Browse

This book examines the outrage against—and attempts to end—the four vices associated with the aristocracy in eighteenth-century England: dueling, suicide, adultery, and gambling. It also discusses how it was commonly believed that all four owed their origin to pride. Many felt the law did not go far enough to punish perpetrators when they were members of the elite. The book explores each vice's treatment by the press at the time and shows how a century of public attacks on aristocratic vices promoted a sense of “class superiority” among the soon-to-emerge British middle class.

The Conquest of Death considers the concepts of violence and state power far more broadly and holistically than previous accounts of state growth by intertwining the national and the local, the formal and the informal to illustrate how the management of incidental acts of violence and justice was as important to the monopolization of violence as the creation of the machinery of warfare. It reveals how the creation and operation of everyday bureaucracy built systems of power far exceeding its original intent and allowed a greater centralized surveillance of daily life than ever before. In sum, this book forces us to think about state formation not in terms of the broad strokes of legislative policy and international competition, but rather as a process built by multiple tiny actions, interactions and encroachments which fundamentally redefined the nature of the state and the relationship between government and governed. The Conquest of Death thus provides a new approach to the history of state formation, the history of criminal justice and the history of violence in early modern England. By locating the creation of an effective, permanent monopoly of violence in England in the second-half of the sixteenth century, this book also provides a new chronology of the divide between medieval and modern while divorcing the history of state growth from a linear history of centralization.

Engines of Truth explores the history of nineteenth-century British trial procedure from the novel viewpoint of efforts to control perjury. Perjury emerged as an acute problem in the Victorian era: new rules allowed many more witnesses to testify, increasing the opportunities for deceit; a broader cultural emphasis on sincerity and truth-telling made the threat seem even greater. Engines of Truth traces the experiments pursued to control witnesses’ truthfulness, from criminal prosecutions and increased reliance on cross-examination, to shame sanctions in British India and inquisitorial investigation in the new Divorce Court. Blending legal, social and colonial history, it employs a broad array of sources, including colonial archival material, provincial newspaper coverage, home office records, literary sources, and legislative records. Engines of Truth concludes with a new look at the pivotal 1898 Criminal Evidence Act in Britain, which allowed criminal defendants to testify on oath, placing that Act within the context of a history of sexual scandals that played out in Victorian courtrooms. While many of the experiments it describes failed, the process of innovation this book charts shaped modern trial procedure. Both the United States and the United Kingdom rely heavily on cross-examination as the main test of witness truthfulness, a by-product of this experimentation. In American law, cross-examination is still described as the “greatest legal engine ever invented for the discovery of truth;” this book provides a new understanding of the complex process that led to its ascendency.

This compelling book chronicles a young boy’s journey from the horrors of Jamaican slavery to the heart of London’s literary world, and reveals the unlikely friendship that changed his life. Francis Barber, born in Jamaica, was brought to London by his owner in 1750 and became a servant in the household of the renowned Dr. Samuel Johnson. Although Barber left London for a time and served in the British navy during the Seven Years’ War, he later returned to Johnson’s employ. A fascinating reversal took place in the relationship between the two men as Johnson’s health declined and the older man came to rely more and more upon his now educated and devoted companion. When Johnson died he left the bulk of his estate to Barber, a generous (and at the time scandalous) legacy, and a testament to the depth of their friendship. There were thousands of black Britons in the eighteenth century, but few accounts of their lives exist. In uncovering Barber’s story, this book not only provides insights into his life and Johnson’s but also opens a window onto London when slaves had yet to win their freedom.

This book provides an imaginative retelling of London's history, framed through the experiences of Indigenous travelers who came to the city over the course of more than five centuries. London is famed both as the ancient center of a former empire and as a modern metropolis of bewildering complexity and diversity. This book offers an imaginative vision of the city's past crafted from an almost entirely new perspective: that of Indigenous children, women, and men who traveled there, willingly or otherwise, from territories that became Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the United States, beginning in the sixteenth century. They included captives and diplomats, missionaries and shamans, poets and performers. Some, like the Powhatan noblewoman Pocahontas, are familiar; others, like an Odawa boy held as a prisoner of war, have almost been lost to history. In drawing together their stories and their diverse experiences with a changing urban culture, the book also illustrates how London learned to be a global, imperial city and how Indigenous people were central to that process.

Press coverage of the 1888 mutilation murders attributed to Jack the Ripper was, of necessity, filled with gaps and silences, for the killer remained unknown, and Victorian journalists had little experience reporting serial murders and sex crimes. This book examines how fifteen London newspapers—dailies and weeklies, highbrow and lowbrow—presented the Ripper news, in the process revealing much about the social, political, and sexual anxieties of late Victorian Britain and the role of journalists in reinforcing social norms. It surveys the mass newspaper culture of the era, delving into the nature of sensationalism and the conventions of domestic murder news. Analyzing the fifteen newspapers—several of which emanated from the East End, where the murders took place—the book shows how journalists played on the fears of readers about law and order by dwelling on lethal violence rather than sex, offering gruesome details about knife injuries but often withholding some of the more intimate details of the pelvic mutilations. It also considers how the Ripper news affected public perceptions of social conditions in Whitechapel.

Thomas Babington Macaulay's “History of England” was a phenomenal Victorian best-seller defining a nation's sense of self, its triumphant rise to a powerfully homogenous nation built on a global empire, and its claim to be the modern nation, marking the route to civilization for all others. This book explores Thomas's father Zachary's effort to lead a life of faith, one committed to making a Christian home, cleansing the nation from the sins that threatened to destroy it, and reconfiguring the empire. It also explores the emotional, intellectual, and political roots of Zachary Macaulay, the leading abolitionist, and Thomas' visions of race, nation, and empire. The contrasting moments of evangelical humanitarianism and liberal imperialism are read through the writings and careers of the two men.

The Marquess of Queensberry is as famous for his role in the downfall of one of our greatest literary geniuses as he was for helping establish the rules for modern-day boxing. The trial and two-year imprisonment of Oscar Wilde, lover of Queensberry's son, Lord Alfred Douglas, remains one of literary history's great tragedies. However, this biography of the Marquess paints a far more complex picture by drawing on new sources and unpublished letters. Throughout his life, Queensberry was emotionally damaged by a series of tragedies, and the events of the Wilde affair told for the first time from Queensberry's perspective were directly linked to his own personal crises. Through the retelling of pivotal events from Queensberry's life—the death of his brother on the Matterhorn and his fruitless search for the body; and the suicide of his father, brother, and eldest son—the book reveals a well-meaning man often stricken with a grief he found hard to express, who deserves our compassion.

This book looks at Northern Ireland's “Troubles” from the late 1960s to the present day. It explains why, a decade and a half after the peace process ended in political agreement in 1998, sectarian attitudes and violence continue to plague Northern Ireland today. Former members of the IRA now sit alongside their unionist adversaries in the Northern Ireland Assembly, but the region's attitudes have been slow to change and recent years have even seen an upsurge in violence on both sides. The author, who grew up a Catholic in Belfast in the 1970s and 1980s, explores how divisions between Catholics and Protestants became so entrenched, and reviews the thirty years of political violence in Northern Ireland—which killed over 3,500 people—leading up to the peace agreement. The book asks whether the peace process has actually delivered for the citizens of Northern Ireland and what more needs to be done to enhance the current reluctant peace.

While 1858 in London may have been noteworthy for its broiling summer months and the related stench of the sewage-filled Thames River, the year is otherwise little remembered. And yet, this book reveals in this microhistory, 1858 was marked by significant, if unrecognized, turning points. For ordinary people, and also for the rich, famous, and powerful, the months from May to August turned out to be a summer of consequence. The book uncovers historically crucial moments in the lives of three protagonists — Charles Dickens, Charles Darwin, and Benjamin Disraeli. It also introduces others who gained renown in the headlines of the day, among them George Eliot, Karl Marx, William Thackeray, and Edward Bulwer Lytton. The book reveals invisible threads of connection among Londoners at every social level in 1858, bringing the celebrated city and its citizens vibrantly to life.

How, and why, did the Anglo-American world become so obsessed with the private lives and public character of its political leaders? This book finds answers in eighteenth-century Britain, when a long tradition of court intrigue and gossip spread into a much broader and more public political arena with the growth of political parties, extra-parliamentary political activities, and a partisan print culture. The public's preoccupation with the personal character of the ruling elite paralleled a growing interest in the interior lives of individuals in histories, novels, and the theatre. Newspaper reports of the royal family intensified in intimacy and its members became moral exemplars—most often, paradoxically, when they misbehaved. Ad hominem attacks on political leaders became commonplace; politicians of all affiliations continued to assess one another's characters based on their success and daring with women and money. And newly popular human-interest journalism promoted the illusion that the personal characters of public figures could be read by appearances.

This book chronicles the attempts of brothers Charles and George Townshend to control the forces of history in the heady days after Britain's mythic victory over France in the mid-eighteenth century, and the historic and unintended consequences of their efforts. As British chancellor of the exchequer in 1767, Charles Townshend instituted fiscal policy that served as a catalyst for American rebellion against the Crown, while his brother George's actions at the same moment as lord lieutenant of Ireland politicized the kingdom, leading to Irish legislative independence. This fascinating study is the first to consider as a linked history the influence of two all-but-forgotten brothers, both of whom rose to national prominence in the same year. The book vividly reconstructs the many worlds the Townshends moved through and explores how their shared conception of an empire that could harness the wealth of America to the manpower of Ireland initiated an age of revolution.

This book reveals more clearly than ever the precise nature and extent of the damage done to the much-vaunted British intelligence establishment during World War II by the notorious “Cambridge Five” spy ring: Kim Philby, Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt, and John Cairncross. The code word “Triplex” refers to an exceptionally sensitive intelligence source, one of the most closely guarded secrets of the war, which appears nowhere in any of the British government's official histories. “Triplex” was material extracted illicitly from the diplomatic pouches of neutral missions in wartime London. MI5, the British Security Service, entrusted the job of overseeing the highly secret assignment to Anthony Blunt, who was already working for the NKVD, Stalin's intelligence service. The rest is history, documented here in detail.