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This book looks at the highly publicised, sensational trials of several young female protagonists in the period 1918-1924. These cases, all presented by the press as morality tales involving drugs, murder, adultery, miscegenation and sexual perversion, are used as a prism through which to identify concerns about modern femininity. The book first examines a libel case, brought by a well-known female dancer against a maverick right-wing MP for the accusation of lesbianism. One aspect of this libel trial involved the drawing up of battle-lines in relation to the construction of a new, post-war womanhood. The book then looks at two inquests and three magistrate-court trials that involved women and drugs; young women in relationships with Chinese men were also effectively in the dock. One way of accessing court proceedings has been via the account of the trial published as part of the Notable British Trial Series. There are no extant trial transcripts. But there are prosecution depositions lodged at the National Archives, much press reportage, and a number of relevant memoirs, all giving a keen sense of the key issues raised by the trial. The book also focuses on an extraordinary divorce case, that of Christabel Russell, involving cross-dressing, claims of a virgin birth, extreme sexual ignorance, and a particular brand of eccentric modern femininity.
‘reasonable’ men did not. In addition, Britain’s case-law-based legal system means that the verdict in one case effectively creates law, by precedent, in any future case.4 The motives of the women in these cases might have been a mbiguous – part personal, part professional and commercial – but the progress, conduct and outcomes of the libel cases were very much a ‘measure of the culture, liberality, and practical ability’ of the age, particularly as Defending the body, defending the self Â141 it related to women. The practical ability of the law to control women is
relation to their use in each chapter. In my first chapter I examine���������������������������������������������� a libel case, brought by a well-known female dancer against a maverick right-wing MP for the accusation of lesbianism. Although the MP was supposedly on trial, it was the dancer who ended up pilloried and defamed, accused of treachery.����������������������������� I have had access not to of- ficial trial transcripts, but to a ‘verbatim’ report of the libel trial published by the libeller himself. Read alongside press reportage, including that of The Times
Victorian medical men could suffer numerous setbacks on their individual paths to professionalisation, and Thomas Elkanah Hoyle's career offers a telling exemplar. This book addresses a range of the financial, professional, and personal challenges that faced and sometimes defeated the aspiring medical men of England and Wales. Spanning the decades 1780-1890, from the publication of the first medical directory to the second Medical Registration Act, it considers their careers in England and Wales, and in the Indian Medical Service. The book questions the existing picture of broad and rising medical prosperity across the nineteenth century to consider the men who did not keep up with professionalising trends. Financial difficulty was widespread in medical practice, and while there are only a few who underwent bankruptcy or insolvency identified among medical suicides, the fear of financial failure could prove a powerful motive for self-destruction. The book unpicks the life stories of men such as Henry Edwards, who could not sustain a professional persona of disinterested expertise. In doing so it uncovers the trials of the medical marketplace and the pressures of medical masculinity. The book also considers charges against practitioners that entailed their neglect, incompetence or questionable practice which occasioned a threat to patients' lives. The occurrence and reporting of violent crime by medical men, specifically serious sexual assault and murder is also discussed. A tiny proportion of medical practitioners also experienced life as a patient in an asylum.
Victorian touring actresses: Crossing boundaries and negotiating the cultural landscape provides a new perspective on the on- and offstage lives of women working in nineteenth-century theatre, and affirms the central role of touring, both within the United Kingdom and in North America and Australasia. Drawing on extensive archival research, it features a cross-section of neglected performers whose dramatic specialisms range from tragedy to burlesque. Although they were employed as stars in their own time, their contribution to the industry has largely been forgotten. The book’s innovative organisation follows a natural lifecycle, enabling a detailed examination of the practical challenges and opportunities typically encountered by the actress at each stage of her working life. Individual experiences are scrutinised to highlight the career implications of strategies adopted to cope with the demands of the profession, the physical potential of the actress’s body, and the operation of gendered power on and offstage. Analysis is situated in a wide contextual framework and reveals how reception and success depended on the performer’s response to the changing political, economic, social and cultural landscape as well as to developments in professional practice and organisation. The book concludes with discussion of the legacies of the performers, linking their experiences to the present-day situation.
career move by a performer with a rising professional profile. Dare was one of the most popular of the postcard beauties whose images were reproduced on dozens of postcards for mass circulation in the early 1910s. Her sudden professional exit is perhaps explained by a high-profile libel case in 1906 that linked Dare’s name to Seymour Hicks, who brought the case against a Liverpool man caught spreading libellous rumours (see also Viv Gardner’s chapter in this volume). The accused had tried to impress his fiancé by claiming to have insider information on Dare and Hicks
the trial was famous in its time (referred to by military historian Michael Kettle as ‘the libel case of the century’), for many years it surprisingly disappeared almost completely from public view.8 In her 1948 reminiscences, novelist Marie Belloc Lowndes reflects: ‘How completely forgotten is the Pemberton Billing case, and yet in the early summer of 1918 little else was talked of in the world in which I lived.’9 It was as if it had been an odd blip of eccentricity thrown up by the war. Since the later 1990s, however, the trial has been ‘rediscovered’ and written
Will Lawther, apparently not embittered by Harvey’s sectarianism at the DURM Chopwell conference, publicly supported Harvey over the Wilson libel case in the anarchist Herald of Revolt.107 Most significantly, however, Harvey was quick to use the publicity to build his own organisation and his IWGB branch, depicting the case as a significant propaganda victory.108 The approaching court case had surely helped him secure some space to propagandise on industrial unionism in the Stanley News.109 Furthermore, news of Wilson’s action seems to have aroused more interest in
Butler’s more traditional approach, in which she built up a composition only after taking scores of painstakingly detailed sketches. The influential critic G. A. Sala of the Daily Telegraph attacked his technique as ‘slapdash’. 25 The issue of ‘finish’ had been given great publicity in the recent Ruskin v . Whistler libel case. In the course of giving evidence the art establishment had reinforced the
allowed to say pretty much what he liked, and took Judy 's ‘truest and bluest’ ideology to its edge. Boucher's anti-Irish material was notably vicious, he drew Zulu king Cetshwayo as a vile savage with a bone through his nose and he turned unfriendly European heads of state into bloodthirsty monsters. (Indeed, a Boucher cartoon ended up being the subject of a libel case, in 1883.) We return to him for a case study at the end of this chapter. Judy 's best-known editor was the aforementioned Ross, who took over in 1869 (Adcock