This study is the first treatment devoted to Sir Arthur Helps (1813–1875), who was a prominent figure in the mid-Victorian world. Readers will discover that from the 1840s until his death, Helps was influential and well-known to many key figures: Carlyle, Ruskin, Froude and the Queen were among those whom he befriended. In fact, it was almost certainly these relationships which Helps sought to protect by directing that the bulk of his private papers and correspondence be destroyed upon his death. Making use of extensive primary and secondary sources, this book begins the process of recovering this once eminent Victorian. Helps did become a forgotten figure, but, nevertheless, during the course of his career he made notable impacts upon many areas of British life. At once a social activist and literary figure, Helps labored to promote social reform while also lifting his pen to educate his readers about the complexity of both societal problems and the difficulties inherent in adequately addressing them. He looked well beyond Britain as well: it would be Helps who authored a four volume history of the Spanish conquest of the New World, while developing unrivaled expertise on the history and practice of slavery in the Americas. As Clerk of the Privy Council, Helps played a decisive role in addressing the problems caused by the ‘Cattle Plague’ which shocked Britain in the middle of the 1860s. Most important, perhaps, it would be as Clerk that Helps served Queen Victoria not only as an informal confidant, but by making decisions which refashioned the monarchy’s public image. The book, then, reintroduces Helps by documenting and assessing his contributions to Victorian Britain.

There has been a great deal of recent interest in masculine clothing, examining both its production and consumption, and the ways in which it was used to create individual identities and to build businesses, from 1850 onwards. Drawing upon a wide range of sources this book studies the interaction between producers and consumers at a key period in the development of the ready-made clothing industry. It also shows that many innovations in advertising clothing, usually considered to have been developed in America, had earlier British precedents. To counter the lack of documentary evidence that has hitherto hampered research into the dress practices of non-elite groups, this book utilises thousands of unpublished visual documents. These include hundreds of manufacturers' designs, which underline an unexpected degree of investment by manufacturers in boys' clothing, and which was matched by heavy investment in advertising, with thousands of images of boys' clothing for shop catalogues in the Stationers' Hall copyright archive. Another key source is the archives of Dr Barnardo's Homes. This extraordinary collection contains over 15,000 documented photographs of boys entering between 1875 and 1900, allowing us to look beyond official polarization of 'raggedness' and 'respectability' used by charities and social reformers of all stripes and to establish the clothing that was actually worn by a large sample of boys. A close analysis of 1,800 images reveals that even when families were impoverished, they strove to present their boys in ways that reflected their position in the family group and in society. By drawing on these visual sources, and linking the design and retailing of boys' clothing with social, cultural and economic issues, this book shows that an understanding of the production and consumption of the boys clothing is central to debates on the growth of the consumer society, the development of mass-market fashion, and concepts of childhood and masculinity.

This multidisciplinary volume highlights the transformed nature of the relationship between higher education and society in the 21st century. In particular, it argues that the development of the global university, especially in the non-western world, has transformed the traditional understanding of the relationship between higher education and society. This has important implications for the relations of state, as education has not only become an object of national development policy but for many states an important export. The history of the university reflects the decisive social transformations which have given definition and identity to both new nations and modern societies. In the post-war period, universities in the industrialized world underwent a radical shift. The mass expansion of higher education ensured that universities were no longer centers designed to train youth to assume the leadership positions held by previous generations. Instead universities were to become centers where job skills could be imparted and knowledge produced, refined and used in the newly emerging Cold War economies, and where students could develop the skills necessary for employment in a changing world. Rather than focusing on the refinement of future leaders, the task of the university became linked to the development of economically exploitable technical knowledge. A shift of comparable magnitude is now ongoing in the nature of higher education itself. Globalization has led to the growth of knowledge communities around the world, mirroring the rise of centers for global finance in previous decades. In the Middle East and Asia the demands of the knowledge-based economy have led to the opening of new indigenous universities and branch campuses and partnerships with established European and North American universities. Education City in Qatar, for instance, has received or been pledged more than 200 billion dollars since its inception. The growth of new indigenous universities has altered the traditional role of the university further, increasing the emphasis on courses which are close to the marketplace. These new partnerships have contributed to the creation of what is now referred to as the global university.

"Friends in Council" by Sir Arthur Helps captivates readers with its engaging portrayal of social and moral issues through thought-provoking dialogues among fictional characters like Milverton, Ellesmere, and Dunsford. These characters come to life for the readers, making the book immensely entertaining.

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).

Based on extensive new research investigating the range of women’s involvement in early nineteenth-century popular politics, mid-Victorian reform and the women’s movements of the late century, Women and the People makes an original intervention in the historiography of the radical tradition by exploring the interconnections of populism, liberalism and feminism. Attending to authorship, the study argues that the representational forms adopted by radicals were as important as the content of what they said in shaping their self-perception, their construction of others, and the reception of their ideas. In fiction, poetry and autobiography, as well as in political writing, speeches and journalism, women reworked radical conventions and imagined new models of political identity, participation and authority. Though, in general, radicals appealed to ’the people’, women were often positioned as the suffering objects of reform rather than as the agents of change. By showing how they challenged or reinforced these conceptions of ’women’ and ’the people’, the book contends that radical women invoked alternative communities of sex, class and nation, and helped to remake and discipline the political sphere, as they strove to make it their own.

ôIt is now forty years,ö Walter Houghton writes, ôsince Lytton Strachey decided that we knew too much about the Victorian era to view its culture as a whole.öá Recently the tide has turned and the Victorians have been the subject of sympathetic ôperiod pieces,ö critical and biographical works, and extensive studies of their age, but the Victorian mind itself remains blurred for usùa bundle of various and often paradoxical ideas and attitudes.á Mr. Houghton explores these ideas and attitudes, studies their interrelationships, and traces their simultaneous existence to the general character of the age.á His inquiry is the more important because it demonstrates that to look into the Victorian mind is to see some of the primary sources of the modern mind.