This article examines images of Jesus broadcast on the BBC from the 1930s through the 1950s. During these years, the BBC sought to use its cultural influence to replace popular religiosity with what the clerics who staffed its Religious Broadcasting Department (RBD) regarded as a more masculine, modern, and vigorous national religious faith. To achieve this aim, the RBD marshaled the might of British New Testament scholarship and its image of a warrior-like, apocalyptic historical Jesus. Yet the RBD's hopes of bridging the gap between popular religiosity and its own vision of Christianity went unrealized. Programs on Jesus that reached a genuinely national audience—The Man Born to be King, Dorothy L. Sayers's wartime radio drama, and Jesus of Nazareth, a popular television series from the 1950s—instead featured Anglicized and ahistorical images deeply embedded within British popular culture. The story of Jesus on the BBC highlights both this popular culture's strength and Christian Britain's fragmentation.

The Scottish Reformation Society's The Bulwark (1851–present) was the Victorian era's most influential anti-Catholic periodical, a reputation based on its self-proclaimed devotion to “facts.” Attempting to counter a unified Catholic Church in a period of pronounced intra-Protestant conflict, the Bulwark sought to root religious controversy in the increasingly popular phenomenon of statistical inquiry. The Bulwark’s obsession with collating and interpreting religion-based numbers was unique not for its existence, but for its sheer extent. It thus exemplifies how “official” statistical documents, methods, and conclusions were translated into the concerns of popular religious culture. In particular, the Bulwark’s ongoing surveys of Catholicism's “progress,” intended to frighten Protestants into action, weaponized statistical discourses that were used in more measured fashion elsewhere. To that end, the Bulwark argued that only Protestants had the right mindset to put religious statistics into a proper explanatory framework, whereas Catholics manipulated their own data for dishonest rhetorical purposes that the Bulwark disclaimed. The Bulwark’s statistical turn, which bypassed the sectarianism of its theological articles, positioned it as a voice uniting the interests of all Protestant readers against Parliament's dangerously tolerant brand of liberalism.

In October 1934, a Croatian terrorist organization assassinated King Alexander of Yugoslavia in the streets of Marseilles, France. His murder caused an international crisis because of the safe haven given to the group by the Italian and Hungarian governments. The assassination led the world's first peacekeeping body, the League of Nations, to intervene and to propose a legal solution for the political crisis. In November 1937, the league completed two antiterrorism treaties. Only the British colonial government of India ratified the terrorism convention, which was, by contrast, rejected by the United Kingdom on legal and political grounds. This article examines the European origins of the League of Nation's consideration of international terrorism and the divisions that occurred between Delhi and London over supporting the antiterrorism measure. Delhi's separate membership in the League of Nations allowed the colonial government to deviate from London and to sign a treaty deemed necessary for domestic security.

Based upon the idea that debates regarding the “public sphere” have paid insufficient attention to the notion of multiple publics and the movement of texts across state borders, this article explores how print culture provided ways of promoting transterritorial publics. It does so by revisiting the vexed notion of the “British problem” in the seventeenth century and relations between Scottish Covenanters and English parliamentarians, and by emphasizing the need to consider print culture in tandem with state formation. It demonstrates that a significant volume of printed material––produced both in England and Scotland, and sometimes collaboratively––reflected and promoted cross-border cooperation, thereby fostering a nascent Anglo-Scottish public. It also emphasizes that the practices involved were intimately linked to attempts to establish federal political institutions that both responded to the existence of a “British” public and necessitated its further development. Ultimately, however, the need to address and maintain such a public led to printed texts being used to navigate tensions between Covenanters and parliamentarians, to the point where Anglo-Scottish interests gave way to national interests, where resistance grew to the legitimacy of using print as a cross-border device, and where print helped to undermine cross-border cooperation.

This article responds to the pieces collected in this special issue of the Journal of British Studies, all of which seek to take some notion of the politics of the public sphere and either apply it to, or break it upon the wheel of, various versions of British history during the post-Reformation period. It seeks to bring the other articles into conversation both with one another as well as with existing work on the topic.

This article takes an unexplored popular debate from the 1860s over the role of dueling in regulating gentlemanly conduct as the starting point to examine the relationship between elite Victorian masculinities and interpersonal violence. In the absence of a meaningful replacement for dueling and other ritualized acts meant to defend personal honor, multiple modes of often conflicting masculinities became available to genteel men in the middle of the nineteenth century. Considering the security fears of the period––European and imperial, real and imagined––the article illustrates how pacific and martial masculine identities coexisted in a shifting and uneasy balance. The professional character of the enlarging gentlemanly classes and the increased importance of men's domestic identities––trends often aligned with hegemonic masculinity––played an ambivalent role in popular attitudes to interpersonal violence. The cultural history of dueling can thus inform a multifaceted approach toward gender, class, and violence in modern Britain.