Book Review: "Women and the Shaping of British Methodism: Persistent Preachers, 1807-1907" (by Jennifer Lloyd)(2012) Cultural and Social History, pp. 314-6

BOOK REVIEWS

The Middleton Papers: The Financial Problems of a Yorkshire Recusant Family in theSixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Edited by José Bosworth, Pat Hudson, MaureenJohnson and Denise Shillitoe. Woodbridge: Yorkshire Archaeological Society inassociation with Boydell and Brewer. 2010. pp. 194. £50.00. ISBN 9781903564318.

This well-presented and informative edition provides an excellent insight into a gentryfamily across one century of change. It focuses on two sets of household and estateaccounts relating to the Middletons of Stockeld. The family were well established inYorkshire, but shifting religious and political circumstances rendered their positionunstable. They were well known for their Catholicism and faced recusancy penalties; inthe Civil War period they, like other royalist families, also had to respond to thesequestration of their estates. The first account book dates from 1578–82, during thelifetime of William Middleton (1551–1614); the second covers 1653–5, when thehousehold was headed by the former’s grandson, also William (c. 1615–58). As theeditors point out, ‘there are few published estate accounts which reflect the Yorkshiretopography and agricultural practices as well as the family circumstances of a Catholichousehold at this social level’ (p. vii). Bringing together both the account books with arange of other manuscript material, from short preliminary accounts to letters betweenmembers of the family, is highly useful. Considering the different pieces alongside eachother, the editors show how it is possible to make sense of the whole.

For those interested in the question of estate management in the absence of the headof household in the sixteenth century, and in the complicated legal and financialarrangements necessary for a family to regain its confiscated estates in the Civil Warperiod, there is much of use here. The importance of the rural standing and activity ofthe household is clear in both accounts, with much space given over to matters relatingto rents and the purchase or sale of a range of agricultural goods. However, light is alsoshed on a variety of other activities. In the sixteenth century, money was spent on,amongst other things, new clothes for household members, annuities and repairs toSpofforth Church. Interestingly, the head of household’s absence in London and on thecontinent did not mean that obligations were avoided. William’s travels demanded thatchannels of funding and of communication be maintained; his steward ThomasRobinson worked hard to try to meet the financial strains that this imposed. Moreover,the expectation to care for the poor of the parish remained, and the family wasexpected, like other Catholics, to prove its loyalty by contributing to defensivemeasures (p. 10). These demands meant that the household was by no means secure.The inventory drawn up in 1578 suggests that the house was sparsely furnished; thismay be because William’s wife took goods with her when staying elsewhere, but it mayalso reflect the lack of income to spend on household luxuries (p. 58). Particularlyinteresting are the additional materials relating to William’s absence abroad, from theofficial royal licence of 1579 allowing him to travel, to his letters home from Franceand Italy. There is a growing interest in recent scholarship in the continental

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Cultural and Social History, Volume 10, Issue 2, pp. 301–312 © The Social History Society 2013

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connections of English Catholics in the post-Reformation period, and the material hereis intriguing in that regard.

Similarly, some interesting snapshots are offered of the family and what it consideredto be its priorities in the mid-seventeenth century. By the 1650s, the Middletons werefacing a complex series of negotiations to try to regain their full estates throughrepayments to the Lowther family. William was in close contact with his youngerbrother Matthew in London, who was negotiating these deals. The family was instraitened circumstances. In order to fulfil repayments to the Lowthers in 1655, theyhad to sell livestock, including the horses ridden by the family: thanks to detailedaccount keeping, we even learn the horses’ names (p. 140). Despite this, living in a styleappropriate to their status remained important. Beyond paying for necessities,including manure spreading and curing sick livestock, the Middletons were spendingon entertainment and hospitality (p. 95), whilst the interest of William’s youngerbrother Christopher in cockfighting, horseracing and drinking created new expenses(pp. 142–5).

The supporting material provided is invaluable: the reader is given a clear andconcise introduction to the family and to the account books, and useful introductorycomments on the additional manuscript sources. In addition, the family trees, map,biographical notes and glossary allow the reader to make sense of some of the moreobscure items and persons mentioned in the sources. Whilst the introduction isextremely useful, perhaps more might have been said of the two ‘crucial periods’ thatthe sources capture: the aftermath of the Northern Rebellion of 1569, and the EnglishCivil War and the confiscation of land. A little more context on the former in particularmight have been helpful. Nonetheless, this is an excellent addition to the series and willbe of great use to scholars of English Catholicism, gentry culture and the north ofEngland.

University of Portsmouth KATY GIBBONS

DOI 10.2752/147800413X13591373275448

The Men andWomenWeWant: Gender, Race and the Progressive Era Literacy Test Debate.By Jeanne D. Petit. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. 2010. pp. 201. £50.ISBN 9781580463485.

This book discusses the campaigns during the early years of the twentieth century torestrict and encourage immigration and to improve the welfare of immigrants. Itdocuments the central conflict between the Immigration Restriction League (IRL),founded in the 1880s, whose members initiated the idea of a literacy test forimmigrants, and the progressive Immigrants’ Protection League (IPL), led by GraceAbbott, who hoped the United States might become a safe haven for immigrants. Petithighlights how the depression of the 1890s and the attendant high unemployment andlabour unrest changed the way that Americans viewed immigration. Prior to that, onlythe socially and morally degenerate and the Chinese had been excluded. The idea of a30

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literacy test to restrict immigration from racially inferior groups from southern andeastern Europe was initially suggested by Henry Cabot Lodge. He used the new‘science’ of eugenics to support his fears of racial contamination. By the start ofTheodore Roosevelt’s presidency, the literacy test had still not become law because ofthe presidential vetoes used by Grover Cleveland and William McKinley.

Restricting immigration in this way was opposed by progressives who believed that,through education and residence in civilized America, any migrant could betransformed into a useful member of society. Business interests were also against theliteracy test, believing that the government should not interfere with the labour market.However, during Roosevelt’s second term of office, both sides agreed that thegovernment ought to take a more active role. Roosevelt established the DillinghamCommission, which sat for four years between 1907 and 1911, to recommend futurepolicy on immigration, and both sides mobilized for more campaigning. The IPLattracted more support as opposition to the literacy test became widespread because ofthe work of progressive women such as Jane Addams, who claimed that the exploitationof immigrants and not their origins was the problem. The IRL redefined themselves asan academic, scientific organization and reached out to white southerners, linkingimmigration with the ‘negro problem’. The Dillingham Commission reported in 1911and supported the literacy test. However, it was vetoed by a further two presidents:William Taft and Woodrow Wilson.

Meanwhile, another voice entered the fray. The American Association of ForeignLanguage Newspapers (AAFLN) opposed the literacy test because of the usefulness tothe country of the labourers that would be excluded by it. Louis Hammerling, itspresident and himself a Polish-speaking immigrant from Galacia, saw southern andeastern European men as central to America’s future. In direct opposition to thetheories of eugenics, Hammerling believed that racial mixing would invigorate thedegenerating American stock. This took the debate in a new direction, with both theIRL and the AAFLN seeing a link between citizenship and manhood. But the IRL stillpreached its message of fear and racial suicide. The progressive IPL still had a voice too,thanks in part to its charismatic leader, Grace Abbott, who worked with immigrants inChicago and who visited eastern Europe to undertake research into the matter. Shedepicted immigrant women as true pioneers and emphasized the importance ofprotecting the immigrant family.

Petit skilfully depicts the changes that took place from 1914 onwards as the FirstWorld War played into the restrictionists’ hands. A fear of immigrant disloyaltyprevailed, as illustrated by the antihyphen campaign, in which Roosevelt argued thatimmigrant groups should ‘drop the hyphen’ and become 100 per cent American, andin doing so assimilate into a single homogeneous group. It was a difficult time forprogressives, who split over whether to emphasize the needy at home or preparednessfor war. At this time, in an atmosphere of suspicion, Louis Hammerling was accused ofbeing an agent for Imperial Germany, and he later committed suicide in disgrace.Finally, in February 1917 the literacy test was made law. Wilson tried to use his veto asecond time but he was overridden in Congress. Grace Abbott moved into child welfarework, while the IRL continued to campaign and successfully pushed for the 1924

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Johnson-Reed act, which further restricted immigration based on racial quotas. Thisact shaped the United States for the rest of the twentieth century. For example, thequotas remained in place, restricting the number of Jewish refugees fleeing from theNazis who could enter the United States.

This is a well-written book that will be insightful for academics specializing in thisfield, but also, due to its author’s clear and straightforward approach, undergraduateand postgraduate students of the progressive era. Indeed, the tendency to prefer to uselively historical narrative as opposed to heavy theoretical prose means that the book willalso appeal to an interested public audience now that a paperback issue is following.

Manchester Metropolitan University CATHERINE ARMSTRONG

DOI 10.2752/147800413X13591373275484

Making, Selling and Wearing Boys’ Clothes in Late-Victorian England. By Clare Rose.Farnham: Ashgate. 2010. pp. 294. £65. ISBN 9780754664444.

Clare Rose aims to establish the role of late-Victorian boys’ clothing in the creation ofnormative modes of ‘respectability’ and masculinity during a period when ‘childhoodwas at the forefront of public debate in Britain’, as well as its importance in the rapidlyexpanding ready-made clothing industry, when ‘changes in production, distributionand retailing practices instigated an era of truly mass consumption’. To this end she hasexamined thousands of photographs, most notably from the Barnardo’s archive, andmarried them with manufacturers’ registered designs for boys’ clothing, retailers’catalogues and other advertising material, publications for tailors and dressmakers,autobiographies and extant garments. Through the inclusion of boys across all classes,rather than focusing on the elite, she contributes to a growing body of work whichrecognizes the role of clothing in the construction and expression of proletarianidentity.

Rose begins by identifying indicators of ‘raggedness’, such as torn clothes andmissing buttons, and ‘respectability’, in particular the white collar. Crucially, she refutesa simple polarity between the two, pointing out that, since raggedness was as much amoral as a sartorial judgement, boys sometimes displayed both ragged clothing andwhite collars simultaneously, the latter overriding the former to demonstrate theintention of respectability. Moving on to selling and buying, Rose argues that the focuson boys’ clothing in retailers’ advertising material identifies it as an important marketfor producers, and that fashion was a key consideration, achieved largely throughvariations in surface decoration rather than novelty of cut. Comparing prices inretailers’ catalogues with family budgets culled from contemporary social surveys, Rosedetects a declining cost, in real terms, of boys’ ready-made clothing, resulting in greatersartorial democratization and a diminution in the difference between clothes forworking- and those for middle-class boys. In terms of the relationship between clothesand identity, she reveals that clothing was used to mark the staged transition frominfancy to adulthood, and that masculinity was demonstrated through conformity with30

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age-appropriate clothing styles rather than through the use of twentieth-centurymarkers such as the avoidance of specific colours. Finally, by aligning the rise of thesailor suit with the growth in seaside holidays, she dispels myths about royal andimperial influences on boys’ clothing.

Rose excels in analysing the detail of clothing, such as subtle but significant changesin design, but this can be at the expense of its wider social and cultural context. Themost compelling chapters are those where she moves away from the eponymousmaking, selling and wearing to the meaning and interpretation of boys’ clothes, and acloser engagement with the secondary literature. Elsewhere potentially interesting linesof enquiry are not pursued. The three opening chapters, for example, all mention theinfluence of military uniforms on both institutional and commercial boys’ clothing,but the significance of this – especially in relation to masculinity – is not discussed. Aquote from the Tailor and Cutter, noting that a ‘really artistic juvenile garment’afforded ‘much more scope for novelty and originality’ than the clothing of adult males,offered an unexploited opportunity to explore what clothing can reveal about thenature of, and transition between, child- and adulthood, and the construction ofgendered identity. Similarly, Rose’s observation that parents’ desire to dress siblingsharmoniously could take precedence over the provision of good work clothes for olderboys would have been the perfect springboard for an examination of the connectionbetween clothing and affective relationships.

Rose’s methods, like her aims, are both quantitative and qualitative. A meticulousand exhaustive researcher, her impressive range of visual, textual and material sources isrepeatedly discussed and justified throughout the volume and in a substantialappendix. On the one hand, this presents a commendably transparent approach toevidence and methodology, but on the other Rose appears anxious to establish theirrefutable veracity of her findings and the superiority of some forms of evidence, ratherthan acknowledging the open-endedness of historical research and embracing thedifferent qualities and limitations of different sources While dismissing (but still using)autobiographies as ‘unreliable’, for example, she feels able to draw general conclusionsabout the meaning of white collars in school photographs based on an analysis ofnineteen images. And while there is no questioning Rose’s ability to marshal the vastrange of data she has gathered, the statistical detail sometimes obscures her point, andthe application of quantitative evidence to qualitative assessments is not always entirelyconvincing.Making, Selling and Wearing Boys’ Clothes is a valuable addition to the historical

scholarship on children and children’s clothing as well as the expanding focus onmaterial culture. But it also contains the potential to make a more significantcontribution to the field of gender history, and it is to be hoped that Rose will furtherexplore some of the themes she introduces to that end.

Goldsmiths, University of London VIVIENNE RICHMOND

DOI 10.2752/147800413X13591373275529

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Rethinking the Interior, c. 1867–1896: Aestheticism and Arts and Crafts. Edited by JasonEdwards and Imogen Hart. Farnham: Ashgate. 2010. pp. 294. £70. ISBN9780754668176.

The introduction and ten essays in this collection have a tight focus, addressing thenature of Aestheticism and the Arts and Crafts during the thirty-year period of theformer’s heyday by examining some of the movements’ important interiors anddecorative objects. The authors of the essays come from a range of disciplines but theart historical leaning of the collection is evident in the concentration on spaces anditems that were produced, self-consciously and intentionally, by eminent practitioners.One of the book’s main aims is to demonstrate that the two movements had more incommon than has sometimes been asserted, and several of the essays convincinglydemonstrate that the Arts and Crafts interiors encompassed beauty and pleasure, whileAesthetic intentions could include considerations of utility and politics.

Another aim of the book, relevant to a wider readership, is to critique existingmethods for understanding interiors of the past and to investigate new avenues ofapproach. The editors express their view that ‘closely read, precisely contextualizedinvestigations of particular spaces stand the best chance of attaining historical precisionand avoiding generalisation and vagueness’. The essays all fulfil this hope, across adiversity of topics, from Sally-Ann Huxtable’s analysis of the iconography of Morris,Marshall, Faulkner and Company’s Green Dining Room at what is now the V&A toMartina Droth’s unpicking of the close relationship between the makers and purchasersof late-nineteenth-century art sculpture. The editors, however, are well aware thathistorians’ usual reliance on representations of interiors, whether visual or textual, canresult in distanced, ‘voyeuristic’, narratives, and they are keen to find ‘alternative,empathic, frameworks of interpretation’ to try to get closer to the materiality of thespaces. They encouraged the authors to experience their chosen interiors at first handin order to explore the historiographical potential of the relationship betweenembodied, present-tense, first-person accounts and more obviously historical forms ofevidence. This approach is most completely adopted in Jason Edwards’ essay onLeighton House. However, while it produces on this occasion a lively account of thespaces, the question remains of how far such a method can illuminate the experiencesof people from a socially and culturally different period. Historians of material cultureare aware that objects from the past do not in themselves simply give up their meaningsand that their materiality is not readable if divorced from their social context. That ourown responses can be very different from those of contemporaries is actuallydemonstrated in Imogen Hart’s essay, which brings a present-day close reading of late-nineteenth-century photographs of the interior of William Morris’s home inHammersmith into alignment with contemporary verbal descriptions of the samespaces. It is fascinating to find that rooms which were papered, patterned and full ofornaments were described at the time as frugal or simple, reflecting bothcommentators’ ideas about Morris himself and their perception that these interiorswere relatively austere and composed in comparison with the packed decorativeschemes that were then common amongst the middle classes. John Potvin’s analysis of30

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contemporary commentaries also reveals that the materiality of interiors does not, onits own, create their meaning. He finds that the much admired, beautiful, object-filled,queer (which he takes to mean non-normative) interiors made by the artist coupleCharles Shannon and Charles Ricketts were seen as acceptable and respectable becausethey maintained a form of middle-class austerity. On the other hand, the furnishingsof Alfred Taylor’s flat, which included ordinary domestic decorative elements, werevilified because Taylor was Oscar Wilde’s co-defendant and because the rooms wereused for commoditized homosexual activities – the very antithesis of the ideal ofdomestic space. This is just one of several essays in the book that address queer interiorsand which subtly and successfully complicate existing discussions of the genderednature of the home.

This collection, then, deepens our understanding of the nature of Arts and Craftsand Aesthetic decorative practices. It provides illuminating insights into the specificcase studies and at the same time offers some useful pointers for those wanting toinvestigate the more ordinary interior spaces of this period. As the editors acknowledge,many consumers used Morris’s fabrics and wallpapers without necessarily subscribingto his political views. Evidence for intentionality or reception is much harder to comeby in this broader social arena, but some can be found (for example in PrecariouslyPrivileged by Zuzanna Shonfield, 1987, which is based largely on the diaries of thedaughter of a London society doctor), and it begs for the kind of careful attention tocontemporary terms of description, to the social context, and to materiality, whichRethinking Interiors deploys.

Queen Mary, University of London LESLEY HOSKINS

DOI 10.2752/147800413X13591373275574

The World in World Wars: Experiences, Perceptions and Perspectives from Africa and Asia.Edited by Heike Liebau, Katrin Bromber, Katharina Lange, Dyala Hamzah and RaviAhuja. Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill. 2010. pp. 613. $183. ISBN 9789004185456.

This impressive collection of essays is concerned with the Asian and African experienceof the First and Second World Wars, and showcases some fine scholarly talent as wellas a great deal of original research. In addition to a significant introductory essay whichsets up the volume very effectively, there are nineteen chapters divided into threesections, dealing with experience and perception; representation and response; andsocial and political transformation. The geographical range is considerable: six of thechapters deal with India, five with sub-Saharan Africa (including South Africa, Malawi,francophone West Africa and the Swahili-speaking eastern region), four with theMiddle East (Syria, the Levant and Iraq), three with North Africa (Egypt, Tunisia andAlgeria), and one with the experience of the Arab population in Nazi Germany. Interestis divided more or less equally between the First and the Second World Wars.

A sample of the strongest pieces (in this reviewer’s opinion) might include ClaudeMarkovits on the Indian Expeditionary Force in France during the First World War, in

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which the author uses their personal correspondence to explore the troops’ perceptionsand experiences of European society, including their encounters with ideas about raceand their sexual liaisons with French women. Also in the Indian context, RadhikaSingha examines the role of caste and ethnicity among both combatants and non-combatants during the 1914–18 war; this first-rate exercise in social history concludesthat there was a shift towards the creation of a more integrated, ‘modern’ army. One ofthe finest essays is that by the late Gerhard Hopp, who provides an exhaustive accountof the treatment of Arabs of various backgrounds at the hands of the Third Reich. Froma very different perspective, Heike Liebau describes how, among Oraons in the Indianprovince of Chota Nagpur during the First World War, anti-British sentimentcrystallized around the figure of the German Kaiser, who came to represent the promiseof almost messianic deliverance. Dina Rizk Khoury offers a penetrating and thoughtfulassessment of Iraqis’ perceptions of the 1914–18 war and its aftermath; there was botha great deal of nostalgia for the Ottoman epoch as it drew to a close, and also a sensethat the modern nation state, looming into view, might represent some degree of‘political liberation’. Emergent national consciousness and social upheaval are alsoamong the themes at the heart of Morgan Corriou’s excellent study of radiobroadcasting and listenership in Tunisia during the Second World War, and ofFrancesca Bruschi’s examination of the impact of conscription in French West Africaduring both world wars.

These are some of the best essays in the volume, but there are many otherstimulating pieces: Lovering on the political experiences of Malawian soldiers duringthe Second World War; Abdallah Hanna on local experiences of war and conscriptionin the Bild al-Sham during 1914–18, and Santanu Das’s examination of Indiannationalist sentiment as expressed through literature in the same period; Lange on theexperiences of the Kurds of northern Syria during the First World War, and NadineMeouchy likewise on Syria as the Ottoman empire collapsed. This was a time ofregulation but also of opportunity, according to Lange, although such ambiguity is lessevident in Suryakanthie Chetty’s study of South Africa during the Second World War,for here a range of groups which had contributed to the war effort – from white soldiersto black South African servicemen to women – experienced disappointment anddisillusionment at war’s end, for an equally diverse range of reasons.

Some minor quibbles are inevitable, perhaps, in a volume of this size and scope. Insome ways the three big divisions are artificial, as there is a great deal of overlap, and itis not always clear why a particular chapter belongs in one section and not in another.A map or two would have helped – the editors (or publishers) appear to have assumedreaders’ awareness of political and physical terrain, or perhaps considered mapsunnecessary in a book organized around themes. More importantly, the English in anumber of chapters can be jarring and somewhat ponderous – no doubt in most casesthe result of writing in a language which is not one’s own – and occasionally clarity islacking and meaning temporarily obscured. More thorough proof-reading would haveaddressed this. The prose in a handful of essays is somewhat strained, and the result,occasionally, is the kind of opacity that some writers of academic text appear toconsider a prerequisite to being taken seriously, but which is in fact invariably needless.30

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But these complaints are, I must stress, relatively minor. This is an excellentcollection, comprising well-organized essays which are highly original, insightful andthoughtful, and containing voices seldom heard. The two world wars are of courseforegrounded and provide the context through which so many lives are explored; butin fact this book ranges across social, cultural, economic and political histories, and hasan enormous amount to offer scholars of imperialism and of anti-colonial protest andidentity. It sheds light, in unexpected ways, on the recent histories of many of the placesunder examination. Military and imperial historians should read it, but so should area-studies specialists with interests in the region from the Maghreb to the Indian sub-continent during this era of tremendous socio-political upheaval.

School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London RICHARD REID

DOI 10.2752/147800413X13591373275600

The Heroic City: Paris 1945–58. By Rosemary Wakeman. Chicago, IL: University ofChicago Press. 2009. pp. 401. £23.50. ISBN 130978022687023.

The Heroic City is a delightfully readable, erudite, impressive and thoroughly engagingwork. Rosemary Wakeman seeks to complicate and ultimately to replace ahistoriographical consensus that, she argues, views the history of post-1945 Paris downto the inception of the Fifth Republic as dominated by cold-eyed, technocraticallyoriented urban planners still living under the modernizing spell of Le Corbusier andleading a controlling, quasi-Foucauldian assault on traditional collective Parisian life.Wakeman’s angle of vision is less the built environment, however, than the livedenvironment. She focuses on the city’s monuments, squares, quartiers, boulevards andstreets; but she views them less as stone and plaster, bricks and mortar, tar and cobble,than as sites of cultural engagement and frameworks for political action by the Parisianpublic. Or rather publics, for Wakeman resists the temptation to reify, homogenize or‘Habermasianize’ the public sphere, rooting it instead in a variety of heterogeneous,multiform local contexts. Foremost among these are the streets and neighbourhoods ofthe working-class areas of the city, which in these years, she argues, overflowed with‘ritual, drama and spectacle’ (p. 8). In her account, the futuristic rationality of theplanners takes second place to forms of cultural and political contestation that she dubsa ‘poetic humanism’. This drew its inspiration, she argues, from the city’s liberationfrom the Nazis, was rooted in working-class experience and was characterized by‘practices of public space [that] were sensuous, emotional and provocative [and that]relied on alternate forms of expression and subjectivity’ (pp. 12–13). These spilled outfrom the capital into the core areas of French identity: ‘the city’s working classes wereable to incarnate the authentic interests of the nation as a universal class’ (p. 12).

Wakeman builds her argument accretively, submitting the city’s political and culturallife in the period to a miscellaneous set of lenses. Chapter 3, for example, examinespopulist politics of the era as played out in the Parisian spatial theatre. The solidity ofthe Communist Party anchored a wide range of protest activities over post-war and

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Cold War social and political issues, ranging from the city’s severe housing crisisthrough to the state’s decolonization pains. Chapter 4 examines the fascination that the‘real life’ of the Parisian everyday exerted over urban explorers ranging from sociologicalinvestigators (Chombart de Lauwe, Henri Lefebvre), historians (Louis Chevalier),urban geographers and historians (Pierre Valedan, Marcel Poëte), the artistic andliterary avant garde (Prévert, Queneau, post-surrealist Lettrists), through to detectivenovelists specializing in the seamy side of the city (Léo Malet, etc). Chapter 6 trains thepoetic humanist prism on the visual media and ranges from well-known figures such asthe film-makers Marcel Carné, René Clair, Jacques Becker, Julien Duvivier and JacquesTati through to more obscure TV programme-makers. Chapter 7 revisits the modernistplanning movement but situates it within an array of counter-discourses more pluggedinto the ‘poetic humanist’ zeitgeist.

This fascinating and rich thickening of the somewhat austere planning narrativewhich dominates conventional accounts helps make Wakeman’s vision of the citywarmly satisfying as well as highly seductive. The cultural and political scene sheportrays seems deeply rooted in inter-war experiences, so that the Liberation, crucial inestablishing the mood of poetic humanism, appears a less profound caesura in Parisianhistory than it is usually considered. The memory of Wakeman’s ‘Heroic City’ stretchedback well before 1945. It is moreover a Paris skewed away from north-west and centrallocations which from the nineteenth century had constituted the city’s outward-looking face. The eastern, working-class arrondissements are the heroes of The HeroicCity, as to a lesser extent is the southern side of the city, split culturally and politically(as she interestingly charts) between student Left Bank and the Saint-Germain-des-Présof the intellectuals.

Wakeman is a lot stronger on the production of poetic humanism than on itsconsumption. Although many of the phenomena she describes (e.g. demonstrations,marches, street theatre) were evidently collective experiences that shaped widerperceptions, quite a few were not. Indeed some probably almost exclusively involvedLeft Bank coteries and their mainly bourgeois followings rather than the workingclasses whose image often took pride of place in these variegated cultural offerings.Similarly, it is not entirely apparent how the Parisian prism through which muchpoetic humanism was refracted really went down in the provinces. The degree towhich the rest of France shared Wakeman’s depiction of ‘the heroic city’ awaits furtheranalysis.

Queen Mary, University of London COLIN JONES

DOI 10.2752/147800413X13591373275646

Domestic Institutional Interiors in Early Modern Europe. Edited by Sandra Cavallo and SilviaEvangelisti. Aldershot: Ashgate. 2009. pp. xiv + 267. £70.00. ISBN 9780754656470.

This appealing and attractively presented collection of essays offers far more than thetitle suggests, illustrating how people from all social orders drew their understanding of31

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‘home’ and ‘family’ from the institution, instead of the traditional household ideal.Traversing gender, religion, material culture, space, place, art and architecture, with thepremise that ‘living interiors and the objects that inhabited them both reflected andcontributed to shape individual and collective identities’, this collection refreshes oldarguments on domestic ideals with new perspectives and resources. In particular, itshows how distinctions drawn between domestic and institutional space, secular andreligious space, or public and private space are arbitrary, unconstructive and largelyimpossible. Reframing our understanding of family life through close studies of objects,material culture, interior space and self-identification, this is an important contributionto the historiography. Moreover, it demonstrates how ‘class played a role in thearticulation of space, and in the material culture of the institution’, yet at the same timeinstitutions deliberately sought to standardize and eliminate such distinctions. In manycases this generated resistance, often in the form of individual attempts to personalizespace, or personal appearance; indeed, the overwhelming conclusion to be drawn is thatno one pattern can be applied to either institutional space or people’s ‘domestic’experiences. With contributors from all over Europe, and topics to match, the evidencepresented here is rich, imaginative and illuminating.

The essays are grouped in two sections. The first, ‘Organizing and representingspaces’, ranges across the social, secular and religious worlds. Henry Dietrich Fernándezbegins by exploring proposals conceived in late fifteenth-century Italy for a newconclave hall, designed to combat politicking in the existing cramped, makeshift livingspaces inhabited by cardinals during papal election ‘lock-downs’. Fernándezconvincingly argues that early-modern people were well versed in the importance ofinterior design for general health and well-being. Likewise, Jane Kromm shows justhow important interior design was to Dutch charitable institutions, which increasinglyreflected the styles of residential housing. Prominence was given to thresholds andentrances – the liminal space between public and private – specifically designed tofacilitate communications and contact with the outside world, drawing public intoprivate. This is a theme that Helen Hills also examines in her exploration of the post-Tridentine convent. Her essay highlights the porosity of institutional space, precisely ata time when enclosure and segregation were widely enforced. Moreover, Hills arguesthat the process actually created ‘spaces of resistance’ to the dictates of enclosure,thereby challenging the dichotomy of public and private. In contrast, Louise Durningapplies a close lens to the very masculine, private spaces of the affluent in the perpetualhousehold of Oxford college halls of residence, arguing that the material, behaviouraland spatial were inherently linked, as exemplified in rebuilding programmes for thecolleges which reflected their expanding intake and the wider social demographictaking up university places during this period. Collectively, the section providesimportant insights into institutional lives at all levels of society, but, more than this, itemploys a fascinating, new and original range of sources such as lottery posters, graffitiand building plans.

The second section, ‘The meaning and use of objects’, opens with a contribution byMolly Bourne, who draws parallels between the Poor Clares convent of Sant’Orsola inMantua and the Gonzaga court through a close study of three women she argues were

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crucial to the material life of the convent, in particular Margherita Gonzaga d’Este (theconvent’s founder) who oversaw the design and used the convent as a ‘private, femalecourt’ whilst amassing magnificent collections of devotional objects and artworks. LikeHills, Bourne explains how women experienced surprising freedoms in the post-Tridentine world. Also considering devotional objects, amongst others, Isabel dosGuimarães Sá explores gendered patterns of consumption, highlighting the influenceof orientalia at the Portuguese royal courts and the trend for women to invest indevotional objects, especially those with ‘powers’, such as relics. Susan Merriamexplores the popular genre of ‘garland pictures’ across Flanders and Italy and their placein debates over ‘cult images’ during a complex period in the history of devotionalpractice in the home, when the Church was increasingly monitoring private worship.Finally, Anne E.C. McCants provides a revealing account of differences in theconsumptive practices and material culture of individuals brought up in institutions, asopposed to private households.

Collectively, these essays explore aspects of domesticity and institutional living innew ways, using beautiful photographs of buildings, interiors and original sources.Highlighting the importance of domestic models in shaping institutional space and thekey role of institutions in early-modern life, it is a welcome and novel addition to theliterature on material culture, interior design and space.

University of East Anglia FIONA WILLIAMSON

DOI 10.2752/147800413X13597210492991

Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire, and Anthropology in Nineteenth-Century Britain.By Sadiah Qureshi. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. 2011. pp. 382. £29.00.ISBN 9780226700960.

Peoples on Parade is the first monograph to address the myriad exhibitions of non-Western peoples in Britain during the nineteenth century. Although several editedcollections have appeared in recent years that explore this subject, this is the firstextended study of the production, promotion, management and performance historiesof displayed foreign peoples, from Sara Baartman, who appeared in 1810 as ‘theHottentot Venus’, to the 1899 ‘Savage South Africa’ exhibition at Earl’s Court.

In the first section of her book Qureshi locates the display of foreign peoples in thecontext of the mid-nineteenth century penchant for identifying urban ‘savages’amongst the spectacle of street life. These chapters map the intersections between theolder science of physiognomy and a newer interest in ethnology, arguing that the desireto view non-Western peoples was forged in a heterogeneous urban environment whereeveryday Britons were schooled in how to read the variety of ‘types’ that were always ondisplay on the pavements of Britain’s increasingly multicultural cities. Additionally, sheargues that the British public came to see foreign peoples as commodities that could beconsumed alongside panoramas of ‘the last days of Pompeii’ or performing fleasbecause of new developments in advertising and newspaper publishing. Qureshi argues31

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that changes in typeface and the nature of bill posting alongside the proliferation ofnewspapers in the nineteenth century shaped how exhibitions of ‘Ojibbeway Indians’,‘Zulu Kafirs’ or ‘Australian Aborigines’ were framed and then interpreted by a publiceager for novelty, entertainment and education.

The central part of the book pays careful attention to how performers were recruited,packaged, promoted and received by British audiences. Rather than seeing these acts asnecessarily always the victims of exploitation, Qureshi traces the relationships amongperformers, managers and sometimes government officials as displays of foreign peoplebecame an increasingly professionalized business over the course of the Victorianperiod. She complicates notions of consent, a contentious issue even at the time, anddemonstrates the ways in which exhibitors were themselves conscious of the need toprovide evidence that performers were free agents, rather than slaves, given how muchthe British prided themselves on their recent history of abolitionism. Moving beyondsimplistic debates over exploitation and victimization allows Qureshi to make a morenuanced argument that transcends the typical interpretation of performers as at bestunwilling collaborators in the imperial project. Instead she offers a useful account ofthe means by which performers could negotiate their agency in relationship to eachother, their managers and the spectators themselves.

The third and final part of the book engages most directly the cultural significanceof these exhibitions. Here Qureshi argues that these displays did not only reflectVictorian understandings of race, but in fact contributed to nineteenth-century racialknowledge. Instead of representing these shows as portraying a crude form of Victorianracism, Qureshi interrogates the ways in which particular exhibitions contributed todiverse and sometimes competing understandings of the nature of human variety atspecific moments throughout the nineteenth century. She argues that these shows wereintegral to the rise of the disciplines of ethnology and anthropology and reveals theinvestments of specific actors – such as Robert Knox, R.G. Latham, Richard Owen andJohn Conolly – in particular interpretations of certain displayed peoples. The booksuggests that these exhibitions provided the raw material for the developing fields ofethnology and anthropology and helped to change how research on human culturaland physical diversity was carried out by providing flesh and blood specimens for thescientific study of racial difference.

These shows seemed to have had the greatest impact on the scientific study of racein the mid-nineteenth century when exhibitions of this nature were still widelyinterpreted as a respectable form of educational entertainment and when race was stilla malleable and highly contested construct. By the end of the nineteenth century, withthe professionalization of anthropology, human displays had become less relevantbecause they had become more spectacular and thus associated with entertainmentrather than edification. But Qureshi also argues that in the late nineteenth centuryBritish anthropology had itself changed and was increasingly placing more emphasis onethnographic work done in situ. As the anthropologist, and later war psychologist,W.H.R. Rivers argued, the use of displayed people as ethnographic specimensdiminished in relation to the amount of time spent abroad as the processes ofacculturation necessarily undermined their authenticity and typicality. Thus unlike

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their Continental counterparts, British anthropologists became less, rather than more,engaged with ‘human zoos’ over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentiethcenturies despite the proliferation of International Exhibitions that regularly featuredthe display of colonized people.Peoples on Parade is an important book that maps shifting perceptions of the

relationships among spectacle, science and race and reveals the ways in whichexhibitions of non-Western peoples contributed to dynamic and contentious debatesabout human variation. Qureshi contributes to the vibrant scholarship on therelationship between popular culture and the cultures of nineteenth-century science, aswell as consolidating arguments about the nature of Britain’s metropolitan imperialculture.

University of Utah NADJA DURBACH

DOI 10.2752/147800413X13599875400975

Women and the Shaping of British Methodism: Persistent Preachers, 1807–1907. ByJennifer Lloyd. Gender in History Series. Manchester: Manchester University Press.2009. pp. x + 305. £60.00. ISBN 9780719078859.

The last few years have seen a remarkable and self-conscious ‘religious turn’ in genderand cultural history – from the exemplary theoretical and thematic chapters in Morganand de Vries’ brilliant collection Women, Gender and Religious Cultures in Britain,1800–1940 (2010) to the first issue of Feminist Review specifically to consider religionand spirituality (issue 97, 2011). Jennifer Morgan’s stimulating study of women’s‘persistent preaching’ within the British Methodist tradition contributes to thiswelcome development as she explores the ways in which women were inheritors andmakers of their own religious cultures. Her book’s jacket cover, depicting a cartoonfrom The Birmingham Owl (1894) in which two frock-coated clergymen jostle with adoor about a woman’s admission over the threshold to the Wesleyan Conference, is aperfect visual summation of her central thesis that ‘this is not a history of progress but,like much of women’s history, of doors opening and closing according to men’s needsand concerns’ (p. 2).

Studies of Methodism have long acknowledged the role played by women incomprehensively shaping the character of British non-conformity and WesleyanMethodism, and Lloyd acknowledges her debt to scholars like David Hempton,Deborah Valenze, Martha Vincinus and Pamela Walker in her comprehensive and richsurvey of women’s roles as preachers, teachers, philanthropists and evangelists withinthe nineteenth century. Extending upon this rich scholarship, Lloyd’s first twointroductory chapters chart the contours of women’s roles in eighteenth-centuryMethodism and Wesley’s sanction of an ‘exceptional call’ to female preaching, beforedivisions emerged on Wesley’s death to split the movement and force a reconsiderationof women’s profile and autonomous activities. This is important background context,as one of Lloyd’s innovative contributions to the scholarship is her exploration of the31

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ways in which the complex and subtle theological, organizational and socialdifferences emerging within a divided Methodism explain the variegated attitudes towomen’s preaching which develop. The movement to urban centres and churchbureaucratization is traditionally seen to have put an end to ‘cottage religion’ (asValenze calls it) and signalled the attempts of a centralized, professional and educated(male) clergy to exclude female preachers by the 1840s. Nevertheless, Lloyd contestssuch a picture of decline and argues that women did continue to preach into thetwentieth century, particularly in sects like the Primitive Methodist and BibleChristian Connexions. Moreover, as it adapted to the challenges of nineteenth-century urbanization, industrialization and missionary expansion, women claimednew avenues across the Methodist tradition as Sunday School teachers, fundraisers,‘slum’ workers, revivalists and missioners. This is an absorbing tale of invention,adaptation and mutation, and while Lloyd is exercised to show that no nineteenth-century female preacher achieved parity of esteem with her male counterparts, andthat women’s capabilities were often mobilized ‘as an extension of their domesticduties’ (p. 270), she is persuasive in illustrating, as others before her, that ‘evangelisticreligion created an environment in which women could claim public space withinreligious organizations … (and) developed a powerful moral authority justified bytheir religion’ (pp. 270–1).

Writing self-consciously from the perspective of women’s history, Lloyd’smeticulous work in the archives and with printed manuscripts and newspapers yieldsimmensely detailed vignettes of individual women’s creativity and enthusiasm in‘seizing opportunities as they arose rather than embarking on an explicit challenge totheir exclusion from the formal ministry’ (p. 9). Vivid character portraits ofexceptional women like female missionary to Sierra Leone Hannah Kilham(1774–1832), travelling evangelist Serena Thorne (1842–1902) and working-classWest London ‘Sister of the People’ Emma Davis (1859–1911) are combined withmore thematic descriptions of other female teachers, philanthropists and localpreachers. Her study is a sustained attempt to rewrite the traces of these women’s livesinto the historical narrative of nineteenth-century British dissent, spanning urbanand rural settings across England, Wales, Scotland and indeed beyond. Buildingupon the sure foundations laid by scholars such as Rhonda Semple and ClareMidgeley, whose comprehensive studies of female missionary activism throughoutthe Empire have been path-breaking, Lloyd’s textured explorations of preachingactivity (as broadly conceived) lead her to excavate the transatlantic and transnationalpathways for service offered to missionary-wives like Bible Christian Lois AnnaThorne (née Malpas) (1858–1904), whose success in teaching, ministering andconverting in China led to her prominence in England as a speaker and fundraiser.The strength of Lloyd’s study, thirteen years in the making, is the ‘intimatelandscape’ (p. 279) it offers and the fascination of her diverse female cast whocumulatively illustrate the scope and depth of the ‘long tradition of women called topreach seizing new opportunities to do so’ (p. 245). As her ‘persistent femalepreachers’ ‘kept doors open for others to build upon their achievements’ (p. 271),this finely grained history will make an important contribution to the ongoing task

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of reintegrating the intersections between religion and gender into broader historiesof philanthropy, urban spaces, imperial networks and associational cultures innineteenth-century Britain.

University of Oxford ALANA HARRIS

DOI 10.2752/147800413X13599875401019

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Documents

Book Review: "Women and the Shaping of British Methodism: Persistent Preachers, 1807-1907" (by Jennifer Lloyd)(2012) Cultural and Social History, pp. 314-6