Dr Helen Dampier

Tilly extols the power and compass of ‘superior stories’ compared with ‘standard stories’. However, things are not always so clear cut, as the case study discussed here shows. A 1906 – 1914 research investigation headed by P. L. A. Goldman, which has initially concerned with the enumeration and commemoration of the deaths of Boer combatants during the South African War (1899-1902), and later with the deaths of people in the concentration camps established in the commando phase of this war, is explored in detail using archived documents. Now largely forgotten, the investigation was part of a commemorative project which sought to replace competing stories about wartime events with one superior version, as seen from a proto-nationalist viewpoint. Goldman, the official in charge, responded to a range of methodological and practical difficulties in dealing with a huge amount of data received from a wide variety of sources, and eventually produced ‘the number’ as politically and organisationally required. However, another number of the South African War concentration camp dead - different from Goldman's, and also added up incorrectly - concurrently appeared on a national women's memorial, the Vrouemonument, and it is this which has resounded subsequently. The reasons are traced to the character of stories and their power, and the visibility of stories about the concentration camp deaths on the face of the Vrouemonument, but their anonymity within Goldman's production of ‘the number’. Tilly's idea of an ‘in-between’ approach to analysing stories by historical sociology is drawn on in exploring this.

Programmatic ideas regarding cultural sociology and its inter-relationship with cultural production inspired by the work of Inglis et al., Mukerji and Bennett are explored. A particular cultural assemblage, the editorial practices arising in an interdisciplinary project concerned with researching and publishing the letters of South African feminist writer and social theorist Olive Schreiner, is detailed. Four key aspects of the particular ‘bringing-into-being’ which these working practices involve are interrogated, regarding the ‘moment of writing’, archive stories, the ‘editorial moment’ and the involvement of the later reader, with these examined in depth in relation to examples of Schreiner’s letters.

This paper concerns eight women's testimonies produced over a period of some fifty years, which describe a protest about meat rations at Brandfort concentration camp in November 1901, during the 1899-1902 South African War. The focus here is not the ‘event itself’, which cannot now be recovered except in its archival or documentary forms, but on the subsequent re/telling of this incident, and on the politicised, (proto-) nationalist content and tone of the Brandfort protest testimonies. While proto-nationalism is present from the earliest extant testimony, the development of this is traced over time, showing how the later testimonies evince a strongly triumphalist nationalist tone. The retrospectively inscribed testimonies of the protest are examined to show how, over time, the story of the Brandfort protest became universalised, retold well away from specificities of time and place. If nationalism depends on the creation of 'stories that find their place', then it was partly through the construction and repetition of what Van Heyningen has called 'costly mythologies' about women's concentration camp experiences that Afrikaner national unity was achieved. This also supports Bradford's important claim that the 1899-1902 war regendered Afrikaner nationalism.

Focusing on the letters of the South African feminist writer and social theorist Olive Schreiner (1855–1920), this article explores Schreiner's strategic uses of letter-writing as a key tool in her work as a cultural entrepreneur in a number of different social and political contexts. In advocating a microhistory approach which recognizes that macro and micro are interconnected and should be seen as lenses of perspective rather than as separate spheres, we examine various strands of Schreiner's 'cultural project' and consider how her epistolary activities articulated and furthered this.

This article explores the letters of South African feminist writer Olive Schreiner (1855–1920) to illuminate connections and tensions between suffrage movements in the imperial metropole and on the colonial periphery. Schreiner's letters shed fascinating light on how she used her contacts in the global suffrage movement to advance local suffrage work. They indicate key differences Schreiner identified between the British and South African suffrage movements, including that the latter should be focused on educating women to want the vote. Schreiner's emphasis on universal suffrage also brought her into conflict with local suffrage organisations which were willing to accept a racial franchise, and also with key figures in the international suffrage movement.

Taking the recognition of the interplays between biography and autobiography - hence, auto/biography - as its starting point, this paper explores the auto/biographical traces of the British social reformer and humanitarian Emily Hobhouse (1860-1926). Following her rise to public prominence during and after the 1899-1902 South African War, Hobhouse made a sustained attempt to testify to her humanitarianism in a number of different auto/biographical forms, all of them incorporating Boer women’s accounts of suffering in the war. We consider the implications of Schaffer and Smith’s (2004) ‘ethics of recognition’ for Hobhouse’s construction of her humanitarian authority, and the processes by which the accounts themselves become 'untouchable' testimonies. In examining the many iterations of Hobhouse’s life writing as emotional practices, we explore her felt morality, grapple with her urge to personal accountability, and consider how her auto/biography was co-produced in South Africa, and to what purposes.

Letters have sometimes been assumed to be a private form of life writing, and certainly many of the South African writer Olive Schreiner’s (1855–1920) letters have been read in this way. However, her letters trouble any simple, binary notions of public and private. This article offers a re-reading of Schreiner’s letters to the statistician and founder of the Men and Women’s Club, Karl Pearson (1857–1936). It argues that the dominant reading that has been made of these letters as ‘unrequited love letters’ needs rethinking, for when these letters are considered in their entirety and contextualised as part of Schreiner’s wider extant letters, and when the intertwining of their public and private aspects is recognised, it becomes clear that a considerably more complex interpretation of her letters is required, and that this has implications for reading letters more generally.

This article explores the letters of South African feminist writer Olive Schreiner (1855–1920) to illuminate connections and tensions between suffrage movements in the imperial metropole and on the colonial periphery. Schreiner's letters shed fascinating light on how she used her contacts in the global suffrage movement to advance local suffrage work. They indicate key differences Schreiner identified between the British and South African suffrage movements, including that the latter should be focused on educating women to want the vote. Schreiner's emphasis on universal suffrage also brought her into conflict with local suffrage organisations which were willing to accept a racial franchise, and also with key figures in the international suffrage movement.

Re-reading as a methodology is often invoked in literary and historical work, but seldom specifically delineated. The substantive focus herein concerns Boer women's testimonies of the 1899—1902 South African War, in particular testimonies of the British military scorched earth policy of forced removals and concentration camps. The methodology of re-reading such texts against each other is explored so as to `re-read the record' of the Mafeking concentration camp, using a set of unpublished testimonies. Re-reading reveals tensions and disjunctures in these testimonies, and highlights the pervasiveness of established, rehearsed narrative structures which characterize in effect all women's testimonies of the concentration camps of the South African War. The processes of re-reading are examined as a methodology which interrogates a particular text's context of production, and, crucially, the context of reading and the ways in which this shapes readerly responses to the text.

Ken Plummer's advocacy of critical humanism and the centrality of documents of life within this has been a crucial part of a social science return to a focus on lived human experience and life history research. This chapter explores some of the key structural features of Schreiner's everyday letter writing practices, with these at basis bound together by her resolute epistolary focus on the 'large & impersonal'. It discusses a fundamental part of Schreiner's everyday letter writing in the period after her 1889 return to South Africa from Britain, especially in her letters to family and friends. The chapter focuses on an important, indeed definitional aspect of what is quotidian in Schreiner's letters. What this brings clearly into sight with regard to Schreiner's letters and the quotidian is the recognition that letters are textual constructions, artful productions, and this should prompt a reminder that the quotidian is not a synonym for home life or domesticity.

There are disturbances as well as regularities in the gender order, including challenges to and re-workings of conventional hierarchies. An example of such re-workings provides the focus of discussion: the political interventions of South African feminist writer and social theorist Olive Schreiner (18551920). Discussion of Schreiners letters to a number of important white political figures is organised around an epistemological question: can Schreiners political influencewithin the masculine political landscape of the Cape in the latenineteenth and early-twentieth centuries be convincingly demonstrated by concrete epistolary examples and compelling evidence? Discussed here regarding womens presence in a masculine political landscape, this epistemological question exercises historiography more generally: with what certainty can knowledgeclaims about the past be advanced? The ideas context in which these questions are explored is feminist historiography concerning gender and in particular separate spheres, which were particularly troubled and complex in the South African context. We argue that the performative dimensions of letter writing need to be encompassed within notions of influence and proof, rather than this being conceived as always lying outside the text: texts and words can have powerful effects, with the evidence in Schreiners case pointing strongly to her significant political influence. Chapters © 2013 The Authors. Book compilation © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Diary writing is popularly defined around assumptions about the temporal and spatial circumstances of writing, which underpin the kind of knowledge diaries are often understood to “hold.” The epistemological status of diaries is rooted in an assumed ontology, concerning the time/space of their writing and the temporal location of their writer in relation to “entries” in them.This article explores “what happens” to the knowledge a diary is seen to hold when its ontological basis is disturbed by its assumed “present-ness” being shown to be an artful (mis)representation. The case study discussed concerns the published diary Het Concentratie-Kamp van Irene (The Irene Concentration Camp, 1905), as well as the manuscript diary, and the letters written concurrently with the preparation of the former for publication, of a South African woman, Johanna Brandt-Van Warmelo. The diary deals with the author's experiences during six weeks spent as a volunteer worker in Irene concentration camp during the 1899–1902 South African War. In the secondary literature, knowledge claims about the Van Warmelo-Brandt diary not only assume referentiality but also the temporal synonymity of “the moment of writing” with “the scene of what is written about.” In particular, the assumption is that the time of its writing, narrative time in each diary entry, and the temporal location of the writer in relation to the diary entries, are all “of the moment.” However, important temporal disjunctures exist between the Brandt manuscript and published diary. Detailed examples are examined by unpacking the “moments of writing” of the manuscript and the published diary, by reference to family letters written by Brandt-Van Warmelo over the period the diary was being prepared for publication. In doing so, we develop the idea of a “simulacrum diary” in thinking about the relationship between the published and manuscript diaries and the complexities of their moments of writing.

This book is a major contribution to the comparative histories of crime and criminal justice, focusing on the legal regimes of the British empire during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Diary-writing is usually defined around assumptions about the temporal and spatial circumstances of writing, which underpin what kind of knowledge diaries are understood to ‘hold’. The epistemological status of diaries is rooted in an assumed ontology, concerning the time/space of their writing and the temporal location of their writer in relation to the ‘entries’ written in them. This paper explores ‘what happens’ to the knowledge a diary is seen to hold when its ontological basis is disturbed by its assumed ‘present-ness’ being shown to be an artful (mis)representation. The case study discussed concerns the published diary Het Concentratie-Kamp van Irene [The Irene Concentration Camp] (1905), and also the manuscript diary, and the letters written concurrently with the preparation of the former for publication, of a South African woman, Johanna Van Warmelo (her pre-marriage name). The diary deals with the author’s experiences of six weeks spent as a volunteer worker in Irene concentration camp during the 1899-1902 South African War. In the secondary literature, knowledge-claims about the Van Warmelo diary not only assume referentiality but also the temporal interrelationship of ‘the moment of writing’ with ‘the scene of what is written about’. In particular, the assumption is that the time of its writing, narrative time in a diary-entry, and the temporal location of the writer in relation to the diary-entries, are all ‘of the moment’. However, important temporal disjunctures exist between the manuscript and the published diary. Detailed examples of this are examined by unpacking the ‘moments of writing’ of the manuscript and the published diary, by reference to family letters written by Brandt-Van Warmelo (her postmarriage name) over the period the diary was being prepared for publication. In doing so, we develop the idea of a ‘simulacrum diary’ in thinking about the relationship between the published and manuscript diaries and the complexities of their moments of writing.

Globalization theory sees the processes of change it is concerned with as distinctively new, with a feminist analytics part of the newness of the current period too, focusing on some of the specific gender dynamics involved. However, the work of the feminist writer and social theorist Olive Schreiner (1855–1920) challenges, indeed overturns, such assumptions. Similar structural economic and political circumstances to those now called globalization were the focus of Schreiner's theorising, with her work demonstrating that ‘it's been done before’ in the case of a feminist analytics of global social change. Also, Schreiner's feminist interrogation of global change refused any confinement to gender (although it encompassed it), because for her gender was always already interconnected with class, ‘race’ and an array of wider structural forces and changes. Schreiner's unfolding analysis of imperialism and the expansionist project in the period 1888 to 1913, and of war, peace and social movements in the period 1914 to 1920, are discussed, in particular by presenting new material from Schreiner's extant letters and exploring the significant ways these add to the analysis in her published work. Over 4000 Schreiner letters are extant, are being researched by the Olive Schreiner Letters Project (http://www.oliveschreinerletters.ed.ac.uk), and provide an unparalleled resource for exploring the emergent analysis of a key feminist theorist.

A website containing transcripts of 5,500 letters by Richard Cobden, explanatory essays, a virtual exhibition and teaching materials for History and Citizenship lessons at Key Stage 3.