1st Edition

Splendidly Victorian Essays in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century British History in Honour of Walter L. Arnstein

By Michael Shirley, Todd Larson Copyright 2001

    This title was first published in 2001. The eminent historian of Victorian Britain, Walter L. Arnstein has, over the course of a career spanning more than 40 years, arguably introduced more students to British history than any other American historian. This collection of essays by some of his former students celebrates Arnstein's inspirational teaching and writing with surveys and analyses of various aspects of the social, cultural, economic and political history of nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain. Nineteenth-century topics covered in the volume include early Victorian caricatures and the thin legal lines that they often trod; British Army fashion and its contribution to Royal spectacles; Free Trade Radicals and how they viewed educational reform and moral progress; the persistence of Chartist ideology following the failure of the movement in 1848; Disraeli and Derby's involvement with the Navy's administration; religious periodicals and their influence; the myth of Bismarck as an honest broker of peace and the subsequent collapse of the myth as a later source of enmity in Anglo-German relations; the powerful mystique evoked back in England by the London missionary societies Mongolian; missions; Victorian urban planning and the re-introduction of the market place.

    Contents: Walter L. Arnstein, teacher and mentor, The Editors; Walter L. Arnstein: a collegial and personal appreciation, Paul W. Schroeder; The Prince of Whales: caricature, Charivari, and the politics of morality, Tamara Hunt; Advertising the army: political aesthetics and British army fashion, 1815-1855, Scott Hughes Myerly; Free trade radicals, education and moral improvement in early Victorian England, Richard F. Spall, Jnr; Chartists after Chartism: Reynolds’s Newspaper and mid-Victorian political reform, Michael H. Shirley; A Whig Private Secretary is in itself fatal: Benjamin Disraeli, Lord Derby, Party Politics and Naval Administration, 1852, John Beeler; Debtor to the Greeks and the Barbarians: religious periodicals and their influence in the Victorian prelude, Marsh Wilkinson Jones; Pyrrhic victory?: the Bismarck myth and the Congress of Berlin in the British Review Press, 1878-79, Todd E. A. Larson; The London Missionary Society’s Mongolian missions: British insights into the Great Game in Asia, Helen S. Hundley; The 19th-century British townscape and the return of the market place to Victorian history, James Schmiechen; Cinemas and their managers in Depression England: a social function, Stephen Shafer; I used to take her to the doctor’s and get the proper thing: 20th-century health care choices in Lancashire working-class communities, Lucinda McCray Beier; Walter L. Arnstein: a bibliography; Index.

    Biography

    Michael Shirley, Todd Larson

    '... Splendidly Victorian is a most fitting tribute to a distinguished historian.' Albion 'All the chapters are refreshingly innovative... They are characterized by the detached judgement and consciousness of the complexity of the past... a fitting tribute... demonstrating the range and distinctiveness of his intellectual influence.' English Historical Review