The workhouse remains a totemic institution for social historians, yet we still know very little about the day-to-day experiences of the indoor poor. Nowhere is this clearer than in discussions about workhouse clothing, which remain overwhelmingly negative in the literature and consistent with the predominant view of the workhouse as a place of suffering and humiliation. Yet more often than not, this view is based on relatively shallow empirical foundations and tends to rely on anecdotal evidence or on the uncritical use of subjective sources such as photographs, newspaper editorials and other cultural products. This article takes a different approach by looking again at the whole range of meanings that workhouse clothing held for paupers and those who oversaw its allocation, and at the practical and symbolic usages to which it was put by them. On the basis of this evidence the authors argue that, contrary to the orthodox view, workhouse clothing was rarely intended to be degrading or stigmatising; that it would have held very different meanings for different classes of paupers; and that, far from being a source of unbridled misery, paupers often found it to be a source of great strategic and practical value.

In interwar debates about Hungarian modernity, the countryside played a prominent symbolic role. For conservative nationalists, the Hungarian countryside became a symbol and source of authentic, ‘traditional’ Hungarian national culture, unchanging, hierarchical, ordered society and stable community, and national uniqueness. Entertainment films of the 1930s provided alternative representations of the countryside that upheld the possibility of modernising traditional Hungary. According to the films, modern Hungary would be created at the intersection and out of the cooperation between rural and urban, modern and traditional. The films questioned and challenged the idea that the rural was ‘pure’, authentic, untainted, but they also rejected the idea that it was shameful, hopelessly backward, or unable to change. Showing the countryside as both traditional and part of modern mass culture, as both nostalgically stable and an exotic vacationland, the films offered an integrative vision of Hungary which destabilised assumptions of both liberals and conservatives. Popular films used the countryside to provide a unique and alternative vision of modern Hungary that was integrative and reconciliatory; they provided an outlet for a liberal, democratic, capitalist perspective unavailable elsewhere in the public sphere.

The article seeks to determine the causes of the agrarian debt in rural Switzerland since the First World War and illustrate this growing phenomena in the 1920s and 1930s, by correlating the increase to the costs of the change in production beginning at the end of the nineteenth century, to the cut in the prices of agricultural products and the parallel depreciation of the soil after the war. After having outlined the effects of indebtedness reflected in the increase in the number of distraints, the article focuses on the political responses put in place to ensure the smooth running of mortgage loans – integrated since 1930 into a system of guarantees designed to limit the risks for creditors. The bill of the federal government intended to promote agricultural debt relief was long put off by some political circles, preferring to step in with precise measures, such as credit payments and extraordinary subsidies.

Taking J. A. Baker's celebrated book The Peregrine as its focus, the article seeks to locate Baker's writing within a broader, less elevated field of postwar observation and publication that worked to shape new ways of understanding, apprehending and taking pleasure from the natural environment. This included the recording practices and publications of the national and county naturalist and birdwatching societies that flourished in these years. The article shows how Baker's book was as much the product of this world of organised amateur natural history as it was of the world of high literature. Baker's book also sheds light on the reconfiguring of bird-human relations within competing postwar cultures of nature and the article uses it to explore the relationship between birdwatching and the bird-centred field sport of falconry. As organised birdwatching sought to establish moral authority over other bird-centred countryside pursuits in its understanding of natural relations, it cast field sports and other countryside practices as atavistic and archaic relics of older cultures of nature. Baker's The Peregrine allows us to see the convergences between the close attention to birds of prey and an intimacy with them that was shared by birdwatchers like Baker and falconers, even as Baker's narrative also sheds light on the differences between the two practices.

The part played by the public health movement in controlling epidemics in urban areas has received considerable attention from historians, as has the regulation of the milk and meat industries that commenced in the late nineteenth century. However, comparatively little work has been carried out on health in a rural context – and the role played by the horticultural sector in the spread of contagious diseases has barely been covered. Yet, as this article shows, it was a sector that had the potential to produce potent contaminants. By examining histories of the production of one horticultural crop, watercress, it reveals how issues around the provision of a clean urban water supply and idealised imaginings of the countryside as a pure space, played a part in exacerbating the extent of outbreaks of typhoid in the industrial city. It also shows that there was governmental reluctance to regulate an industry that grew a staple product, even when growers themselves were keen for guidance.