Father Victor Braun and the Catholic Church in England and Wales, 1870–1882

2007 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 547-574
Author(s):  
Brigid Gallagher

Nineteenth century London, like many towns and cities in Britain, experienced phenomenal population growth. At the centre of the British Empire, and driven by free trade and industry, it achieved extraordinary wealth, but this wealth was confined to the City and to the West End. East London, however, consisted of ‘an expanse of poverty and wretchedness as appalling as, and in many ways worse than the horrors of the industrial North’. There was clear evidence of the lack of urban planning, as factories were established close to the immense dock buildings constructed near Stratford. Toxic materials such as paint and varnish were produced in large chemical works owned by the German chemist, Rudolf Hersel, as were matches by the firm Bryant and May, and rubber, tar and iron for the building trade by various industrialists. Social historians have viewed the poverty of mid-nineteenth century London's East End as a symbol of urban disintegration in which skilled artisans were reduced to sweated, lowly-paid, labourers. Their homes, built close to the industrial sectors, were erected hastily and cheaply, and lacked proper hygienic and sanitary facilities, so that slum conditions prevailed. Moreover, this housing had to be demolished frequently to make way for new roads and railways, thus creating great hardship for an already destitute people.

Author(s):  
David Faflik

Urban Formalism radically reimagines what it meant to “read” a brave new urban world during the transformative middle decades of the nineteenth century. At a time when contemporaries in the twin capitals of modernity in the West, New York and Paris, were learning to make sense of unfamiliar surroundings, city peoples increasingly looked to the experiential patterns, or forms, from their everyday lives in an attempt to translate urban experience into something they could more easily comprehend. Urban Formalism interrogates both the risks and rewards of an interpretive practice that depended on the mutual relation between urbanism and formalism, at a moment when the subjective experience of the city had reached unprecedented levels of complexity. What did it mean to read a city sidewalk as if it were a literary form, like a poem? On what basis might the material form of a burning block of buildings be received as a pleasurable spectacle? How closely aligned were the ideology and choreography of the political form of a revolutionary street protest? And what were the implications of conceiving of the city’s exciting dynamism in the static visual form of a photographic composition? These are the questions that Urban Formalism asks and begins to answer, with the aim of proposing a revisionist semantics of the city. This book not only provides an original cultural history of forms. It posits a new form of urban history, comprised of the representative rituals of interpretation that have helped give meaningful shape to metropolitan life.


Author(s):  
Noel Malcolm

This essay presents a hitherto unknown work: the first autobiography ever written by an Albanian. It was composed in 1881–2 by a young man (born in 1861) called Lazër Tusha; he wrote it in Italian, and the manuscript has been preserved in an ecclesiastical archive in Italy. Tusha was the son of a prosperous tailor in the city of Shkodër, which was the administrative centre of the Catholic Church in Albania. He describes his childhood and early education, which gave him both a love of Italian culture and a strong desire to serve the Church; at his insistence, his father sent him to the Catholic seminary there, run by the Jesuits. He describes his disappointment on being obliged, after six years, to leave the seminary and resume lay life, and his failed attempts to become either a Jesuit or a Franciscan. Some aspects of these matters remain mysterious in his account. But much of this unfinished draft book is devoted to things other than purely personal narrative: Tusha writes in loving detail about customs, superstitions, clothes, the city of Shkodër, its market and the tailoring business. This is a very rich account of the life and world of an ordinary late-nineteenth-century Albanian—albeit an unusually thoughtful one, with some literary ambition.


2013 ◽  
Vol 38 (152) ◽  
pp. 600-619 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Roddy

The idea of an ‘Irish empire’ has had enduring appeal. It was a rare source of pride promoted by politicians and churchmen during depressed periods in independent Ireland, particularly the 1950s, and the phrase provided an evocative title for at least one popular – and notably sanguine – version of the Irish diaspora's story as late as the turn of this century. In such contexts ‘Irish empire’ can appear simply a wry play on a far more commonly used and, if recent scholarship is to be taken into account, by no means unrelated term, ‘British empire’. Yet as many historians of the Irish abroad, the Irish Catholic Church, and Irish culture more generally have noted, the existence of a peculiarly Irish ‘spiritual empire’ was widely spoken of even as the island's ports were daily choked with emigrants. Nevertheless, the pervasiveness and persistence of the concept, invariably involving the perception of a special, God-given emigrants' ‘mission’ to spread the Catholic religion in whatever part of the world they settled, warrant a more searching analysis than historians in the above-mentioned categories have hitherto devoted to it.


1990 ◽  
Vol 36 ◽  
pp. 379-418 ◽  

Juda Hirsch Quastel, who contributed for more than 60 years to the growth of biochemistry, was born in Sheffield, in a room over his father’s rented sweet shop on the Ecclesall Road. The date was 2 October 1899, and his parents, Jonas and Flora (Itcovitz) Quastel, had lived in England for only a few years. They had emigrated separately from the city of Tamopol in eastern Galicia, which was then within the Austro-Hungarian Empire; it has since, after a period under Polish rule, become part of the Ukrainian Republic of the Soviet Union. Tamopol at the end of the 19th century was a city of some 30 000 and the centre of an agricultural district. Its inhabitants were ethnically mixed, but about half of them were Jews, many of whom under the relatively benevolent Austrian regime were fairly prosperous. Quastel used to recall how his father and grandfather had held the Emperor Franz Joseph in great respect. His grandfather, also Juda Hirsch (married to Yetta Rappoport), had at one time worked as a chemist in a brewery laboratory in Tamopol. The parents of the subject of this biography had been in commerce there, and were not poor; but today’s family members know little about the life of Jonas and Flora in Tamopol, or about the reasons that persuaded them, like many of their neighbours, to emigrate to the West. An uncle had already gone to England, and perhaps had encouraged them to follow because of the greater opportunities. In England they lived at first in London’s east end, where they worked in garment factories; but their move to Sheffield, and to Jonas’s modest entrepreneurship, had been completed in the late 1890s. It was there that Juda Hirsch and his four younger siblings (Charles, Doris, Hetty and Anne) were born.


2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 167-177
Author(s):  
Adom Getachew

This review essay situates Christopher Taylor’s Empire of Neglect: The West Indies in the Wake of British Liberalism (2018) in the context of the two-decade-long debate about the emergence of a liberal imperialism during the nineteenth century. Through an examination of the political economy of emancipation in the British West Indies, Taylor recasts the problem of liberal imperialism by decentering its justificatory discourses in the metropole to examine its practical effects in the colonies. In this turn, he provides an important and missing “materialization” of liberal empire that makes the deep connections between free trade and freeing slaves legible. The practical and theoretical coincidence of these nineteenth-century developments as well as Taylor’s reconstruction of a West Indian tradition of political economy provide a new way of conceptualizing colonial economic violence elaborated as the product of a neglectful empire. It is in this tradition of critiquing and resisting a neglectful empire that we find critical and normative resources to think beyond the terms of our own entrapments within the terms of liberal political economy.


1984 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 188-207 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sheridan Gilley

Quite the most remarkable achievement of nineteenth-century Ireland was the creation of an international Catholic Church throughout the Celtic diaspora in the British Empire and North America. A true Irish empire beyond the seas, it was often compared in Hibernian self-congratulation to the monastic missions of the Dark Ages and was served by an Irish clergy and a host of religious orders who fostered a distinctively ‘ethnic’ or Irish Catholic expatriate culture, while often showing the higher values of the Catholic spiritual life. It is remarkable that there is no scholarly modern study of this international community now in process of dissolution, for it has given an incalculable strength to twentieth-century Roman Catholicism. Something of its dimensions and importance can, however, be glimpsed from a growing body of historical writing about Irish Catholicism in England and Scotland, the United States and Australia, as well as in Ireland itself. The American Republic and the white settler areas of the British Empire were to Irish Catholics what the Roman Empire had been to Jews and Christians, the alien organisms by which a faith was carried to the far corners of the earth. As a matter of institutional and ecclesiastical history, the subject is one in which the new nations were divided into dioceses and parishes, and provided with churches, convents, colleges, seminaries and schools. This was, moreover, achieved by no easy process, but in spite of endemic conflict within Irish Catholic communities, who were also opposed by Roman Catholics of other national traditions, by the expanding Protestant Churches and by a hostile Protestant or secular state.


1759 ◽  
Vol 51 ◽  
pp. 38-40

About four o’clock on Thursday afternoon, July 13th 1758. a short but severe thunder-storm, with lightning, fell upon the top of an house standing alone, and belonging to a common garden, on the causeway near Sandling's ferry, in the city of Norwich; struck off the tiles of the roof at the east end, to the space of a yard or two 5 burnt a very small hole in the middle of a lath, in piercing into the chamber, and then darted to the north-east; ript off the top of an old chair, without throwing it down; snapt the two heads of the bed-posts, rent the curtains, drove against the wall (the front of the house stands due north-east), forced out an upright of a window frame a yard long, three inches broad, and two thick; smote it in a right line into an opposite ditch, ten or twelve yards distant; then struck down on the wall of the chamber, paring off half a foot s breadth of its plaistered covering quite down to the floor, listed up a board of the floor, and leaving an hole of half an inch diameter, pierced thro’ by the side of the main beam into the kitchen, towards the west end of a pewter- shelf; traversed the whole shelf to the east, and melted superficially to the breadth of a shilling six pewter dishes, two plates, and a pewter bason, all standing touching one another: two of the dishes were thrown down, the rest not displaced.


2021 ◽  
Vol 102 (s1) ◽  
pp. s309-s338
Author(s):  
Laurie K. Bertram

How did marginalized and racialized ethnic immigrants transform themselves into active, armed colonial agents in nineteenth-century Western Canada? Approximately twenty Icelanders enlisted to fight Louis Riel’s forces during the North-West Resistance in 1885, just ten years following the arrival of Icelandic immigrants in present-day Manitoba. Forty more reportedly enlisted in an Icelandic-Canadian battalion to enforce the government’s victory in the fall. This public, armed stance of a group of Icelanders against Indigenous forces in 1885 is somewhat unexpected, since most Icelanders were relatively recent arrivals in the West and, in Winnipeg, members of the largely unskilled urban working class. Moreover, they were widely rumoured among Winnipeggers to be from a “blubber-eating race” and of “Eskimo” extraction; community accounts testify to the discrimination numerous early Icelanders faced in the city. These factors initially make Icelanders unexpected colonialists, particularly since nineteenth-century ethnic immigration and colonial suppression so often appear as separate processes in Canadian historiography. Indeed, this scholarship is characterized by an enduring belief that Western Canadian colonialism was a distinctly Anglo sin. Ethnic immigrants often appear in scholarly and popular histories as sharing a history of marginalization with Indigenous people that prevented migrants from taking part in colonial displacement. Proceeding from the neglected history of Icelandic enlistment in 1885 and new developments in Icelandic historiography, this article argues that rather than negating ethnic participation in Indigenous suppression, ethnic marginality and the class tensions it created could actually fuel participation in colonial campaigns, which promised immigrants upward mobility, access to state support, and land.


2000 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 307-331 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. J. Marshall

Late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Calcutta was the setting for the first sustained encounter between Asian intellectuals and the west. An Indian intelligentsia living in Calcutta responded in a most creative way to aspects of European culture that became available to them in the city. Much about this response is now contentious. If the term Bengal Renaissance is still generally applied to it, the implications of that term are disputed. It is no longer necessarily assumed that ‘modern’ India was born in early nineteenth-century Calcutta by a fusing of what was western and what was ‘traditional’. Assumptions that Indian cultures in general and that of Hindu Bengal in particular lacked a capacity to change and to develop on their own internal dynamics, whatever the input from the west, now look more than a little ‘orientalist’. Furthermore, even if the Bengal Renaissance can be shown to have had its roots in its own culture, to some recent critics it was still a movement whose impact was severely limited by the very narrow base on which it rested: an elite group enclosed in a colonial situation. Yet, however the Renaissance may be reassessed, there can still be no doubt that Calcutta under the East India Company contained Indian intellectuals of exceptional talent, who absorbed much from the west. ‘The excitement over the literature, history and philosophy of Europe as well as the less familiar scientific knowledge was deep and abiding’, Professor Raychaudhuri has recently written.


Numen ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Leonel Piovezana

RESUMOA hegemonia jurídica do terreno da sexualidade e da reprodução sempre foi disputada pelas religiões e pelo poder político. No Ocidente, com a constituição dos Estados laicos (século XVIII e XIX), deu-se a separação entre Estado e Igreja, sendo esta consignada em suas Cartas Magnas. Mas a disputa em torno das normas que regem o exercício da sexualidade e da reprodução continuou ao longo dos séculos XIX, XX e início do XXI, constituindo-se ainda em tema de grande atualidade. Neste artigo abordamos a interferência da Igreja Católica no Congresso Nacional  na disputa de projetos de Lei sobre Reprodução e Sexualidade na década de 90. Nele caracterizaremos três atores ligados à Igreja Católica: o Grupo Parlamentar Católico, o Setor Família da CNBB e o Movimento Pró-Vida, destacando sua organização e suas estratégias nesta disputa cuja arena foi o Congresso Nacional.Palavras-chave: Laicidade. Estado. Direitos sexuais. Direitos reprodutivos.ABSTRACTThe legal hegemony of the sexuality’s terrain and reproduction has always been disputed by religions and for political power. In the West, with the secular States Constitution (eighteenth and nineteenth century), occurred the separation between State and Church, these being consigned to their Magna’s letters. But the dispute around the rules governing the exercise of sexuality and reproduction continued throughout the 19th, 20th and beginning of the 21th centuries, still in big theme today. In this article we discuss the Catholic Church’s interference in the National Congress in the dispute of law projects about reproduction andsexuality in the 90s (nineties). It will feature three actors linked to the Catholic Church: the Catholic Parliamentary Group, the Family of the Brazilian Bishops and the Pro-Life Movement,highlighting its organization and its strategies inthis dispute whose arena was the National Congress.Keywords: Secularism. State. Sexual Rights. Reproductive Rights. 


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