‘Unfit for reform or punishment’: mental disorder and discipline in Liverpool Borough Prison in the late nineteenth century

This article examines how Liverpool Borough Prison, opened in 1855 as one of the largest local prisons in England to adopt the separate system, categorized and dealt with mental distress and disorder amongst its prison population in the late nineteenth century. High prison committal rates in Liverpool, alongside high levels of recidivism, especially among female prisoners, led to severe overcrowding and encouraged a harsh disciplinary regime. Exacerbated by the poor physical and mental condition of the prisoners, this produced a challenging environment for maintaining the separate system of confinement and prisoners’ mental well-being. While official figures for the rates of mental disorder in local prisons are not readily available, Liverpool Prison’s diverse and under-exploited archives and official reports indicate that insanity caused prison officials and visiting justices great concern, and many prisoners were declared unfit for the rigours of prison discipline. Our article explores the implications of the ever more punitive, deterrent and physically taxing penal policy implemented in the late nineteenth century on the minds of prisoners. Despite the heavy toll on prisoners’ mental well-being, such cases were often retained by prison medical officers reluctant to acknowledge the failure of the prison to deter, reform and redeem.     

The emergence of the modern life cycle in Britain∗

Robert Erikson and John H. Goldthorpe, The Constant Flux: A Study of Class Mobility in Industrial Societies (1992), xvi + 429 (Clarendon Press, Oxford, £48.00).     

Who were his peers? The social and professional milieu of the provincial surgeon-apothecary in the late-eighteenth century

The social standing of the surgeon-apothecary cannot be determined by reference to professional life alone, yet few such men left social documents. The lower middling sort was typically reticent about evaluations of their own social position in any source genre. This article uses a unique archive, and the concept of community connectedness, to investigate the status of Thomas Higgins, surgeon-apothecary and man-midwife of north Shropshire. Higgins embodied the traditional practitioner who relied on local knowledge and his 'friends' for advancement, in contrast to alternative modes of rising professionalism. He was demonstrably a trusted man at the heart of his home town, but his reliance on the 'partiality' of his neighbors brought him into conflict with his colleagues.     

Self-Employed People in the United Kingdom: Included or Excluded?

Within the United Kingdom social security scheme, self-employed people remain excluded from some of the most valuable benefits, yet there is some evidence to suggest underuse of benefits to which they do have access. There are administrative problems in dealing with applications for benefit from self-employed people, and there is considerable undercollection of the National Insurance contributions that are due. Self-employed people in the United Kingdom are not well provided for through private pensions and insurance. The author draws on her recent research, and argues that a fundamental review of social security for self-employed people in the United Kingdom is overdue.     

Just like a ‘modern’ wife? Concubines on the public stage in early Republican China

Whilst scholars have highlighted a variety of women who became active in the public arena in early Republican China (1912–28), little attention has been given to concubines. Beyond reformers’ social and legal efforts to abolish the custom of concubinage, we know little about the public activities of concubines and social reactions to them. This article investigates how, under the influence of the Western practice of wives accompanying their official husbands for formal functions, Chinese officials were obliged to bring their wives out of domestic seclusion to appear with them in public. Many wives, however, did not feel comfortable doing so. Consequently, a unique opportunity opened up for the concubines of Chinese officials to play the role of a ‘modern’ wife on various social and diplomatic occasions both domestic and abroad, which brought an unprecedented degree of visibility and respectability to a category of women of traditionally low-status origin. Nevertheless, these women suffered and endured discrimination and stigmatization for a variety of reasons. Their public presence was full of tensions and contradictions, which reveal the social reality of a China caught between the legacies of custom and tradition and new ideals of gender and nation inspired by Western definitions of modernity.     

From the state to the family or to the market? Consequences of reduced residential eldercare in Sweden

This article analyses the changing roles of the state, family and market in providing care for older people in Sweden, in relation to Scandinavian welfare ideals of universalism and de‐familisation. Since 2000 every fourth residential care bed has disappeared and the increase in homecare services has not compensated for the decline. Instead family care (defined here as help from adult children and other non‐cohabiting family or friends) has increased in all social groups: help by daughters mainly among older people with shorter education and help by sons among those highly educated. Use of privately purchased services has also increased but continues to play a marginal role. Family care remains more common among older people with less education whereas privately purchased services are more common among those with higher education. This dualisation of care challenges universalism, and working‐class daughters continue to be most affected by eldercare cutbacks.     

Is the Future more or less Human? Differing Views of Humanness in the Posthumanism Debate

A debate has emerged in the bioethics literature about the use of biotechnology to modify human nature. A failure to define humanness has produced conceptual confusion in this debate. We draw upon recent social psychological work on folk concepts of humanness and dehumanization to analyse the understandings of humanness that underpin the rival positions. We argue that advocates and opponents of human nature modification employ distinct conceptions of humanness, and that their differing evaluations of modification make sense in light of these conceptions. Advocates view modification as the enhancement of a non‐essentialist sense of humanness that takes us further from animal nature. Opponents view it as the loss of an essentialist sense of humanness that takes us closer to a robotic state. Recognition that humanness has multiple senses implies that there is no mutually exclusive choice between seeing the outcome of modification as a quantitative gain in humanness or a fundamental, qualitative loss of it.