Long-Nineteenth Century Seminar

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The first of a new seminar series hosted by Manchester Metropolitan University.

About this event

In order to foster collaboration within the field of long-nineteenth century studies, this event marks the first of a new research seminar series hosted by Manchester Metropolitan University.

Our presentations will offer opportunities to discuss cutting-edge approaches and findings to key topics of concern during a period of immense change that continues to inspire reflection.

Lucinda Matthews-Jones will explore how photographs enable historians to understand the visual utterances of homosocial relationships in cross-class organisations. It explores how peer-to-peer and cross-class homosocial relationships were captured by photographers working at Rugby Club, West London. Photographs offer us the rare chance to uncover working-class male experiences of club life, so often missing in written accounts of the social settlement movement. The article considers how photography captured the performances of peer-to-peer and cross-class friendships. It does this through an exploration of the Rugby Club’s summer camp photographs. These photographs gesture to how homosociability within a cross-class space was both vertical (peer-to-peer) and horizonal (hierarchical by class and age). The performances of homosociality enacted push against the argument that heteronormativity imposed bodily restriction on men and that all-male associations were able to be enact closeness and personal connection.

Hollie Geary-Jones will analysehow nineteenth-century sex workers faced constant surveillance in England. It explores how legality controlled every aspect of sex workers lives. The paper reveals how the Regulatory System produced the sex worker as a social ‘deviant’. It reviews the legal, medical, and cultural impact of the Contagious Diseases Acts (1864, 1866, 1869). It demonstrates how sex workers were subject to confining regulations regarding their dress, body, behaviour, and movements. It analyses how sex workers were forced into a distinct cultural identity. It reviews the process of arrest and registration which inscribed ‘prostitutes’ onto an official, public register. The paper argues that English legality mirrored Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon Principles (1791). It demonstrates how the Regulatory System was centred upon surveillance from arrest through to inscription. The paper examines the controlled realm of commercial sex both within and outside brothels, prisons, and hospitals. It reveals the extent in which English legality curbed ‘prostitutes’ personal agency. It demonstrates how strict surveillance served as a mechanism of social control. The paper reveals how the fear of being watched forced sex workers into legal and medical compliance. It determines how individuals suffered due to juxtaposing regulations; Sex workers must remain hidden but visible to those who were searching for them. Finally, the paper demonstrates how sex workers were able to avoid constant surveillance and criminalization. Through deliberate adjustments to their clothing, body, and behaviour, sex workers could reclaim personal agency.

About our speakers

Lucinda Matthews-Jones is a senior lecturer at Liverpool John Moores University, where she teaches nineteenth-century gender and urban modules. She researches the British settlement movement and has published articles in Victorian Studies, Historical Journal, Cultural and Social Studies, and Journal of Victorian Culture. She co-edited Material Religion in Modern Britain, with Timothy W. Jones. She is currently writing her monograph Settling: The Making of the British Settlement Movement, 1880-1920.

Hollie Geary-Jones is a PhD candidate and Visiting Lecturer at the University of Chester. Her research is titled: ‘The Nineteenth-Century Sex Worker in Fact and Fiction: Infectious Performance and Dressing the Self’. Her interdisciplinary thesis examines the extent in which French and English sex workers were able to mislead society through clothing, body, and behaviour. (Twitter Handle @HollieGJ1)