Character Matters: Individual Character, Moral and Political Education in Victorian Britain

This project (CHARMA) is a study of the political importance of the concept of personal character in Victorian England. CHARMA will be developed through a 24-month European Fellowship with the University of Manchester. The overarching goal of this project is understanding the relationship between the cultivation of individual character and the plans for building a peaceful society, at a time when Britain was experiencing rapid socio-economic and political change. To achieve this overarching goal, I divided my project into two sub-goals. My first sub-goal is understanding the Victorian discourse of character and its political importance through texts of early and mid-Victorian political thought. This study will be pursued by textual analysis. My second sub-goal is demonstrating that this concept influenced actual plans for educational and social reform. To do so, I will focus on a case-study: I will analyse the reform practices and institutions of a highly influential group of Dissenters, the Unitarians, in Victorian Manchester. This study will be pursued through archival research, using the vast collections in the University of Manchester Archive. I will also used social network analysis to trace the connections of Unitarians with different social groups and represent them graphically. This project will contribute to the fields of intellectual history, history of political thought and political philosophy. CHARMA's methodology is interdisciplinary, as it combines different fields, different kind of sources and a practice-based, bottom-up approach with a contextualist study of published texts. CHARMA also uses a mixed-methods approach and provides methodological innovation by introducing a new method, social network analysis, into the field of intellectual history.