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Autumn Events at The Guild

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MICHAELMAS 2012

The nineteenth century saw massive changes in the material organisation of society. How did the people who lived through them experience these changes? The Guild is pleased to announce its programme of events for 2012/13

When?   Every Second Monday of Full Term, 2-4pm

Where?  Room SG1, Alison Richards Building, 7 West Road, Cambridge

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15 October

Ruskin and Cultural Value

Professor Robert Hewison

Professor in Leadership and Cultural Policy Studies, City University London

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29 October

Victorian Narratives of the Reformation of Work

Dr. Jocelyn Betts

Junior Research Fellow, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge

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12 November

Air and the Question of Mental and Physical Performance in Nineteenth Century Environmental Design

Dr. Henrik Schoenefeldt

Lecturer of Sustainable Architecture, University of Kent

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26 November

Cabinet Makers, Bodgers, Scampers and Slop Work: Issues in Nineteenth Century Working Practices in the Furniture Trade

Professor Clive Edwards

Professor of Design History, Loughborough University

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A map of the venue is available here

Please check the CRASSH website for more information.

Death and the American Civil War

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Drew Gilpin Faust (currently president of Harvard) was at the Huntington Library in California last week. She was speaking about her book This Republic of Suffering and the TV show based on it – Death and the Civil War. No prizes for guessing what they’re about.

Gilpin’s subject is a shattering one. Historians’ current best guess is that 750,000 died in the American Civil War. In the South, about one in five white men of military age were killed. The book is pretty powerful as a document of the suffering Americans endured in the 1860s – and for decades after as they remembered those they had lost.

The analytical thrust of the book is built around the argument that the American Civil War forged a new relationship between state and citizen. This new relationship was born of the struggle to cope with the scale of death.

The American Civil War is often called the first modern war – but its armies were organized in the same rudimentary way that fighting forces had been for centuries. Commanding officers reported to their chain of command, but there were no systems for administering the army as a whole. Without central record-keeping or a large bureaucracy neither army was equiped to keep track of inividual soliders. Reporting the death of a soldier to his family was a matter for his friends or the commander of his unit. In the confusion of long campaigns miles from home many of the dead were simply lost. Their families would never learn what happened to them, nor where they had been buried.

As the war dragged on a patchwork of charitable and, in the North, government agencies began compiling information for families searching for missing men. But it was not until the war neared its end that the state took on responsibility for those who had fallen on its behalf. Tales of desecration of Union soldiers’ grave in the South led to the creation of the first national cemetries where the Northern dead were collected together and, where possible, identified.

Gilpin argues that this moment marks the emergence of a modern notion of the reciprocal duties linking state and citizen. The rhetoric of nationhood which emerged as the Civil War progressed increasingly stressed the idea that the dead were paying a price in blood for the preservation of the nation (Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is a case in point). The correlate of the sacrifice the state demanded of its citizens was a duty it owed them even in death. From the Civil War onwards, every soldier should be accounted for and, wherever possible, brought home or buried with honour. The military cemetries of the 20th century are a sign of the enduring importance of this commitment.

Faust is certainly right to identify the emergence of a new relationship between the state and those who fell for it in the American Civil War. For example, war memorials to the Civil War dead are common in America. This response to conflict would not be seen in Europe for decades – I know of a few for the Boer War in Britain (as well as the Crimea memorial outside Westminster Abbey), but not until the First World War did the become widespread.

However, neither the scale of the conflict nor the notion that the future of the state rested on the sacrfices of the dead are enough to explain these developments alone. After all, many early modern wars such as the Thirty Years War or the English Civil Wars displayed one or both of these charecteristics.

The scale of suffering was important. But the new relationship between state and citizen manifested in the national cemetries of the Civil War was also born out of a conjunction of democratic ideologies (which were central to the North’s self-image after the Emancipation Proclamation) and new administrative systems which made it possible to account for individuals for the first time. These provided motives and methods for dealing with the dead in a new way. In the modern age, the state would use its administrative capabilities to recognise the claim that every citizen made to equality before it and in its service.

Conference in Cambridge: ‘Work Ethics: Rethinking Literary Labour in the Long Nineteenth Century’

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An interdisciplinary conference convened by Marcus Waithe (English, Magdalene College) and Claire White (French, Peterhouse) with the support of CRASSH, University of Cambridge

Saturday 6 October 2012 at Magdalene College, Cambridge

La Bruyère discovered the world’s erroneous estimate of literary labour: ‘There requires a better name to be bestowed on the leisure (the idleness he calls it) of the literary character, and that to meditate, to compose, to read and to be tranquil, should be called working.’
— Isaac D’Israeli, The Literary Character of Men of Genius, Drawn from their Own Feelings and Confessions(1818)

Should writing ‘be called working’, as La Bruyère argued? How have writers projected and problematised their labours against a changing understanding of what it means to ‘work’? Have they operated at a remove from dominant modes and measures of productivity or sought an accommodation? In what sense is literary activity poised between labour and idleness?

This symposium brings together researchers from across the humanities to address the enduringly troubled relationship between writing and ‘work’. It raises questions that are topical when cuts in public spending are prompting scrutiny of what we mean by ‘cultural production’. At the same time, this is a debate with deep historical roots. By taking the long view, this event aims to shed fresh light on some unusually persistent problems. Papers will focus on Western European writing between c. 1790-c. 1910, a formative period in our understanding of the terms of labour, writing and idleness. Against the emergent pressures of labour politics and developing paradigms of industrial production, the conditions of ‘literary labour’ were being scrutinised and reformulated with new urgency.

This event will explore new connections between social history and literary history, focusing less on the depiction of work in others, than on the representation, and self-representation, of writers as ‘workers’. As such, it responds to recent critical interest in the testimony of writers, in the formal qualities of the writing process, and in the scope for its reform or restoration as ‘work’.

Participants include:

Morag Shiach (English, Vice Principal QMUL)
Richard Salmon (English, Leeds)
Ross Wilson (Literature, Drama and Creative Writing, East Anglia)
Richard Hibbitt (French, Leeds)
John Hughes (Dean and Chaplain, Jesus College)
Nicholas White  (French, Cambridge)
Claire White (French, Cambridge)
Marcus Waithe (English, Cambridge)

For more information and online registration please click here.