This year marks the 175th anniversary of the Liverpool Philharmonic: the UK’s oldest surviving professional symphony orchestra. The occasion has been marked with a major new exhibition in Liverpool, which I was recently able to visit during a research trip to the city. The exhibition traces the story of the Liverpool Philharmonic from its Victorian roots through to the present day. Documents on display give a fascinating insight into the world of nineteenth-century entertainment and celebrity culture. The exhibition is
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Interpreting the Victorian courtroom
Sean McConnell, Department of English and Cultural History, Liverpool John Moores University Given that the module I study is ‘Prison Voices’, it is perhaps surprising that the wide variety of literary and historical sources we have engaged with are as interested with what goes on outside the prison walls as they are with what happens within. We have examined various literary tropes about the courtroom, such as Dickens’ critique of the Victorian legal system through his characterization of Jaggers in
Read more‘Caught at Last’: The criminalization of men in nineteenth-century Liverpool
Megan Ainsworth, Department of English and Cultural History, Liverpool John Moores University On a recent field trip to one of Liverpool’s most prominent buildings, St. George’s Hall, our ‘Prison Voices’ module was taken beyond the university. The building, regarded as a monument to the city, opened in 1854 and was to serve a multitude of purposes for the people of Liverpool, being both a concert hall and courtroom. The building is renowned for its judicial history. Initially, the Assizes (the
Read moreArgyle Street Bridewell: Walking the beat with Liverpool’s nineteenth–century police force
Beth McConnell, Department of English and Cultural History, Liverpool John Moores University When we visited the welcoming pub, L1 Bridewell, it was difficult to believe we were sitting in what were once the holding cells for Victorian prisoners. Known in the nineteenth century as Argyle Street Bridewell, it was one of ten police stations in the Liverpool district as each station could not be more than 1.5 miles apart. In one of the original cells, we did a close reading
Read moreResearching ‘the terrors of their neighbourhood’: Street robbery in Chisenhale Street
Keiran Southern, Department of English and Cultural History, Liverpool John Moores University In our sessions on Victorian street robbery, we examined a case involving a ‘garotter’, 19 year old Martin Corrigan. In 1869 Corrigan was tried at Liverpool Assizes, held in St George’s Hall, for robbing Patrick Spelman, a porter in the city’s St John’s market, on Chisenhale Street bridge. This bridge had a fearsome reputation for violent street crime in the mid-nineteenth century, so I decided to do more
Read moreA Brief History of St George’s Hall
Riain Egan, Department of English and Cultural History, Liverpool John Moores University The factual information in this blog has been drawn from Steve Binns’s informative tour of St George’s Hall and his series of podcasts which are available online here Liverpool has always been, and continues to be, synonymous with great feats of architecture from ‘The Three Graces’ that line the Pier Head to the neo-classical St George’s Hall. Opened in 1842, and built on the site of the old
Read moreResearching Nineteenth-Century Prison Graffiti
Sam Bennett, Department of English and Cultural History, Liverpool John Moores University During a field trip to Liverpool’s St George’s Hall for our Prison Voices module, I noticed a piece of graffiti on one of the cell walls. It reads, ‘Mary Lecy Hornby Street 7 years 1871’. One of the key areas of the module aims to recover ‘prison voices’, so I was thrilled to find this original graffiti. I was interested in finding out about the apparent author of
Read moreJubilee Tribulations in Two Victorian Ports: Swansea and Liverpool
by Mike Benbough-Jackson (Liverpool John Moores University) In the celebration-packed year of 2012, I mustn’t say this too loudly: celebrations and jubliees are not all about jollity and communitas; they also evoke despondency and division, or, even worse, apathy. The celebrations that marked Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887 were widely held as having been a triumph. Of course no one denied that there was opposition, mainly from Republicans and Irish Nationalists. Yet the very fact that dissent came from
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