After a brief discussion of how marine tanks were perfected in the early 1850s, Chapter 1 considers some of the cultural factors that helped make tank keeping so popular: a new interest in the sea, the expansion of seaside tourism, and the increasing popularity of amateur science and collecting. Then, it examines how tank keeping was materially done, the technical difficulties it entailed, and the market it generated; in particular, it investigates the way in which tank keeping was discussed and conceptualised, providing a survey of the most popular aquarium books published in the 1850s. The final section explores the audiences addressed by these texts: tank keeping was advertised as a remarkably flexible pursuit, which could serve multiple purposes and functions, thus appealing in different ways to different publics in terms of class, gender, education, and levels of scientific expertise.

This chapter examines the emergence of the ‘innocent’ or vulnerable child as an alternative to the ‘child of wrath’ explored in the Introduction. Childish helplessness is highlighted in the reaction of the Protestant community in Ireland to the shock of the 1641 Rebellion, one of the most significant events in modern Irish history. A belief in the ‘innocent’ child has traditionally been traced to the late eighteenth century, and associated with the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who explicitly theorised the child as naturally virtuous rather than corrupt. However, a duality in the understanding of childhood and children had crept into the discussion long before the end of the eighteenth century. This chapter argues that in Ireland, a significant development in the prehistory of the innocent child can be found in responses to the violence of 1641, particularly in Sir John Temple’s hugely influential history, The Irish Rebellion (1642), but also in the many pamphlets and instant ‘histories’ which poured from the presses during and immediately after the rebellion. These texts characterise the agitating Irish Catholic rebels as evil beasts invading the nursery to kill and maim pregnant women and newborn, innocent Protestant babies. For the details of his important account of the atrocities, Temple depends on a selective reading of the Depositions, the approximately 8,000 witness testimonies provided by more than 1,500 survivors of the rising, though he focuses specifically on those in which women and children are harmed by marauding Catholic insurgents.

Starting from ‘Black Tarn’, a novella published in All the Year Round, the conclusion briefly retraces the fortunes of Victorian tank keeping from a widespread craze to a half-forgotten pastime. The reasons for the temporary success of the marine aquarium, as well as those behind its demise a few years later, offer valuable insights into the complexity of Victorian culture, especially as they involved expectations concerning efficiency, control, and durability, or the capacity of humans to recreate, and then manage, miniaturised ecosystems. Moreover, Victorian discussion of the aquarium testify to an important moment in the development of what we would now call environmental awareness.

This chapter reveals a tendency in MS Ashmole 61 for objects to encourage self-reflection in their human neighbours and to provide opportunities for penance and redemption. In this section of the manuscript, the widespread necessity of such assistance is re-emphasised. Here, human error is witnessed in the wounds on Christ’s body (Wounds and Sins), the extent of humans’ misappropriation of other material agents to support their own luxury (Vanity) and of self-imposed human spiritual exile (The Sinner’s Lament and The Adulterous Falmouth Squire), with the human soul infecting the human body and producing the tangible pains of hell (Prick of Conscience Minor), leading to perhaps the most emotionally wrenching poem in the collection (Maidstone’s Seven Penitential Psalms), expressed through the material effects of tears of contrition and in contrast to the incorrupt non-human animals with whom humans share the earth. This section of Ashmole 61 is a reminder that the weakness of one element in a morality-assemblage was understood as extending to and potentially harming all.

The conclusion explores the implications of the coronavirus pandemic and lockdown for the nationalising thrust in British politics. It argues that the future of Britain will be defined by shifting the configuration of state and nation rather than just by state and market.

Chapter 2 discusses the marine tank in connection to real and imaginary travel. The first part is centred on how tank keeping merged with seaside tourism, both practically and textually: in fact, aquarium books described – and often prescribed – ways of experiencing the seaside vacation, envisaging the aquarist as a good tourist in terms of the activities pursued, of the closer relationship established with locals, and of an active engagement with the environment, even though tensions soon emerged between an ‘acquisitive’ appreciation of nature and the recognition that seashore collecting might eventually jeopardize delicate and fragile ecosystems. The second part of the chapter outlines how the aquarium vogue also spurred journeys of the mind: in the 1850s, the tank was widely believed to be a perfect replica of the underwater world, and as such stimulated fictitious descriptions of abyssal excursions; even more intriguingly, the aquarium could at times turn into a time-machine and suggest speculations on progress, on geological past, and on a not-so-far future.

This chapter examines the mythical nature of ‘origins’ and the extent to which certain types of source criticism depends upon a linear dimension that is designed to trace the process of composition back to the moment (usually mystified) of creation.

Chapter 1 proposes that sounds onstage become ‘soundgrams’ (repeated components of theatrical meaning, following Louise George Clubb’s term ‘theatregrams’, of which the ‘core process’ is given as ‘permutation and declension by recombination with compatible units, whether of person, association, action, or design’). To trace the repeated use of sound effects onstage, this chapter narrows its focus to four of the most common (and loud) sounds of the early modern stage: trumpets, gunfire, thunder and bells. Following Wes Folkerth’s coinage of the phrase ‘signature sounds’, it develops terminology to examine allusions and innovations in the theatrical sonic tradition. Using early modern commonplaces as a metaphor for this mobility of meaning, the chapter concludes that sounds have a rhetorical power like that of speech, in that they can create allusions, as well as humour, irony, shock and fear.

Chapter 2 asks why the glories and values around the Second World War were such a prominent source of inspiration in the initial austerity period. The chapter shows how the nation was mobilised – as in, the informal boundaries of Britishness were made clear, and then people were compelled into policing those boundaries – around a nostalgic and disciplined vision of Britain. This entailed political conflict: rounding on those who refuse to commit to that vision and living within one’s means by adequately suppressing their appetites for food, sex, and shopping.

This chapter locates Gavin Douglas’s poem, The Palyce of Honour, within a wider medieval tradition of dream vision poetry. Geoffrey Chaucer’s dream vision poems, The House of Fame and The Parliament of Fowls, as well as Robert Henryson’s The Testament of Cresseid are presented as intertexts to Douglas’s vision. Douglas’s text is shown to fracture typical expectations of the dream vision landscape, the dreamer’s interaction with this landscape, as well as the narrator’s conceptualisation of the process of recording the dream vision. The poem is then set in conversation with concepts of Italian humanist poetics, which conceived of the poet as a divine conduit, a prophet, that could transmit divinely inspired discourses. The framework of the narrative grotesque is applied in order to elucidate the ways in which Douglas warps the medieval genre to integrate humanist philosophies of poetics into his work.

This chapter explores the formulae available to the practising early modern dramatist, and the ways in which they were deployed. It takes the notion of the ‘meme’ – a recurrent formulation used to negotiate particular situations, both as phenomena to be repeated (and recognised by an audience) and as a starting point for theatrical and textual innovation.

A Concordance to the Rhymes of The Faerie Queene offers a unique insight into Spenser’s creative processes and the tools of his trade. It enables readers to review the variety of Spenser’s rhyming in a detail which has not previously been possible. In this study, Richard Danson Brown illustrates this rhetorical variety by focusing on a selection of key devices which are characteristic of the poem as a whole, and which stress the radical and hybrid aesthetic which underpins The Faerie Queen.