Using the Cayley-Hamilton theorem with N-partitioned matrices

A definition is given for the characteristic equation of anN-partitioned matrix. It is then proved that this matrix satisfies its own characteristic equation. This can then be regarded as a version of the Cayley-Hamilton theorem, of use withN-dimensional systems.

Missionary children: The French Holy Childhood Association in European context, 1843-c.1914

In the mid-nineteenth century, thousands of children in Europe and beyond were organized into battalions of fundraisers for overseas missions. By the end of the century these juvenile missionary organizations had become a global movement, generating millions of pounds in revenue each year. While the transnational nature of the children’s missions and publications has been well-documented by historians, the focus has tended to be on the connections that were established by encounters between the young western donors, missionaries overseas and the non-western ‘other’ constructed by their work. A full exploration of the European political, social and cultural concerns that produced the juvenile missionaries movement and the trans-European networks that sustained it are currently missing from historical accounts of the phenomenon. This article looks at the largest of these organizations, the Catholic mission for children, the French Holy Childhood Association (L’Œuvre de la sainte enfance), to understand how the principles this mission sought to impose abroad were above all an expression of anxieties at home about the role of religion in the family, childhood and in civil society as western polities were modernizing and secularizing in the nineteenth century.

Poetry of social conscience, poetry of transition: Ann Hawkshaw's 'Introductory Stanzas' and 'The Mother to her Starving Child'

Through close readings of Ann Hawkshaw's poetry in the context of industrial Manchester in the 1840s, this article highlights the interaction of form and content in poetry that makes use of the idea of the past to question or complicate the politics of the present.