The Golden Age

Ian Inkster, Colin Griffin, Judith Rowbotham

Contents: Introduction; A lustrous age?, Ian Inkster; ’Nor all that glisters.....’: the not so Golden Age, Harold Perkin; Part One Industry: Introduction, Colin Griffin; Coalmining in mid-Victorian Britain: a Golden Age revisited?, Colin Griffin; A Golden Age of agriculture?, Stephen Caunce; The cotton industry in the 1850s and 1860s: decades of contrast, Geoff Timmins; The Golden Age of electricity, Gillian Cookson; Part Two Technology: Introduction, Ian Inkster; Michael Farraday and lighthouses, Frank A. J. L. James; Lies, damned lies and declinism: Lyon Playfair, the Paris 1867 Exhibition and contested rhetorics of scientific education and industrial performance, Graeme Gooday; Machinofacture and technical change: the patent evidence, Ian Inkster; Part Three Social Institutions: Introduction, Jeff Hill; ’Why should working men visit the Exhibition?’ - workers and the Great Exhibition and the ethos of industrialism, Su Barton; Estimating a public sphere: intellectual and technical associations at the time of the Great Exhibition, Vicky Brown and Ian Inkster; ’Golden Age’ and ’Better Days’: narratives of industrialism in the cotton trade of north-east Lancashire, 1860s to 1920s, Jeff Hill; Popular culture and the ’Golden Age’: the Church of England and hiring fairs in the East Riding of Yorkshire c. 1850-75, Gary Moses; In defence of respectability: financial crime, the ’High Art’ criminal and the language of the courtroom 1850-1880, Sarah Lowrie; Part four gender: Introduction, Judith Rowbotham; ’Physically a splendid race’ or ’hardened and brutalised by unsuitable toil’?: unravelling the position of women workers in rural England during the Golden Age of agriculture, Nicola Verdon; The respectability imperative: a golden rule in cases of sexual assault?, Kim Stevenson; Keep the ’whoam’ fires burning: domestic yearnings in Lancashire dialect poetry, Catriona M. Parratt; ’All our past proclaims our future’: popular biogra