New Books in British Studies

What role has gender played in government institutions? In Gender, Rhetoric and Regulation: Women’s Work in the Civil Service and the London County Council 1900-1955, Helen Glew, a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Westminster uses detailed case studies of the Post Office, London County Council, and the British Civil Service to explain this crucial question. The book explores the social, economic and cultural setting for the idea of ‘women’s work’ in British state bureaucracy, looking at the barriers confronting women and their resistance to these constraints. The book uses rich historical evidence to analyse campaigns for equal pay, along with the eventual end of the bar to married women in the Civil Service. The book offers a new gendered perspective on organisations that are crucial to understanding British society at the start of the twentieth century. Clear, engaging and well written, the book will be of interest to a general audience, as well as to academics and historians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Within the context of the social upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s, elite institutions of higher education began to feel pressure to open their doors to women. In ‘Keep the Damned Women Out’: The Struggle for Coeducation (Princeton University Press, 2015), an expansive study in institutional decision making, Nancy Weiss Malkiel analyzes how institutions ultimately decided to approach coeducation and what their institutions would ultimately look like following this radical change. By using examples from both the United States and the United Kingdom, one gets a sense of how men at these institutions viewed coeducation, how women who ended up attending these schools reacted, and how traditionally women-only institutions handled the change. Finally, Nancy Weiss Malkiel answers the important set of questions within this move toward coeducation: what did coeducation do and what did it not do? Nancy Weiss Malkiel is emerita professor of history at Princeton University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Dave Gosse’s recent book Abolition and Plantation Management in Jamaica, 1807-1838 (University of the West Indies Press, 2012), looks at a crucial period in Jamaican history. The time between the abolition of Britain’s slave trade in 1807 and the end of slavery and the apprenticeship system in 1838 saw dramatic attempts by plantation owners and managers to continue grinding profit out of their enslaved workers. Gosse takes on previous assumptions about the efficiency and success of those planters and overseers, by arguing that Jamaican management in this period was largely a failure. Not only did the business culture on plantations encourage negligence, and sometimes theft, but those supervising enslaved workers made little attempt to ameliorate their condition. This exacerbated illness, mortality, and encouraged enslaved Jamaicans to push back. The book brings new perspectives on the end of a brutal and exploitative period in Jamaican history. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

The term historical fiction covers a wide range from what the mystery writer Josephine Tey once dubbed “history with conversation” to outright invention shading into fantasy. But behind every story set in the past lies the past itself, as re-created by scholars from the available evidence. This interview features Helen Rappaport, whose latest work reveals the historical background behind the Masterpiece Theater miniseries Victoria, due to air in the United States this month. Rappaport served as historical consultant to the show. The Queen Victoria who gave her name to an age famous for a prudishness so extreme that even tables had limbs, not legs, is nowhere evident in Rappaport’s book, the television series, or the novel by Daisy Goodwin, also titled Victoria, that gave rise to the series. Victoria: The Heart and Mind of a Young Queen (Harper Design, 2017) explores in vivid, compelling prose the letters, diaries, and other documents associated with the reign of a strong-minded, passionate, eager, inexperienced girl who took the throne just after her eighteenth birthday. This Victoria loved to ride, resisted marriage, fought to separate herself from her mother, detested her mother’s close adviser, and became infatuated with her prime minister before transferring her affections to Prince Albert, who initially did not impress her. Wildly devoted to her husband, she bore nine children but hated being pregnant and regarded newborn infants as ugly. Even her name caused controversy: christened Alexandrina, she switched to Victoria on taking the throne, overriding critics who insisted that Elizabeth or Charlotte were more suitable appellations for a British monarch. By the time she died sixty-three years later, entire generations understood the word “queen”as synonymous with “Victoria.” Although the most powerful woman in the world, Victoria here makes some serious mistakes, as any eighteen-year-old thrust into the center of politics would. If she had no social media to record every misstep, she also had no publicity managers or image brokers to spin her rash remarks or misjudgments. As Daisy Goodwin notes in the foreword to this book, Victoria had to grow up in public, and she left a precious record of that journey in her own exquisite handwriting. But since this is the official companion volume to a television show, it also includes details about casting and costuming, as well as numerous photographs of the actors and background information about the times. It makes a perfect starting point for a discussion of history and historical fiction, their differences and similarities, and how to observe the requirements of one without violating the precepts of the other. C. P. Lesley is the author of six novels, including Legends of the Five Directions (The Golden Lynx, The Winged Horse, and The Swan Princess), a historical fiction series set in 1530s Russia, during the childhood of Ivan the Terrible. Find out more about her at http://www.cplesley.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

As the founder of Sinn Fin and a leading architect of Irish independence, Arthur Griffith ranks as one of the founding fathers of modern Ireland. In his book Arthur Griffith (Merrion Press, 2015), Owen McGee offers a biography of the writer and patriot framed within the context of the Irish nationalist movement. The son of a Dublin printer, Griffith was active in nationalist politics at an early age. His own experience in publishing led Griffith to start his own review journals, which served as a platform for his ideas and which were read by many of the leading writers and activists in Ireland. The First World War and the Rising that followed brought Griffith’s vision of parliamentary abstention into the mainstream of Irish politics, with Griffith and the other Sinn Fin victors in the general election that followed the war refusing to take their seats in Parliament and instead forming their own representative body, the Dil ireann. A leader of the nascent Irish government, Griffith served in a number of key positions and was the chairman of the Irish delegation that negotiated the controversial Anglo-Irish Treaty a treaty that partitioned the island ad plunged the new nation into a civil war that Griffith’s untimely death left for others to resolve. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Culinary Shakespeare: Staging Food and Drink in Early Modern England (Duquesne University Press, 2016) is a collection of essays that offers new dimensions for reading and understanding Shakespeare’s plays. Responding to a rich scholarship on Shakespeare, the authors shift the centers and margins of literary discourse to illuminate aspects that were previously dismissed as insignificant. In Culinary Shakespeare, food is theorized as a territory where multiple dimensions intersect and overlap: aesthetic, social, national, political, etc. As the authors of the introduction section state, “This culinary Shakespearean moment, by crystalizing question about knowledge, power, ethics, colonialism, labor, and desire, introduces us to the grave importance of food in the early modern period and to the dangers of ignoring eating as an ontological and epistemological phenomenon” (1). A part of everyday life, food reflects the individuals engagements with the world and others, revealing intricacies of communication and world-view construction. In Shakespeare’s plays, food is copiously visible and, at the same time, exquisitely subtle. As the essays demonstrate, Shakespeare offers a variety of food engagements ranging from traditional English cuisine and exotic delicatessens to drinking, feasting and banqueting. The three parts of the collection guide readers through the levels Shakespeare’s gastronomic representations permeate: Local and Global; Body and State; Theatre and Community. The three chapters coherently illustrate the idea framed by the introduction note: “For Shakespeare, the culinary is primary” (3). Although the statement may sound categorical, it nevertheless draws attention to textual layers that contain essential information not only about Shakespeare’s plays, but also about society and the community in Early Modern England. Describing food subtleties, the contributors discuss how Shakespeare address the issues of economy and nationhood. Highlighting the perspectives that were underrepresented in the traditional scholarship, Culinary Shakespeare also invites new engagements with literature and literary criticism. Revealing shifting nature of centers, the collection provides tools for reading texts as entities that participate in and absorb a diversity of discourses. David B. Goldstein is associate professor of English at York University in Toronto. Amy L. Tigner is associate professor of English at the University of Texas, Arlington. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

How should we understand the interwar years in Britain? In Prince of Tricksters: The Incredible True Story of Netley Lucas, Gentleman Crook (University of Chicago Press, 2016) Matt Houlbrook, Professor of Cultural History at the University of Birmingham,tells the fascinating and complex story of Netley Lucas, a character whose fragmented and complex story offers clues to the social changes of the period. Netley’s career as confidence trickster, fraudulent journalist and editor, and creator of counterfeit royal biographies, forms the basis of an engagement with anxieties over class boundaries, the reassertion of social norms, and the nature of the historical source. The book is resplendent with a complex cast of characters and offers a rich portrait of the period. Houlbrook raises the question of how to tell the story of the trickster, if it is possible to capture a life of half-truths and duplicity, and the struggle of historical practice, ultimately causing us to question the possibility of history itself. The book is a fascinating tale, as well as being of interest across the humanities and to the general reader. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

During the mid- to late 1930s, a small but socially prominent group of right-wing Britons took a public stance in support of the Nazi regime in Germany. While many of them curtailed their activities upon Britain’s declaration of war in 1939, as Richard Griffiths reveals in his book What Did You Do During the War? The Last Throes of the British Pro-Nazi Right, 1940-45 (Routledge, 2016) some of them continued to support their nation’s declared enemy in a variety of ways. Refuting ex post facto justifications of their actions, Griffiths punctures the myth of wartime national unity by demonstrating how Oswald Mosley and others sought to erode Britons’ support for the war effort in the early months of the conflict by joining pacifist organizations and criticizing openly the motivations behind Britain’s participation in the conflict. Though many of these prominent pro-Nazis were locked up by the authorities in May 1940, several far-right advocates for Germany among the upper class were spared arrest, thanks to their connections and government concerns about the impact on public opinion of detaining of so many prominent members of the social elite. With the prewar pro-Nazi movement disrupted by the detentions, however, many of its unrepentant members turned to individual activities designed to advance their beliefs, while others gradually abandoned politics in favor of other activities as their views were marginalized permanently by the course of events both during and after the Second World War. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

Traditionally histories of the Enlightenment era exclude Ireland in the belief that the movement left little impression on developments. In The Irish Enlightenment (Harvard University Press, 2016), Michael Brown challenges this assumption, demonstrating how the ideas and themes of the Enlightenment had a considerable impact upon the history of the country. He begins by examining how the Enlightenment entered the public discourse confessionally, though the debates taking place within the Presbyterian, Anglican, and Catholic faiths in the aftermath of the decisive War of the Two Kings in the 1690s. From there it spread to the public sphere, where issues of civility took center stage both as a means of addressing problems in Irish life and as a tool for bridging the divide between confessions. By the late 18th century, however, the public discourse became increasingly radicalized, with the divergence of views leading to the 1798 Rising, which Brown terms an “Enlightened Civil War” that represents the failure of civil society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies

The question of how we should act when facing something gravely immoral is a difficult one. This is particularly true when that immorality touches upon our everyday life. Such was the issue that Quakers, and others, faced with the question of goods produced by slaves. Was consuming goods, such as sugar or cotton clothing manufactured by slaves incompatible with abolitionism? Could the refusal to consume such goods contribute to the liberation of slaves? In her new book, Moral Commerce: Quakers and the Transatlantic Boycott of the Slave Labor Economy (Cornell University Press, 2016), Dr. Julie Holcomb focuses on abolitionists who answered yes to both of these questions. In this carefully researched and fascinating study, Holcomb examines the boycott movement in the Atlantic world, focusing on Britain and the United States, and ties together various discourses on race, religion, culture, and the economy. This book is particularly well suited for those interested in the history of abolitionism, but because of the wide variety of subjects it covers, virtually every reader can find something useful in it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/british-studies