This article examines the relationship between shame and police court media trial reports. It explores the social and cultural mores that underpinned the construction of shaming practices in trial coverage and assesses the ways in which the media functioned as a judicial and extrajudicial shaming resource. Far from disappearing with changing sensibilities, as has been argued elsewhere, premodern religious and judicial shaming methods shifted into areas of modernity, being relayed, supported, and influenced by new forms of modern print culture. The media, this article contends, served as an extension of the disciplinary apparatus, with editors applying their own assumptions about the guilt of the accused regardless of judicial verdicts and in line with their own notion of “common-sense” lay justice. The use of shame, though, was discriminatory—mirroring, and even helping to define, middle-class notions of shameful behavior and masculine and feminine conduct—which would, crucially, expose the social and cultural confines of media censure.

“Disguise in all its forms is a badge of slavery.” That J.S. Mill, at one time an ardent advocate of secret voting and later its equally ardent opponent, should have included this sentiment in his attack on the ballot may strike one as rather odd. Yet the expression of sentiments of this kind was not an uncommon feature of the debate provoked by the ballot question during the mid-Victorian period and before. Although Mill himself did not explicitly stigmatize the ballot as “un-English,” the emotional content of his condemnation strongly resembled a considerable number of written and verbal assaults on secret voting which attached that label to the proposed reform. Such denunciations of secret voting as un-English were taken seriously at the time, and should be treated seriously by historians of early and mid-Victorian England.

It is, however, necessary to place this un-English aspect within a broader context. The opponents of the ballot were motivated by a number of considerations, and different opponents attacked the measure for different reasons. The formulation of the case against the ballot incorporated several diverse elements: the self-interest of an aristocracy nervous about the potential impact of secret voting on the existing distribution of political power; intellectual convictions concerning the nature of the franchise; and emotional commitments which rejected secret voting as un-English. To ignore the first two of these elements would be to obscure the relative significance of the last. Thus it is perhaps best to begin with the emergence of the ballot as a practical political issue.

This article examines the seminal contributions of Britain's marriage counseling and therapy services toward cultivating a new emotional purpose for marriage in the decades following World War II. It presents two related narrative threads. First, it argues that psychologically oriented relationship services attracted government support because they supported the postwar ideal of a classless democratic society. Pioneering practitioners promoted a universalized view of citizens’ emotional relationships—rather than their socio-economic circumstances—as the determining fact of their lives. Second, it argues that these services provided a compelling language and set of concepts for articulating transforming understandings and expectations of marriage in the decades after 1945. To this end, the article reveals how the language and concepts of marriage therapists were mobilized by divorce reformers in the 1960s, and helped replace the offense model for divorce petitions with a less punitive psychological model of relationship “breakdown” in 1969. Britain's postwar marriage welfare services endowed stable harmonious families with crucial social and political importance as the bedrock for postwar social reconstruction and the most fitting environment for children and adults alike to develop into fully mature and self-realized democratic citizens.

The memoirs of six “scholarship boys”—Richard Hoggart, Frank Kermode, Eric Hobsbawm, Harold Perkin, A. H. Halsey, and Brian Magee—reveal the deeply varied experience of academically gifted working- and lower-middle-class males in the twentieth century. The arc from social outsider to cultural prominence drew upon a commitment to humanism acquired in their youth. Scholarship boys navigated the crosscurrents of post-industrial culture in many ways but shared an unwillingness to accept uncritically the sophisticated reductions of postmodern theory and the “creative destruction” of neoliberal practice. The life writing of these figures reveals the often-concealed subjectivities behind academic success, including the desire in old age to honor the lived worlds of their youth. Humanism remained a continuing though not always dominant strain in post-industrial culture.

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 article examines how early modern publics were shaped partly by dynamics of linguistic difference and physical distance. Taking Wales as its focus, it argues that barriers to communication have yet to be considered sufficiently in a literature which presents English language metropolitan discourses as normative. Particularist publics that drew upon different cultural heritages and employed different communicative practices to those prevailing in and around London deserve greater attention. This is illustrated principally by the vernacularizing impulses of Protestant reform in sixteenth-century Wales and the responses these elicited from Catholic interests, and also the attempts to construct political publics in Wales during the 1640s and 1650s. Early modern Welsh public culture was characterized by a degree of isolation from the genres and sites of critical opinion (such as newsbooks and coffeehouses); print production was underdeveloped; and there were logistical barriers to the spread of news. Conceptualizing early modern Wales as a “particularist public” can help enrich our understanding of center-locality relationships in other parts of the English (and subsequently British) realm.

This article uses fifteenth-century Chancery court bills to demonstrate how women negotiated solutions to social and legal disputes not just in Chancery but through a variety of legal jurisdictions. This approach sheds light on women's actions in courts where the records have not survived, and it also adds nuance to the long-running debate about whether equity was a more favorable jurisdiction for women than the common law. By bringing into view other jurisdictions—such as manorial, borough, and ecclesiastical ones—it demonstrates how litigants might pursue justice in a number of arenas, consecutively or concurrently. Some women approached Chancery because they did not think they would get justice in a lower court, while others were keen that their cases be sent back down so that they could be fully recompensed for the offences against them. A fuller understanding of the disputes to which Chancery bills refer complicates our understanding of why women “chose” Chancery. Chancery is only one piece of the puzzle of how women negotiated justice in late medieval England, but its records can also shed light on some of the missing pieces.

In his Crime and Society in England 1750-1900 Clive Emsley notes that “for England the subject of the middle-class woman ‘kleptomaniac,’ as opposed to the working-class woman ‘thief,’ awaits an historian,” and casts doubt on the significance of the respectable shoplifter in England. However, not only is there ample evidence that middle-class shoplifting was a rising concern in Victorian England, it is a key example of the way in which gender ideology and medical science were constructed to solve a commercial and legal problem. Early in the nineteenth century, a respectable woman accused of shoplifting only had the option of denying her crime and blaming the shopkeeper; however, as the number of middle-class women committing retail crimes such as shoplifting and fraud increased, the issue of representation in the nineteenth century became more complicated. Woman’s role as aggressive consumer and her role in retail crime clashed with her home-centered image. In trials, canting ballads, and scathing articles, critics presented an image of the retail female criminal as greedy, fraudulent, and middle-class. Women fought against this image by denying their crimes or by participating in the creation of the developing representation of criminal women as ill rather than greedy.

George Yule's “Independents and Revolutionaries” suggests that in many respects he and I are not so far apart. We agree that a “rigid two-party view” of Interregnum politics is a mistake, that not all members of the Rump were political Independents, that “Independent” was not commonly used as a political term after 1648, and that the clue to the events of 1648-49, the climax of the Puritan Revolution, lies in the existence of a group of genuine radicals who can and ought to be identified. He also seems to agree in one place that the criticisms of his statistical methods in The Independents in the English Civil War which I advanced in “The Independents Reconsidered” are justified, though in another he argues that the table in The Independents enables the reader to surmount these difficulties. This being so, if a technical dispute over methodology was all that remained between us, his latest article might well be left unchallenged. It contains, however, a number of assumptions about seventeenth-century religion and politics which are either unfounded or need serious qualification, and on which a few further comments are necessary.

First, as to method. It is true that the table referred to enables the reader to obtain Yule's estimates of the total numbers in various groups, such as (a) “Fled to Army, 1647,” (b) purged, 1648, and (c) Rumper, and of how these break down by social position and religious affiliation. But nowhere is there any entry for all of Yule's allegedly Independent M.P.s and of the breakdown for these, nor is there any way of obtaining it from the table.

Elizabeth Poole, “the Abingdon prophetess,” makes a brief appearance, often as a footnote, in several standard political histories of the seventeenth century. However, only two attempts seem to have been made to evaluate fully her significance in the politics and religion of the period, one by Professor Firth in his edition of the Clarke Papers and one by the American scholar Dorothy Ludlow in a thesis published in 1978. Firth’s attempt was uncharacteristically superficial, and he limited himself to retailing Royalist propaganda on the subject; while Ludlow, although she brought together much of the available information, was more concerned with Poole as a woman than as a political activist. This article attempts to put her life and public activities into a wider context. It argues that her example shows that it was not impossible for women of the time to function at the highest political levels. What was significant about Poole was her failure to achieve political aims that were not in themselves unrealistic or lacking in influential support. Finally, this article postulates that female political activity at the decision-making levels was limited to a mode that could support or oppose general political strategies but was ill-suited to the furtherance of specific policies or actions.

Since his death in 1950, at the age of forty-six, George Orwell's personal following and literary reputation have grown so steadily that he has become the most widely read English writer of his generation. Orwell's name has come to evoke almost universal recognition as a kind of legendary symbol of resistance to political dishonesty, hypocrisy, and totalitarianism. But in spite of his popularity, he remains a strangely enigmatic figure and a source of continuing controversy among critics and historians.

The initial critical studies of Orwell and his work were often little more than highly partisan attempts to define or dismiss Orwell as an anarchist, a disillusioned socialist, or a conservative reactionary. The shortcomings of this critical approach, which was once virtually an obsession with the politically committed critics of Orwell's generation, have become increasingly obvious. Orwell was one of the most politically “engaged” writers of the twentieth century, but the precise nature of his political posture simply cannot be defined and analyzed within the context of any identifiably modern political ideology, party, or movement. During his politically active years, Orwell enthusiastically supported a wide variety of radical causes and revolutionary reforms, but the political and intellectual conformity demanded by the modern parties of the Left seems always to have been at odds with his well-developed sense of intellectual honesty and personal integrity. As Anthony Powell has observed, “Orwell could never be integrated into any normal party machine. His reputation for integrity might be invoked, his capacity for martyrdom relied on, his talent for pamphleteering made use of, but he could never be trusted not to let some devastatingly unwelcome cat out of the political bag.”

In January, 1696, Parliament passed an act to reform the procedure used in treason trials. The consequences of this act were immense. It immediately changed the complexion of treason trials from that of conciliar hearings aimed at eliminating the government's enemies to that of actual trials which sought to establish guilt or innocence. Moreover, Parliament subsequently extended some of the key provisions of this act to criminal law proceedings, thus giving the 1696 statute a claim to being one of the well-springs of legal reform in modern England. Most important of all, however, was the effect the act had on politics. It helped to bring to a close an age in which politicians frequently attacked their opponents with charges of treason, and it thus played a part in opening a new age, one where less violent practices were employed in the political struggle.

It is not the least of ironies in English history that an act as important as the Treason Trials Act of 1696 should have received so little scholarly attention. The only historian to give the act more than a few pages is Samuel Rezneck in an article written in 1930. Most historians who work on the period follow the practice of such scholars as G. M. Trevelyan, David Ogg, and Sir Keith Feiling, and either fail to mention the act or note its passage in a sentence or two. Many scholars, especially those of an earlier generation, seem to assume that the act was a natural, perhaps inevitable, reaction to Stuart tyranny—that it was part of the light brought in by William and Mary at the end of a dark century—and, hence, that there is little need to discuss it.