When Henry Mayhew produced the greatest single survey of the Victorian poor in London, in the years around 1850, he encountered and interviewed various street guitar players. With the aid of the contemporary newspapers and archives, the picture of these musicians given by Mayhew can be very much enlarged. The accounts of legal hearings in police courts and quarter sessions, for example, often give an edited paraphrase of statements given by the musicians themselves in court (usually as the defendant, on charges connected with affray and drunkenness, but also sometimes as the plaintiff). These reports disclose a large number of the street guitar players by name, both white and black, male and female, together with details of the life they led, the repertoire, they performed, and the many hardships that they endured. These are the lost players of an instrument hitherto lost to musical history.

Aldhelm wrote a set of 100 short riddles, following in the footsteps of earlier writers in this genre, such as Symphosius. Examples are also given here from the collections by other early eighth-century writers, namely Tatwine, Hwætberht and Boniface, including several different ways of writing a riddle on the popular subject of a pen. The riddle genre was also popular in Old English.

We live in a period in which liberal ideas about personal autonomy is under considerable pressure. Can poems be liberal? Baudelaire’s Enivrez-Vous captures something essential about the most appealing forms of liberalism, and about its underlying spirit (captured, in different ways, by John Stuart Mill, Walt Whitman, and Bob Dylan as well): its insistence on freedom of choice, on the diversity of tastes and preferences, and on human agency. The poem is liberal in its exuberance – its pleasure in its own edginess, its defiance, its sheer rebelliousness, its sense of mischief, its implicit laughter, its love of life and what it has to offer. It is the opposite of dutiful. It is far more exuberant than Mill’s On Liberty, but it is exuberant in the same way. It tells us something important about autonomy and freedom.

Police are the gatekeepers to the criminal justice system. Without police officers investigating offenses and bringing cases to prosecutors, criminal courts would have little to do. Thus, the decisions made by police are critical to understanding Mass Incarceration.

This chapter explores social morality on the home front focusing on the commentary about the public behaviour of soldiers’ wives, anxiety about a supposed increase in incidences of female drunkenness, and concern about prostitution and the spread of venereal disease. It tracks the number of wartime arrests of women for drunkenness and child neglect. The chapter argues that the hostility to separation women transcended the nationalist movement, and that while there were many incidences of soldiers’ wives arrested for drunken behaviour, the rhetoric exaggerated the reality with total convictions for drunkenness declining in wartime Ireland after the first year of the war.The chapter further explores concern with sexual immorality in wartime, focusing on venereal disease and illegitimate births. It also examines the women’s patrols established to limit the public interaction between working-class women and the soldiers. The chapter concludes that the public behaviour of working-class women in Ireland altered little as a consequence of the war, but there was nevertheless greater censure of problems evident before 1914. While the separation allowances brought women greater control over their domestic spaces, the surveillance of state and society confined women to narrowly defined codes of behaviour.