Browse
The deliberate destruction of the university library in Louvain during World War I caused an international outcry, but also elicited constructive reactions. One of the most impressive responses was the collection in England of an enormous donation of books to replace those lost, a project coordinated by the John Rylands Library in Manchester. Although the librarian, Henry Guppy, documented the donation in issues of the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, this generous and altruistic work has received little mention in the recent scholarship on the burning of the library and its rebuilding. This article charts the development of the project and the extent of the contribution, drawing on Guppy’s publications and documents in the library archives of the University of Manchester, Oxford University and the University of Toronto. Some of the most valuable gifts from private individuals receive special attention, as do the institutional donations by the Bodleian Library and the University of Toronto.
Much has been published about John Rylands, whether during his lifetime, in response to his death, or by historians looking back. While records of his business are plentiful, archival records for the Longford estate he bought in Stretford, Lancashire in 1855, including the hall he subsequently built, were not easily found. In recent years, however, estate records have emerged with new information, suggesting others may have survived. These records prompt a reassessment of the date at which Longford Hall was built, and identify the architect as Philip Nunn. This article explores Nunn’s career, and his work as a leading architect is set in the context of the contemporary vogue for Italianate architecture, especially for warehouses. Longford Hall’s demolition in 1995 was a major loss to Longford Park, but a more positive approach to the Park’s history is in prospect, with a multi-million pound Lottery bid approved, and plans to catalogue Stretford’s building plans.
This article examines three medieval charters of the Norman abbey of Mont Saint-Michel, today preserved among the collections of the John Rylands Research Institute and Library. Rare survivors of the destruction of the abbey’s archives in 1944, these charters previously formed part of the enormous private library assembled by Sir Thomas Phillipps (1792–1872), antiquarian and bibliophile. They are here studied in detail for the first time, showcasing them not just for what they can tell us about the property to which they relate and the celebrated abbey to which it once belonged, but, more importantly, for what they reveal about the structure and organisation of the lost institutional archive of which they formed a part in the Middle Ages. This article also contextualises these charters within the wider Phillipps collection, exploring questions associated with the antiquarian practice of preserving and presenting medieval documents, a subject which has only recently begun to receive the scholarly attention it deserves.
The nature of Britain’s unreformed parliamentary electoral system has been the focus of interest and study for over two centuries. For the unreformed period, historians have identified a range of factors influencing the outcome of parliamentary elections: prevailing economic and social power structures; the nature, extent and effectiveness of electoral treating and corruption; and the role of political issues, among both the political elite and the electorate. Within these interpretations, the role of parliamentary boroughs dominated by electoral patrons has been seen as an important feature. This article considers one such borough, Newton in Lancashire. Often presented as the archetypal ‘pocket borough’, Newton’s parliamentary elections were indeed dominated by the lords of the manor, the Leghs of Lyme. The papers of this family show, however, that this electoral control was more complex than has previously been thought, and required significant electoral management by the family.
This chapter portrays the life story of Henry Simon. Employing a close reading of Henry’s correspondence, it draws out his character as a hard-working engineer and philanthropist. As well as illustrating his private family life, the chapter explores his firm moral principles and liberal beliefs and their antecedents. In this vein, it explores the influence of Henry’s uncle, Heinrich Simon, as well as Henry’s interest in eastern religion. The chapter demonstrates Henry’s integral position in Manchester’s German community and his role in enriching the city’s civic institutions.
It is important to study the multiplicity of interpretations given to stigmata from outside Catholicism. Rather than confirming the picture of two opposing confessional blocks, this chapter deepens and extends the argument of the first three chapters by examining discussions about supernatural bodies in Protestant, Nonconformist communities. Stigmata did not manifest on Catholic bodies only. In particular, this chapter explores how stigmata functioned as extraordinary bodily credentials for individuals with prophetic ambitions in the margins of Christianity. Their bodies became public, and publicly contested, sites of millenarian religion around which small communities were sustained. Taking as its focus the Canterbury messiah John Thom and the ex-Methodist cult leader Mary Ann Girling, this chapter links the specificities of their stories to the emergence of ‘modern’ supernatural bodies in a public sphere that consumed such spectacle in myriad ways. Unlike the stigmatised women abroad that dominated debates, Thom and Girling presented their wounds to the world in unconventional ways, as markers of superhuman strength or physical evidence of their identity as Christ reborn. Both thrust their bodies into the public arena: they appealed to the press and showed their wounds to select audiences during carefully staged events. Tracing the trajectories of these prophetic bodies through the public sphere, this chapter also highlights often-neglected aspects in studies of the reception of the supernatural: mockery, humour, empathy.
This chapter traces the contribution of all four Simons in housing reform: from Henry’s role in a Victorian tenement scheme, to Emily’s connection with the Edwardian garden suburb movement, and then to Shena and Ernest’s work in interwar mass municipal housing development. In addition to illustrating Ernest and Shena’s important role in the development of the Wythenshawe Estate and their longstanding connections with it, the chapter discusses how Ernest’s unique ideas about democratic town planning were profoundly shaped by his investigations of foreign nations.
This chapter illuminates the Simon family’s longstanding connection with the University of Manchester. In addition to elucidating how the Simons’ link with the university stemmed from the family’s relationship with Manchester’s German business community, it focuses on Ernest’s intellectual vision for university education as a uniquely influential lay governor. In assessing Ernest’s belief that education for citizenship and the social sciences were central to higher education, the chapter details how this vision inspired the Simon fellowship scheme. The chapter considers the scheme’s early history as well as the impact it has had on research in the social sciences.
This chapter presents a holistic account of the largely unrecorded development of the Simon Engineering businesses over the course of ninety years from the 1870s to 1960s. It traces how a global and multifaceted business empire began with Henry Simon’s introduction into Britain of innovative reforms to flour milling and to coke production. The chapter demonstrates how the Simons’ contribution to industry was grounded upon an ethos of fostering innovation to serve fundamental human needs and to benefit society.
Emigration formed a cornerstone of the GFS’s imperial work. In 1883 the GFS established the Department for Members Emigrating to ensure the safe passage of girls and young women travelling between various parts of the empire. The previous chapter examined how whiteness was central to imaginings of settler colonial societies, and this chapter considers how the GFS tried to make these imaginings a reality through its emigration programmes and the building up of settler societies. The chapter begins by outlining the wider contexts in which the GFS’s emigration programmes emerged and situates their development in relation to similar emigration schemes for girls. It then traces the different motives that informed the development of the GFS’s programmes. Child rescue and emigration organisations argued for the necessity of removing girls from the perceived dangers of poverty and urban life in England to the more wholesome environment of the colonies. Girls also provided valuable labour to colonial societies and were integral in making the empire white by ensuring the construction of English households abroad. Despite the high demand for emigrants in settler colonies, the GFS and other emigration organisations faced myriad difficulties, which were rooted in broader class and racial anxieties and specifically concerns about the whiteness of emigrants and white prestige in colonial societies. These challenges also reveal the competing, rather than complementary, objectives among emigration organisers, settlers, and girl migrants and fault lines within emigration programmes and the settler colonial project.