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Written by a team of noted historians, these essays explore how ten
20th-century intellectuals and social reformers sought to adapt
such familiar Victorian values as "civilisation", "domesticity",
"conscience" and "improvement" to modern conditions of democracy,
feminism and mass culture. Covering such figures as J.M. Keynes,
E.M. Forster and Lord Reith of the BBC, these interdisciplinary
studies scrutinize the children of the Victorians at a time when
their private assumptions and public positions were under
increasing strain in a rapidly changing world. "After the
Victorians" is written in honour of the late Professor John Clive
of Harvard, and uses, as he did, the method of biography to
connnect the public and private lives of the generations who came
after the Victorians. Peter Mandler is also author of "Aristocratic
Government in the Age of Reform: Whigs and Liberals, 1830-1852",
and editor of "The Uses of Charity: The Poor on Relief in the 19th
Century Metropolis".
Written by a team of eminent historians, these essays explore how
ten twentieth-century intellectuals and social reformers sought to
adapt such familiar Victorian values as civilisation',
domesticity', conscience' and improvement' to modern conditions of
democracy, feminism and mass culture. Covering such figures as J.M.
Keynes, E.M. Forster and Lord Reith of the BBC, these
interdisciplinary studies scrutinize the children of the Victorians
at a time when their private assumptions and public positions were
under increasing strain in a rapidly changing world.
After the Victorians is written in honour of the late Professor
John Clive of Harvard, and uses, as he did, the method of biography
to connnect the public and private lives of the generations who
came after the Victorians.
Celebrated anthropologist Margaret Mead, who studied sex in Samoa
and child-rearing in New Guinea in the 1920s and '30s, was
determined to show that anthropology could tackle the psychology of
the most complex, modern societies in ways useful for waging the
Second World War. This fascinating book follows Mead and her
closest collaborators-her lover and mentor Ruth Benedict, her third
husband Gregory Bateson, and her prospective fourth husband
Geoffrey Gorer-through their triumphant climax, when Mead became
the cultural ambassador from America to Britain in 1943, to their
downfall in the Cold War. Part intellectual biography, part
cultural history, and part history of the human sciences, Peter
Mandler's book is a reminder that the Second World War and the Cold
War were a clash of cultures, not just ideologies, and asks how far
intellectuals should involve themselves in politics, at a time when
Mead's example is cited for and against experts' involvement in
Iraq and Afghanistan.
Before the Second World War, only about 20% of the population went
to secondary school and barely 2% to university; today everyone
goes to secondary school and half of all young people go to
university. How did we get here from there? The Crisis of the
Meritocracy answers this question not by looking to politicians and
educational reforms, but to the revolution in attitudes and
expectations amongst the post-war British public - the rights
guaranteed by the welfare state, the hope of a better life for
one's children, widespread upward mobility from manual to
non-manual occupations, confidence in the importance of education
in a 'learning society' and a 'knowledge economy'. As a result of
these transformations, 'meritocracy' - the idea that a few should
be selected to succeed - has been challenged by democracy and its
wider understandings of equal opportunity across the life course.
At a time when doubts have arisen about whether we need so many
students, and amidst calls for a return to grammar-school selection
at 11, the tension between meritocracy and democracy remains vital
to understanding why our grandparents, our parents, ourselves and
our children have sought and got more and more education - and to
what end.
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.
What kind of people are 'the English' - what are the characteristic
traits and behaviour that distinguish them from other people? This
highly original and wide-ranging book traces the surprisingly
varied history of ideas amongst the English about their own
'national character' over the past two centuries. Two hundred years
ago, the very idea of a 'national character' was novel and not very
respectable. In our own time, when we like to think of ourselves as
unique individuals, it's hard again to think of a 'national
character' that binds us into a national unit. But in between, as
Britain became a democracy, 'national character' became part of the
national common sense, in depictions of 'John Bull' and his
twentieth-century successor, the 'Little Man', and in a set of
stereotypes about English traits, follies and foibles. Far from
being shy of talking about themselves, the English have produced
over the past two hundred years a vast outpouring of material on
what it means to be English - material on which this book draws:
lectures, sermons, political speeches, journalism, popular and
scholarly books, poems and novels and films, satires and cartoons
and caricatures, as well as the most up-to-the minute social
science and public opinion research. In this comprehensive, lucidly
argued account of the history of thinking about the English
national character, one of the leading historians of modern Britain
challenges long-held assumptions and familiar stereotypes and
offers an entirely new perspective on what it means to think of
oneself as being English.
How much do the English really care about their stately homes? In
this pathbreaking and wide-ranging account of the changing fortunes
and status of the stately homes of England over the past two
centuries, Peter Mandler melds social, cultural, artistic, and
political perspectives and reveals much about the relationship of
the nation to its past and its traditional ruling elite.
Challenging the prevailing view of a modern English culture
besotted with its history and its aristocracy, Mandler portrays
instead a continuously changing and modernizing society in which
both popular and intellectual attitudes toward the aristocracy --
and its stately homes -- have veered from selective appreciation to
outright hostility and only recently to thoroughgoing admiration.
With great panache, Mandler adds the missing pieces to the story
of the country house. Going beyond its architects and its owners,
he brings to center stage a much wider cast of characters --
aristocratic entrepreneurs, anti-aristocratic politicians,
campaigning conservationists, ordinary sightseers and voters -- and
a scenario full of incident and local and national color. He traces
attitudes toward the stately homes, beginning in the first half of
the nineteenth century when public feeling about the aristocracy
was mixed and divided. Criticism of the "foreign" and "exclusive"
image of the typical aristocratic country house was widespread. At
the same time, interest grew in those older houses that symbolized
an olden time of imagined national harmony. The Victorian period
also saw the first mass tourist industry, and a strong popular
demand emerged for the right to visit all the stately homes. By the
1880s, however, hostilitytoward the aristocracy made appreciation
of any country house politically treacherous, and interest in
aristocratic heritage declined steadily for sixty years. Only after
1945, when the aristocracy was no longer seen as a threat, was a
gentle revival of the stately homes possible, Mandler contends, and
only since the 1970s has that revival become a triumphant
appreciation. He enters today's debate with a discussion of how far
people today -- and tomorrow -- are willing to see the
aristocracy's heritage as their own.
This book challenges the view that there was a smooth and
inevitable progression towards liberalism in early
nineteenth-century England. It examines the argument used by the
high Whigs that the landed aristocracy still had a positive
contribution to make to the welfare of the people. This argument
came under scrutiny as the laissez-faire state met with serious
criticism in the 1830s and 1840s, when the majority of people
proved unwilling to accept the `compromise' forged between the
middle classes and other sections of the landed elite, and mass
movements for political and social reform proliferated. The Whigs'
readiness to embrace these pressures kept them in power for sixteen
of the twenty-two years between 1830 and 1852, and allowed them to
serve as the midwives of the `Victorian origins of the welfare
state'. Drawing on a rich variety of original sources, including
many country house archives, Peter Mandler paints a vivid composite
picture of the high aristocracy at the peak of its wealth and
power, and provides a provocative and original analysis of how
their rejection of middle-class manners helped them to govern
Britain in two troubled decades of social unrest.
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