Philip Howell

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• PhD
• Professor at University of Cambridge

In Sheila Burnford’s 1961 novel The Incredible Journey, three domestic animals undertake an arduous trek through the forests of northern Ontario to be reunited with their owners and family. As an example of “homing instinct” stories, The Incredible Journey has been influential, notably as a result of the 1963 Disney film. The genre is easily dismis...

This paper explores the history and political significance of black horsemen and horsewomen, using the appearance of mounted protesters at the 2020 Black Lives Matter rallies in the US to consider the role of the horse as both an adjunct of authority, in symbol and in material power, and as a partner in forms of protest and resistance. This paper b...

Birdsong is familiar but enigmatic: to some nothing but mechanical “instinct,” but so excessively exuberant that enthusiasts have linked the songs of birds to the development of the aesthetic sense. Where medieval scholars once saw the origins of music in the imitation of nature, by the Enlightenment birdsong was banished in the anthropocentric def...

From September 2015, the deaths of hundreds of pet cats in Croydon, London and the UK have been attributed to the actions of one or more killers. In September 2018, the police operation to catch the ‘Croydon cat killer’ was called off, with the deaths attributed to the actions of cars and foxes. This paper considers what the case says about our rel...

This article discusses the significance of the literary techniques used to characterize the problem of drunkenness and the figure of the “drunkard” in Anthony Trollope’s short story “The Spotted Dog” (1870). “The Spotted Dog” is in most aspects a conventional account of the dangers of drink, but the story nonetheless dramatizes the process by which...

This paper uses a case study of animals in wartime to ask how historical animal geographers might approach the historical geography of emotions. Its substantive focus is the entangled emotional experiences of humans and companion animals during the Second World War on the British home front. Arguing against a focus on the practical and political di...

This article discusses the significance of the literary techniques used by Anthony Trollope to present the problem of drunkenness and the figure of the “drunkard” in his short story, “The Spotted Dog” (1870). A conventional account of the dangers of drink in many ways, “The Spotted Dog” nonetheless dramatizes the process by which we arrive at ethic...

Unpublished manuscript, not to be cited without permission.

This paper considers the time and the place of drinking in modern British life, as represented in Patrick Hamilton's trilogy of novels set in the publand of London's West End in the interwar years, through Mikhail Bakhtin's concept of the chronotope and with critical nods to Hagerstrand's time-geography corpus. The chronotopes of pubs and their nei...

Although the British consider themselves a nation of dog lovers, what we have come to know as the modern dog came into existence only after a profound, and relatively recent, transformation in that country's social attitudes and practices. In At Home and Astray, Philip Howell focuses on Victorian Britain, and especially London, to show how the dog'...

This paper provides a commentary on the papers in this special feature, and on the conceptualisation of scale and moral regulation in the sociological and geographical traditions more generally. It uses three recent monographs on empire and moral regulation to illustrate the current challenge to assumptions of scale embedded in the methodological n...

This essay examines the impact of the Great War on the breeding and showing of pedigree dogs (the "dog fancy") in Britain. Hostility toward Germany led first to a decline in the popularity of breeds such as the dachshund, with both human and canine "aliens" targeted by nationalist fervor. Second, the institutions of dog breeding and showing came un...

Recent proposals to establish a ‘managed zone’ for female street sex workers in Liverpool are placed in this paper in historical and geographical context. Liverpool is shown to be an exemplar of a late Victorian municipal management of prostitution that was just as firmly committed to the containment and ‘localisation’ of sex work. This model is co...

In an earlier article in Irish Historical Studies the present author argued that the beginnings of the Irish Free State’s campaign against venereal disease were caught up in a politics of prostitution that mobilised nationalist, republican and post-colonial sentiments, revolving around the struggle between military and civilian authority, and invok...

First things first: the rather grand title of Pamela Gilbert's book gives little clue to the fact that this is a specialized and thematic study of social and medical mapping in Victorian Britain, with rather brief nods to British India and to the influence of disease maps on literary culture.It takes quite a lot to overcome colonic irritation, but...

Journal of Social History 39.4 (2006) 1219-1221 This is a very significant contribution to our understanding of the relationship among poverty, gender and social welfare in early modern London. It fills in some major gaps in our knowledge about London's VD institutions, and provides a clear narrative of the changing basis of that provision up to th...

This article considers a neglected example of the British colonial regulation of prostitution, tracing the workings of such a system in the Crown Colony of Gibraltar in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Gibraltar's strategic importance impelled the British authorities to regulate sex work, but no specific Contagious Diseases legislation...

The geography of the regulation of sex work in colonial Hong Kong is examined as a contribution to the historiography of the colonial city. Particular attention is paid to racial and sexual segregation and their relation to Foucauldian concepts of discipline and regulated sexuality. The introduction and revision of Venereal Disease Ordinances, and...

To what extent has a North-South divide been a structural feature of England's geography during the last millennium and to what extent has it been especially associated with, and recognized during, particular periods in the past? These are the central questions addressed in this pioneering 2004 exploration of the history of a fundamentally geograph...

This article is intended primarily as a contribution to work on the regulation of sexuality in modern Ireland, but, more generally, it attempts to situate the Irish experience within a wider problematic concerning the relations of state and society in the regulation of prostitution. The regulation of sexuality in early twentieth-century Ireland has...

This paper uses the experiences of Sir John Pope Hennessy (1834‐91) as Governor of Barbados (1875‐76) and Hong Kong (1877‐82) to investigate the political geography of British imperial government in the later nineteenth century. Pope Hennessy's postings brought him into conflict with successive white settler elites, as he attem...

Radical urban geography has recently begun a critique of crime fiction, seeing its ideological shortcomings as politically instructive. This paper argues that this critique is theoretically naive and suggests that a concentration on the epistemological claims of both fiction and urban geography is more fruitful. The paper turns the critique back on...

The recent 'animal turn' in geography has contributed to a critical examination of the inseparable geographies of human and non-human animals, and has a clear ethical dimension. This paper is intended to explore these same ethical issues through a consideration of the historical geography of petkeeping as this relates to the death and commemoration...

Guidebooks to brothels and prostitutes flourished in mid-nineteenth century Britain and America, particularly in the great cities of London and New York. This paper treats such guides as a form of imaginative mapping, associated with a ‘sporting’ male culture of sexually predatory men and an ideal city of male sexual opportunity. Such guidebooks of...

In Britain the regulation of prostitution became a matter of urgency in the middle and later decades of the nineteenth century, most famously in the Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s. «Regulationist» policy attempted to isolate, segregate and domesticate prostitutional activity, resulting in a spatial order with clear class and gender biases. A...

In this paper I examine the interplay of race and sexuality in 19th-century British colonial legislation concerning prostitution. I demonstrate that British systems of regulation of prostitution predated the introduction of the Contagious Diseases Act in 1864, and that rather than spreading from Britain to its colonies regulationist measures develo...

This paper uses information on the local leadership of the National Charter Association to argue against a number of assumptions about the historical geography of the Chartist suffrage movement in mid-Victorian Britain, including the emphasis on the movement's local background, on the local bases of popular politics, and the overarching methodology...

Lecturing activity was central to the ambitions of the Chartist movement for universal suffrage in early Victorian Britain, not merely because it was an effective means of political proselytism, but also because it was emblematic of Chartist political aims. Political lecturing followed a long radical tradition, but Chartism was able to systematize...

This paper seeks to trace and re-evaluate the convergence between political geography and contemporary political theory regarding the normative ascendancy of the local, contingent, concrete and particular over universal, abstract and general theories of justice. The search for universal norms has been roundly critiqued, principally by postmodern, c...

This paper contributes to the ongoing discussion of the historical geography of modernity. It is argued that the exclusive focus on social theory has detrimental effects on the appreciation of normative political concerns and that it ignores the resurgence of normative political theory. Habermas's concept of the public sphere, and its place within...