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.     

Preserving The English Landscape,c.1870–1914

ABSTRACT

This article examines the significance and ideological character of the landscape preservation movement in England before 1914. In these years, preservationist discourse had considerable resonance across all sections of society. At a time of change, mainstream English culture increasingly valued natural landscapes seen to be ‘relics' of ages past, or associated with historical figures, events and customs. This historicized reading of landscape was bound up with patriotic sentiment, but did not reflect the dominance of any atavistic ideology of rural Englishness. In late Victorian and Edwardian England, the preservationist dispensation ran with the grain of modernity, not against it.     

Popular Politicians: The Interaction Between Politics and Popular Culture in the Netherlands, 1950s–1980s

ABSTRACT

From the late 1950s onwards, the Netherlands witnessed a transformation of the emotional codes of politics. A culture of political leadership marked by notions of duty and restraint, made way for self-expression and authenticity. This article argues that the interaction between the spheres of politics and popular culture played a vital role in this transformation. The practices and discourses of popular culture became a significant part of the repertoire through which politicians articulated representative claims. The article traces how politicians negotiated their interaction with popular culture, started to cultivate a private persona and eventually turned into political celebrities.     

‘Bloomers’ and the British World: Dress Reform in Transatlantic and Antipodean Print Culture, 1851–1950

The ‘bloomers’ are rarely considered beyond their 1851 origins in the United States and subsequent appearance in Britain. This article expands dress reform scholarship by analysing print culture elsewhere in the British world, specifically Australia and New Zealand. The colonial press manufactured controversy over this fashion – a perceived transgression of gender norms – even though antipodean women rarely sported the outfit. This article focuses on the dress reform lectures and writings of Amelia Bloomer, Caroline Dexter and Dr Mary Walker. While certain continuities resurfaced alongside the bloomer-like rational dress popularised in the bicycling culture of the 1890s, dress reform was largely deemed far less controversial by the turn of the twentieth century.     

Civilized Attire: Refashioning Tastes and Social Status in the Gabon Estuary,c. 1870–1914

Dress in Libreville, the capital of the French African colony of Gabon, reveals the complexities of cross-cultural interaction and cultural influences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Mpongwe coastal ethnic community in the town, long linked to Atlantic commerce, adapted elements of European dress as part of a lifestyle of assimilation to French culture. Free people with access to missionary education and economic employment with Europeans adapted foreign dress. This cultural hybridity provoked dismay from some European and American observers who presented Mpongwe interest in western clothes as signs of their degeneration. Some Mpongwe rejected these criticisms by upholding assimilation as proof of their equality with Europeans. Mpongwe people also combined older fashion trends and ways of displaying foreign objects in ways that show the survival of older forms of status and wealth.     

‘Experimental’ secondary modern education in Britain, 1948–1958

Studies of mid-twentieth century education in England and Wales have conventionally hinged on the 1944 Education Act, foregrounding policy over practice. This article considers the significance of the inter-war progressive educational movement for postwar educational developments. It presents a case study of one teacher who was active in the early ‘experimental’ years of secondary modern education, suggesting that this period was important in the making of ‘modern’ education. It seeks to complicate both negative and positive readings of ‘meritocracy’ in postwar educational history. This article also highlights the paucity of available source material for the study of the secondary modern school, arguing that attention should be paid to well-documented cases, placed in context.