Music And Victorian Liberalism

Examines the interaction between music and liberal discourses in Victorian Britain, revealing the close interdependence of political and aesthetic practices.

This volume reveals music's role in Victorian liberalism and its relationship with literature, locating the Victorian salon within intellectual and cultural history.

"The daughter of one of Britain's longest-serving prime ministers, Mary Gladstone was a notable musician, hostess of one of the most influential political salons in late Victorian London, and probably the first female prime ministerial private secretary in Britain. Pivoting around Mary's initiatives, this intellectual history draws on a trove of unpublished archival material that reveals for the first time the role of music in Victorian liberalism, explores its intersections with literature, recovers what the high Victorian salon was within a wider cultural history, and shows Mary's influence on her father's work. Paying close attention to literary and biographical details, the book also sheds new light on Tennyson's poetry, George Eliot's fiction, the founding of the Royal College of Music, the Gladstone family, and a broad plane of wider British culture, including political liberalism and women, sociability, social theology and aesthetic democracy"...

This is a critical assessment of Victorian cathedral music, unique in its detailed treatment of the cultural intellectual, philosophical and religious issues that shaped the composer's creative world and so influenced compositional practice. Among the issues investigated by William Gatens are the status of music in Church and society, the Victorians' views on the moral dimension of music, the aesthetic implications of Christian orthodoxy and notions of stylistic propriety. The careers and works of seven eminent composers - Thomas Attwood, T. A. Walmisley, John Goss, S. S. Wesley, F. A. G. Ouseley, John Stainer and Joseph Barnby - are discussed in some detail with emphasis on anthems and fully composed service settings. These provide specific illustrations of stylistic trends and the practical effects of theoretical principles. The study seeks to correct some of the misunderstandings and distortions that were common among earlier twentieth-century writers on the subject.

In the mid-Victorian era, liberalism was a practical politics: it had a party, it informed legislation, and it had adherents who identified with and expressed it as opinion. It was also the first British political movement to depend more on people than property, and on opinion rather than interest. But how would these subjects of liberal politics actually live liberalism? To answer this question, Elaine Hadley focuses on the key concept of individuation—how it is embodied in politics and daily life and how it is expressed through opinion, discussion and sincerity. These are concerns that have been absent from commentary on the liberal subject. Living Liberalism argues that the properties of liberalism—citizenship, the vote, the candidate, and reform, among others—were developed in response to a chaotic and antagonistic world. In exploring how political liberalism imagined its impact on Victorian society, Hadley reveals an entirely new and unexpected prehistory of our modern liberal politics. A major revisionist account that alters our sense of the trajectory of liberalism, Living Liberalism revises our understanding of the presumption of the liberal subject.

Examines how liberal thought influenced representations of animals within nineteenth-century animal welfare discourse and the Victorian novel.

Current studies in disciplinarity range widely across philosophical and literary contexts, producing heated debate and entrenched divergences. Yet, despite their manifest significance for us today seldom have those studies engaged with the Victorian origins of modern disciplinarity. Victorian Culture and the Origin of Disciplines adds a crucial missing link in that history by asking and answering a series of deceptively simple questions: how did Victorians define a discipline; what factors impinged upon that definition; and how did they respond to disciplinary understanding? Structured around sections on professionalization, university curriculums, society journals, literary genres and interdisciplinarity, Victorian Culture and the Origin of Disciplines addresses the tangled bank of disciplinarity in the arts, humanities, social sciences and natural sciences including musicology, dance, literature, and art history; classics, history, archaeology, and theology; anthropology, psychology; and biology, mathematics and physics. Chapters examine the generative forces driving disciplinary formation, and gauge its success or failure against social, cultural, political, and economic environmental pressures. No other volume has focused specifically on the origin of Victorian disciplines in order to track the birth, death, and growth of the units into which knowledge was divided in this period, and no other volume has placed such a wide array of Victorian disciplines in their cultural context.

This book examines the ways in which imperial agendas informed the writing of history in nineteenth-century Britain and how historical writing transformed imperial agendas. Using the published writings and personal papers of Walter Scott, J. A. Froude, James Mill, Rammohun Roy, T. B. Macaulay, E. A. Freeman, W. E. Gladstone, and J. R. Seeley among others, Theodore Koditschek sheds light on the role of the historical imagination in the establishment and legitimation of liberal imperialism. He shows how both imperialists and the imperialized were drawn to reflect back on the Empire's past as a result of the need to construct a modern, multi-national British imperial identity for a more economically expansive and enlightened present. By tracing the imperial lives and historical works of these pivotal figures, Theodore Koditschek illuminates the ways in which discourse altered practice, and vice versa, as well as how the history of Empire was continuously written and re-written.