The 1926 General Strike provided a special opportunity for the Bright Young People (BYP) to reinvent Britishness in their own image, particularly that of the quintessential English gentleman amateur and, to a lesser degree, the charitable, gracious English lady. For young people who considered themselves deprived of the opportunity to prove themselves in the Great War, the General Strike provided an appropriately theatrical setting for another sort of dramatic enactment. The strike-time emergency lent a festive and egalitarian spirit even to dirty and tedious volunteer efforts. Media accounts emphasized the strike's levelling effect, the emergence of a cheerful, classless, spirit of fraternity among volunteers and those they helped. Detailed reports of the more strenuous volunteer work experiences did occasionally appear in newspapers but more typically in magazines. For instance, Edward Benn submitted his memoirs to the Nation, an American magazine that described him as a '"class-conscious" young author'.

This chapter discusses that the manuscript is the 'real' work and interpretation begins from the manuscript. In considering the status of the written manuscript Walter Benjamin's 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' is useful. The difficulty of variation between editions exposes the lack of fixity in what Fredson Bowers and other textual critics call 'accidentals' and raises the question of what actually constitutes the text. The result of mechanical reproduction is the reproduction of a uniform text; one copy being functionally the same as the next. The chapter considers the example of Tristram Shandy, the uniformity may exist only within individual editions. Individual copies of printed texts may retain an aura of sorts, of individuality if not of uniqueness, linked to our own subjectivity, individuality or egocentricity. The most convenient form for reading pages of text is the codex form.

This chapter explores the gender renegotiations by the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY) as they threw themselves into the manly tasks of driving and mechanics. Evadne Price's brilliant modernist representation of the war from women's experiences underscores the silences in the FANY texts. The Royal Army Medical Corps was to be employed or commissioned by the British Red Cross Society (BRCS) to provide transport for the British sick and wounded at Calais. The chapter focuses on 1916 and features the story of FANY Unit 3 driving for the British Army. It records their activities and experiences and in particular examines their work in transport and mechanics that subverted traditional mythologies about femininity. Of all the FANY writings, the few accounts penned by Unit 3's Second-in-Command Muriel Thompson provide the bluntest descriptions of the geography of hell.

This chapter emphasises that canals formed just one component of Manchester's transport system from 1750 to 1850. Roads and railways, as well as coastal shipping, were also important elements. The competition between road and rail, like that between canals and rail, differed by geography and by commodity. The major improvements to Manchester's road system were effected by turnpikes. The triumphant opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway in 1830 heralded the beginning of Manchester's railway age. In the 1830s and early 1840s, it is important to remember that railway carried goods were susceptible to loss by fire, when cinders were thrown up by the chimneys of the locomotives' steam engines. One way in which railways asserted their supremacy over canals was by their assumption of ownership or operational control of waterways.

This chapter considers questions of ill-health, which arguably gives a better impression of the everyday problems and experiences involved in caring for large numbers of small children. It also considers the health of nursling infants, set in the context of contemporary accounts of feeding methods and diseases of infants. Breastfeeding gave foundling infants their biochemically most appropriate source of nutrition, and also a supply of antibodies against pathogens encountered by the nurse. The chapter examines the procedures and policies adopted to combat ill-health among the weaned children, both while at nurse and after their return to the London Foundling Hospital. There is a significant amount of information available on the ill-health of foundling children as opposed to infants, in the form of both causes of death and records of non-fatal illness. Contagious diseases and fevers were the largest single identifiable causes of death for foundling children.

This chapter introduces the issue of women's rights in relation to the creation of modern definitions of ‘religion’ and ‘secularism’ in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when feminists and anti-feminists, Christians and Freethinkers battled over who had women's best interests at heart. These debates were fundamental to the development of feminist thought in England, but have been almost entirely passed over in the historiography of the women's movement. The study treats the subjects not simply as ideologues of infidel feminism but as activists within a movement, whose ideas emerged out of the messy reality of public meetings, arguments, encounters with the enemy and attempts to carve out a space for themselves in a male-dominated world.

This chapter explores Grace Ashley-Smith's work as a First Aid Nursing Yeomanry (FANY) in Belgium during September and October 1914, and highlights the key theme in the negotiation of gender relations in war. It suggests the ways the sentimental, romantic genre associated with the 'Great War Rhetoric' and women's literary heritage allowed Ashley-Smith the opportunity develop a female heroism. Ashley-Smith's accounts of her first months in Belgian as a FANY are recorded in Nursing Adventures: A FANY in France. Most women attempted to blend old romantic traditions with more modernist approaches and their writing often illustrates what Angela K. The experience saw Ashley-Smith begin as bedside heroine, putting her on a footing with men in terms of the involvement with suffering, and graduates to battlefront heroine where she more actively risked the dangers of war and developed her own notion of personal heroism.

The biographical articles of nineteenth-century reference works such as the Dictionary of national biography have been the only guides available to those interested in Francis Hutchinson's early clerical career and family background. During the course of his life, Hutchinson's father, Edward, became a relatively wealthy yeoman farmer and can be regarded as being of the 'middling' rank in seventeenth-century English society. The Hutchinsons were not only of the middling sort, but also communicants of the Church of England. In early 1692, Hutchinson was presented to the perpetual curacy of St James' in Bury St Edmunds. Fairly soon after his appointment to St James', Hutchinson moved from Hoxne to Bury St Edmunds, a place where he lived and worked for the next 28 years or so. Hutchinson remained rector of the living until the vacancy was filled in 1727 by John Jenkins, an alumnus of St Catharine's College, Cambridge.

This chapter analyses the photographic material published in the mainstream press during the events of May of 1968, drawing upon the French dailies published in Paris, that is Le Figaro and L'Humanité and the weekly Le Nouvel Observateur. It examines the use of photographs covering the events during May and June and studies whether photojournalism contributes to constructing stereotypes of the events, which informed the construction of subsequent dominant narratives. The existing hierarchy and the separation between the party representatives and the public not only resemble older representations of the labour movement, but also remind us of the representation of mainstream politics. Collectivisation in L'Humanité was associated with either photographs of static workers taken in the occupied factory or photographs of a crowd without particular characteristics. Le Figaro, in contrast with the student press and L'Humanité, covered the demonstrations in support of the General.

On 20 April 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold turned up at their school armed with two shotguns, a 9-mm Hi-Point carbine semi-automatic rifle and a TEC-DC9 handgun. Although this attack was preceded by others at Springfield, Oregon, Paducah, Kentucky and Jonesboro, Arkansas, the event at Columbine was by far the most deadly and traumatic, causing recriminations in the national press. In Columbine, the goths were opposed to the jocks who baptised them with their name after the goth fashion for wearing long, black trenchcoats, a fashion that was given further cultural resonance by the Matrix films. In his account of the Columbine event, John F. Murphy Jr cites eye-witness reports that Harris and Klebold 'were ecstatic in their happiness'. One of the curiosities of Harris and Klebold's action in the library and elsewhere at Columbine is that technological objects became their targets as well as the students.

British suppression of the transatlantic slave trade rested on the threat of violent force. On a practical level, the British Royal Navy's interception of transatlantic slave traders preceded Britain's abolition of the slave trade. This chapter examines the periods of British abolition and the West Indian emancipations, the early Victorian crisis of suppression, and the era of the American Civil War, tracing across time the development of priorities, motives and traditions. James Stephen, the dynamic young lawyer who served as secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society, worked hard to promote slave-trade suppression as a war measure. A reconfirmation of parliamentary support for suppression only strengthened the government's desires, in 1860, to find a new front against the Cuban slave trade. Brazilian citizens and their politicians had acted decisively against the slave trade after 1850, while in Cuba plummeting sugar prices sapped demand for slaves.

One of the most significant ways of British culture was articulated throughout the Empire was by exporting the nation’s most important political ideology, Liberalism. A good deal of imperial history, from the British side, can be seen as a dialogue over the interpretation of Liberalism. As liberal ideas were carried away from home, two interpretations of the British Liberal heritage emerged, each focusing on one part of that heritage, and fated to clash. The first was widely held by colonists and other “non-official” Britons and the second by officials. The first emphasized the liberty of the individual and the consequent limitation of state power; the second focused on equality under the law for all subjects (including non-Britons), and the use of the state to maintain “ordered liberty,” with equal emphasis on both terms. The most famous clash was, of course, the American Revolution, but a similar dynamic underpinned relations between official and non-official Britons in the Empire through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries virtually down to the Empire’s end.This chapter will explain how these two forms of Liberalism developed and how they came into conflict, citing several examples in the history of India and the West Indies.