Histories of the Great Fire of London regularly mention and reproduce Valentine Knight's scheme for London's reconstruction, published in 1666, and note that he was imprisoned for his pains. His proposal, with new streets laid out on a rough grid and a canal through the heart of the city, has attained a walk-on part in longue durée histories of urban planning. However, Knight has remained a mysterious and little studied figure; the significance of his imprisonment and of the fact that his was the only scheme to be published remain unexplored. By reconstructing his biography and discovering the reason for his incarceration, and by relating his and the other proposals for the rebuilding of the capital after the fire to the history of public opinion, this article uses this episode to explore the tacit rules governing the discussion of public affairs in Restoration England. Further, by examining the publication history of all the immediate post-fire schemes for rebuilding London from 1666 to 1750, it traces how architectural plans gradually became objects for critical discussion in the worlds of print and periodical.

During the Exclusion Crisis (1678–83), political opinion polarized around the issue of who, or indeed what, should succeed Charles II. In addition to the labels “Whigs” and “Tories,” the rapid polarization of politics after 1681 resulted in the adoption of blue and red ribbons distinguishing the two movements. This article focuses on the Whigs’ blue ribbon, arguing that the device created the sense of an “imagined consensus” within the group's varied support base. The Whigs’ enemies used memories of Britain's troubled past in order to claim that ribbon wearing replicated the behavior of the Covenanter and Parliamentarian movements of the 1630s to 1650s. The history of ribbon wearing in England and Scotland since the 1630s suggests the Whigs were conscious of the blue ribbon's significance. This consciousness reflected an identification with the Covenanter and Parliamentarian movements that survived the Restoration. Evident in contemporary writings and speech, it has been overlooked by scholars of Restoration memory and remembering.

How did the character John Bull come to be so widely recognized as a stand-in for the British government or people? John Arbuthnot created the character in 1712 in a series of five pamphlets criticizing the British role in the War of the Spanish Succession, and for fifty years the character was mentioned only in references to Arbuthnot. In the late eighteenth century, John Bull began to appear in newspaper articles relating to other political contexts, eventually appearing in satires on all manner of British policies and characteristics, from taxes and the economy to xenophobia and imperialism. This essay argues that the American colonists adapted the character to their own purposes. This analysis contributes to the understanding of the content, political engagement, and spread of the press in eighteenth-century Britain and America. It also reveals one way that writers about British national identity and its symbolism accounted for an increasingly diverse global empire that could not be represented adequately by a single figurehead.

Despite having a powerful influence on the historiography of radicalism and nineteenth-century politics for the past several decades, the language of the constitution has not recently received scholarly attention. In Chartist and radical historiography, the constitution is usually treated as a narrative of national political development. This article extends the horizons of Chartist constitutionalism by exploring its similarities with American constitutionalism. By doing so, it also opens up questions regarding the ideas of the movement. Like the Americans sixty years before, the Chartists were confronted by a parliament that they believed had superseded its constitutional authority. This perception was informed by a belief that the constitution rested on the authority of the fixed principles of fundamental law, which they argued placed limits beyond which Parliament had no power to reach. As a result, the Chartists imagined that the British constitution functioned like a written constitution. To support this claim, they drew on a sophisticated interpretation of English law that argued that the common law was closely related to natural law.

The diaries and other papers of the Oxford classics teacher Arthur Sidgwick (1840–1920) show how men like Sidgwick used ancient Greek to demarcate the boundaries of an elite male social, emotional, and educational sphere, and how that sphere became more porous at the turn of the twentieth century through processes such as university coeducation. Progressive dons like Sidgwick stood by women's equality in principle but were troubled by the potential loss of an exceptional environment of intense friendships forged within intellectually rigorous single-sex institutions. Several aspects of Sidgwick's life and his use of Greek exemplify these tensions: his marriage, his feelings about close male friends, his life as a college fellow, his work on behalf of the Oxford Association for the Education of Women, and his children's lives and careers. The article recovers a lost world in which Greek was an active conversational language, shows how the teaching of classics and the inclusion of women were intimately connected in late-nineteenth-century Oxford, and suggests some reasons why that world endured for a certain period of time but ultimately came to an end. It offers a new way of explaining late-nineteenth-century cultural changes surrounding gender by placing education and affect firmly at their center.

This article examines images of Jesus broadcast on the BBC from the 1930s through the 1950s. During these years, the BBC sought to use its cultural influence to replace popular religiosity with what the clerics who staffed its Religious Broadcasting Department (RBD) regarded as a more masculine, modern, and vigorous national religious faith. To achieve this aim, the RBD marshaled the might of British New Testament scholarship and its image of a warrior-like, apocalyptic historical Jesus. Yet the RBD's hopes of bridging the gap between popular religiosity and its own vision of Christianity went unrealized. Programs on Jesus that reached a genuinely national audience—The Man Born to be King, Dorothy L. Sayers's wartime radio drama, and Jesus of Nazareth, a popular television series from the 1950s—instead featured Anglicized and ahistorical images deeply embedded within British popular culture. The story of Jesus on the BBC highlights both this popular culture's strength and Christian Britain's fragmentation.