Location
Collingwood College Penthouse Conference Suite, Durham University
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This two-day conference will explore why, how, to what ends, and with what effects people in Britain and Ireland organised and were organised for political purposes during the long nineteenth century, one that has been seen as an age of association.
This event will be hybrid. Registration will open in May and close on 5 July for in-person attendance and on 17 July for online attendance, via:
All are also welcome to attend the book launch for Henry Miller’s A Nation of Petitioners: Petitions and Petitioning in the United Kingdom, 1780-1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023). It will take place on Wednesday, 19 July 2023, 4-5pm, PG.21 (Palace Green 21). Contact: henry.j.miller@durham.ac.uk
DAY ONE: THURSDAY 20 JULY
8.30AM – 9.15AM Registration (Lobby) and refreshments (Boardroom)
9.15AM – 10.30AM Keynote talk (Penthouse Suite Room A/B)
Professor Katrina Navickas (University of Hertfordshire): ‘Practical representation and battles over locality: the importance of place in British popular politics in the long nineteenth century’
10.30AM – 11AM Refreshments (Boardroom)
NB: During this break the Penthouse Suite will be split into rooms A and B for the panel sessions
11AM – 12.20PM Panel Session One
Panel 1.A (Room A) Politics and emotions
Nicholas Barone (Princeton University): ‘“The indifference is the deadweight of history”: Apathy and British Radical Politics, 1790-1840’
Professor Matthew Roberts (Sheffield Hallam University): ‘Cobden, Peel, the Anti-Corn Law League and the Politics of Feeling in Mid-Victorian England’
Dr Laura C. Forster (Manchester University): ‘The political lecture tour in nineteenth-century Britain: activism, hospitality and intimacy on the road’
Panel 1.B (Room B) Politics of land
Dr Lowri Ann Rees (Bangor University): ‘Protesting paternalism: the Rebecca Riots as a political protest movement in south-west Wales’
Dr Brian Casey (Durham University): ‘Michael Davitt’s second tour of the Scottish Highlands, 1887’
Dr Andrew Phemister (Newcastle University): ‘“A usurpation of the functions of government”: Boycotting, democracy and the state’
12.20PM – 1PM Lunch (Boardroom)
1PM – 2.20PM Panel Session Two
Panel 2.A (Room A) Politics in Ireland
Patrick Duffy (Trinity College Dublin): ‘“The gap of the north”: territorial rhetoric, identity and a frontier mentality in south Ulster, 1828-35’
Professor Peter Gray (Queen’s University Belfast): ‘Radicalism and its discontents in early-Victorian Belfast: The Ulster Constitutional Association, 1840-41’
Dr Colin Reid (Sheffield University): ‘Crisis management: the world of Irish Toryism during the 1830s and 1840s’
Panel 2.B (Room B) Politics in the age of reform
Dr Philip Salmon (History of Parliament): ‘Marrying for the vote: the political organisation of marriage in the UK’s freeman boroughs, 1800-1840’
Professor Richard Huzzey (Durham University), with Dr Kathryn Rix (History of Parliament): ‘Exclusive dealing and the politics of organisation in the age of reform’
Dr Martin Spychal (History of Parliament): ‘“she, yes she was the only member of Parliament”: Harriet Grote and the organisation of radicalism, 1832-41’
2.20PM – 2.45PM Refreshments (Boardroom)
2.45PM – 4.05PM Panel session 3
Panel 3.A (Room A) Four nations politics
Dr Kyle Thompson (Pittsburg State University): ‘The Young Scots Society and Gladstone’ (Online)
Dr Shaun Evans (Bangor University): ‘Landowners against land reform: the aims and activities of the North Wales Property Defence Association, c.1886-96’
Dr Niall Whelehan (University of Strathclyde): ‘Land, Rent and Irish Migrant Activism in late-nineteenth century Britain’
Panel 3.B (Room B) Inside and out of parliament
James Peate (Bristol University): ‘Friends of the People? Populism, Loyalism and Reform in the 1790s’
Sarah Boote-Powell (Warwick University): ‘“The sinews bag unstrung”: the organisation and practice of electoral registration in local politics in Coventry and Leicester, 1832-41’
Tom Musgrove (Queen Mary, University of London): ‘Representing the Balkans: “Expert” Image-Making and the Balkan Committee, 1903-1914’
4.05PM – 4.25PM Refreshments (Boardroom)
4.25PM – 5.45PM Panel session 4
Panel 4.A (Room A) Knowledge and morality
Josh Smith (University of Stirling): ‘“Friends to the diffusion of knowledge”: The Associational Politics and Patronage of the British Subscription Library, 1800-1832’ (Online)
George Palmer (University of Cambridge): ‘Tory Faddism? The Church of England Temperance Society and the Politics of Conservative Morality in the Late Nineteenth Century’
Olly Gough (University of Oxford): ‘History, Voluntary Association and the State in British Political Thought, 1870-1914’
Panel 4.B (Room B) Political writing
Dr Marion Loeffler (Cardiff University): ‘Dissenters, Poets and Dangerous Translations: Undercover Radicals in 1790s Wales’
Dr Vic Clarke (Durham University): ‘Advertising Radicalism: Identity and Collective Branding in the Chartist Press’
Dr Martin Wright (Cardiff University): ‘Print Culture, Language and Radical Networks in Welsh Socialism before the Great War’
5.45PM-6.45PM Drinks reception (Boardroom)
Generously co-sponsored by Centre for Nineteenth Century Studies and History of Parliament Trust
7PM – conference dinner (location TBC)
DAY TWO: FRIDAY 21 JULY
8.30AM – 9AM Registration (Lobby) and refreshments (Boardroom)
9AM – 10.20AM Panel session 5 (Penthouse Suite Room A/B)
Visual and material cultures
Dr Henry Miller (Durham University): ‘Petitions and the material culture of political organisation’
Dr Chloe Ward (Queen Mary, University of London): ‘Art and Action: Victorian Painting as a Call to Arms’
Professor James Thompson (University of Bristol): ‘The visual culture of demonstrations, c. 1880-1914’
10.20AM – 10.50AM Refreshments (Boardroom)
NB: During this break the Penthouse Suite will be split into rooms A and B for the panel sessions
10.50AM – 12.10PM Panel session 6
Panel 6.A (Room A) Regional politics
Professor Simon Morgan (Leeds Beckett University): ‘“The mainspring of the movement”: Richard Cobden’s letters and the regional organisation of the Anti-Corn Law League’
Dr Kathryn Rix (History of Parliament): ‘Between the centre and the constituencies: regional party organisation in England in the wake of the Third Reform Act’
Professor Ewen Cameron (University of Edinburgh): ‘Joe Duncan and the challenge of Labour organisation and activism in the east of Scotland, 1906 to 1914’
Panel 6.B (Room B) Suffragette politics
Dr Mari Takayanagi (Parliamentary Archives): ‘Suffragette activism in the Palace of Westminster’
Dr Erin Geraghty (University of the West of England): “‘‘It is not nationality, but personality that counts”: English suffragists in the Irish suffrage movement’
Dr Kate Connelly (New York University, London): ‘…And Whose Army?’
12.10PM – 12.50PM Lunch (Boardroom)
12.50PM – 2.10PM Panel session 7
Panel 7.A (Room A) Politics of space
Mary O’Connor (University of Oxford): ‘Forum Selection in the Anti-Corn Law Campaign of the 1820s’
Dave Steel (Warwick University): ‘The Power of the Crowd’
Dr Caitlin Kitchener (York University): ‘Political Palimpsests: How landscape, memory, and heritage organised mass platform meetings in early nineteenth radicalism’
Panel 7.B (Room B) Politics of association
Dr Francis Calvert Boorman (Institute of Advanced Legal Studies): ‘Independence or interference?: Arbitration and working-class associational culture in nineteenth-century England’
Dr Dan Weinbren (Open University): ‘Friendly societies and the performance of fraternal democracy’
Professor Graeme Morton (University of Dundee): ‘Politicising Middle-Class Associational Culture in a Stateless Nation’
2.10PM – 2.25PM Refreshments
2.25PM – 3.45PM Panel session 8
Panel 8.A (Room A) Women in politics
Dr Ciara Stewart (National Library of Ireland): “‘The Tyrannous and Immoral Law” Petitioning Against the Contagious Diseases Acts in Britain and Ireland: A Comparative Perspective’
Natasha Booth-Johnson (University of Birmingham): ‘Isabella Ford and the Dream of a Lesbian Utopia’
Dr Helen Sunderland (University of Oxford): ‘Schoolgirl electioneering: mock elections and political culture in girls’ schools in Edwardian England’
Panel 8.B (Room B) Politics of empire
Isaiah Silvers (Durham University): ‘Voluntarism and political conflict in Barbados, 1807-1834’
Dr Tom Scriven (Oxford Brookes University): ‘Transatlantic democracy and the Chartist positions on slavery and abolition, 1838-1856’
Professor Andrea Major (University of Leeds): ‘Political Activism, Colonial Philanthropy, and Spaces of Empire: George Thompson in Britain and India, 1838-43’
Thank you to the following sponsors:
British Agricultural History Society
Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies
Durham University Faculty of Arts and Humanities
History of Parliament Trust
Leverhulme Trust
Past & Present Society
Social History Society
Society for the Study of Labour History