familiar but critically ignored cultural icon, Penguin's mascot followed a wave of prominent advertising characters that energetically burst onto Britain's commercial scene in the early 1920s. Highly visible on packaging, poster hoardings, and advertisements within the press, brand mascots became popular media stars in the 1920s, seeming to herald a dawning age of material parity and collective consumer sovereignty. A decade later, Penguin's mascot used this utopianism around branded mass consumption to forge a leftist vision of social-democratic progress. Augmented by certain in-store display techniques and modes of purchase, Penguin Books appeared to constitute an enlightened public sphere. The cartoon bird became a lucrative mechanism through which browsers were invited to contribute to this progressive cultural project.

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.

In his lively reassessment of extra-parliamentary politics early in the reign of George III, John Brewer advances a conclusion of potentially great significance. Where Sir Lewis Namier and Ian Christie see in Wilkism little more than a political May dance without important effect, Brewer finds a “focussed radicalism” embodying fundamental change in the nature of traditional English politics. Where George Rudé carefully delimits the geographical, social, and political range of Wilkite influence, Brewer argues that “focussed radicalism” was a truly national phenomenon personified in Wilkes and parent to the popular sensibility that underlay later anti-aristocratic and reform politics.

Brewer appears fully as unconventional in his attitude toward what constitutes proper evidence as in the conclusion he builds upon that evidence. Namier and Christie rest their cases on the seemingly solid foundation of election analysis. But Brewer rejects this evidence as inherently unsatisfactory. The “formal, institutional yardstick” of polls, we are told, cannot help measure the influence or extent of radical political opinion. Instead, he concentrates on non-electoral evidence, relying, above all, on the fragile and fleeting indications of support for Wilkes that are to be found in provincial newspapers, petitions, and public gatherings during the years 1768-1771.