History

Research purpose This paper seeks to explore the extent to which advertising might be said to trade in illusions, warping realities and dealing in fantasies through a specific case study of the marketing of British shipping lines in the period c.1880 to c.1970. It explores the means by which this might have been achieved and questions whether the marketing of passenger shipping through this time was particularly susceptible to such practices. Through this long period romanticism and the pathetic fallacy are considered in relation to the idea that, with the rise of modernity, marketing went to increasing lengths to “hide” the product in favour of building emotive appeals. Thus, a central research question is, does the marketing of British shipping in the period c.1880 to c.1970 typify the principles of modern marketing and advertising whereby meanings are fabricated around goods and services, removing from them the intrinsic value of those items in preference for ‘artificial, constru...

"'Centres of Brightness: The Spiritual Imagination of Toynbee Hall and Oxford House, 1883-1914' argues that Christianity underwent a transformation in the period 1880-1914. It challenges the pervasive influence of the secularisation thesis in recent historiography by exploring the spiritual imagination of those middle-class men who ‘settled’ in the East End of London and engaged in philanthropic work with local working-class men. The settlement houses Toynbee Hall and Oxford House (both opened in 1884) reveal that modern philanthropic religiosity was neither an attempt to protect pre-industrial expressions of faith nor a means to reconcile faith with the onset of a secularized society but rather a means by which to modernise Christianity for a new social reality. The spiritual imagination is a new analytical concept which allows for a major overhaul of historical and contemporary understandings of the secularisation thesis. Here Sarah Williams’s seminal study on religious belief in Southwark plays an important role. In addition to Williams’s work, recent developments by sociologists of spirituality and postmodern theologians will also be utilised to argue that religious belief was a lived faith expressed through every day practices and experiences of belief rather than through rigorous church attendance. As such, the ‘spiritual imagination’ is a holistic concept that acknowledges the relationship between informal and formal Christianity, whilst also recognising that religion and spirituality are culturally and socially interdependent upon one another. The spiritual imagination provides scholars with the analytical tools needed to fully explore religious belief both within and outside the spaces of the Church which has important ramification for religious and cultural historians interested in how Christianity transformed into a new imaginary in the modern period.

Toynbee Hall and Oxford House, the two foundational houses of the university settlement movement, provide an ideal case study for the investigation of Britain’s spiritual imagination during this period. Toynbee Hall and Oxford House marked a new phase in the history of urban philanthropy, offered by elite men the chance to live near their working class brothers. Of the two, Toynbee Hall, the unsectarian house, has played a central role in the historian’s imagination with the High Anglican Oxford House being all but forgotten. The propensity to polarise these houses along the lines of secular welfarism on the one hand and Christian charity on the other obscures the extent to which a spiritual imagination structured their engagement with urban spaces and the people that inhabited them. Settlement houses were not obviously sacred spaces when compared to the church, cemetery or shrine. An exploration of their spiritual imaginations nevertheless reveals that settlement space was invested with sacred meaning. The present study examines the Christian imagery of both settlement houses to explore the ways in which settlers, heads and supporters of the movement sought to enchant settlement space. It pays particular attention to the sacred meanings imposed on material objects, settler identity, social action and geographical space. The success of Toynbee Hall and Oxford House’s spiritual imagination ultimately lay in its ability to make settlements centres of brightness, beacons which reminded the middle classes of their Christian duty to the poor in a thoroughly modern way.

I am happy to provide e-copies of this thesis to anyone interested in reading it. You can email me at [email protected]."

is a timely discussion of the opportunities and challenges presented by new technologies. It signals the journal's intention to act as a forum for digital research. Matt Rubery's article considers how digital audio books can be used to rethink the experience of reading in the Victorian age and in our own, whilst Jerome McGann, Richard Pearson, James Mussell, and Julie Thomas take part in a thoughtprovoking roundtable discussion on the potential of digital archives. The second special issue, 'Victorian Afterlives', considers the legacy of the Victorian period (J. of Victorian Culture, 13:2, (2008), pp. 200-222). Tracy Hargreaves examines literary and filmic representations of the Victorians in order to consider recurrences of thought that bind the present-day mindset to that of the nineteenth century. Carol T. Christ assesses the resonance of Victorian educational debates in recent arguments about the future of universities. Peter D. McDonald looks at the long life of Victorian disputes about censorship into the twentieth century. Sharon Aronofsky Weltman adds a theatre historian's perspective by analysing recent 'stagings' of Victorian culture. 'Victorian afterlives' is a theme that also emerges in Cora Kaplan, 'Fingersmith's Coda: Feminism and Victorian Studies' (JVC, 12), which uses the work of Sarah Waters to explore the political and critical genealogy of pastiche Victoriana, and examines modern feminism's enduring relationship with post-war Victorian studies. 2008 also sees the foundation of Neo-Victorian Studies, with a special issue on ' "Swing Your Razor Wide . . .": Sweeney Todd and Other (Neo)Victorian Criminalities'. War, Welfare and Capitalism is a collection of twelve previously published essays that consider (i) the fiscal character of the Victorian state, (ii) the relationship between the state and the City and (iii) the state and philanthropy (Boydell and Brewer, £55). The development of an international market for wheat is explored in Mette Ejanaes, Karl Gunnar Persson and Søren Rich, 'Feeding the British: convergence and market efficiency in the nineteenth-century grain trade' (Econ. Hist. R. 61). Francesco Cinnirella, 'Optimists or pessimists? A reconsideration of nutritional status in Britain, 1740-1865' (Eur. R. of Econ. Hist., 12), revises previous estimates on average nutritional status to argue that this declined substantially. It is argued that enclosures and the decline of the cottage industry partially explain this fall. Bernard Harris, 'Gender, health, and welfare in England and Wales since industrialisation ' (Res. in Econ. Hist., 26), re-examines historiography on sex-specific differences in height, weight and mortality in England and Wales before 1850 and uses two electronic datasets to examine changes in cause-specific mortality rates between 1851 and 1995. Moving to Ireland, Charles R. Hickson and John D. Turner, 'Preand post-famine indices of Irish equity prices' (Eur. R. of Econ. His., 12), uses data obtained from stockbroker lists to estimate market capitalisation and construct weighted and unweighted monthly stock markets to demonstrate that the market for company stock appears to have been relatively unaffected by the Famine.

companion to the Journal of Victorian Culture (JVC). It is an innovative departure from static academic journal websites. An open access multi-authored academic blog and social media presence, JVC Online is attached to JVC, but acts independently of it and can extend beyond the Journal's parameters. Going beyond the traditional web activities of academic journals, it demonstrates the new directions which academic publishing can take in the digital age. Much of the current discussion about academic publishing privileges the question of open access in relation to traditional publishing methods. This is not surprising given the fast pace with which the Finch Report has been implemented in the UK. 1 However, the preoccupation with open access should not cause us to overlook the myriad ways in which the web and social media are being used, and could be used, for greater research engagement and community building by academic journals. Indeed, Jane Winter has praised JVC Online as 'a separate online supplement' to JVC which 'very effectively builds community around the publication and presents a rich and diverse range of material' and adding that, 'The journal is quite deliberately reaching beyond its core academic audience to a wider public online.' 2 This article considers how JVC Online has reconceived academic publishing for the digital age by contextualising the current website and its associated activities and by discussing possible future developments. In doing so, it questions the narrative that traditional non-open access

This article considers how lecturing in Victoria Park in the East End of London allowed three early heads of the university settlement Oxford House to engage local communities in a discussion about the place of religion in the modern world. It demonstrates how park lecturing enabled James Adderley, Hebert Hensley Henson, and Arthur Winnington-Ingram, all of whom also held positions in the Church of England, to perform and test out their religious identities. Open-air lecturing was a performance of religious faith for these settlement leaders. It allowed them to move beyond the institutional spaces of the church and the settlement house in order to mediate their faith in the context of open discussion and debate about religion and modern life. The narratives they constructed in and about their park sermons reveal a good deal about how these early settlement leaders imagined themselves as well as their relationship with the working-class men they hoped to reach through settlement work...

War Letters of Cardiff University Settlement Lads' Club 'I still remain one of the old Settlement boys' was how Guardsman Dai Luker chose to sign off one of his first letters home after enlisting for active war service in 1915. Written to husband and wife Edward and Amy Lewis, organizers of the Cardiff University Settlement Lads' Club, the letter is among a number sent between working-class former settlement attendees and the Lewises, middle-class settlement workers, during the war. Letters have long been important sources for historians of the First World War, offering first-hand accounts of military experience. But war letters are also cultural products that enable us to analyse emotion, gender and selfhood. 1 This article explores one as yet under-researched element of First World War letters: the way in which cross-class friendships formed in philanthropic organizations before the war were sustained after 1914. Letters sent by former members of Cardiff University Settlement Lads' Club, I will argue, not only offer a glimpse of how one group of soldiers experienced the Great War, but also allow invaluable insight into the nature of the relationships formed in organizations such as university settlements. The article shows how letters written by former members of the Lads' Club incorporated Cardiff University Settlement into their imagination of home and community. The university settlement movement, so-called because it involved university graduates settling in poor urban areas for the purposes of social work, was established in 1883. Settlement houses acted as centres of cultural, social and economic philanthropy for the local area. The first to be established were Toynbee Hall and Oxford House in East London. The movement spread to Glasgow (1889), Manchester (1895), Cardiff (1901), Edinburgh (1905), Liverpool (1907), and Bristol (1911), where universities and university colleges sought to address the social and economic needs of their own cities. 2 The histories of London settlements in general and of Toynbee Hall in particular have dominated much of the historiography on the university settlement movement. 3 This article expands the scholarly terrain by focusing on the lesser-known case of Cardiff University Settlement. Plans for a Welsh university settlement were first discussed in 1899. Initially, Thomas Ellis, the Liberal MP for Merioneth, proposed that Old Aberystwythians based in London should open a settlement house in East London for the Welsh poor residing there. Ellis died in 1899, prompting others to take up his project, but instead of London, they decided to

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