'Looking at the Others': Oscar Wilde and the Reading Gaol Archive

In looking at Wilde and the prison, scholarship has understandably focussed on the lengthy and complex De Profundis, and how the prison experience confirmed or re-shaped Wilde as a writer and thinker. Wilde himself claimed to have been saved by the ‘others’ that he encountered in prison, and these ‘others’ have received scant attention. Who were they? How does a greater knowledge of them supplement our sense of the nineteenth-century prison and of Wilde? This essay looks closely at the Reading Gaol archive, tracing out the lives of some of those with whom Wilde was incarcerated and providing analyses of the prison population in Reading while Wilde was there. Aside from yielding the only known photographs of any of the young working-class men in whom Wilde took an interest, the essay seeks to build a more nuanced reading of Wilde's experience. Above all, the aim is to open out the meanings of the Wilde myth, and, in particular, to offer a more socially inclusive version.

'The largest type in England': wood lettering for jobbing printing 1800–1830

Traces the development of new letterforms for printing in the first 30 years of the nineteenth century.

Judah Benjamin: marginalized outsider or admitted insider?

Judah Benjamin (1811-1884) was one of the greatest of nineteenth century lawyers. This article analyses how a young man who might have been marginalized in society because of the circumstances of his birth, ethnic origin and religious identity rose to prominence in law, politics and business in the United Kingdom and the United States.

Thomas Heywood: just in time

The scholarly study of the dramatic works and career of Thomas Heywood has increased significantly in the last fifty years but still lags far behind that of his contemporaries Shakespeare and Jonson. Labelled the ‘prose Shakespeare’ by Charles Lamb in the early nineteenth century, Heywood seems to have been considered by scholars and publishers to be a ghostly figure who haunted the early modern theatrical world. In fact, recent research using archival records shows the ways in which Heywood is at the centre of an extensive and highly networked professional industry.

Causation, complexity, and the concert: the pragmatics of causal explanation in international relations

A causal explanation provides information about the causal history of whatever is being explained. However, most causal histories extend back almost infinitely and can be described in almost infinite detail. Causal explanations therefore involve choices about which elements of causal histories to pick out. These choices are pragmatic: they reflect our explanatory interests. When adjudicating between competing causal explanations, we must therefore consider not only questions of epistemic adequacy (whether we have good grounds for identifying certain factors as causes) but also questions of pragmatic adequacy (whether the aspects of the causal history picked out are salient to our explanatory interests). Recognizing that causal explanations differ pragmatically as well as epistemically is crucial for identifying what is at stake in competing explanations of the relative peacefulness of the nineteenth-century Concert system. It is also crucial for understanding how explanations of past events can inform policy prescription.