Susan Pedersen is writing a book about late Victorian marriage and politics.
This is the third full biography of A.J.P. Taylor to appear since his death in 1990. I find this fact almost more interesting than anything in the biographies themselves. For more than two decades after the war Taylor was, very nearly, the public face of the historical profession in Britain, delivering his pugnacious, often revisionist, views on television and radio, in more than two dozen...
Imagine you are hired, fresh out of college at the age of 24, as tutor to the teenage daughter of the chancellor of the exchequer. His wife is away in the country much of the time; he wanders about 11 Downing Street in his carpet slippers. He looks at you a lot, and brushes up against you in the hallway when he passes. You know he has a terrible reputation but if you are honest with yourself...
When I was an undergraduate in the United States in the late 1970s and early 1980s, social history was a much admired discipline. We trudged across campus lawns with sacred texts in our rucksacks (The Making of the English Working Class, Work and Revolution in France), convinced that we were acquiring the tools to explain – and, we naturally assumed, alter – relations of power and...
Simply explaining the revolting details of mid-19th-century vaccination does much to render its critics understandable. Vaccination was hardly a matter of ‘clean needles’: at that time it did not involve needles at all. Instead, the infant’s skin was scored with a lancet in several places and viral material rubbed into the wound. Eight days later, the parent was required to bring the child back: those who had developed vesicles had the lymph harvested for direct application to another child. This ‘arm to arm’ method was cheaper than vaccination with calf lymph but was, unsurprisingly, much resented by the poor, who could neither prevent their children from being used as a sort of petri dish for the cultivation of vaccine material.
In January 1866, on a bitterly cold night, a man dressed in ragged clothes begged for a night’s lodging in the male casual ward of Lambeth workhouse. On entering, he was made to strip and plunge into bathwater so polluted with use that it looked ‘disgustingly like weak mutton broth’; he was then issued with a towel and a regulation striped cotton shirt, and shown into a...
Susan Pedersen talks to Joanna Biggs about Shelagh Delaney and her landmark 1958 play, A Taste of Honey.
Susan Pedersen on the birth of ‘International Relations’.
I have often thought of writing a history of own goals. It would try to identify the factors common to the great boomerangs of the past: the conceit that mistakes itself for cunning, the...
When Susan Pedersen writes that Eleanor Rathbone was the most significant woman in British politics in the first half of the 20th century she might have added that another Somerville alumna,...
In the Seventies and Eighties, right-wing think-tanks and their academic lapdogs put about the idea that the ills of contemporary Britain were fundamentally due to its genteel aversion to...
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