Rohan Mcwilliam
Biographic Data
| ID | 1479770 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Rohan Mcwilliam |
| GIVEN NAMES | Rohan |
| FAMILY NAME | Mcwilliam |
| SIGNATURE | MCWILLIAM R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Anglia Ruskin University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4630-3758 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 53 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 12 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 52 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1989 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
British Masculinity in Transatlantic Cinema
Edwardian Follies
Journal Article Edwardian Follies Get access The Funniest Man in London: The Life and Times of H. G. Pélissier (1874–1913), Forgotten Satirist and Composer, Founder of The Follies: by Anthony Binns, Pett, East Sussex: Edgerton Publishing Services, 2022, ix + 242 pp., £20.00 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-9933203-8-5 Rohan McWilliam Rohan McWilliam Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK E-mail: [email protected] Search for other works by this au…
Democratic Passions
Rethinking the history of British popular culture, 1850–1914
This article explores the way in which the history of Victorian popular culture has been rethought by historians since 2000. In the mid to late 20th century, the social history of leisure was often shaped by Marxist assumptions and devoted to emphasising the role of social class in determining forms of pleasure. In the 21st century historiography, class still matters but so do issues around race, gender and space
Local Histories
Journal Article Local Histories Get access The Diaries of Anthony Hewitson, Provincial Journalist (Volume 1: 1865–1887): edited by Andrew Hobbs, Cambridge: Open Book, 2022, xlix + 672 pp., £25.95 (paperback), ISBN 9781800642362. This is available on open access at this link: .Prostitution in Victorian Colchester: Controlling the Uncontrollable: by Jane Pearson and Maria Rayner, Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2018, xii + 210 pp., £18…
The Gaiety Girl and the Matinee Idol
This study examines the role that musical comedy on stage played in shaping popular culture in the long Edwardian period (1890–1914). It is based around two iconic theatrical types of the period: the Gaiety Girl and the matinee idol. Historians have underestimated their importance and what they represented. These two are decoded as a way of understanding the development of a culture based upon glamour, celebrity, fashion, display and public forms…
Celebrities, Heroes and Champions
Journal Article Celebrities, Heroes and Champions: Popular Politicians in the Age of Reform, 1810–67, by Simon James Morgan Get access Celebrities, Heroes and Champions: Popular Politicians in the Age of Reform, 1810–67, by Simon James Morgan (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021: pp. xi + 308. £90). Rohan Mcwilliam Rohan Mcwilliam Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK [email protected] Search for other works by this author …
The Electric Pleasure District
This study examines the cultural work of the West End of London in the long Edwardian period (1880–1914). It argues that the pleasure district was changed in a number of ways in which electricity was one thread. The coming of electricity affected the character of the area, not only transforming theatre lighting but also introducing new forms of street advertising, notably on Piccadilly Circus. The West End was physically changed by the constructi…
Robert Paul and the Origins of British Cinema
Why do Victorianists so often ignore film? The obvious answer is that it came along towards the end of the period. This has tended to mean that the literature on early film has been left to film specialists. However, pictures had moved long before the moving picture. In 1781, Philip de Loutherbourg, stage artist at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, invented his small mechanical theatre, the Eidophusikon, which made images look as though they were mob…
Malcolm Chase (1957-2020)
Malcolm Chase, who has died aged sixty-three, was a strong supporter of History Workshop and a great embodiment of its ideals. He was steeped in the work of E. P. Thompson and cared passionately about history from below. One of the distinguishing features of Malcolm’s work was his deeply felt commitment to reconstructing the lives of the poor and taking their politics seriously. Like Thompson, he was particularly strong on the tone of workers’ vo…
London's West End
How did the West End of London become the world's leading pleasure district? What is the source of its magnetic appeal? How did the centre of London become Theatreland? 'London's West End, 1800-1914' is the first ever history of the area which has enthralled millions. The reader will discover the growth of theatres, opera houses, galleries, restaurants, department stores, casinos, exhibition centres, night clubs, street life, and the sex industry…
The Histrionic Art
This chapter is a study of West End theatre in the age of Romanticism. It explains the importance of the patent theatres (particularly those in Drury Lane and Covent Garden) and their attempts to retain a monopoly over the performance of the spoken word. This is then contrasted with the emergence of so-called ‘minor’ theatres in the West End such as the Lyceum, the Adelphi, and the Olympic. They became associated with new theatrical forms includi…
The Victorian National Theatre
Henry Irving once compared the business of theatre management to Monte Carlo. There was the possibility of riches but also the likelihood of going bust. He might have been describing Frederick Chatterton, manager of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, between 1862 and 1879. He took seriously the honour of running the West End’s oldest theatre with a history that included the performances of Garrick and the plays of Sheridan. Following the Theatre Regu…
Secular Martyrdom in Britain and Ireland
Edward Lloyd and His World
The publisher Edward Lloyd (1815-1890) helped shape Victorian popular culture in waysthat have left a legacy that lasts right up to today. He was a major pioneer of both popular fiction and journalism but has never received extended scholarly investigation until now. Lloydshaped the modern popular press: Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper became the first paper to sell over a million copies. Along with publishing songs and broadsides, Lloyd dominated the f…
Charles Dibdin and late Georgian culture
Alun Howkins
Shortly after Alun Howkins passed away in 2018, I wrote to Malcolm Chase at the University of Leeds lamenting this huge loss. Malcolm had been part of the Graduate School at the University of Sussex with me in the early 1980s. He responded by saying that Alun was really the ‘second supervisor for all of us’. This captures something of how we saw him. Second supervisors were less common at that time but we did not need one: we had Alun. No one emb…
From Scholarship Boy to Social Historian
John F. C. Harrison, who has recently passed away, was one of the founders of British social and labour History. Along with figures such as E.P. Thompson and Asa Briggs, Harrison put nineteenth-century social history on the scholarly map. He traced the histories of adult education, Owenism and popular millenarianism. Many came to Victorian history through his textbooks about the period. This appreciation traces his life and work, attempting to es…
Man about Town
This article aims to establish night life and pleasure districts as historical problems. It examines as its case study the Haymarket in London's West End between 1840 and 1880 when the street was notorious for louche entertainments aimed at younger members of the nobility. A moral panic developed around the street, particularly concerned with the high level of prostitution. The article looks at the Argyll Rooms dance hall at the top of the Haymar…
Going to the Palais
Listen to these names: the Hammersmith Palais, the Streatham Locarno, the Nottingham Palais de Danse, the Rialto (Liverpool), the Rivoli Ballroom (Manchester). They capture the dream worlds of mid
I Hope I Don’t Intrude
Politics, Performance and Popular Culture
It has been obvious for a while that ‘theatricality’ is a category whose time has come. Where social historians in the 1970s deployed the soft anthropological categories of ritual and symbol, they
George Augustus Sala and the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press
Full of Eastern Promise
Victorian Classical Burlesques
The Theatricality of the Staffordshire Figurine
Melodrama and the Historians
Research Article| October 01 2000 Melodrama and the Historians Rohan McWilliam Rohan McWilliam Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Radical History Review (2000) 2000 (78): 57–84. https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-2000-78-57 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Rohan McWilliam; Melodrama and the Historians. Radical History Review 1 October 2000; 2000 (78): 57–84. doi: https://doi.org/10.121…
Historical Perspectives on Class and Culture∗
Charles Dibdin and late Georgian culture
Man about Town
This article aims to establish night life and pleasure districts as historical problems. It examines as its case study the Haymarket in London's West End between 1840 and 1880 when the street was notorious for louche entertainments aimed at younger members of the nobility. A moral panic developed around the street, particularly concerned with the high level of prostitution. The article looks at the Argyll Rooms dance hall at the top of the Haymar…
Going to the Palais
Listen to these names: the Hammersmith Palais, the Streatham Locarno, the Nottingham Palais de Danse, the Rialto (Liverpool), the Rivoli Ballroom (Manchester). They capture the dream worlds of mid
Back to the future
Notes1 E. P. Thompson, ‘The peculiarities of the English’ in The Poverty of Theory, and Other Essays (London, 1978), 47. I would like to thank the following for their comments on this article: Kelly Boyd, Jim Obelkevich, Tony Taylor and Pamela Walker.2 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1968 [1963]).3 E. J. Hobsbawm, ‘The labour aristocracy in nineteenth-century Britain’ in Labouring Men: Studies in the History of La…
Jonathan Miller'sAlice In Wonderland(1966)
Political Movements in Urban England, 1832-1914
The old canard that political historians can be characterised by their resistance to ideas is firmly refuted by Matthew Roberts's new textbook, which scrutinises the modern literature on Victorian and Edwardian popular politics with flair and verve. Roberts writes as a revisionist, eager to show the way in which political history has developed new and sophisticated thinking in a post-Marxist age. The student reader (the main audience for this boo…
Short notices
Julian Hoppit, Risk and Failure in English Business, 1700–1800 (1987), vii + 228 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, £22.50). Brian Maidment, The Poorhouse Fugitives: Self‐taught Poets and Poetry in Victorian Britain (1987), 374 (Carcanet, Manchester, £14.95). Jane Fulcher. The Nation's Image. French Grand Opera as Politics and Politicized Art (1987), x + 280 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, £27.50). Jeffrey Haydu, Between Craft and Cl…
Currents of Radicalism
'Those who were originally called radicals and afterwards reformers, are called Chartists', declared Thomas Duncombe before Parliament in 1842, a comment which can be adapted for a later period and as a description of this collection of papers: 'those who were originally called Chartists were afterwards called Liberal and Labour activists'. In other words, the central argument of this book is that there was a substantial continuity in popular rad…
Short notices
Jeffrey Richards, Sex, Dissidence and Damnation. Minority Groups in the Middle Ages (1991), xii + 179 (Routledge, £25.00). Richard Holt and Gervase Rosser (eds), The English Medieval Town. A Reader in English Urban History 1200–1540 (1990), viii + 291 (Longman, £9.95). James E. Bradley, Religion, Revolution and English Radicalism: Nonconformity in Eighteenth‐Century Politics and Society (1990), xxii + 473 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, £…
Historical Perspectives on Class and Culture∗
The Crisis of Conservatism
The Crisis of Conservatism 1880-1914 offers a new interpretation of Conservative politics in the period 1880-1914 and comes to the startling conclusion that, but for the intervention of the First World War, there may well have been a 'Strange Death of Tory England.'
Television
Journal Article TELEVISION : The Civil War Get access Rohan McWilliam Rohan McWilliam Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar History Workshop Journal, Volume 39, Issue 1, SPRING 1995, Pages 202–204, https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/39.1.202 Published: 01 March 1995
Moments of Modernity
MOMENTS OF MODERNITY?: RECONSTRUCTING BRITAIN, 1945–1964, University of Portsmouth 9–10 July 1996 Get access Rohan McWilliam Rohan McWilliam Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar History Workshop Journal, Volume 43, Issue 1, SPRING 1997, Pages 284–286, https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/1997.43.284 Published: 01 January 1997
Melodrama and the Historians
Research Article| October 01 2000 Melodrama and the Historians Rohan McWilliam Rohan McWilliam Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Radical History Review (2000) 2000 (78): 57–84. https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-2000-78-57 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Rohan McWilliam; Melodrama and the Historians. Radical History Review 1 October 2000; 2000 (78): 57–84. doi: https://doi.org/10.121…
Cornwall Politics in the Age of Reform, 1790-1885, Edwin Jaggard
Journal Article Cornwall Politics in the Age of Reform, 1790–1885, Edwin Jaggard Get access Rohan McWilliam Rohan McWilliam Anglia Polytechnic University, Cambridge Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, Volume 116, Issue 466, April 2001, Pages 493–494, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/116.466.493 Published: 01 April 2001
The Arctic in the British Imagination, 1818-1914
1Anglia Polytechnic University, Cambridge The Arctic in the British Imagination, 1818–1914 Robert G.David ManchesterManchester U.P. 2000278£46
The Theatricality of the Staffordshire Figurine
Liberalism lite
Liberalism lite? Rohan McWilliam (bio) In June 1885, Benjamin Wilson, once one of the stalwarts of Halifax Chartism, organized a reunion of local former Chartists at Maude's Temperance Hotel. The occasion was the passing of the third Reform Bill, an event that signified to participants that the aims of the Chartist movement had largely been achieved. Speakers praised the social and political progress that had been made since the early Victorian d…
The Wonderful and Surprising History of Sweeney Todd
Reviewed by: The Wonderful and Surprising History of Sweeney Todd: The Life and Times of an Urban Legend Rohan McWilliam The Wonderful and Surprising History of Sweeney Todd: The Life and Times of an Urban Legend, by Robert L. Mack; pp. xx + 375. London and New York: Continuum, 2007, £25.00, $29.95. Compared with other icons of nineteenth-century fictional terror (the Frankenstein monster, Dracula, Mr. Hyde), Sweeney Todd has enjoyed relatively l…
The Cultural Turn in U.S. History
A Mad, Bad and Dangerous People? England, 1783–1846
The account of the nineteenth century in the New Oxford History of England series is now complete. Boyd Hilton and G.R. Searle have produced volumes that bookend K. Theodore Hoppen's The Mid-Victorian Generation which covered the years 1846–1886.1 One of the privileges of reviewing books like these is that one joins (I suspect) a minority of the book's actual readership: namely, people who read these books from cover to cover. The authors of thes…
Political Movements in Urban England, 1832-1914
The old canard that political historians can be characterised by their resistance to ideas is firmly refuted by Matthew Roberts's new textbook, which scrutinises the modern literature on Victorian and Edwardian popular politics with flair and verve. Roberts writes as a revisionist, eager to show the way in which political history has developed new and sophisticated thinking in a post-Marxist age. The student reader (the main audience for this boo…
Asa Briggs and the Making of Modern British History
Asa Briggs was one of the most influential historians in the post‐war world. He not only put the history of 19th century Britain on the map and fostered Victorian Studies but he became a key figure in the development of social history. Briggs has been an innovator, launching urban history, local history, labour history, media history and the history of material culture. Both in his career as an historian and as a university manager, he has encour…
Jonathan Miller'sAlice In Wonderland(1966)
The force of fashion in politics and society
Beverly Lemire , ed. , The force of fashion in politics and society: global perspectives from early modern to contemporary times ( Aldershot : Ashgate , 2010 . Pp. xviii + 280 . 3 figs. 2 maps. 4 tables. 28 illus. ISBN 9781409404927 Hbk. £60/$119.95 ) Why is fashion so often ignored by historians? This is the question that Lemire poses in the polemical introduction to this new collection, which attempts to change this state of affairs. Fashion's …
Gladstone Studies
‘The last quarter of the nineteenth century should have been the era of Randolph Churchill, Joseph Chamberlain and Parnell. Instead, it remained the age of a very elderly figure who would not retire and whom a vast portion of the electorate did not want to do so’ (p. 30). So writes the late Frank Turner in the first article of this eclectic and insightful new collection on William Gladstone. Most Victorian Prime Ministers can claim a cottage indu…
The Legend of Spring-Heeled Jack
Karl Bell, Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2012, vii +262 pp, £55.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-843-83787-9 If we were to compile a list of the things that made the Victorians different from the in
KATHRIN Levitan. A Cultural History of the British Census
Imperial Cities
Back to the future
Notes1 E. P. Thompson, ‘The peculiarities of the English’ in The Poverty of Theory, and Other Essays (London, 1978), 47. I would like to thank the following for their comments on this article: Kelly Boyd, Jim Obelkevich, Tony Taylor and Pamela Walker.2 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1968 [1963]).3 E. J. Hobsbawm, ‘The labour aristocracy in nineteenth-century Britain’ in Labouring Men: Studies in the History of La…
Elsa Lanchester and Bohemian London in the Early Twentieth Century
Elsa Lanchester (1902–86) is best known today as a character actress in Hollywood, who played the title role in the Bride of Frankenstein. Less well known is her remarkable early life in Britain where she participated in the avant-garde through dance, theatre, film and other forms of performance. This article explores Lanchester's world before her marriage to the actor Charles Laughton in 1929 to investigate aspects of bohemian culture in the ear…
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