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This book provides a broad account of the nineteenth-century cult of King Alfred. It reveals the rich cultural interest of the corpus of texts as a whole. The book redresses a misleading modern emphasis on Arthur and the Victorians, and addresses a genuine gap in the current literature on nineteenth-century medievalism. The book focuses on what was probably the apex of Victorian Alfredianism. It provides the background to this event both in terms of the wider cultural movements and in the sense of the Alfredian tradition which the nineteenth century inherited. The intersection of the cult of Alfred with nineteenth-century British politics is considered in the book, which focuses upon the role that Alfredianism played in debate about the future of the monarchy. The book speculates how the Saxon king was enlisted to vindicate and ennoble those institutions of which Victorian Britain was most proud - notably its navy, law-code, constitution and empire. It examines the conceptions of ninth-century Wessex as a time of immense cultural change - the mirror-image of the nineteenth century - and reviews Victorian appropriations of Alfred's reign as a prestigious starting point for myths of national progress. The book further focuses upon more domestic narratives - the use of Alfred, by Victorian authors, to exemplify moral values, and the rewriting of his life as a parable of error and redemption. Finally, the crucial question of Alfred's decline in fame is addressed in the book, which surveys the diminished interest in the Saxon king after 1901.
This chapter examines how various visual perceptions of one garment, the smock frock, influenced nineteenth-century British politics. By the first half of the nineteenth century, the smock frock was a cheap utilitarian ready-made overall used by many working men including small-scale farmers and agricultural labourers. Farmers who worked ‘hands-on’, alongside their labourers, became associated with the character of the ‘smock frock farmer’, also personifying honesty and integrity. However, as growing urban populations put pressure on food production, many saw such farmers as inflexible, adhering to old systems, backward-looking, and against progress. These two conflicting interpretations of this sartorially based term are investigated, considering how they were used for political gain by both sides in many important political debates of the era. The chapter then discusses how the smock frock was taken up as a uniform for class confrontation alongside the fustian jacket, which was commonly associated with working-class radicals. As many rural labourers faced abject poverty and starvation during the mid-1840s, their daily dress, the smock frock, became used as a political symbol of their condition. How agricultural labourers expressed their political discontent using their appearance is investigated along with the implications this had into the late nineteenth century. Politically, the smock frock could thus embody both class conscious radicals and traditionalists opposed to progress. As this chapter illuminates, the dichotomy between the two stances makes the metaphor of the smock frock in political identities fluid and often contradictory.
.g. India and Africa) have been traditionally framed, it argues that imperial culture and identities figured importantly in the everyday lives of British subjects the world over. I argue that colonial subjects in the empire were as important to the creation of nineteenth-century British politics and culture as anyone at ‘home’. Colonial subjects abroad had a formative influence on discourses on Britishness
power of New Labour under Tony Blair in 1997. While Blair inherited rather than inaugurated neoliberal governance in the UK, his decade of rule made manifest the separation of the modern British Labour Party from its roots in socialism and the working-class struggles of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In many ways, the New Labour project saw Labour return to a kind of progressive laissez-faire liberalism typical of nineteenth-century British politics: committed to ‘opportunity for all’ but at ease with seeing the free market as the natural context in which
rhetoric was not constructed in a vacuum and the wider imperial-political languages in use in this period must be therefore be taken in account. At this time, as always, ideas of empire and imperialism were essentially fluid and open to contest. Richard Koebner’s observation that late nineteenth century British politics played host to two competing notions of imperialism remains important for understanding
settings of nineteenth-century British politics while gesturing – in their analyses of caricature and ‘domestic imperialism’ ( Chapter 1 ), the self-presentation of an imperial administrator and a cabinet official charged with oversight of Ireland and India ( Chapter 5 ), and the uniform of a Royal Army officer ( Chapter 7 ) – beyond the island nation’s shores. The contributors to Part III , ‘Global connections and entanglements’, foreground this dimension in their analyses of the colonial contexts of political
1880, Charles Stewart Parnell towered over late nineteenth-century British politics in a way surpassed only by Gladstone himself. And Gladstone described Parnell as the most remarkable man he had ever met. To the Irish people he was their ‘uncrowned king’, the dominating, mesmerising, even messianic hero, directing a national movement on an international scale, and giving them back their self
ultimate, legally unbound power and which, given the legal-political facts of nineteenth-century British politics, told in favour of identifying Britain as a land of parliamentary sovereignty. 9 These thinkers understood themselves to be discussing the question not of
before April 1840. For those who are not familiar with nineteenth-century British politics, what the government did in sending a fleet to China was not illegal or unconstitutional. The British Parliament did not make war or peace until modern times and the government, as the executive, did not need the approval of Parliament to start a war. Parliament, however, passed laws and voted taxes as the legislature. Although declaring and conducting war was an executive action, war always required high taxes so Parliament could subsequently make it easy or difficult for the
.4.1°. 37 B. Chubb, Cabinet Government in Ireland (Institute of Public Administration, Dublin, 1974), 8. 38 Other ideas current in nineteenth-century British political theory reflected in the Irish constitution are the separation of powers (reflected e.g., in Article 6 of the Constitution); and the principle of the sovereignty of the people (reflected e.g., in the Preamble and in Article 6.1). 39 See Chubb, Cabinet Government in Ireland at 9–12. See more generally A. Birch, The British System of Government (tenth edition, Routledge, London, 1998). 40 Gallagher