The Metaphysical Society (1869-1880)

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Scientific Progress ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
John Ruskin ◽  
William Gladstone ◽  
Spiritual Crisis ◽  
The Status ◽  
Dining Room

The Metaphysical Society was founded in 1869 at the instigation of James Knowles, editor of the Contemporary Review and then of the Nineteenth Century, as a private dining and debate club that gathered together a latter-day clerisy. Building on the tradition of the Cambridge Apostles, the founding members elected talented men from across the Victorian intellectual spectrum: bishops, one Cardinal, philosophers, scientists, literary figures, and politicians. There were liberals and conservatives, empiricists and intuitionists, and Protestants, Catholics, and unbelievers. It included in its 62 members the prominent intellectual superstars of the period, such as T. H. Huxley; William Gladstone; Walter Bagehot; Henry Edward Manning; John Ruskin; and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. The members of the Society discussed the reality of miracles, the status of evolution, and the nature of ethics. This collection moves beyond Alan Willard Brown’s 1947 pioneering study of the Metaphysical Society by offering a more detailed analysis of its inner dynamics and its larger impact outside the dining room at the Grosvenor Hotel. It casts light on many of the colourful figures that joined the Society and also examines, with fresh eyes, the major concepts that informed the papers presented at Society meetings. By discussing groups, important individuals, and underlying concepts, the chapters contribute to a rich, new picture of Victorian intellectual life during the 1870s, a period when intellectuals were wondering how, and what, to believe in a time of social change, spiritual crisis, and scientific progress.

The Traditional and the Modern in the Writings of Ivan Pnin

Slavic Review ◽  
1975 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 539-559
Author(s):  
Samuel C. Ramer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
State Policy ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Political Reform ◽  
Russian Empire ◽  
High State ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Russian Empire

Studies of political reform in the Russian Empire during the first decade of Alexander I's rule have focused largely on the emperor and his most prominent advisers: the unofficial committee of four close friends who counseled him in secret during the first two years of his reign; powerful court factions, particularly those nobles who sought to augment the status and political power of the Senate; and, finally, high state officials such as Michael Speransky. The nature of reformist thought emanating from sources less directly involved in the actual preparation of legislation has been unduly neglected. There were, for instance, a number of minor writers who sought to influence state policy by submitting their ideas to Alexander. A study of the kind of society they hoped to create and the ways in which they thought social change achievable can enhance our appreciation of the variety of reformist thought in Russia at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Victorian Pain

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Ablow
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Harriet Martineau ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Natural Philosophers ◽  
First Time

The nineteenth century introduced developments in science and medicine that made the eradication of pain conceivable for the first time. This new understanding of pain brought with it a complex set of moral and philosophical dilemmas. If pain serves no obvious purpose, how do we reconcile its existence with a well-ordered universe? Examining how writers of the day engaged with such questions, this book offers a compelling new literary and philosophical history of modern pain. The book provides close readings of novelists Charlotte Brontë and Thomas Hardy and political and natural philosophers John Stuart Mill, Harriet Martineau, and Charles Darwin, as well as a variety of medical, scientific, and popular writers of the Victorian age. The book explores how discussions of pain served as investigations into the status of persons and the nature and parameters of social life. No longer conceivable as divine trial or punishment, pain in the nineteenth century came to seem instead like a historical accident suggesting little or nothing about the individual who suffers. A landmark study of Victorian literature and the history of pain, the book shows how these writers came to see pain as a social as well as a personal problem. Rather than simply self-evident to the sufferer and unknowable to anyone else, pain was also understood to be produced between persons—and even, perhaps, by the fictions they read.

Women and Agency in Bankim’s Rajmohan’s Wife and Tagore’s The Home and The World

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
Author(s):  
Manju Dhariwal ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Indian English ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
English Novel ◽  
The World ◽  
The Status ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Status Of Women

Written almost half a century apart, Rajmohan’s Wife (1864) and The Home and the World (1916) can be read as women centric texts written in colonial India. The plot of both the texts is set in Bengal, the cultural and political centre of colonial India. Rajmohan’s Wife, arguably the first Indian English novel, is one of the first novels to realistically represent ‘Woman’ in the nineteenth century. Set in a newly emerging society of India, it provides an insight into the status of women, their susceptibility and dependence on men. The Home and the World, written at the height of Swadeshi movement in Bengal, presents its woman protagonist in a much progressive space. The paper closely examines these two texts and argues that women enact their agency in relational spaces which leads to the process of their ‘becoming’. The paper analyses this journey of the progress of the self, which starts with Matangini and culminates in Bimala. The paper concludes that women’s journey to emancipation is symbolic of the journey of the nation to independence.

The History of ‘the Reading Public’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Collini
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Reading Matter ◽  
History Of ◽  
Victorian Periodicals

This chapter argues that accounts of ‘the reading public’ are always fundamentally historical, usually involving stories of ‘growth’ or ‘decline’. It examines Q. D. Leavis’s Fiction and the Reading Public, which builds a relentlessly pessimistic critique of the debased standards of the present out of a highly selective account of literature and its publics since the Elizabethan period. It goes on to exhibit the complicated analysis of the role of previous publics in F. R. Leavis’s revisionist literary history, including his ambivalent admiration for the great Victorian periodicals. And it shows how Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy carries an almost buried interpretation of social change from the nineteenth century onwards, constantly contrasting the vibrant and healthy forms of entertainment built up in old working-class communities with the slick, commercialized reading matter introduced by post-1945 prosperity.

In Between Market and Charity: Child Domestic Work and Changing Labor Relations in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Istanbul

2020 ◽  
Vol 97 ◽  
pp. 81-108
Author(s):  
Yahya Araz ◽  
İrfan Kokdaş
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Foster Care ◽  
Child Labor ◽  
Labor Relations ◽  
Domestic Work ◽  
Domestic Service ◽  
Wage Labor ◽  
Service Market ◽  
Economic Interests ◽  
The Status

AbstractThis article focuses on children taken by Istanbulite families for upbringing and employment in the Ottoman capital during the 1800–1900 period. It suggests that domestic child labor which was shaped by the concept of ‘charity’ and economic interests during the first half of the nineteenth century progressively turned into wage labor during the second half of the century. The study claims that the nineteenth century witnessed a transformation of labor relations in the domestic service market, implying the transition from reciprocal to commodified labor. The labor of children employed in domestic services underwent a monetization process throughout the nineteenth century. Parallel to this monetization, the status of children under foster care or in domestic service came to be determined by standardized legal contracts.

Open Houses from Etic to Emic Perspectives: Casa Aperta in Early-Modern and Nineteenth-Century Italy

2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 440-463
Author(s):  
Raffaella Sarti
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Local People ◽  
Geographical Differences ◽  
Citizenship Rights ◽  
The Status ◽  
Changes Over Time ◽  
Over Time

What did early-modern and nineteenth-century Italians mean when they used the expressions tener casa aperta or aver casa aperta, literally to keep open house and to have an open house? In this article I will try to answer this question, which is far less trivial than one might imagine. Before tackling the topic, a premise is necessary. In some previous works, I used an etic category of ‘open houses’, i.e. a category I elaborated to interpret the implications of the presence, in many households, of domestic staff from different classes, places, races than their masters/employers. Such a presence made those houses open. The border between different peoples and cultures was inside the houses themselves that were places of exchanges, confrontations and clashes. In this article, I will develop a different approach: I will map the emic uses of the ‘open-house’ category, i.e. I will analyse how early-modern and nineteenth-century Italians used the expressions tener casa aperta or aver casa aperta. While some uses had to do with hospitality and sociability, others had legal meanings, referring to citizenship rights and privileges, the status of aristocrats, the differences between foreigners and local people and taxpaying. I will pay particular attention to the latter, also suggesting possible geographical differences and changes over time. This will present an opportunity to delve into the cultural and legal world of early-modern and nineteenth-century Italians, and to unveil the importance of houses for one's status.

scholarly journals Debating Scientific Medicine: Homoeopathy and Allopathy in Late Nineteenth-century Medical Print in Bengal1

2012 ◽  
Vol 56 (4) ◽  
pp. 463-480 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shinjini Das
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South Asia ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Medical Systems ◽  
Scientific Medicine ◽  
Medical Journals ◽  
The Status ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Print Market

AbstractThe historiography of medicine in South Asia often assumes the presence of preordained, homogenous, coherent and clearly-bound medical systems. They also tend to take the existence of a medical ‘mainstream’ for granted. This article argues that the idea of an ‘orthodox’, ‘mainstream’ named allopathy and one of its ‘alternatives’ homoeopathy were co-produced in Bengal. It emphasises the role of the supposed ‘fringe’, ie. homoeopathy, in identifying and organising the ‘orthodoxy’ of the time. The shared market for medicine and print provided a crucial platform where such binary identities such as ‘homoeopaths’ and ‘allopaths’ were constituted and reinforced. This article focuses on a range of polemical writings by physicians in the Bengali print market since the 1860s. Published mostly in late nineteenth-century popular medical journals, these concerned the nature, definition and scope of ‘scientific’ medicine. The article highlights these published disputes and critical correspondence among physicians as instrumental in simultaneously shaping the categories ‘allopathy’ and ‘homoeopathy’ in Bengali print. It unravels how contemporary understandings of race, culture and nationalism informed these medical discussions. It further explores the status of these medical contestations, often self-consciously termed ‘debates’, as an essential contemporary trope in discussing ‘science’ in the vernacular.

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