‘Scripture its own interpreter’: Mary Martha Sherwood, the Bible and female autobiography

This is a reading of the work of Mary Martha Sherwood, the Victorian Evangelist and Children’s Author (and pupil at the Abbey School, Reading). Based upon research on Sherwood’s private correspondences and diary conducted at UCLA with the aid of a Mitzi Myers (this before my arrival at Reading), the essay offers a radical reinterpretation of her work. Previously understood in terms of a rigid, if self-contradictory and ‘anxious’, Evangelism, the essay reads the diary through Sherwood’s little known Biblical scholarship. Through this I argue that Sherwood grants her own writing the status of Biblical truth precisely because of its contradictions and ‘anxiety’.

On the environmental valuation of catastrophe: revisiting mining disasters in the United Kingdom, 1851-1962

In the context of environmental valuation of natural disasters, an important component of the evaluation procedure lies in determining the periodicity of events. This paper explores alternative methodologies for determining such periodicity, illustrating the advantages and the disadvantages of the separate methods and their comparative predictions. The procedures employ Bayesian inference and explore recent advances in computational aspects of mixtures methodology. The procedures are applied to the classic data set of Maguire et al (Biometrika, 1952) which was subsequently updated by Jarrett (Biometrika, 1979) and which comprise the seminal investigations examining the periodicity of mining disasters within the United Kingdom, 1851-1962.

Living the Revolution: urban communes & soviet socialism, 1917-1932

This book follows a revolutionary trend popular among young activists and would-be radicals after 1917, the formation of collective units of cohabitation and association known as 'urban communes'. In these spaces, activists tried to live what they understood as the 'socialist lifestyle', self-consciously putting Marxist and Bolshevik theories into practice. By telling the story of the urban communes, this book reveals how grand revolutionary ideals, such as collectivism, equality, proletarian ethics, and modern practice, were experienced, understood, and appropriated on a human level. This enables us to better understand the messy realities of the early Soviet state, showing how ideological beliefs and revolutionary contingencies actually came into being during this time.