In February of 1885 news was flashed to England from Egypt that General Gordon was dead, stabbed by an Arab spear as the hordes of the Mahdi were overrunning the city of Khartoum in the Sudan. Dead he certainly was and nothing could resurrect him, and yet he has survived in the pages of biography, in the comments of the press, and in the mythology of culture. His “after-life” reveals some interesting facts about the nature of hero-worship and the role heroes play in the ethos of a national people and their self-image.

Charles George Gordon was born in January, 1833, the second son of a military family. He was trained for the military, too, became a Royal Engineer, and fought in the Crimean War. He saw service in Turkey, and then was sent to China where he gained fame in the suppression of the Taiping rebellion against the Manchu Empire in 1864, earning the nickname of “Chinese Gordon” at home and a Companion of the Bath from a grateful English government. The next six years he spent in service at Gravesend, constructing defensive fortifications, and devoting much of his time to rehabilitative work with the poor street boys of the town. Another six years he spent in Equatorial Sudan in an unsuccessful struggle to eliminate the slave trade. A brief period as Secretary to Lord Ripon, Viceroy of India, was followed by service in Mauritius, and fighting against the Basuto uprising in South Africa for the Cape Government. The penultimate year of his life he wandered in the Holy Land, and finally he answered the call to return to the Sudan, which was threatened by the revolt of Mohammed Ahmed, the Mahdi.

To assert that Joseph Conrad was the first English novelist to recognize a basic English ignorance of Russia and the Russians would be patently absurd. As early as 1891, Rudyard Kipling began his short story “The Man Who Was” with this cryptic sentence: “Let it be clearly understood that the Russian is a delightful person till he tucks in his shirt.” He then follows this opening with a concrete example of the difficulty one can encounter in trying to measure a Russian by Western European standards.

Winston Churchill's famous dictum (as part of a statement made in 1939) exemplifies this difficulty: “I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.”

Joseph Conrad, however, was in a more favorable position than most English citizens of the twentieth century to interpret Russian behavior to the West. Born in 1857 in Russian Poland, he had been in a peculiarly advantageous situation to observe first-hand the Tsarist autocracy. In 1862 his father was condemned to exile in Russia because he had taken a leading role in the formation of the secret Polish National Committee. Conrad's mother, there-upon, chose to accompany her husband into exile, taking young Joseph with her. By 1863, the mother had contracted tuberculosis as a result of the hardships she suffered in Russia. After she died in 1865, Joseph was allowed to return to Poland in the care of a maternal uncle. His father was released in 1868 and moved to Cracow with his son, only to die during the following year. Joseph returned to his uncle's home, where he remained until he left for Marseilles in 1874.

Writing just before the outbreak of the Second World War, Joseph Schumpeter remarked that English socialism, in contrast to European socialism, was at bottom an ethical creed. For socialist intellectuals, the Fabians for instance, there was no difference between slums and the House of Lords. Both were bad things and ought to be eliminated. I do not suggest that by the time Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy was published in 1942 this was by any means a new idea. The briefest survey of the speeches or writings of George Lansbury or James Keir Hardie, not to mention those of the Webbs and Bernard Shaw, would show the same attitude. They dwelt less in terms of the people's need than of the people's rights. By and large, they talked not of what could be done, but of what should be done. Accordingly, they sneered at the social legislation of the New Liberalism as a plaster bandage which did nothing to heal the working man's wounds, but made them hurt less. They saw clearly that national insurance and old age pensions were prompted less by recognition of the moral imperative behind the public welfare than by fear on the part of the nation's rulers of a politically aroused working class which might effect a parliamentary revolution through the agency of the Labour party, or, indeed, after the war, a violent revolution

The only criticism that need be made of Schumpeter's analysis of the extent of the permeation of English socialism is that he did not see by the end of the 1930s how far it had gone. My own research suggests that by the time of the outbreak of the second World War, socialism — or social justice in the sense that the physical and economic welfare of the ordinary citizen was the unquestioned responsibility of the state — had become the creed of the ordinary English citizen. He took for granted that it was society's business to support him when unemployed and that in old age the state should provide him with a pension. Sidney Webb's national minimum had become part of the ethical furniture of the mind of the working man.

Here is a concise, recent and thoroughly orthodox historical judgment on the Nyon Arrangements of 1937:

Here is another judgment, this one by a Soviet historian, which offers a somewhat different view of this episode:

Historians of Anglo-America have long been fascinated by the cultural relationship between the colonies and the mother country during the eighteenth century. Recently, this interest has been intensified by studies suggesting that the Americans drew heavily on English sources for their revolutionary ideology. Scholars have thus recognized the importance of defining the exact nature of the interplay between England and America, and one of the most frequently-chosen means of accomplishing this clarification has been to examine the accounts of English travelers in the colonies and the impressions of provincial visitors to the British Isles. Such personal narratives provide an excellent basis for comparing the two cultures and for delineating the extent of their shared heritage. Yet strangely enough, despite this continuing interest in colonial reactions to England and vice versa, few works have discussed in detail the experience of the loyalist refugees who fled to Great Britain during the revolutionary war. In part this seems to be a consequence of the long-term neglect of the loyalists in serious studies of the American rebellion, but even with the recent upsurge of interest in them, their time in exile has received scant attention from historians. Generally the loyalists' experience in England has been treated as something of a side show to the main event, which was acted out upon the American stage. This lack of scholarly concern is at the same time curious and lamentable, for the refugees' letters and diaries provide a wealth of information about the ways in which eighteenth-century Americans perceived Great Britain, and thus about the nature of the relationship between the two closely-connected English-speaking cultures.

It is the purpose of this essay to rescue the Henrician Poor Law of 1536 from its relative obscurity by examining the statute as the beginning of a new legislative era in English economic and social history. Although the non-exist ence of House of Commons Journals for this period prevents a detailed study of the making and makers of the Henrician poor law legislation, documents hitherto neglected, exist for a comparative study of Tudor poor law policy. Whether dealing with the nineteenth-century corn law question or with the sixteenth-century poor law policy, few historians give sufficient time and attention to a detailed analysis of the actual statutes of the realm.

Historians have ignored the Henrician statutes and usually begin their discussions of English poor relief by describing and interpreting the famous Elizabethan Poor Law of 1601. If mentioned at all, the Henrician legislation is presented as an ineffective attempt to solve the problem of poverty. Often this legislation is the subject of unfavorable generalizations:

The social legislation of Henry's Parliaments was not only scant but brutal and demoralizing in that it reflected a puritanical callousness in assessing poverty as the just desert of sloth and evildoing. … Thus Elizabeth inherited the problem of widespread poverty with her crown; and her legislative program was immediate, massive, and positive.

While the English Glorious Revolution has been the subject of considerable investigation, the Scottish phase of this vital conflict has been virtually ignored. The purpose of this paper is to look briefly at the degree of Scottish participation in the revolutionary events of 1688. It is not my intention to investigate either the underlying or the immediate reasons for the ousting of James VII & II from the thrones of Scotland and England, for that would necessitate a a detailed consideration of James's policy of political and religious despotism.

It would be a very rash judgment to charge any single person or event with catapulting the Scottish nation into revolution. Yet, if ever one person came close to individually fomenting a revolution, that person was James VII of the ill-fated house of Stuart. In Scotland James's attempts to cajole, bribe, or threaten influential men into lending their support to Roman Catholic relief was without success. His personal policy of religious oppression and arbitrary rule progressively alienated politically important segments of his Protestant kingdom so that by 1688, despite their differences and personal rivalries, they coalesced to a degree that left the king virtually isolated in Scotland. The failure of James's policies had created a situation ripe for revolution. Nevertheless, there is no evidence of any readiness on the part of the Scots to initiate such a revolt. However much one might wish to be able to point to the catalyst of revolution in Scotland, one is still left with the hard fact that from June to October 1688, while Englishmen plotted their revolution and William of Orange prepared his invasion, Scotsmen remained loyal to their native king, and Scottish royal administration continued its rule virtually unchallenged by dissenters. James's rule may have been detested by the majority of Scotsmen, but Scotland was too weak a nation to unilaterally overthrow a monarch who also commanded the superior strength and resources of England. Scottish hesitancy to precipitate a revolution persisted despite the fact that the birth of the Prince of Wales in June 1688 seemed to assure the permanence of the hated Catholic regime.

Australians recognize distance and isolation as a mold which shaped their history. Geoffrey Blainey observes this in his brilliantly provocative book, The Tyranny of Distance, and points out the consequences of Australia's geographic situation. Australia is at least 12,000 miles from England, and her continental perimeter is another 12,000 miles. Because of slow and uncertain communications between Australia and Whitehall from 1788 to 1850, the governor was really “the man on the spot”; he had often to act more independently than his instructions intended, and at times he defied both Whitehall and the colonists, sometimes at the same time. Although his link with the Colonial Office was direct, the secretaries of state to whom he was responsible changed frequently; yet much of our information comes from the dispatches between these officials.

The colony of New South Wales comprised nearly all of eastern continental Australia until 1850. It was founded as a penal colony in 1788. The commission of the first governor, Arthur Phillip, gave him almost complete autocratic powers over the colony, prompting a military attaché to observe: “I never heard of any one single person having so great power vested in him as the Governor.” This commission stood, with some slight exceptions, for more than thirty years.

Because of these extraordinary powers, the early governors were called autocrats. Although the British government decided how many convicts were to be sent and the colonial secretaries in London issued frequent instructions, the distance and slow mails — three to six-month voyages en route each way — placed the governor in complete control of the colony's expansion. Thus, the disposal of land, labor, and capital depended on each governor's individual discretion. After 1824, when George Arthur became lieutenant governor, Tasmania became independent from New South Wales. Eventually, these two autocratically ruled prison farms became prosperous self-governing colonies after 1850. Meanwhile, Western Australia and South Australia were founded sans convicts in 1829 and 1836, respectively. This paper will deal first with New South Wales, and more briefly with Tasmania, Western Australia, and South Australia.

British historians agree that from 1756 to 1761 William Pitt was the driving force behind England's victories in the Seven Years' War. Historians are divided, however, in their assessment of Pitt's relations with his generals. Basil Williams concisely stated one position when he linked success with Pitt's “wise choice of commanders on land and sea.” Julian S. Corbett best represents the opposite opinion. “It is commonplace,” he observed, “to credit him [Pitt] with a remarkable talent for choosing commanders. Yet surely no great War Minister ever appointed so many bad ones.”

The lines for debate are clear, and the question is vital for a general interpretation of Pitt's career and England's role in the war. Surprisingly, modern students of the elder Pitt have uncritically followed the opinion represented by Williams, and they have disregarded Eric McDermott's call in 1955 for a fresh examination of the “Great Commoner” and civil-military relations during the war. This essay deals with the question by telling the story of three English military operations on the French coast in 1757 and 1758. They are important in themselves for what they reveal about military planning and execution. More important, the story supports Corbett's conclusion by shedding light on the relationship between Pitt in London and the commanders in the field.

Pitt came to power when the country's military fortunes were at their lowest point. General Braddock's defeat in western Pennsylvania and the loss of Minorca, the Royal Navy's best base in the Mediterranean, punctuated the pre-war hostilities with France. At home, the armed services were undermanned, and abroad the search for allies left England with Prussia to face the combined forces of France, Austria and Russia.

The recent debate concerning the problems of ecology has focused our attention upon the relationship between man and his physical surroundings. For the most part, historians have been interested in such questions tangentially. ignoring the basic issue of the effect of the environment upon people. The rising interest in the history of technology is based on the realization that political and military events, the history of ideas, and changing social patterns take place within the physical world. The effects of the environment can hardly be ignored if one is to understand fully historic change. One problem which illustrates the interrelationship between human and natural spheres in history is the development and use of the chimney and fireplace in medieval England. Hitherto it has not been fully realized how the new heating technology affected the spectrum of society, and changed the mores of medieval life.

Early medieval buildings heated by a central hearth required a high ceiling to prevent sparks from causing fires. Thus, whatever warming might come by sitting around the fire in a circle was partly offset by the upward dissipation of heat into the large, high-ceilinged room. Moreover, when such rooms had louvers at their peaks to vent smoke, they also let the heat escape — a waste of fuel, as well. With adoption of the fireplace and chimney in many homes of the twelfth century, the number of persons sitting next to the fire was reduced by nearly three quarters, thus diluting the functional capability of large rooms. The chimney fostered the small room. Though heat loss still occurred through the chimney, it was much less than the loss from the open hearth. Moreover, with a chimney the danger of fire from sparks lessened. Rooms could be built smaller and with much lower ceilings, heating the area more evenly. When precautions were taken to exclude draughts, a smaller room heated by a fireplace warmed fewer people but with a better heat distribution than the larger hall with a central hearth, where most of the heat rose toward the high ceiling, and of course, no person benefited from it.

Irish political activity diminished in the early 1850s from previously more intensive levels. The tenant-right movement, established to secure economic justice for tenant farmers whose numbers dominated the ranks of Irish cultivators, continued to elicit a sympathetic response. But by the middle of the nineteeth century, it had deteriorated to a shadow of its former strength. The enthusiasm of the rural Irish for political causes had seemingly been drained by the traumatic experience of the Potato Famine of the late 1840s. The potato blight, with the failure of a crop upon which many were heavily dependent, resulted in the death of over a half million persons. The flow of emigrants accelerated in the famine and immediate post-famine period. The population of Ireland was reduced from over eight million in 1841 to about six and one-half million in 1851. Landlords engaged in widespread tenant eviction during the famine episode. The established trend of the shift of agricultural land from crop to livestock production was accelerated.

Rural assistance programmes initiated in the famine and immediate post-famine years were primarily intended to benefit landlords and large farm operators with measures for soil improvement and drainage control. Recovery from the famine was slow and tortuous: the real value of agricultural output was still ten percent lower in the early 1860s than in the early 1850s. The reduction of the value of crop output by about one-third was largely compensated by the rise of value of livestock output. It proved to be a hostile environment for those tenant farmers surviving the famine. The tenant farmers — all but three percent of the total number of farm operators — were defeated and submissive. They offered slight resistance to measures introduced for the consolidation of estates and for the transfer of title from indebted to more commercially oriented owners.

“The Office of the sense shall be the only judge of the experiment, and … the experiment itself shall judge of the thing.”

Francis Bacon, The Great Instauration

The first history of the Royal Society of London, published in 1667, and the most recent full study of that scientific organization published three centuries later, agree on one important point: that Sir Francis Bacon was the intellectual progenitor of the body, that in the denigrating words of a contemporary critic the Society was “Bacon-faced.” The author of the former, Thomas Sprat, termed Bacon the “one great Man, who had the true Imagination of the whole extent of this Enterprise,” and in “whose Books there are every where scattered the best arguments that can be produced for the defence of Experimental Philosophy.” The author of the latter, Margery Purver, agrees that “Bacon was the great formative influence on the Society's concept of science.”

Yet it must be conceded at once that Bacon's legacy was ambiguous. While the early Royal Society indeed was Bacon-faced, “it saw many faces of Bacon.” The period after the founding of the Society, the 1660's and 1670's, was one of contending philosophies and of a continuing effort to fashion clearer notions of what an experimental philosophy was to be like and what role experience was to play in scientific argument. Two of the more important and influential members of the Society who were actively engaged in this pursuit were Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke; these men were, and saw themselves, as disciples of the Lord Chancellor. It is my intention here to illustrate the differing approaches to the Baconian legacy of Boyle and of Hooke by focusing attention upon an interesting analogy, used by both, which may aid us in interpreting the conception of experiment in the works of these two founders of the experimental philosophy.

In the last hundred years the British initiators of the Industrial Revolution have fallen behind one after another of their imitators. As a consequence, the issue of “modernization” has moved to the head of the political agenda in a nation that was for the nineteenth century world the very model of “modernity.” Much of this change in world position was inevitable — yet not all of it. Why, historians have recently been asking, did Britain between 1870 and 1900 lose the economic dynamism that had been her hallmark? Why, further, did the British fail to recover this lost dynamism in the twentieth century?

The British experience ought to be of particular interest to Americans today, for recently we have become aware of the costs as well as the benefits of economic growth. Our faith in material progress is dimming. At the same time, our former economic dynamism seems now in question. Indeed, we may be repeating the experience of Britain.

To understand the change in British economic behavior, we must look at more than solely economic history. As Max Weber argued as far back as 1904, economic activity takes place in a wider social context. Attitudes and values play a vital role in shaping economic behavior. Development economists have discovered in the last two decades that economic change is not produced solely by economic means — by introducing technology and capital alone. To some degree at least, societies “choose” their economic futures by the values they hold. Because of this, intellectual and social history may tell us much about the difficulties of continuing modernization in twentieth century Britain.

So says Keith Grahame Feiling with great wistfulness of the passing of the turbulent times surrounding the abortive Second Stuart Restoration and its impact on English and Irish social and political life in the opening page of his The Second Tory Party, 1714-1832.

Prior to this time the Irish philosopher and patriot George Berkeley, author of the celebrated Treatise on the Principles of Human Nature and the ingenious Querist was a member of that same circle and after the breaking of the circle charges of Jacobitism that had been levelled at the members of this brilliant and select group trotted behind his footsteps as he moved through the remaining decades of his life. The following pages are an attempt to explain Berkeley's connections with the Augustan Circle and to mitigate the criticisms brought against him by those opposed to the views of some of that group.

Many historians have written about the impressive social achievement of the last Liberal Government which sat in Britain from 1905 to 1916. Prominent among them is Bentley Gilbert whose Evolution of National Insurance in Great Britain importantly expands. Maurice Bruce's excellent survey The Coming of the Welfare State. Much of this work has emphasized the political maneuverings for legislation which increased the economic security of millions of British citizens. This paper takes a different, supplementary approach. It is an attempt to understand the impact of the Liberals' social reform program on a part of the philanthropic community which had asssumed an important role in meeting the problems of poverty. The focus is on the provisions for social welfare made by voluntary and statutory agencies in order to clarify the beginnings of their successful partnership which today operates in the Welfare State. David Owen, in his monumental study of English philanthropy, has rightly characterized the modern role for voluntary agencies as “Junior Partner(s) in the Welfare Firm,” but he has wrongly stated that this role was recognized only after the First World War. The voluntary-statutory partnership in social welfare was formed during the Liberals' legislative revolution from 1906 to 1911: voluntarists who were affected by it understood its signficance for their work.

The welfare measures of the post-Second World War Labour Government gave final recognition to the fact that in Britain social development was no longer to be the by-product of economic development, and that the State must plan comprehensively to meet social needs rather than filling in the gaps left by private effort. In a very real sense the proposals of the Fabians, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, given shape in this new age by a Fabian disciple, William Beveridge, became the foundation of British policy. But the social legislation enacted by the Labour Government was implanted in ground haphazardly prepared by previous measures which provided for specific needs, but often with little reference to related questions.

In the year 1676 there appeared on the London stage a new kind of comedy. The play was The Virtuoso, by Thomas Shadwell; and the new element was its satire on the contemporary amateur scientist called a “virtuso.”

Shadwell's play marked the beginning of a trend. For the next hundred years the “virtuoso” became a familiar figure in English literature. He was described, mocked, praised and lectured in plays, poems, and essays. He attracted the attention and interest of such authors as Dryden, Addison, Swift. Pope, Akenside, Johnson, and Shenstone.

Exactly what was a virtuoso? Originally he was a Renaissance gentleman of wealth and leisure who, inspired by the revival of classical learning, became a collector of Greek and Roman antiquities — paintings, sculptures, coins, and medals. His motives were varied: partly sheer curiosity and delight in knowledge for its own sake; partly the need for occupation as an escape from boredom and melancholy. But it must be genteel occupation: one suited to his class and fortune, divorced from manual labor or money-grubbing, and from any kind of practical utility. The reputation to be gained by a note-worthy collection furnished added incentive. Finally, sensibility played a part: the romantic desire for “some living contact, however vicarious, with the heroes of old, classical and national.”