This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book presents a study of canal transport during the British Industrial Revolution. It presents new quantitative data on the geographical and commodity composition of Manchester's canal and river trades. The book analyses the canals' relationships with other modes of transport. It outlines the massive extensions to Manchester's urban waterfront in the first half of the nineteenth century, analysing the development of Manchester's five canal and river basins and building private canal branches within the town. The book examines the spatial location of Manchester's factory sector, quantitatively demonstrating the striking clustering of textile factories, engineering/glass works and sawmills alongside canals, a development largely overlooked in studies of the topography of British industrialisation.

The mythologising that turned King Alfred into a hero began in his own lifetime. The earliest source that Victorian Alfredianists could turn to for information about the king was the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a collection of annals about the British Isles spanning the period from the landing of Julius Caesar to the twelfth century. For nineteenth-century audiences, The Life of King Alfred, beyond any other early source, was what set Alfred the Great apart from other Anglo-Saxon monarchs. According to the Life, Alfred was also an inventor, devising time candles and lanterns to allow him to allot exactly half of his time to God's service. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries saw Alfred get tangled up in minstrelsy, morality and university rivalry. In the case of Asser's Life, which Matthew Parker transcribed and printed in 1574, an eleventh-century manuscript of the text was conflated with the twelfth-century Annals of St Neots.

Unstable social conditions, economic disruptions, and Britain's increasing loss of colonial and industrial power contributed to the polarization of attitudes that crystallized in the 1926 General Strike. From the perspective of the Labour Party and the Trades Union Congress (TUC), the General Strike used the rational, organized pressure of a general work stoppage to persuade the community at large of parliament's moral responsibility to the miners. When the TUC General Council agreed to resume negotiations with the government on 12 May 1926, the General Strike officially ended. In communities of strikers, people gave money for soup kitchens, and organized a series of singing and jazz band concerts, and even a traditional Sword Play in one community, to raise money for those without food. Even non-union working-class and lower-middle-class volunteers were invited to enter the periphery of this holiday world by having their ordinary work declared a social service.

This chapter aims to apply a more robust method to the calculation of mortality rates at the London Foundling Hospital, which will allow comparison with other hospitals and with wider populations. It considers the levels of childhood mortality among the foundlings, to see whether any survival penalties continued beyond the age of one. The greater efficiency of the nursing system explains much of the difference in mortality rates between the Foundling Hospital in London operating under a system of open admissions and others in Europe. An explanation for falling mortality after 1760 may instead be found in the reasons for the general lowering of infant death rates in this period. The coincidence in trend among foundlings and non-foundlings alike suggests that even very disadvantaged infants were able to benefit from the factors underlying the general improvement in mortality.

This chapter explores Algernon Charles Swinburne's liminal and transgressive excursions into marginal Hellenic territories, often obscured by the exclusively Olympian vision of Greece extolled by most Victorians in their quest for secure ideological foundations. In his 1931 book Swinburne, A Nineteenth Century Hellene, William R. Rutland strove to defend the purity of Swinburne's Greek inspiration, which he probably thought might be a good way of drawing attention back to his poetry. John Morley accused Swinburne of 'glorify[ing] all the bestial delights that the subtleness of Greek depravity was able to contrive'. Swinburne rejected the monochrome or chromatically limited vision of ancient Greek literature and art. Under the veil of his mastery of Greek language and culture, Swinburne explored the frontiers of the other, the unknown margins which archaeologists, anthropologists, and Cambridge Ritualists at the end of the nineteenth century would attempt to exhume and reveal.

King Arthur may have been so much more attractive than King Alfred to the nineteenth-century authors simply because he offered them greater imaginative freedom. The horrors of two world wars and the demise of a vast empire probably rendered the triumphal structure of Alfredian narrative less suited to the nation's mood than the downfall of Arthur's round table. The legacy of Victorian racialism made the Saxon a problematic figure for many authors in the decades during and after the Second World War. Towards the close of the nineteenth century, the theory of the Norman Yoke was superseded by the view that Norman blood had contributed positive qualities like shrewdness and determination to the composite English character. Ten years after the Alfred Millenary a more developed appeal to the value of legend was made by G.K. Chesterton.

Wartime excesses of chauvinism, anger and hate became regarded with incredulous embarrassment and were then forgotten. Patience, tolerance and generosity returned. The forgetting of 'wartime excesses' also meant sweeping the victims of these excesses under the carpet, especially the German community in Britain. The prisoners remembered by British society were those held by the Germans, especially in Ruhleben. German accounts of First World War internment differ from British ones in several ways. In the first place, the most important period for remembering prisoners was the Great War and the interwar years, when numerous personal accounts appeared and when prisoner-of-war associations came into existence. Some general volumes have appeared in recent decades on the history of prisoners of war over a long time period for both an academic and a general market, probably those with an interest in all things military.

In the years after the South African transition, these constructions of reconciliation began to proliferate beyond the borders of South Africa. Chapter 3 reconstructs this process and examines how the South African transition and reconciliation discourse were part of and fed into another discourse that emerged on the global level at the time, namely the discourse on transitional justice. Chapter 3 argues that it was in the context of this emerging global discourse that the reconciliation ideal gained authority beyond the South African confines from the late 1990s onwards, and the South African constructions of reconciliation diffused around the globe. The global spread of the reconciliation language, as argued in chapter 3, performed in global politics by authorizing the truth commission as a legitimate institution in the context of transition. While the truth commission was no new institution at the time, it was hitherto seen as a ‘second-best’ response to human rights violations, and it was through the rise of global reconciliation discourse that this institution gained normative authority on its own.

This chapter considers how the communist children's organisation evolved and was organised, its relationship to the wider parent Party and the Young Communist League (YCL). The communist children's movement offered its child members a quite distinct experience. Its principles and guiding ethos marked it out as a body radically different from all other contemporary children's organisations. The chapter also considers the ways the 'little comrades' were educated to take their place in the next levels of the Party structure. It looks at the mission, ethos and inner world of the children's organisation, and the Party's attempts during the interwar years to capture and retain the loyalty and enthusiasm of its youngest members. The authority and example of the Soviet Union was frequently asserted to maintain the enthusiasm of the young comrades in Britain.

This chapter assesses the impact of transport, especially canals, on the major economic and social changes occurring in Manchester from 1750 to 1850. It also assesses the part played by Manchester and its canals in the major historiographical debates surrounding the origins of the first Industrial Revolution. Douglas North has argued that the Industrial Revolution was facilitated by secure property rights and a flexible legal system, as well as the absence of a centralised government imposing confiscatory taxation. The chapter addresses the canals' part in sustaining Manchester's economic growth from the early nineteenth century to 1850. The standard view is that canals did not contribute significantly to national market integration. It is usually argued that canals were constructed and financed by, and designed to serve the interests of, regional industrial and commercial elites. Social savings methodologies have been used by historians to explore the impact of transport and economic growth.

This moves the analysis to the strike's origins and outbreak, with escalating workplace tension as management – led by Albert Wheeler, the Scottish Area Director of the National Coal Board – sought to cut production costs by closing some pits and attacking trade unionism in those that remained. Rule books detailing union involvement in daily operations were ‘torn up’, literally as well as figuratively. The moral economy of the coalfields, tested although not quite broken in the 1960s and early 1970s, was now explicitly transgressed, with decisions by managerial fiat, and closures and job losses damagingly felt in the context of unemployment, rapidly escalating under the deindustrialising impact of Thatcherite economic management. Workforce resistance resulted, observable in a sequence of pit-level disputes in 1983, as well as the outbreak of the strike itself in 1984.

This chapter examines Beatrice Annie Pace's trial in Gloucester: involving some of the most prominent lawyers and forensic experts of the age, its abrupt ending added a surprising, dramatic twist. Despite the new emphasis on motive, the most striking element of the trial was not the reiteration of the prosecution's case but rather the defence's response. Norman Birkett's strategy centred on a searching cross-examination, under the pressure of which the framework of the Crown's arguments would buckle. Beatrice was fortunate to have a man of Birkett's skill on her side. Birkett was forty-four when he agreed to defend the 'tragic widow'. The legal 'martyrdom' of the 'tragic widow of Coleford' had, it seemed, at long last come to an end. The widow's main accusers seemed vindictive, and some of their factual testimony was questioned. Beatrice's role as a caring nurse and a cooperative witness was highlighted.