The Changing Media Representation of T. E. Lawrence and Celebrity Culture in Britain, 1919–1935

Abstract

This article presents a new analysis of representations of T. E. Lawrence to explore how the media created celebrity identities in interwar Britain. Examining his appearance in seventeen national newspapers and in newsreels between 1919 and 1935, it shows how earlier press depictions that borrowed from Lowell Thomas’s portrayal of him as the mythical ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ were disrupted by a nascent media-driven celebrity culture which aimed to uncover intimate details of the lives of the so-called ‘real’ people that were believed to exist behind the outward personae of the famous. By the late 1920s, the press’s attention had switched from Lawrence as an imperial adventurer to focus on the intensely private man who lay behind the public image of the ‘Blonde Bedouin’. This shift in emphasis denoted a significant change in the way celebrities were presented by the news media in interwar Britain. Journalists intensified their exposure of celebrities’ private lives to amplify the empathetic connection between the public and the famous at a time when new modes of self-fashioning were configured through expression in private, domestic life. This shift was also informed by growing anxieties regarding how public figures communicated their social authority to the new audiences of the interwar mass media, newspapers and newsreels exposing famous people’s private lives to generate emotional connections with members of the public which would strengthen concepts of social leadership and trust.     

Humility & Humiliation: The Transformation of Franciscan Humour,c.1210–1310

Humiliation and self-ridicule worked as surprisingly important tools of evangelical outreach in the first decades of the Franciscan Order (c.1210–50). According to early Franciscan texts such as the Assisi Compilation (c.1240s) and Jordan of Giano’s Chronica (c.1260), St Francis and his earliest followers sought to win supporters by stripping naked in public, mocking learned preachers and ludicrously imitating animals. Yet within a few decades of the founder’s death this type of humour had been erased from Franciscan texts. Chronicles now omitted references to Francis’s laughter, while humiliating behaviour came to be condemned by Franciscan preachers, chroniclers and theologians alike. From being a means of undermining dignity and reason, joking was now instead celebrated as a tool of upholding these very same values. Describing the nature of this shift, and contextualising it within the evolving institutional priorities of the Franciscans under the leadership of Bonaventure (d.1274), this article will complicate debates about the development of medieval humour, while also reflecting on laughter’s role as a means of resistance to the significant social and cultural upheavals of the 1200s.     

The Logic of Conquest: Tripoli, 1289; Acre, 1291; why not Sis, 1293?

In 1289, Tripoli was taken from the Franks by the Mamluk Sultan Qalāwun. In 1291, Qalāwun's son al-Ashraf Khalīl captured Acre, the last capital of the Crusader "kingdom of Jerusalem", and the few surviving Frankish outposts on the Levantine coast were swiftly abandoned. Next in line seemed to be the Armenian kingdom in Cilicia and the Taurus mountains - but it was to be a further 84 years before Sis, the kingdom's capital, was to fall to the Mamluks. It does not seem unreasonable to ask why the Mamluks should have let it survive so long: indeed, how did it survive the 1290s?     

The Street Robber and the Gentleman Highwayman: Changing Representations and Perceptions of Robbery in London, 1690–1800

Owing to the growth of urban crime, the expansion of print culture, and changing cultural attitudes, a remarkably diverse range of positive and negative images of robbery were disseminated in eighteenth-century London. Attitudes in the 1690s were already ambivalent, but repeated negative reports in newspapers and trial accounts contributed to the identification, in the 1720s during a perceived crime wave, of the ‘street robber’ as a particularly threatening criminal. In response, the concept of the polite gentleman highwayman emerged, epitomized in representations of James Maclaine at mid-century. From the 1770s, however, the appeal of the gentleman highwayman began to wane, and all forms of robbery came to be seen as equally undesirable.     

Outcasts of Echo Park,Heroes of Brentwood: Quinceañera,Keeping Up with the Steins and Coming of Age in Ethnic L.A.

The challenge of maintaining a national identity as a subculture in America is most evident in connection with special occasions, like transition rites. Coming of age is such an event. The continuity and transformation of the subculture is at stake. In American cities, as exemplified by Los Angeles, the ethnic neighborhood becomes a New Old Country. Those who welcome change and those who resist change may belong surprisingly to unexpected categories, and the roles of the generations can also be more nuanced than popular stereotypes suggest.     

A Question of Trousers: Seafarers,Masculinity and Empire in the Shaping of British Male Dress,c. 1600–1800

Trousers have a history. The British-imperial biography of this garment reveals the significance of ready-made clothing production for naval and merchant administrations with global reach. This history demonstrates the significance of male sartorial experiments in colonial settings. And it also confirms the rising importance of imperial and maritime cultures in shaping masculine ideals and habits of dress. Ultimately, middle ranked and elite male Britons came to rethink their allegiance to breeches and hose, a mnemonic of the ancien régime. Social cross-dressing ensued, with men of higher status adopting the garb of nautical working men, at a time when mariners were increasingly esteemed. The study of trousers opens new vantage points from which to assess the forces altering British masculinity, forces that also reshaped material norms.     

What is the better predictor of students’ personal values: Parents’ values or students’ personality?

This study examines the relationship between young adults’ values, multicultural personality traits and their parents’ values. A total of 102 students and their matched parents filled in the Multicultural Personality Questionnaire and the Portrait Value Questionnaire. The influence of one's personality and one's parents’ values on personal values was tested by hierarchical regression analyses and structural equation modelling. The analyses revealed a greater contribution of multicultural personality to the variance in stimulation, self-direction, universalism, and achievement values in comparison to the impact of parents’ values, whereas an opposite pattern was found for power, benevolence, and conformity. Tradition, hedonism, and security were found to be linked to multicultural personality and parents’ values to a similar extent. Furthermore, overall trait-like parents’ values were better predictors of the offspring's trait-like values, and the same effect held for parental societal values: they predicted better the offspring's societal values. The authors discuss the need for differentiation between trait-like and societally oriented values and the application of content-tailored personality measures, in line with previous studies.     

Agrarian Capitalism and Poor Relief in England, 1500–1860: Rethinking the Origins of the Welfare State. By Larry Patriquin.

ABSTRACT

Drawing on Paul Ricoeur's notion of narrative identity and on his observations concerning testimony in Memory, History, Forgetting, this article explores the operation of memory under two aspects, that of narrative identity and that of witness. This exercise involves some related discussion both of the history/memory problem and of the relationship between written and spoken traces in engaging the past. The methodological focus for the work is a written text of an unusual kind, comprising an extensive and detailed eyewitness account written, forgotten and re-discovered by the same individual – Lionel Curtis – after an intervening period of half a century.     

‘Let the People Sing’: J.B. Priestley and the Significance of Music

Abstract

In a writing life that spanned the 1910 to 1970s, J.B. Priestley engaged with a variety of subjects, across various literary forms, ranging from politics, popular culture and Englishness through to theories of time. However it has rarely been noted that he also wrote passionately and knowledgeably about music, with the latter playing an important role in key novels, plays and nonfiction. Priestley also promoted chamber festivals, wrote the libretto for an opera ‘The Olympians’, and even occasionally performed himself. Priestley’s writings on music fitted into his concerns about the rise of an Americanized mass order, and his mistrust of commericalized musical forms was shared by other critics of the time. However, Priestley’s work is more significant than a binary high/low low cultural validation of classical music/dismissal of more popular musical forms. He was often critical of jazz and ragtime, but more positive about popular music that was produced in, reflected, and empowered the individual and community. Priestley’s writings on music marked a genuine attempt at understanding the role of music in culture, and contributed to his democratic critique of the mass society.