The Match Girl and the Heiress
The Match Girl and the Heiress

Author: Seth Koven

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2016-04-19

Total Pages: 464

ISBN-13: 0691171319

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

How two extraordinary women crossed the Victorian class divide to put Christian teachings into practice in the slums of East London Nellie Dowell was a match factory girl in Victorian London who spent her early years consigned to orphanages and hospitals. Muriel Lester, the daughter of a wealthy shipbuilder, longed to be free of the burden of money and possessions. Together, these unlikely soulmates sought to remake the world according to their own utopian vision of Christ's teachings. The Match Girl and the Heiress paints an unforgettable portrait of their late-nineteenth-century girlhoods of wealth and want, and their daring twentieth-century experiments in ethical living in a world torn apart by war, imperialism, and industrial capitalism. In this captivating book, Seth Koven chronicles how each traveled the globe—Nellie as a spinster proletarian laborer, Muriel as a well-heeled tourist and revered Christian peacemaker, anticolonial activist, and humanitarian. Koven vividly describes how their lives crossed in the slums of East London, where they inaugurated a grassroots revolution that took the Sermon on the Mount as a guide to achieving economic and social justice for the dispossessed. Koven shows how they devoted themselves to Kingsley Hall—Gandhi's London home in 1931 and Britain's first "people's house" founded on the Christian principles of social sharing, pacifism, and reconciliation—and sheds light on the intimacies and inequalities of their loving yet complicated relationship. The Match Girl and the Heiress probes the inner lives of these two extraordinary women against the panoramic backdrop of shop-floor labor politics, global capitalism, counterculture spirituality, and pacifist feminism to expose the wounds of poverty and neglect that Christian love could never heal.

Factory Girls
Factory Girls

Author: Paul Chrystal

Publisher: Pen and Sword History

Published: 2022-12-01

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 1399011952

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Ever since there have been factories women and children have, more often than not, worked in those factories. What is perhaps less well known is that women also worked underground in coal mines and overground scaling the inside of chimneys. Young children were also put to work in factories and coalmines; they were deployed inside chimneys, often half-starved so that they could shin up ever narrower flues. This book charts the unhappy but aspirational story of women and children at work through the Industrial Revolution to the beginning of the 20th century. Without women there would have been no pre-industrial cottage industries, without women the Industrial Revolution would not have been nearly as industrial and nowhere near as revolutionary. Many women, and children, were obliged to take up work in the mills and factories – long hours, dangerous, often toxic conditions, monotony, bullying, abuse and miserly pay were the usual hallmarks of a day’s work - before they headed homeward to their other job: keeping home and family together. This long overdue and much needed book also covers the social reformers, the role of feminism and activism and the various Factory Acts and trade unionism. We examine how women and children suffered chronic occupational diseases and disabling industrial injuries - life changing and life shortening – and often a one way ticket to the workhouse. The book concludes with a survey of the art, literature and the music which formed the soundtrack for the factory girl and the climbing boys.

Love, Desire and Melancholy
Love, Desire and Melancholy

Author: Angharad Eyre

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-10-11

Total Pages: 172

ISBN-13: 1351849840

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Originally inspired by the digitisation of the autobiographical writings of Constance Maynard, this volume considers women’s historical experience of sexuality through the frame of the history of emotions. Constance Maynard (1849-1935) rose to prominence as the first Mistress and Principal of Westfield College, holding that position from 1882 to 1913. However, her writings offer more than an insight into the movement for women’s higher education. As pioneering feminist scholars such as Martha Vicinus have discovered, Maynard’s life writings are a valuable source for scholars of gender and sexuality. Writing about her relationships with other women teachers and students, Maynard attempted to understand her emotions and desires within the frame of her evangelical religious culture. The contributions to this volume draw out the significance of Maynard’s writings for the histories of gender, sexuality, religion, and the emotions. Interdisciplinary in nature, they use the approaches of literary studies, architecture studies, and life writing to understand Maynard and her historical significance. This book was originally published as a special issue of Women’s History Review.

Disaffected
Disaffected

Author: Tanya Agathocleous

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2021-04-15

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 1501753908

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Disaffected examines the effects of antisedition law on the overlapping public spheres of India and Britain under empire. After 1857, the British government began censoring the press in India, culminating in 1870 with the passage of Section 124a, a law that used the term "disaffection" to target the emotional tenor of writing deemed threatening to imperial rule. As a result, Tanya Agathocleous shows, Indian journalists adopted modes of writing that appeared to mimic properly British styles of prose even as they wrote against empire. Agathocleous argues that Section 124a, which is still used to quell political dissent in present-day India, both irrevocably shaped conversations and critiques in the colonial public sphere and continues to influence anticolonialism and postcolonial relationships between the state and the public. Disaffected draws out the coercive and emotional subtexts of law, literature, and cultural relationships, demonstrating how the criminalization of political alienation and dissent has shaped literary form and the political imagination.

Religion and Relationships in Ragged Schools
Religion and Relationships in Ragged Schools

Author: Laura M. Mair

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-03-22

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 1351185535

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Focusing on the interaction between teachers and scholars, this book provides an intimate account of "ragged schools" that challenges existing scholarship on evangelical child-saving movements and Victorian philanthropy. With Lord Shaftesbury as their figurehead, these institutions provided a free education to impoverished children. The primary purpose of the schools, however, was the salvation of children’s souls. Using promotional literature and local school documents, this book contrasts the public portrayal of children and teachers with that found in practice. It draws upon evidence from schools in Scotland and England, giving insight into the achievements and challenges of individual institutions. An intimate account is constructed using the journals maintained by Martin Ware, the superintendent of a North London school, alongside a cache of letters that children sent him. This combination of personal and national perspectives adds nuance to the narratives often imposed upon historic philanthropic movements. Investigating how children responded to the evangelistic messages and educational opportunities ragged schools offered, this book will be of keen interest to historians of education, emigration, religion, as well as of the nineteenth century more broadly.

Teaching Britain
Teaching Britain

Author: Christopher Bischof

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-05-09

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 0192569848

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Teaching Britain examines teachers as key agents in the production of social knowledge. Teachers in nineteenth century Britain claimed intimate knowledge of everyday life among the poor and working class at home, and non-white subjects abroad. They mobilized their knowledge in a wide range of media, from accounts of local happenings in their schools' official log books to travel narratives based on summer trips around Britain and the wider world. Teachers also obsessively narrated and reflected on their own careers. Through these stories and the work they did every day, teachers imagined and helped to enact new models of professionalism, attitudes towards poverty and social mobility, ways of thinking about race and empire, and roles for the state. As highly visible agents of the state and beneficiaries of new state-funded opportunities, teachers also represented the largesse and the reach of the liberal state - but also the limits of both.

Sweet Canadian Girls Abroad
Sweet Canadian Girls Abroad

Author: Cecilia Morgan

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 2022-09-15

Total Pages: 441

ISBN-13: 0228013275

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

By the late nineteenth century, Canadian women had begun forging careers as professional actresses, appearing not just in Canada, but in the United States, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand. They played an integral role in theatrical networks and helped shape transnational middle-class culture. Taking the approach of feminist collective biography, Sweet Canadian Girls Abroad writes the lives of women who, despite their renown during their lifetimes, have been all too easily forgotten. Cecilia Morgan examines these “sweet girls’” childhoods, their experiences of work, touring, and company management, the plays in which they appeared, and the celebrity they enjoyed. In so doing she shows how women helped convey messages about race, empire, and white identity in popular culture. Investigating a period from the 1870s to the 1940s, Morgan demonstrates how actresses evolved within a period of change in theatre, how they coped with new challenges, and how they brought their craft to new media. Paying particular attention to the careers of Margaret Bannerman, Tony Award-winner Beatrice Lillie, Margaret Anglin, Julia Arthur, and Frances Doble, among many others, this book explores how being an actress abroad became work as well as profession for Canadian women. Extensively researched and generously illustrated, Sweet Canadian Girls Abroad argues for the importance of theatre, both to Canadian women’s history and to our understanding of Canada in a transnational world.

Biography and History
Biography and History

Author: Barbara Caine

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2018-09-19

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 1350307459

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Looking at the complex relationship between the discipline of history and the writing of lives, this key textbook provides an original and insightful introduction to a growing and increasingly important area of historical scholarship and research. Examining key works that have changed the nature of biography, Barbara Caine also explores the way biographical narrative and life stories have become a central preoccupation for history. Outlining the main features of contemporary historical biography, this is an ideal companion for undergraduate and postgraduate students taking courses on historiography, theory and history, theory and methods, historical methodology, history and life/biographical/autobiographical writing, and life-writing courses on English or creative writing degrees. New to this Edition: - Thoroughly updated throughout - New concluding chapter on history and the individual life, and the place of biography in history

Encyclopedia of London's East End
Encyclopedia of London's East End

Author: Kevin A. Morrison

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2023-03-03

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 1476648379

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The East End is an iconic area of London, from the transient street art of Banksy and Pablo Delgado to the exhibitions of Doreen Fletcher and Gilbert and George. Located east of the Tower of London and north of the River Thames, it has experienced a number of developmental stages in its four-hundred-year history. Originating as a series of scattered villages, the area has been home to Europe's worst slums and served as an affluent nodal point of the British Empire. Through its evolution, the East End has been the birthplace of radical political and social movements and the social center for a variety of diasporic communities. This reference work, with its alphabetically organized cross-referenced entries and its original and historical photography, serves as a comprehensive guide to the social and cultural history of this global hub.