Beier: For Their Own Good

For Their Own Good

The Transformation of English Working-Class Health Culture, 1880–1970

Lucinda McCray Beier

In For Their Own Good Lucinda McCray Beier examines the interactions between working-class health culture and official provision of health services and medical care in three English communities between 1880 and 1970. Based on 239 oral history interviews of laypeople and annual public health reports, this book considers gender, class, political, economic, and cultural aspects of the mid-twentieth-century shift in responsibility for illness, birth, and death from the informal domestic and neighborhood sphere to the purview of professional, institutionally based authorities.

For Their Own Good is a case study, located in a particular place and time, of a phenomenon that has occurred in all Western nations and is now happening worldwide. As in Barrow, Lancaster, and Preston, in most circumstances, the transition from traditional to modern medicine is stimulated and enforced from the top down. Current global struggles with AIDS, overpopulation, malaria, malnutrition, and other killers offer powerful reminders that elite knowledge and strategies rarely result in success unless laypeople are engaged and invested in solutions. Furthermore, as this book demonstrates, the desired transition to Western medicine carries the twin burdens of the loss of lay ability to prevent and manage ill-health, on one hand, and the demand that political elites and medical professionals meet proliferating health care needs and demands, on the other.

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LaMonaca: Masked Atheism

Masked Atheism

Catholicism and the Secular Victorian Home

Maria LaMonaca

Why did the Victorians hate and fear Roman Catholics so much? This question has long preoccupied literary and cultural scholars alike. Masked Atheism: Catholicism and the Secular Victorian Home by Maria LaMonaca begins with the assumption that anti-Catholicism reveals far more about the Victorians than simple theological disagreements or religious prejudice. An analysis of anti-Catholicism exposes a host of anxieties, contradictions, and controversies dividing Great Britain, the world’s most powerful nation by the mid-nineteenth century.

Noting that Catholicism was frequently caricatured by the Victorians as “masked atheism”—that is, heathenism and paganism masquerading as legitimate Christianity—LaMonaca’s study suggests that much anti-Catholic rhetoric in Victorian England was fueled by fears of encroaching secularism and anxieties about the disappearance of God in the modern world. For both male and female writers, Catholicism became a synonym for larger, “ungodly” forces threatening traditional ways of life: industrialization, rising standards of living, and religious skepticism.

LaMonaca situates texts by Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Christina Rossetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Michael Field, and others against a rich background of discourses about the growing visibility of Anglo and Roman Catholicism in Victorian England. In so doing, she demonstrates the influence of both pro- and anti-Catholic sentiment on constructs of Victorian domesticity, and explores how writers appropriated elements of Catholicism to voice anxieties about the growing secularization of the domestic sphere: a bold challenge to sentimental notions of the home as a “sacred” space. Masked Atheism will contribute a fresh perspective to an ongoing conversation about the significance of Catholicism in Victorian literature and culture.

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Tromp, ed.: Victorian Freaks

Victorian Freaks

The Social Context of Freakery in Britain

Edited by Marlene Tromp

While “freaks” have captivated our imagination since well before the nineteenth century, the Victorians flocked to shows featuring dancing dwarves, bearded ladies, “missing links,” and six-legged sheep. Indeed, this period has been described by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson as the epoch of “consolidation” for freakery: an era of social change, enormously popular freak shows, and taxonomic frenzy. Victorian Freaks: The Social Context of Freakery in Britain, edited by Marlene Tromp, turns to that rich nexus, examining the struggle over definitions of “freakery” and the unstable and sometimes conflicting ways in which freakery was understood and deployed. As the first study centralizing British culture, this collection discusses figures as varied as Joseph Merrick, “The Elephant Man”; Daniel Lambert, “King of the Fat Men”; Julia Pastrana, “The Bear Woman”; and Laloo “The Marvellous Indian Boy” and his embedded, parasitic twin. The Victorian Freaks contributors examine Victorian culture through the lens of freakery, reading the production of the freak against the landscape of capitalist consumption, the medical community, and the politics of empire, sexuality, and art. Collectively, these essays ask how freakery engaged with notions of normalcy and with its Victorian cultural context.

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Dintenfass: Managing Industrial Decline

Managing Industrial Decline

The British Coal Industry between the Wars

Michael Dintenfass

Managing Industrial Decline examines the dramatic decline of the British coal industry through the lens of comparative business history, challenging the prevailing belief that the industry's decline was due primarily to global economic factors and instead demonstrating that entrepreneurial failings of individual coal firms contributed significantly to the problem.

Through a comparative analysis of company histories, Dintenfass shows how the full range of business operations at British coal firms, including labor management policies, technological choices, and marketing practices, affected their performance. The histories of individual firms demonstrate that the managements could improve productivity, increase sale prices, and sustain profitability, even as the coal trade succumbed to cyclical depression and secular decline. According to Dintenfass, comparisons between the individual firms and the regional coal industries to which they belonged show that neighboring firms were slow to introduce the modest innovations that the successful firms pioneered. Since there were few barriers to the implementation of these strategies, it appears that Britain's coal masters miscalculated their costs and benefits, contributing to the problem by failing to adopt inexpensive and accessible second-best solutions to production and commercial problems.

Managing Industrial Decline breaks new ground in the field of business history and restores entrepreneurship to its proper place in the analysis of industrial decline.

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Wiles: Freshest Advices

Freshest Advices

Early Provincial Newspapers in England

R. M. Wiles

When Princess Anne was crowned Queen of her several realms in 1702, there were only two provincial newspapers in England to report the coronation. When, two generations later, another Archbishop placed the crown on the head of George III, there were local weekly newspapers in twenty-nine English towns. Between these two events, during the reigns of Anne and the first two Georges, scores and scores of newspaper sprang into being in country towns all over England. This book gives an account of that rapid development in early journalism.

The significance of the phenomenon was recognized by very few people at the time. Even so astute an observer as Samuel Johnson saw only the fact; he was not aware that a mighty struggle was in progress, the struggle of a force that burst its way into the open, thrusting aside all impediments, gaining momentum steadily, and bringing a new dimension into the life of England.

An examination of the papers themselves provides the modern reader not only with an account of the provincial press in its formative years but also with an incredible abundance of material on every aspect of life in a swiftly developing nation. For in them are revealed what political and economic questions were of chief concern to their thousands of readers, what incidents in the normal day-to-day life of people were thought to be worth reporting, what kinds of prose and verse the local papers disseminated throughout England’s fifty thousand square miles, and what efforts were made by printers to keep the public informed about events in other parts of the nation and of the world.

When compared with the stately official papers in Great Britain’s archives, these ephemeral and hastily produced weekly bulletins of news may seem pathetically unimportant as historical documents; yet their numerous details of fact and speculation disclose, perhaps more strikingly than any other body of evidence, the ethos of early Georgian provincial England.

The author has assimilated a prodigious mass of detail to write, with grace and humor, a definitive study of an important aspect of eighteenth-century publishing history.

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