Professor Simon Morgan

Celebrity is an emergent theme in historical studies. However, except when searching for the antecedents of modern celebrity, theorists have largely ignored the historical context, while few historians have applied contemporary celebrity theory to the period before 1900. This article gives a general introduction to the topic, reinterpreting the assumed relationship between celebrity and modernity and arguing for the existence of distinct celebrity cultures in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It contends that the application of celebrity theory to the past would provide original insights into themes such as the development of consumer society and the expansion of the public sphere before setting out desiderata for future research.

This article explores the role of the press in defining the boundaries of respectable feminine activity in the public sphere in mid-nineteenth-century Britain. Through an examination of the reporting of women's meetings and appeals to female opinion, it demonstrates that although women who engaged in public controversy risked ridicule and condemnation, it was possible for women's engagement in the public sphere to be portrayed as respectable and even desirable by developing the notion of a virtuous female public opinion based solely on consensus rather than controversy. This was achieved by selective reporting of women's meetings, usually excluding any reference to debates and individual speeches, and concentrating only on the outcome. The article proceeds to consider the broadening opportunities for women to address mixed audiences on topics such as female education and social reform. It concludes that the stifling of public debate between women in order to uphold an ideal of female moral purity was a price that women had to pay in order to have an influence on public opinion, and that such ideals of feminine respectability continued to shape women's access to platforms long after the hypocrisy of moral arguments against women's involvement in political debate had been exposed and the existence of a unified "female opinion" thrown into doubt.

The recent emphasis on the bourgeois public sphere as a predominantly masculine space means that the wider meanings and interpretations of respectable women's presence at public occasions have been ignored or misunderstood. This article addresses the contribution of urban middle-class women to the public construction and expression of middle-class identity in the mid-nineteenth century, and examines the way in which women were written into civic narratives as champions of public virtue. It is argued that the notion of ‘female influence’ allowed women to expand their public roles, and even to participate in potentially subversive political activities. However, it also effectively contained such activities by distancing ‘respectable’ women from the potentially corrupting arena of political controversy.

Simon Morgan aims to redress the balance, by drawing on a variety of sources including private documents he argues that women actually played an important role in the formation of the public identity of the Victorian middle class.

Celebrity is an emergent theme in historical studies. However, except when searching for the antecedents of modern celebrity, theorists have largely ignored the historical context, while few historians have applied contemporary celebrity theory to the period before 1900. This article gives a general introduction to the topic, reinterpreting the assumed relationship between celebrity and modernity and arguing for the existence of distinct celebrity cultures in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It contends that the application of celebrity theory to the past would provide original insights into themes such as the development of consumer society and the expansion of the public sphere before setting out desiderata for future research. © The Social History Society 2011.

This article explores the relationship between the ‘hero’ and the celebrity culture in the nineteenth-century United States. Even by the 1820s, the activities of print media and entrepreneurial manufacturers meant that individuals widely recognised and worshipped as ‘heroes’ almost inevitably became part of the nascent celebrity culture of the age, while some actively courted this connection to pursue their own political or financial agendas. However, using the receptions of three foreign heroes, the Marquis de Lafayette, Lajos Kossuth and John Bright, the article contends that we can still make valid distinctions between the two states through the analysis of cultural practice and discourse. In turn, by conceptualising ‘hero’ and ‘celebrity’ as two axes on the graph of fame, it is possible to use such analysis to assess more accurately a given individual’s public reputation.

This article explores the development of John Bright’s heroic status in America for his activities in helping to defuse Anglo-American tensions during the American Civil War and his promotion of the Union cause to British audiences. It argues that while revisionists have questioned the extent of Bright’s influence on British public opinion, they overlook his value to Lincoln’s administration as evidence of a putative ‘silent’ pro-northern majority in Britain, and the emotional impact of his oratory on ordinary Americans. Bright therefore acted as an unofficial ambassador from the people of Great Britain to the people of the United States, helping to moderate anti-British feeling. It concludes by considering how Bright’s post-bellum reputation was shaped by tensions between his wartime role and subsequent controversies over free trade.

This article uses the insights of material culture studies to explore the role of objects in the development of a politics of personality in the first half of the nineteenth century. Political objects were part of a broader material culture of fame and recognition in this period, encompassing a wide range of public figures such as royalty, military heroes and authors. These artefacts acquired agency, playing an important role in the construction of their subjects as recognizable public figures: an asset for popular politicians whose primary constituencies lay beyond the ranks of the enfranchised. By representing key moments in the public narrative of a politician's career, objects and other representations helped to cement the connection between individuals and the causes with which they were chiefly associated. Some objects, including jugs, teapots and other practical items, may have been used in the public performance of rituals of loyalty to a particular figure. Others, including the famous Staffordshire figurines, were designed for display in the home, becoming vehicles for the domestic re-enactment of public narratives and the performance or construction of personal loyalties and identities. The article concludes by considering the way in which objects associated with famous political figures, including autograph letters, signed prints or even more intimate objects such as locks of hair, could be used to forge real or imagined relationships between politicians and individual members of their wider public.

This compilation of writings focuses attention on neglected aspects of women's political activity during the 18th and 19th centuries, addressing religion, European nationalism, lifestyle and social protests against widow burning in India.

Testimonials were a ubiquitous form of public ritual in nineteenth-century Britain, and probably the most important way in which individual public service was recognized and rewarded. This article charts the emergence, development and decline of the testimonial, using accounts in the press, biographies and privately printed pamphlets. By placing them in their cultural context, it demonstrates the complex patterns of meaning that could be developed through these rituals, and uses them to throw new light on the controversy over paternalism and deference in factory culture, arguing that the role of testimonial occasions in that culture has been fundamentally misunderstood.

This article reassesses relations between the free-trade and anti-slavery movements in the mid-nineteenth century. It places well-known controversies over the removal of preferential import duties on free-grown sugar into the context of a broader and more complex relationship, in which the Anti-Corn Law League borrowed many of the tactics pioneered by the abolitionists, while also attempting to assume anti-slavery's mantle of moral reform. In particular, the article situates the campaigns in a transatlantic context complicated by the domestic agendas of American anti-slavery groups and southern cotton growers, both of whom tried to take advantage of the British free-trade movement for their own ends. Finally, it is argued that the apparent success of the League in forcing the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 not only contributed to the decline of anti-slavery as an effective extra-parliamentary movement, but also ensured that other moral reform campaigns such as the peace movement were forced to adopt the language and tactics of free-trade liberalism to survive, generating a lasting legacy that came to fruition with the emergence of the Gladstonian Liberal Party.

‘Civic pride’ is often studied in the abstract through architectural or institutional histories, or as a rather vague group attribute associated with pride in place or ideologies of urban ‘improvement’. This article offers a new perspective, using the unique journals of Leeds doctor John Deakin Heaton, together with the records of a range of cultural, medical and educational institutions, to analyse the matrix of social, familial, religious and professional identities which shaped the public activities of an influential but relatively obscure individual. It also explores the mechanisms through which Heaton influenced decision making, and the limits of his ability to promote public above personal or professional interest.

This book will be of interest to students and scholars of Britain, Ireland, continental Europe and North America in the nineteenth century, as well as general readers with an interest in the history of popular politics.

The third volume of Cobden's Letters covers the Crimean War, the Indian Mutiny, and the preliminary negotiations over the Anglo-French Commercial Treaty of 1860.

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.

Addressing the critical issues that were to bring Richard Cobden (18041865) to the attention of Europe's political classes, this volume provides a timely reassessment of his influence on the development of nineteenth-century economic ...