How could Victorian capitalist values be harmonized with Christian beliefs and concepts of public morality and social duty? This book explores ideas about citizenship and public virtue and how public morality was reconciled with the market.

An economic and social history of measurements in nineteenth-century British markets, showing how social conventions shaped local practices and economic institutions. This book uncovers how metrology alone failed to make 'measurements' reliable, and discusses the importance of localised practices based on political and social values in shaping trust in measurements.

The Age of Equipoise by W.L Burn was published in 1964 and became a central text in the canon of interpretations of the Victorian period. The book subsequently fell out of favour but recent claims to establish a new interpretative standard have, paradoxically, prompted reviewers to cast back to Burn's work as the orthodox standard against which such claims should be judged. The essays in this volume by British and American contributors all engage, to varying degrees, with the notion of 'equipoise' and how it can help to illuminate the mid-Victorian period in ways which alternative formulations cannot. Some of the chapters develop arguments embedded in Burn's own book; others take up issues largely absent in The Age of Equipoise, such as the position of children, Britain's interaction with the wider world, and the threats the period experienced to its concept of masculine identity. Together the essays demonstrate the intricacy and turbulence of the forces of cohesion in Victorian society, along with the success of that culture in achieving a working, if shifting, modus vivendi. Moreover, they substantiate the argument that, whatever the limitations of Burn's work, 'equipoise' deserves rehabilitation as a powerful conceptual framework for making sense of mid-Victorian Britain. About the Editor: Martin Hewitt is Director of the Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies and editor of the Journal of Victorian Culture. With Robert Poole he has recently produced an edition of The Diaries of Samuel Bamford, 1858-61 (Sutton, 2000).

Campaigns for moral reform were a recurrent and distinctive feature of public life in later Georgian and Victorian England. Anti-slavery, temperance, charity organisation, cruelty prevention, 'social purity' advocates, and more, all promoted their causes through mobilisation of citizen volunteer support. This 2004 book sets out to explore the world of these volunteer networks, their foci of concern, their patterns of recruitment, their methods of operation and the responses they aroused. In its exploration of this culture of self-consciously altruistic associational effort, the book provides a systematic survey of moral reform movements as a distinct tradition of citizen action over this period, as well as casting light on the formation of a middle-class culture torn, in this stage of economic and political nation-building, between acceptance of a market-organised society and unease about the cultural consequences of doing so. This is a revelatory book that is both compelling and accessible.

It demonstrates that developments in technology, commerce, and infrastructure in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were closely linked to theological shifts and changing modes of religious life as British evangelicals developed new methods of spreading the gospel and new forms of personal religious practice.

This enlightening text analyses the origins of Western complaints, prevalent in the late nineteenth century, that Japan was characterised at the time by exceptionally low standards of 'commercial morality', despite a major political and economic transformation. As Britain industrialised during the nineteenth century the issue of 'commercial morality' was increasingly debated. Concerns about standards of business ethics extended to other industrialising economies, such as the United States. Hunter examines the Japanese response to the charges levelled against Japan in this context, arguing that this was shaped by a pragmatic recognition that Japan had little choice but to adapt itself to Western expectations if it was to establish its position in the global economy. The controversy and criticisms, which were at least in part stimulated by fear of Japanese competition, are important in the history of thinking on business ethics, and are of relevance for today's industrialising economies as they attempt to establish themselves in international markets.

DIVA statement on how “knowledge” is socialized and assimilated by a culture, investigating popular and canonical fiction, early encyclopedias, and other popular efforts at mass education and knowledge dissemination./div

This book explores the life of Madeleine Smith, who in 1857 was tried for poisoning her secret lover. As well as charting the course of this illicit relationship and Madeleine’s subsequent trial, the authors draw on a wide range of sources to pursue themes such as the nature of gender relations and the extent of women’s social and commercial activities, and to bring vividly to life the world of the mid-Victorian middle class.The book contains new discoveries about Madeleine’s long and colorful life after the trial which confirm the view that it is only in fiction that the bad end unhappily. The book will be of interest to academic social historians, but the fascination of its subject matter and the way in which much rich material is used to evoke a vivid sense of time and place, will also promote a wider interest among a more general readership.

Victorian Britain is often considered as the high point of 'laissez-faire', the place and the time when people were most 'free' to make their own lives without the aid or interference of the State. This book explores the truth of that assumption and what it might mean. It considers what the Victorian State did or did not do, what were the prevailing definitions and practices of 'liberty', what other sources of discipline and authority existed beyond the State to structure people's lives - in sum, what were the broad conditions under which such a profound belief in 'liberty' could flourish, and a complex society be run on those principles. Contributors include leading scholars in British political, social and cultural history, so that 'liberty' is seen in the round, not just as a set of ideas or of political slogans, but also as a public and private philosophy that structured everyday life. Consideration is also given to the full range of British subjects in the nineteenth century - men, women, people of all classes, from all parts of the British Isles - and to placing the British experience in a global and comparative perspective.

This book traces the transformation of history from a Romantic literary pursuit into a modern academic discipline during the second half of the nineteenth century, and shows how this change inspired Victorians to reconsider what it meant to be a historian. This reconceptualization of the ‘historian’ lies at the heart of this book as it explores how historians strove to forge themselves a collective scholarly persona that reflected and legitimised their new disciplinary status and gave them authority to speak on behalf of the past. The author argues that historians used the persona as a replacement for missing institutional structures, and converted book parts to a sphere where they could mould and perform their persona. By ascribing agency to titles, footnotes, running heads, typography, cover design, size, and other paratexts, the book makes an important shift in the way we perceive the formation of modern disciplines. By combining the persona and paratexts, it offers a novel approach to themes that have enjoyed great interest in the history of science. It examines, for example, the role which epistemic and moral virtues held in the Victorian society and scholarly culture, the social organization and hierarchies of scholarly communities, the management of scholarly reputations, the commercialization of knowledge, and the relationship between the persona and the underpinning social, political, economic, and cultural structures and hierarchies. Making a significant contribution to persona studies, it provides new insights for scholars interested in the history of humanities, science, and knowledge; book history; and Victorian culture.