This chapter examines Sarah Scott's early fiction and its implications for midcentury political, economic and philanthropic debates about the moral and economic functions of women's work. It argues that, more than any other writer of the mid-century, Scott was committed to moving the working woman from the periphery to the centre of the eighteenth-century novel, to exploring the relationship between labour and gentility, and to asserting that women's work was individually enfranchising and culturally necessary.

This introductory chapter discusses the theme of this volume, which is about the activities and mental world of William Blundell, a seventeenth-century Catholic gentleman in Lancashire, England. The first part of this book considers the extent to which his public activities corroborate his claims of passive victimhood and the second examines Blundell's reading practices as documented in his commonplace books Adversaria and Historica. This volume also evaluates the extent to which Blundell's reputation was justified by his actions and suggests that he was neither the passive victim nor the entirely loyal subject that he and others have claimed.

This chapter focuses on political impostors, or people who assumed the identity of a royal personage in order to achieve either a personal goal or that of a political faction, in early modern England. These people were either genuine members of the royal dynasty or ordinary men or women who claimed to be the real heir to the throne and therefore challenged the legitimacy of the current ruler. The former are often labelled as pretenders or claimants. The chapter discusses various circumstances of a vacuum of power, including political or succession crisis, which provided fertile ground for their claims.

This book is about Britain's membership to the EEC. It provides a comprehensive rendering of the views and activities of the anti-Market movement and discusses ‘low political’ protest and populism of the kind exercised by Fleet Street crusaders. It argues that constructions of Britishness or national identity, whether reflexive or calculated, dominated both the genesis and the subsequent transmission of anti-Market sentiment. This volume suggests that the impact of the anti-Marketeers was greater than previously suggested but less than its proponents hoped, precisely because the overwhelming reliance upon national sentiment was simultaneously the movement's greatest strength and greatest weakness.

This chapter addresses the question of literary ignorance, which is also a question of reading. It shows that reading begins in ignorance, in the search for answers or enlightenment, but that there are some kinds of reader that do not desire knowledge. Aside from being a question of reading, Plato suggests that literary ignorance is also a condition of a certain conception of writing and of authorship. The chapter examines one way to approach literary agnoiology and one problem raised by certain conceptions of the literary. Finally, it also considers a major question of a study of literary ignorance, which is concerned with the question of the knowledge allowed by literary texts.

This chapter develops the arguments in the context of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, respectively. Scottish broadcasting was most self-confident and mature. From its inception, large number Scots staffed BBC Scotland. By comparison with the other regions, Scottish broadcasting was well funded and effectively led from the mid-1930s by its dynamic Programme Director, Andrew Stewart. Scottish broadcasting also strove to be effectively Scottish in content; it reflected politics, society and Scottish life, and in short, the culture of Scotland. One of the challenges of discussing the history of BBC Scotland and its role in constructing and reinforcing Scottishness is the paucity of historical work on radio broadcasting in Scotland. Moreover, periodic conflict with London highlights the history of Scottish broadcasting. Although in many ways the most accomplished of the BBC regions, Scottish broadcasters were also quick to take offense at perceived slights. A common complaint was the use of ‘English’ when ‘British’ would have been a more accurate adjective.

One of the main aims of this book has been to place the story of refugee women and asylum seekers at the centre of accounts of refugee migration and migrants in Britain and France in order to increase our knowledge and understanding of their place and role in these two countries and to highlight their agency rather than present them as passive victims or accompanying dependants. First, it has set out the legal/institutional framework within which women asylum seekers have their status determined. It has shown how this decision is made in Britain and France and the extent to which gender is recognised as a factor influencing the kind of persecution experienced and the reasons for it. Second, it has given a detailed view of refugee women's lives and experiences in Britain and France, from their arrival to their asylum decision and integration or removal. Finally, it has analysed refugee women's participation in refugee community associations and non-governmental organisations in order to draw some broader conclusions about participation and citizenship.

This chapter concludes the book, summarising the findings of the study and providing an overall evaluation of compulsory electoral participation on the basis of these results. It speculates as to the likelihood that electoral compulsion will be adopted in democracies where going to the polls is voluntary. The chapter also considers alternatives to making electoral participation a legal obligation, as well as possible modifications to the institution.

Contemporary cases of infanticide typically are greeted with revulsion and incredulity within an Irish population. The Infanticide Act could be seen as an effort on the part of lawmakers to bring statute into line with what had gradually become standard judicial practice. The reaction of Catholic writers to infanticide represented a mixture of theology and pragmatism that occasionally conflicted with official Catholic teaching. The 1949 Infanticide Act owed less to the influence of the Catholic Church than to a combination of British criminal justice principles, current judicial practice and basic pragmatism. Judges and juries usually approached infanticide cases from the assumption that the ‘typical’ infanticide defendant was a poor, seduced, desperate woman who committed infanticide on the spur of the moment, out of a sense of panic and shame.

This chapter sheds light on the life and work of Humphrey Jennings, a filmmaker of extraordinary talent and one of the very few authentic exponents of cinematic language in the British cinema. Jennings is one of the most remarkable imaginative intelligences of his generation, who gained his sense of the visual from his painting and from his poet's understanding of the power of language. His outstanding talents as a documentary filmmaker were initially developed within the General Post Office (GPO) Film Unit, and subsequently within its successor, the wartime Crown Film Unit. In 1950, the year of his untimely death at the age of forty-three, Jennings was working for the independent film company Wessex Films. He fell to his death from a cliff on the Greek island of Poros while scouting for locations for a film to be included in a series called The Changing Face of Europe (1951).

This chapter focuses on the mercantile connections of Scots in the West Indies. It analyzes the case of the firms of Alexander Houstoun and Co. and the Baillie family's houses in London and Bristol which demonstrate the transatlantic nature of Caribbean enterprise. As with plantation management, kinship networks underpinned the ways in which mercantile concerns organised themselves. This chapter discusses the transfer of strategies and other measures and innovations employed by merchants to exploit better opportunities and to address the challenges and crises confronting them in the transnational world of exchanges.

The Congress of Vienna in 1815 did not debate the future of Gibraltar at all, and therefore the retention by Britain of sovereignty over the peninsula was confirmed by default. A porous land frontier with Spain allowed overland migrants to join those arriving as before by sea, and they mixed with a civilian population that in any case was growing by natural increase. What was not increasing was the size of Gibraltar to accommodate them. What was not decreasing was the concern of Gibraltar's local and London managers about the composition of visitors and of the resident civilian population. Civilian experiences and, indeed, their sense of a common identity were therefore to be seriously affected by how, and how effectively, those in authority operated immigration controls. This chapter first examines population growth in Gibraltar from 1815 to 1901, before turning to the regulation of aliens, the response of civilians to the rules on aliens, and the Aliens Order-in-Council of 1873 and 1885.

This chapter considers the representation of figures such as Noah's wife, Eve and the Virgin in relation to the typology that is established through their paradigm stories. Religious and literary texts, like the writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, and the poems Piers Plowman and The Romance of the Rose, demonstrate the complexity and reflexivity of motherhood in a range of genres that in turn influence such dramas as the later court plays Wisdom and Nature. Focusing upon the mother figure in terms of function rather than subject, the chapter traces the utility of motherhood as a dramatic trope. This richness of meaning ensures that the mother figure is integral to a reformulation of ideology during the process of Reformation. Her importance as an emblem is demonstrated by reference to two polemical plays written during the Reformation and its aftermath, the Protestant Kyng Johan and its Catholic rejoinder, Respublica.