Abstracts

Heritage, museums and memorialisation in the Salvation Army

Steven Spencer, Salvation Army International Heritage Centre

The Salvation Army was founded in 1865 as a Christian revival mission which had developed into a charitable trust by the end of the century. This Victorian movement has continued into the twenty-first century as a church and charity. The first attempts at memorialisation began after the death of the founder, William Booth, in 1912. It was not until 1926, however, that the first dedicated Salvation Army museum was set up, and that as part of the British Empire exhibition at Wembley. The first volume of an official history was not published until after the Second World War.

The Wembley museum was one ancestor of the modern Salvation Army International Heritage Centre which holds archives, books and objects to tell the story of the Salvation Army across museums in London and Nottingham. This paper looks at the evolution of the Salvation Army's museums and the role of the Heritage Centre, originally as an internal resource telling a Salvation Army story and now as an external facing research centre working with the public and academics, as well as providing information governance functions for the Salvation Army. The paper will consider how the concerns of the Salvation Army in the present can draw on the representation of similar issues in the archives.

Biography

Steven Spencer has been Director of The Salvation Army International Heritage Centre since 2016. He is also an Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck's Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies. Steven received an MA in History from Canterbury Christ Church University (2005) and a Graduate Diploma in Archives & Records Management from UCL (2008). He has published articles on the temperance movement, Victorian periodicals and the architecture of Salvation Army halls.

Belonging to elite knowledge networks: how subscription libraries shaped and maintained power structures in the English provinces

Amber Flood, University of Exeter

The records of nineteenth century subscription libraries in provincial towns can help weave together narratives of how social hierarchies were shaped and organised in England. Uncatalogued committee minutes, notices and manuscripts gathering dust in cupboards, or discovered behind library shelving units contain telling evidence of local power structures and intellectual gatekeeping practices. Established for elites and the rising middle classes, subscription libraries aimed to be local repositories, knowledge disseminators and sociable outposts for the travelling gentry and professionals. The archives of surviving independent libraries provide a window into physical and symbolic social boundaries that were sustained by associations and far-reaching imagined communities. However, their associations with clubs, societies and authoritative figures in regionally distant areas varied depending on the location of the subscription library and the specific connections of its members. Though these institutions operated similarly in the Victorian period and had similar aspirations, the records demonstrate that they evolved and were shaped by different influences, such as local character, infrastructure and geography. The Devon and Exeter Institution, for example, had a strong Anglican character, and had a special admission option for members of the military and navy. The Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society, on the other hand, had strong Unitarian and industrial influences. This paper will therefore illustrate how independent library archives are instructive for understanding how power was constituted differently in different regions during the Victorian period. Minute books, visitors' books, library collections and museum collections will be drawn on for this purpose.

Biography

Amber Flood is a final year collaborative PhD student studying social change in English subscription libraries during the long-nineteenth century. Her work focuses on mechanisms of knowledge exclusion through the lens of class, gender, associational culture, and imperialism. Amber is also interested in the emotions linked to identity defining spaces in the nineteenth century, like libraries and museums.

“A trusted, second home”: belonging in settlement history and belonging in the settlement community

Dr Lucinda Matthews-Jones (Liverpool John Moores University), Dr Jane Skelding, and (in absence) Professor Georgina Brewis (UCL)

The settlement movement was founded in 1883 to reconnect rich and poor together as neighbours. Unlike other Victorian institutions, settlement houses were unique in the philanthropic landscape in that they provided wealthier individuals (often from middle class background) with somewhere to live in working-class urban class districts. From its inception, the movement centred the building of social cohesion, neighbourliness and belonging through its buildings and relational infrastructure. Today, the residential component of the movement has been largely removed, but many settlements continue to be place-based charities in their historic neighbourhoods.

Drawing on relationships with Oxford House, St Margaret's House, St Hilda's East (SHE), and Toynbee Hall, our paper will examine how settlements continue to be understood as homelike spaces. Scholars of the initial settlement movement have often emphasised the movement's domestic ideas and practices. This paper reflects on how contemporary users have extended this to convey their attachment to the settlement and their neighbourhood. We will draw on community-led workshops that we ran in March 2026 and a series of creative workshops at SHE to consider how belonging continues to be maintained by former settlements at a time when ‘trusted, second home[s]' are needed in a cost of living crisis, urban deprivation and loneliness epidemic.

Biographies

Georgina Brewis is Professor of Social History at UCL Institute of Education. She is a social historian of higher education, voluntary action and humanitarianism in Britain and the wider world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She has recently published Student London: A New History of Higher Education in the Capital (2026) and A Social History of Student Volunteering: Britain and Beyond (2014).

Lucinda Matthews-Jones is a reader in Victorian History at Liverpool John Moores University. Her research focusses on the British settlement movement in the nineteenth century. She is currently writing a monograph on this topic, having published articles in Victorian Studies, Gender & History, The Historical Journal, to name a few. She has worked extensively with settlement partners and community audiences to think about their history.

Jane Skelding has a BA in Modern History from the University of Bristol and a Masters in Research (MRes) from the Institute of Historical Research, School of Advanced Study. Based at the Institute of English Studies, she recently completed her Collaborative Doctoral Award PhD in partnership with FindMyPast.

Hostile environments: Victorian prison archives

Professor Caroline Bressey

The over representation of people of colour in prison systems of former settler colonies is well-known. In the United States, Angela Davies has observed the history of prisons is understood to be closely intertwined with slavery and racism. In Britain, the extent to which longer histories of racism, enslavement and empire are intertwined in these modern racisms are seldom acknowledged or widely discussed in Britain. This paper draws on my own concerns with publishing research I have undertaken on the lives of Black men found within the archives of the nineteenth century English prison system, and the limitations of methodologies that draw attention to stereotypes of ‘Black men' and ‘crime', particularly in visual forms. My concerns around using prison archives has led me to publish little of this research to date; yet these are concerns other outlets do not share. Articles on newly published digitised databases of ‘Victorian criminals' have provided pages of sensationalist othering in national newspapers; a process that also reinforces the imagined geographies of whiteness of the urban poor in Victorian England. In this paper I consider what methodologies could possibly overcome the concerns I have regarding publishing work on Black men in Victorian prisons, but also how the decision to publish or not to publish may challenge or enable the marginalisation of heritage sites Black people may or may not engage with.

Biography

Caroline Bressey is Professor of Historical Geography, in the Department of Geography, University College London. Her research focuses upon recovering the Black presence in late nineteenth and early twentieth century England, especially the lives of Black women in London. Her research draws from fan mail, art works and photography, prison, hospital and asylum records as well as exploring the possibilities of surfacing lives through the digital newspaper archive. Parallel to this are her interests in ideas of racism and anti-racism in the late Victorian society. This was the focus of her book on the historical geographies of perhaps Britain's first anti-racist periodical Anti-Caste in, ‘Empire, Race and the Politics of Anti-Caste' (Bloomsbury Academic) which won the Women's History Network Book Prize in 2014, and the Robert and Vineta Colby Scholarly Book Prize in 2015. Her interests in how history is represented in heritage spaces has led to curatorial collaborations with the National Portrait Gallery, London, the London Museum Docklands, and Tate Britain including an intervention on The Cinema in the ‘Dreams and Realities' gallery of inter-war art, during the summer of 2025.

The Ashanti Spoils (1896): Crown agents, museums and Scotland Yard

Dr Lewis Ryder (University of Lincoln)

This paper outlines British museum's active pursuit of colonial spoils in the late nineteenth century, and the administrative and intellectual – but not ethical – problems these objects presented. It does so through examining the spoils of war seized by the British military following their victory in the Fourth Anglo-Ashanti War (1896). I will first explore the different motivations behind a range of museums coveting of the spoils, before turning to the men standing between them and the objects - the Crown Agents. Often overlooked in the literature on loot, this paper homes in on the Crown Agents to interrogate how they navigated their roles as temporary custodians of colonial loot. By 1896 they had some experience in managing such objects, but a case of stinking, blood splattered stools presented new problems. How the agents dealt with these stools tells us a lot about perceptions of Africa, knowledge networks and the normalisation of violence in Late Victorian Britain.

Biography

Dr Lewis Ryder is a historian of modern Britain with specific interests in empire, collecting and museums. As an Early Career Leverhulme Fellow at the University of Lincoln he is researching the emotional politics of British colonial looting. His first monograph, Connoisseurs and Conmen, published with Manchester University Press earlier this year explores the rivalry between a trickster collector and British museum authorities in the early twentieth century to investigate how the democratisation of culture impacted collectors and museums.

The Burden of Empire: The Impact of Colonial Masculinity on Armed anti-Colonial Resistance in India

Shriya Dasgupta (Purdue University)

Examining how Victorian ideologies operated as a mechanism of political and cultural suppression in colonial Bengal in the late 19th-early 20th century, this study argues that while the British Empire constructed and imposed racialized ideas of gender on Bengalis drawing on Victorian ideas of masculinity, the anticolonial revolutionaries' attempt to reclaim a masculine voice replicated the same gendered notions perpetrated by the very Empire they sought to overthrow. The study demonstrates that the socio-economic factors that gave rise to the fear of emasculation in Victorian Britain followed by the industrial revolution, also led to the gendered construction of society in colonial Bengal as a result of the deindustrialization of the colony. Scholars such as Partha Chatterjee argue that when bhadralok men (upper-caste, upper-class educated Bengalis) lost control over the outside world, they shifted focus inwards in an attempt to control the domestic life. The British constructed a stark opposition between the ‘manly Englishman' (embodying vigor, strength, athleticism, self-control, and discipline) and the ‘effeminate Bengali' (constructed as bookish and lacking the necessary martial prowess for self-governance). This racialized ideal of manliness, tied to notions of being the superior and virile race, served as one of the key social justifications for British presence in India. Moreover, the colonies itself served as a crucial site for remasculinization for British men, resolving domestic anxieties prevalent during the late Victorian and Edwardian periods regarding effeminization. The Indian armed revolutionaries responded by engaging in muscular nationalism, a counterstrategy promoting physical culture and ‘man-making education' to assert indigenous virility. This counter-masculinity involved strict bodily discipline, including enforcing celibacy (brahmacharya) to conserve vital fluids and linking individual male strength to national vitality, reflecting anxieties about degeneration of the nation — almost all of which played out earlier in England as well.

Biography

Shriya Dasgupta is a 2nd year PhD History student at Purdue University. She is the founder of Agnijug Archive, a digital repository that aims to document oral histories of anticolonial Indian revolutionaries and the spirit of resistance that they espoused. Her research explores 20th century South Asian history with a focus on colonial Bengali women, displacement, forced migration, and the role of autobiographies as a means to construct parallel history.

Coercive Care for Penitent Women: The Reform Home for Sex Workers in Wellclose Square, 1830-1875

Dr Catherine Phipps

This paper considers how heritage spaces can approach histories of sex work, empire and “care” under coercive conditions. At the outset of a Leverhulme fellowship examining reform homes for sex workers established by religious groups in Britain and the British Empire, I examine how religious groups in Victorian Britain cared for women who sold sex in port cities as a way to enforce racial boundaries and the imperial hierarchies. This includes the case study of the Maritime Penitent Female Refuge in Wellclose Square, a reform home established in 1830 at the heart of London's “sailortown” to try to curb the visibility of women selling sex to seafarers. Hundreds of women stayed here in the 19th century, following the home's draconian rules to try to prove that they were “penitent” and could start a new life in domestic service in parts of the British Empire. Many women who sold sex in the 19th century used a language of melodrama and white victimhood to invoke support from charitable patrons. As well as considering the racialised motivations of Victorian “care”, this paper also offers ways for historians and heritage organisations to engage with sources in ways that that offer insight into women's lives, experiences and motivations.

Biography

Catherine Phipps is a Senior Research Associate at the University of Bristol. Her research examines the history of gender, sexuality and empire. She recently received funding for a Leverhulme early career fellowship for “Of Magdalenes and Missionaries: Sex Work, Christian Missionaries and the British Empire” and her monograph on sexuality in the French Empire in Morocco will be published next year by Manchester University Press.

Lacemaking and the Therapeutic: Weaving Everyday Histories of the Victorian Asylum

Professor Alana Harris (King's College London)

In Victorian asylums, female pauper patients were often encouraged to engage in lace making and needlework as a form of ‘moral therapy’. Photography in medical case books often features portraits of patients with elaborate lace collars – probably made by themselves and expressive of their individuality over standard-issue institutional dress. Archived inventory books provide testimony also to the ubiquity of this crafting in the asylum, charting individual patients' assiduous and often highly skilled efforts making handkerchiefs, doilies, dresses and blouses. While such activity might have been beneficial and pleasurable for the patients, this routinised industry might also function as a form of social control and enforced labour, embracing economic gain too through external sales and maintenance of asylum clothing stocks.

This paper focuses on a collaborative project with The Grange (formerly The School of Stitchery and Lace, Bookham) exploring historical shifts in understandings of occupational therapy for disabled patients within Surrey's residential institutions. It reuses photographic portraits and archival lists of Victorian lace work to prompt conversations about traditional occupational therapy regimes and their dislocation with the emergence of the medical model and the prioritization of psychopharmacological treatments in contemporary psychiatry and most disability management.

The ‘Synthetic Weaves’ project explored in this paper offers a contemporary reinterpretation of traditional lace work, with patterns historically formed by floral and botanical motifs replaced by the molecular compound structures of medications used by patient-residents to treat epileptic seizures, pain management, and psychosis. Through creative workshops with residents at The Grange (a disability charity which continues the School's historical legacy of embroidery, alongside other arts-based and horticultural interventions today), I frame this creative public history project through the lens of ‘everyday heritage' and interrogate the contemporary re-embrace of arts and complementary therapies as well as ‘nature of prescription'.

Biography

Alana Harris is Professor at King's College London.

In their own hands: reconstructing difference through the lives of nineteenth-century craftspeople

Amy Stone, Royal Holloway, University of London

The material record of the lives of disabled people is fragmentary, medicalised and does not prioritise disabled voices. In addition to being missing from museum displays and store rooms, disabled people are often absent from museum audiences. This paper sits within a wider project taking an affirmative approach to both audiences and archives; improving access and inclusion for disabled people in museum contexts by combining historical research and the study of museum practices. Here I will present part of this work through a series of vignettes exploring the lives of disabled makers associated with Surrey-based institutions in the nineteenth century and the objects they might have left behind.

It is often stated that the medical model of disability was born in the Victorian period. This emphasises what a person's body or mind cannot do and the ways in which they are different from the perceived norm. It is with this lens that many museum collections represent disability in the nineteenth century and beyond, if it is present at all. Objects and displays often centre the ‘freak' show, medical treatment, and the institutions and charities who tasked themselves with the care of people seen as different. Where disabled people are present in our museums, they are often nameless, voiceless and their lives reduced to their impairment. What happens when we explore their lives in their own hands, if not in their words, and complicate the persistent narrative that disabled people's lives are, and have always been, marked by their differences?

Biography

Amy is a PhD student at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her research sits at the intersection of disability history, making, and museums, with a focus on material literacy and Victorian institutions. Based across the Royal Holloway Business School and the School of Humanities, her interdisciplinary work draws on her own making practice and experience in the heritage sector to explore new participatory opportunities for engaging with museum collections and material culture. Alongside her research, she is an Access and Community Heritage Consultant with over ten years' experience working across the cultural sector in the South East. She specialises in supporting small museums and heritage projects to develop more inclusive practices across collections, workforce, and audiences. Her work emphasises the wellbeing benefits of museums, particularly for underserved audiences, and she also supports blind and visually impaired artists, practitioners, and researchers working in cultural and heritage contexts.

To drink or not to drink? How legislation affected entertainment seekers in the wake of the 1843 Theatres Act

Dr Deborah Jeffries

The sale of alcohol on the premises has always been a pivotal issue for the success of entertainment venues; with the way audiences could access refreshments being determined by the law under which they were licensed. In 1843 the Theatres Act was passed to create equality between so-called legitimate theatres – that is, those with royal patents and/or were licensed under the 1737 Licensing Act by the Lord Chamberlain – and their illegitimate counterparts, which were licensed, like music halls, by local magistrates under the 1752 Disorderly Houses Act. It has long been claimed that the 1843 Act prohibited theatres licensed by it from selling alcohol in the auditorium during a performance. However, this was not the case. There is no mention of alcohol in the Act whatsoever. It is likely that there was an understanding (not a law) that led theatres to continue to restrict their alcohol sales and consumption to the bars and refreshment areas, as was common practice, and that theatres previously licensed under the 1752 Act would follow suit. Music halls, still operating under the 1752 Disorderly Houses Act, would continue to be licensed to sell alcohol in the auditorium. Where and when in the building that alcohol was sold was the issue, not whether it was sold at all.

London's saloon theatres — including Wilton's, which had been operating, some illegally, as a hybrid between theatres and music halls — chose to be licensed as theatres under the 1843 Act but continued their practice of selling alcohol during the performance. After petitioning, this was sanctioned by the Lord Chamberlain, and so, once again, there became a divide between types of theatres. Music Halls retained their ability to sell alcohol in the auditorium, as they weren't licensed as theatres.

This paper will attempt to unpick the hitherto confusion and misinformation regarding alcohol licensing across the spectrum of entertainments venues in the mid- to late-nineteenth century and demonstrate how legislation was applied to support the contrasting business models of theatres and music halls.

Biography

Dr Deborah Jeffries is a historian, journalist, and public speaker. She gained her PhD on 'Legitimising London's 'entertainment of the stage' 1737 to 1866' at the University of East London in September 2024. Her work explores the licensing and homogeneity of entertainment, most notably theatre, circus and music hall, in addition to challenging the notion of highbrow versus lowbrow. Recent published works include the music hall years chapter in the History of Hoxton Hall book, published earlier this year, and an essay on Pantomime at the Britannia Theatre, Hoxton in Blockbusters of Victorian Theatre, 1850-1910, in addition to numerous journal articles and academic conference papers on London's eighteenth- and nineteenth-century entertainments buildings. She now spends most of her time in Great Yarmouth, where she writes about and consults on the town's magnificent heritage buildings.

Touching community: tactile literacy and blind identity in nineteenth-century Britain

Tilly Guthrie, University of Sheffield

It is easy to assume from institutional narratives and sighted commentators that a sense of ‘blind identity' did not exist in the nineteenth century. Before the standardisation of Braille at the end of the Victorian era, the blind population of Britain was faced with a ‘Babel of systems' for reading and writing (Armitage, 1886), leaving them without a uniform method of communication. Access to literature — and to each other — was tightly controlled by the asylums and workshops which assumed responsibility for blind people's livelihoods. In contrast, the educational and postal reforms enjoyed by the sighted population in this period paved the way for a firm sense of belonging to national networks through the written word.

Despite these obstacles, this paper will explore ways in which blind community was created and sustained: through shared experience, geography (including the nation), and language. With an emphasis on the materiality of text, I argue that blind communities were able to participate in a collective identity through writing.

In the second half of my presentation, I will go on to show how blind community in the present can be enhanced by engaging with this complex heritage. The audience will have an opportunity to handle tactile replicas of proto-Braille scripts, as I relate my experiences of conducting outreach work at blind educational events. I have found that the rich linguistic history of the community is largely unknown by its members, and making replicas of inaccessible collections provides a first point of contact with that heritage.

Biography

Tilly Guthrie is a final year PhD student in History at the University of Sheffield. Her thesis addresses cultures of correspondence within the nineteenth-century British blind community, from the Penny Post to the typewriter.

“No-one loves you more”: Recovering Queen Victoria's secret marriage to John Brown, through The John Brown Family Archive

Dr Fern Riddell

Three questions have haunted Queen Victoria's relationship with her Highland Servant, John Brown since the 1860s: were they lovers? Did they marry? Was there even the possibility of a child? Since Victoria's death, each of this questions has been repeatedly dismissed and discredited by both the Royal Family, the Royal Archives, as well as numerous Royal historians. However, among a small group of Victorianists across the last century, there have been whispers that John's family held a personal private archive, which told a very different story. Yet it has been considered by most to have been lost for decades. Since 2021, using digital archive, auction catalogues, search engines, digitised collections, and genealogical databases, as well as private archives and museums, I have been on the trail of this lost family archive. This collection, containing letters, gifts, and artefacts between Victoria and John, can now be identified for the first time. Not only does it prove that Victoria and John were lovers, but it also provides previously unknown evidence for their private marriage. In this paper, I will set out my methodology and evidence, left by Victoria herself, John's own relatives, and the historians who came after. It combines Victoria's own determination to conserve her history, away from the control of her court and government, the historians who refused to be silenced, and the remarkable advances that digitisation gives us today.

Biography

Dr Fern Riddell completed her BA Hons and MA in history at Royal Holloway, and was awarded her PhD from King's College London in 2016. For the last 14 years, she has worked as a public historian across film, TV and radio as both an expert presenter and consultant. Author of 4 non-fiction history books and 1 non-fiction kid's book, her work uncovering the John Brown Family archive was published by Penguin/Ebury in 2025 as Victoria's Secret, and she also cohosted the documentary based on her work with Rob Rinder, for Channel 4.