When francophone women selling sex in London evaded expulsion by claiming to have been born in Quebec, Canada, and therefore to be British subjects who could not be deported, the police did not know what to do. The cases of women who used this strategy in the 1910s and the 1930s illustrate the possibilities these women afforded themselves by selling sex in London and the difficulties of documentary legibility and legal ambiguity. The article shows how 'parastatal' organizations shaped the moral enforcement of British borders and how negotiations over dominion sovereignty and imperial mobility hinged on the categories of desirability.
While clearing out her mother's personal possessions after her death, a Canadian woman discovered a parcel of letters hidden in the jewellery drawer, which seemed to indicate her mother's love affair with another woman. This article considers the possibility of lesbian desire hidden in plain sight within the post-war nuclear family as a case study opening up broader questions of the ethics of historical practice. As the 'imaginative turn' in history prompts scholars to adopt methodologies which speculate on, or imagine, their subjects' intimate experiences and emotions, this article explores whether and how those stories can ethically be told.
This article examines how Atlantic slavery debates interacted with domestic reform demands in industrial Sheffield between 1823-48. It explores the shifting language of slavery, which has an ancient political tradition, but in the nineteenth century increasingly involved allegories between Britain's working classes and enslaved Africans. The article first analyses Sheffield's specific economic and sociopolitical heritage. Next, it investigates how slavery metaphors emerged in middle-class reform culture. Finally, it examines how slavery tropes impacted working-class radicalism. Highlighting the ways slavery terminology evolved across these different social movements unearths how broad ideas of human difference were conceptualized within provincial nineteenth-century Britain.
Abstract More than thirty years ago, a team of amateur archaeologists swept up dust from underneath the floorboards of Hackney’s oldest home, Sutton House. Hundreds of pieces of ephemera were discovered, including coloured and cut prints and folded paper from the seventeenth century, products of an early modern schoolgirl art that has almost no material survival. This article explores these fragments’ connection to seventeenth-century girls’ schooling in the Hackney area and the well documented but rarely extant schoolgirl art of adorning domestic spaces with prints of the natural world and built environment.
Abstract The British lodging houses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are often portrayed as sites of poverty, illness, and crime. This article reexamines them by highlighting their positive impact on itinerant traders. These cheap dwellings offered more than affordable beds: in them, pedlars found allies and assistance. Staying in one could be a way to evade police control and migration restrictions. Lodging houses thus played a strategic role in pedlars’ networks well into the 1930s, despite their numerical decline. The article emphasizes the agency of petty capitalists and questions the effectiveness of state surveillance over these cheap lodgings.
