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Before 'Page Three'

Matt Pickles | 16 Feb 12 | 0 comments

As The Sun newspaper’s ‘Page Three’ column came under scrutiny in the Leveson inquiry last week, editor Dominic Mohan defended the feature as an ‘innocuous British institution’. In fact, while ‘Page Three’ was first printed in 1970, an Oxford University historian has found that the media’s obsession with celebrity and sex dates back more than 200 years.
In a new book, Dr Faramerz Dabhoiwala cites the example of Kitty Fisher, a famous courtesan in 18th Century England. ‘People like Kitty were the first pin ups,’ he explained. ‘Celebrities like Kitty not only exploited the media to keep their names at the forefront of our attention but they even had pictures of themselves painted and reproduced in thousands of copies for people to buy.’
Based on his research at Oxford University, Dr Faramerz Dabhoiwala of the History Faculty established that the apparent liberalization of sexual attitudes which swept the western world in the 1960s was made possible by developments that began in the 18th Century.
‘In 1600 almost everyone across the western world took for granted that sex outside marriage was a dangerous and pernicious kind of behaviour that should be stamped out – in fact the main pressure for change was to penalise adulterers, fornicators and prostitutes even more,’ Dr Dabhoiwala said.
‘The last person to be executed for adultery in England was probably a woman called Susan Bounty, who was hanged in 1654. Then by 1800 a remarkable change had occurred. In the middle of the 17th Century only about 1% of births took place outside marriage, by 1800 40% of all brides come to the altar pregnant.’
Dr Dabhoiwala first noticed the change in sexual attitudes during his research at Oxford into legal sources from the 17th and 18th centuries at Oxford. He then expanded his research to literary, pictorial and other sources from the period.
Dr Dabhoiwala attributes the first sexual revolution to a changing approach to religion, the collapse of public punishment and the growth of the principle of sexual freedom. ‘In the 18th Century the way people understood religious imperatives changed, the text of Bible was not taken so literally and sexual freedom became more compatible with religious belief,' he said.
'The change can also be explained by the growth of major cities and urban living which made the small-scale self-regulation of village communities impossible. Sex became much more private and the idea that people could do what they want with their own bodies began to be seriously put forward.’
He added: ‘Arguments that have developed with increasing strength in our society over the past 50 years were first articulated and made possible in the 18th century by the great intellectual developments of that day. There is even evidence of people defending same sex relations – Jeremy Bentham spent his entire adult life obsessing about the sexual freedom for homosexuals.’
So whatever the outcome of the Leveson discussion on Page Three, the debate itself is nothing new.
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The making of Dickens

Matt Pickles | 07 Feb 12 | 0 comments

Having been born 200 years ago today, Charles Dickens remains one of England’s most celebrated authors. But, as Dr Robert Douglas-Fairhurst of Oxford University’s English Faculty explains, Dickens himself never felt that he had ‘made’ it as a writer.
Dr Douglas-Fairhurst, who wrote the book Becoming Dickens: the Invention of a Novelist which was published by Harvard University Press last year, said: ‘I don’t think Dickens ever felt that he had arrived. Although he seems to have achieved everything he set out to achieve – wealth, fame, status – he never stopped looking for the loving security he had craved as a child and alternately yearned for and flinched from as an adult.’
Dr Douglas-Fairhurst believes this craving for affection may have hastened his death, which came in 1870 at the age of 58, as Dickens embarked on an exhausting series of public readings.
But Dr Douglas-Fairhurst says the main effect of Dickens’ desire for loving security was on his prolific literary output. ‘His characters were like a huge extended family he could tease, bully and cajole into his stories,' he explains. 'Occasionally these stories were optimistic fantasies of the life he could have led – happy families, cheerfulness, jokes by the score – but more often they were dark and brooding shadows of the life he felt that he had narrowly escaped. In a novel like Oliver Twist they were both at once.
'And ultimately that is why I wanted to write this book – to explore what lay behind the restless, driven Dickens we know from later in his life, who could often be spotted pacing the streets of London, covering ten or twenty miles at a stretch, and wrote as if he was scratching an incurable itch. It is an attempt to understand what it was like to be a writer who never stopped trying to work out who he was or where he was going.’

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'He would enjoy the whisky'

Matt Pickles | 25 Jan 12 | 0 comments

Lament in rhyme, lament in prose,
Wi’ saut tears trickling down your noise; Our Bardie’s fate is at a close,
Past a’remead!
The last, sad cap-stane of his woes;
Poor Mailie’s dead!
These lines, from Robert Burns' poem Poor Mailie's Elegy, will no doubt be read out in many pubs, halls and homes as Burns Night celebrates the legendary Scottish poet’s birth 253 years ago today.
The poem is a favourite of Professor Fiona Stafford of Oxford University’s English Faculty, who studies Burns’ poetry and his dialogues with and influences on other poets. ‘The poem manages to be funny and moving at the same time,’ she explains. ‘Burns is lamenting the death of his favourite sheep, in a poem that is very literary – playing with the conventions of pastoral elegy and mock heroic – but at the same time conveying a very powerful sense of loss over a very real sheep.
'This is a real calamity and yet also comic. Each stanza ends with ‘Mailie dead’, which keeps reminding us of what has happened, while becoming funnier and funnier with each repetition.’
Burns Night has developed into a truly global phenomenon. A search of today’s newspapers brings up articles about Burns Night from as far afield as Vancouver and Moscow, which may seem surprising given that Burns wrote in a heavy dialect. ‘Burns's poems and songs were admired by all the major Romantic writers as well as the reading public of the time,’ Professor Stafford says.
‘Scottish emigrants and regiments also helped to carry Burns's words to different countries - and Burns songs were being sung by people across the globe. His skills as a song writer have always been a major part of his popular appeal - many people know his songs, even if they don't know that Burns was the lyricist.’
As Burns suppers have become more popular, their form has changed. ‘The traditions associated with Burns Night have developed into something approaching rituals over the years - and at times, Burns's work can be a little overwhelmed by the bagpipes and the haggis and the tartan,’ Professor Stafford says.
‘In the early days, people were gathering to remember a poet, and their ways of doing so varied - apparently beef was sometimes served! For much of the twentieth century, Burns Night also tended to be rather male-dominated, but there seems to have been a trend towards more inclusivity in recent years.’
But if he were able to attend a Burns Night this evening, Professor Stafford does not think Robert Burns would object too strongly to what he saw. ‘I should think he would very much enjoy the whisky,’ she says.

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How the dream crossed the pond

Matt Pickles | 16 Jan 12 | 0 comments

The national observance of Martin Luther King Jr Day in the USA today (16 January) reflects Dr King’s enormous contribution to America's civil rights movement. But what impact did he have on Britain? Dr Stephen Tuck, a lecturer in US history at Oxford University and author of an editorial in today's New York Times, explains.
Tell us what your research on Dr King has found?
Among other things, just how important he was as a global figure. It was partly because he travelled quite extensively, not least to Britain. But it was also because the civil rights movement was a televised event at a moment when America had begun to dominate popular culture - his 'I have a dream' speech in Washington was beamed to the UK via satellite.
How and to what extent did American and British struggles for racial equality interact?
This is very interesting. He was extremely popular, and black Britons certainly drew inspiration from him. As he gave his ‘I have a dream’ speech in 1963, demonstrators in London marched to the American Embassy carrying a banner that read, ‘Your fight is our fight.’ But they used his wider popularity in Britain for their own ends, too. By likening their own - often ignored - protests to the US civil rights movement (even when they weren't that similar), they found a way to legitimize their cause.
What was Dr King’s reputation abroad?
He was popular pretty much everywhere, but for different reasons in each country - Eastern Europeans sided with black Americans and the 'other America' against capitalism, while Western European leaders applauded his nonviolent engagement with the democratic process.
Tell me about King’s visits to Britain?
King accepted invitations abroad, his speechwriter Clarence Jones told me recently, 'to get his message out', and he visited Britain a few times. But his November 1964 visit stands out: he preached at St. Pauls, addressed a mass meeting in London, gave any number of interviews with the press, met with politicians, black British activists, foreign students and others. I think he also met with a high ranking Indian politician and secured a promise from the Indian government to stay nuclear-free. A meeting with activists in Britain led to the formation of the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination, the pre-eminent anti-discrimination group in Britain, fashioned on King’s nonviolent, pro-integration model.
What do you see as his legacy?
When we think of the civil rights movement, we tend to think of King. In one sense, that's a very good thing - there is a person that we can learn about to engage with a vitally important topic. King and the civil rights movement is an extremely popular subject at school and university.
The danger, of course, is that we can remember a rather sanitized nonviolent heroic protest against evil crazy bus conductors version of history, a version which oversimplifies the problem of racial inequality, leaves it firmly in the past, places responsibility on others, and removes the history of modern race protest to the United States - when we have an important tradition of race equality protest here in the UK.
Martin Luther King, Jr., who was assassinated on 4 April 1968, would have turned 83 yesterday.
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Behind the shining armour

Matt Pickles | 05 Jan 12 | 0 comments

Diarmaid MacCulloch, Professor of the History of the Church in Oxford University's Faculty of Theology, was knighted for services to scholarship in the 2012 New Years Honours list. In addition to his distinguished academic career, Professor MacCulloch has become a familiar face on our TV screens as presenter and writer of the award-winning BBC2 and BBC4 documentary series, Diarmaid MacCulloch's A History of Christianity. Here, he tells Arts at Oxford what the knighthood means to him.

Firstly, as a reverend, professor and now a knight, how should we now address you?
'As you'd expect in this great country of ours, it's quirky. If you were to bother with something like a large mouthful of it (and I guess you wouldn't, very often), it's Prof. Diarmaid MacCulloch, Knight, since I also happen to be a Deacon of the Church of England. This form of address is thanks to a custom which I'm told originated during the reign of that model of Anglican piety, King Edward VII: clergy of the Church of England are not addressed as Sir unless they are hereditary baronets or got ordained after being knighted. Australian and New Zealand Anglican clergy who were knighted routinely used to ignore this rule, but I expect that was to do with the weather down there. This circumstance also means apparently that Her Majesty doesn't lower a sword onto my shoulder, but does something else, the nature of which I will no doubt discover on the day. It's a pleasant anomaly.'
What was your reaction to being knighted?
‘I was astonished and delighted to be honoured in this way. The great thing about these awards is that they always represent some particular field or subject, and the field that is being given a thumbs-up by this award is church history in particular, the religious history that I’ve studied, but it's also all arts and humanities subjects in universities. This award is saying that the sort of subject I have studied matters; it is good for the nation.’
What set you on the path of studying church history and theology?
'Matters ecclesiastical have long been a family business; my father and his father were both Anglican clergy (Scottish Episcopal and C of E) and I spent a happy childhood in one of those wonderfully absurdly large and decayed country rectories where Agatha Christie could set a murder (the Church has sold them all off now) in a Suffolk parish which also has two beautiful medieval churches. My father loved history, and so as a family over meals we talked about it as others might talk about football. And then my first job, rather accidentally, was teaching in a Methodist theological college, where from Day One in my late twenties I taught all the church history, Plato to Nato, to prospective Methodist ministers. No escape there from religious history, even though my Cambridge doctorate had been about the political aspects of the English Reformation.'
How has the field of church history and theology more generally changed since you began your career?
'The delight of it has been that church history has moved out of its old insularity, the tribal history of various denominations cultivated by themselves, to connect up with other aspects of history - politics, social structures, anthropology. Consequently others now see it as part of the mainstream of study; and the world's general turn to religion in the last forty years has underlined the urgency of knowing about religion in the past. Academic historians may not believe in a particular theology, but certainly far more of them now see the sense in understanding how it has worked for others.'
What motivates you as an academic?
'An intense curiosity about humans both alive and dead, and a fatal urge to want to tell other people about the results of my curiosity. I'd do this even if they didn't pay me.'
Why do you think communication by academics to the wider public is important?
'For all the reasons above. Religion hugely matters to millions on millions of human beings currently alive, and therefore we vitally need to understand it, in its own terms, rather than imposing some external logic on it. Much of it is bad religion, because it is wilfully simple religion, and over-simple religion very commonly depends on taking an over-simple view of the past. That needs complicating without being confusing. It's the enjoyable task of the historian to tell a complex story, but to tell it in a way which a lot of folk will understand. It would be very selfish for academics to keep our research to ourselves.'
What is next for you?
'The next series, already in the can, is for BBC2, and is called How God made the English - a look at how the English came to be, and what happens to Englishness now that religion is apparently less central to it, and that the three-centuries-long project of Britishness is disintegrating. That's out sometime this winter. And in April/May I have to deliver the Gifford Lectures in Edinburgh, on 'Silence in Christian History: the witness of Holmes's Dog'. So my task this spring is to spend six hours talking about silence. Wish me luck.'

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Pull up a pew for online carol service

Matt Pickles | 24 Dec 11 | 0 comments

The stalls in New College’s 13th-Century Chapel, with their famous misericords, can seat only around 250 people – if everyone agrees to breathe in. Unsurprisingly, then, the choir’s Christmas Carol Service on the last Sunday of term (December 4, 2011) was an all-seater. But since then, many hundreds more people have listened to the service thanks to the choir’s decision to record and upload selected services on their website.
‘We began webcasting in October 2010 for a number of reasons,’ said Edward Higginbottom, director of the New College Chapel Choir and the Choral Professor in the Music Faculty. ‘It allows us to share worldwide what happens on a daily basis in Chapel; to chronicle the choir’s quotidian work; to contribute to carbon savings by allowing visitors to ‘attend’ one of our services at home; and to give us as a group of musicians a regular ‘control’ of our work. Those who can’t get out for one reason or another are also very much in our minds.’
The feedback has been enthusiastic and the website has a regular stream of traffic, allowing the choir to reach out beyond its usual audience to listeners worldwide. New College is not the first choir to put such a scheme in place and, in Professor Higginbottom’s opinion, they will not be the last. He said: ‘I’m sure other choirs will adopt webcasting in the future. St John’s Cambridge already does and Merton has occasional webcasts from their chapel. Webcasting services is a great way of opening up an experience that we can easily take for granted here in Oxford.’
The Christmas Carol Service can be heard here – and wearing your Sunday best while listening to it is optional.
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About this blog

The latest news and views in the arts, humanities and culture at Oxford University. Blog is updated by Matt Pickles, Press Officer at Oxford University.

Contact: Matt Pickles

01865 270046

matt.pickles@admin.ox.ac.uk