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This article was downloaded by: [Dalhousie University] On: 06 October 2014, At: 17:23 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Women's History Review Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rwhr20 The Civilising Mission and the English Middle Class, 1792–1850: the ‘heathen’ at home and overseas Jenise Depinto a a College of Saint Rose , New York Published online: 05 Nov 2010. To cite this article: Jenise Depinto (2010) The Civilising Mission and the English Middle Class, 1792–1850: the ‘heathen’ at home and overseas, Women's History Review, 19:5, 807-809, DOI: 10.1080/09612025.2010.531562 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09612025.2010.531562 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub- licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly

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Page 1: The Civilising Mission and the English Middle Class, 1792–1850: the ‘heathen’ at home and overseas

This article was downloaded by: [Dalhousie University]On: 06 October 2014, At: 17:23Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH,UK

Women's History ReviewPublication details, including instructions for authorsand subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rwhr20

The Civilising Mission and theEnglish Middle Class, 1792–1850:the ‘heathen’ at home andoverseasJenise Depinto aa College of Saint Rose , New YorkPublished online: 05 Nov 2010.

To cite this article: Jenise Depinto (2010) The Civilising Mission and the English MiddleClass, 1792–1850: the ‘heathen’ at home and overseas, Women's History Review, 19:5,807-809, DOI: 10.1080/09612025.2010.531562

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09612025.2010.531562

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all theinformation (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform.However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make norepresentations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, orsuitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressedin this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not theviews of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content shouldnot be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sourcesof information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions,claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilitieswhatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connectionwith, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes.Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly

Page 2: The Civilising Mission and the English Middle Class, 1792–1850: the ‘heathen’ at home and overseas

forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

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some friction against the assertion of the self-expression, agency, and experience of thehistorical figures that the book engages.

This friction, however, does not upset the book’s overall richness. The book exploresan admirable range of women, from the well-known Pandita Ramabai and RamabaiRanade, to the lesser-known Chimabai kom Lakshman Kadam, the ‘first womancartographer of modern India’ (p. 228). A thorough appendix supplies details for eachwoman discussed. Anagol’s references to scholarship ranging from the 1980s to post-2000 alike as ‘recent’ can be awkward at times, yet ultimately reflect the wide range ofmaterials consulted in her research. With its rich detail and illuminating arguments,Anagol’s book provides a much-needed response to scholarship that has overlookedwomen’s voices and experiences in colonial India.

SHARLEEN MONDAL

University of Washington, USA

© 2010, Sharleen Mondal

The Civilising Mission and the English Middle Class, 1792–1850: the ‘heathen’ athome and overseas

ALISON TWELLSBasingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009Pp. xiv + 353. £55.00. ISBN 1 4039 2040 0

This study charts the emergence, expansion, and shifting outlooks of the missionaryphilanthropic movement in early nineteenth-century Britain. Alison Twells offers acogent argument for the importance of missions in shaping new expressions of middle-class identity which in turn helped forge a broader sense of national purpose embodiedby the concept of ‘civilizing mission’. By 1850, she concludes, the ambitious agenda ofglobal cultural outreach promulgated by early missionary philanthropists to the widerpublic crystallized into a coherent national vision that situated missions ‘at the centreof the master narrative of imperial history and at the heart of the cultural life of thenation’ (p. 219).

Delving deep into missions’ public records and private correspondence, Twellstakes Sheffield as her case study, a town rich in archival resources and representativeof the general enthusiasm surrounding missions in this era. The study is organizedaround four main themes: (1) The relationship between overseas and domesticmissions; (2) the influence of colonial knowledge on strategies to reform the domesticpoor; (3) a re-placement of women’s agency in the early movement; and (4) a focuson the Bible as the primary cultural source from which missionary philanthropistsformulated notions of gender, family, and modes of engaging ‘heathen others’ in Brit-ain and abroad.

Challenging the separate treatment of colonial and home missions, Twells bringsthem into a single analytical frame to explore them as interlocking dimensions of aunified global project based in shared personnel, ideas, and ‘technologies of reform’

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Book Reviews

deployed to spread the gospel, and the contours of family life and social practice itallegedly authorized, to the wider world (p. 5). Twells reveals the unity of missions inthe comparative language organizers used to elaborate the problem of poverty athome, language that depicted English poor and colonial subjects as co-occupants of ashared state of ‘savagery’, defined in terms of ‘heathen darkness’ and immorality, forwhich the antidote was a Christian conversion signaled by outward transformation ofcultural practice.

Twells’ main goal is to recover the Bible’s centrality in shaping philanthropists’conceptions of gender and cultural difference, a theme she finds neglected in the histo-riography by scholars who privilege secular sources, overlooking the fact that missionswere above all theocentric and driven by faith (p. 17). While acknowledging thebroader contextual influences of Enlightenment paradigms of race and progressencompassed by stages theory, Twells insists that biblical conceptions of a fundamentalhuman unity provided the main interpretive lens through which early missionaryphilanthropists understood human relationships. Differences between English andnon-western peoples were delineated along lines of ‘heathen’ and Christian drawnfrom Pauline descriptions of gentiles more than the racialized colonial discourse of theperiod. At the heart of this outlook, she contends, lay a genuine conviction thatembracing faith would obliterate difference to ‘produce a new Christian subject’(p. 18), albeit one that was western in dress, manners, sexual practice and familyorganization; the outward signs of true conversion.

The first four chapters draw out these themes and deal extensively with the roles ofwomen philanthropists and the connections they saw between family life, domesticvisiting of the poor and global mission. Twells challenges assumptions that evangelicalwomen subscribed to narrow notions of domesticity or hard and fast distinctionsbetween public and private. Rather, they articulated an active, expansive ‘missionarydomesticity’ inspired by scripture, which took prominent biblical women as rolemodels of community intervention and situated the Christian family at the centre ofglobal reform (p. 84). She shows how this model of Christian female activism was elab-orated by Hannah More and later embraced by nineteenth-century philanthropists likeHannah Kilham and Mary Anne Rawson (p. 69), whose papers provide critical sourcematerial for chapters 3 and 4.

The last two chapters focus on colonial missions, outlining internal tensions and agradual breakdown of the global humanitarian view toward mid century amid variouschallenges within and without missions networks: pressures to prioritize the domesticpoor over foreigners in the turbulent 1830s and 1840s, rising doubts about the sincerityof colonial converts for lack of outward signs of change, and the shift toward more rigidviews of race in contemporary science and literature. Such pressures increasinglyoccluded earlier convictions about the capacity of non-western peoples for civilizationand led to a divergence of home and overseas missions into separate endeavors by midcentury.

Twells engages ongoing debates about empire’s significance in a period generallyhighlighted by social historians for the dislocations wrought by industrial capitalistexpansion, and the social formations and political tensions it shaped. In doing so, her

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study falls firmly within the parameters of the new imperial history, whose proponentsargue for the pervasive influence of overseas empire in shaping metropolitan cultureand social life. She confirms the analyses of Catherine Hall and Susan Thorne, whosecomprehensive studies of Baptist and Congregational missions reveal their gendereddimensions, their contributions to the consolidation of bourgeois and national identi-ties (Hall, 1992, 2002), and highlight the convergence of class and race in reformistrhetoric (Thorne, 1997, 1999).

Twells’ attention to women’s roles broadens the field of middle-class women’sparticipation in public life in the early nineteenth century beyond the parameters ofanti-slavery movement activism (Midgley, 1992, Hall, 1992, passim). She illuminateshow evangelical women negotiated the boundaries of gender and engaged empire bybringing it ‘home’ to position themselves as agents of reform among the English poor,whose local communities they viewed through a global lens and claimed as their own‘little Sierra Leone’ or Tahiti (p. 1). Twells thus contributes to historical knowledgeabout the mutuality of race and class and the complexity of sex/gender constructs likedomesticity and separate spheres as broader organizing principles of social meaning inthis period.

References

Hall, C. (1992) The Early Formation of Victorian Domestic Ideology,

White, Male and Middle Class:explorations in feminism and history

(London: Routledge).Hall, C. (2002)

Civilising Subjects: metropole and colony in the English imagination 1830–1867

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press).Midgley, C. (1992)

Women Against Slavery: the British campaigns 1780–1870

(London: Routledge).Thorne, S. (1997) The Conversion of Englishmen and the Conversion of the World Inseparable:

missionary imperialism as the language of class in early industrial Britain, in F. Cooper & A.L.Stoler (Eds)

Tensions of Empire: colonial cultures in a bourgeois world

(Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press), pp. 238–262.

Thorne, S. (1999)

Congregational Missions and the Making of an Imperial Culture in 19th-CenturyEngland

(Stanford: Stanford University Press).

JENISE DEPINTO

College of Saint Rose, New York

© 2010, Jenise Depinto

Feminism and Empire: women activists in Britain, 1790–1865

CLARE MIDGELYLondon and New York: Routledge, 2007Pp. 207. £18.99. ISBN 978 0 415 25015 3

In the early 1990s the contention that race and empire were critical to the making ofBritish feminism and womanhood was articulated with new power and to a newaudience. In different ways Vron Ware, Antoinette Burton and Catherine Hall eachchallenged readers to acknowledge the centrality of imperialism and race to feminist

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