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This article examines the spatialization of sleep in Victorian Britain across a range of institutions, including homes and dormitories. It situates the emergence of modern sleeping space at the intersection of two key narratives regarding the history of the body: Elias's `civilising process' and Foucault's account of the realization of a `disciplinary society'. Beginning in the early modern period, sleeping bodies were gradually accorded their own space set apart from others, and by the end of the 19th century the individual bed was regarded as an essential ingredient of civilized society. However, the evolution of modern sleeping space was only in part informed by ideas of privacy and civility: it was also animated by ideas concerning the functioning of `normal' bodies and minds, the governmental agency of space and the moral integrity of nuclear families. Furthermore, the bed remained a highly problematic, indeterminate space, facilitating deviant as much as civilized behaviour, and giving rise to all manner of pathologies, perversities and phobias. In this respect, the history of sleeping space also sheds light on the reciprocities of rule and resistance, pleasure and power, which at once constitute and imperil the integrity of the modern body.

These days the secret ballot is taken for granted and it is often seen as the natural complement of universal, democratic suffrage. Its emergence, however, was just as contested and varied as the franchise and raised similar issues concerning the nature and practice of citizenship. This article focuses on the emergence of the secret ballot in Britain and France, two countries with a long history of parliamentary and local elections. In Britain, the secret ballot was introduced in 1872, while in France, which introduced universal male suffrage in 1848, it was as late as 1913 before envelope and polling booth rendered the vote completely secure. This study documents the varied polling practices employed in both countries prior to the onset of the secret ballot. It also highlights the contentious nature of polling reform. For some, the secret ballot was regarded as a means of safeguarding electoral independence and eliminating corruption. Others, including radicals, argued quite the opposite: that secret voting was an affront to honourable, public-spirited citizenship. In the end, full secrecy was achieved as part of the broader process of domesticating and disciplining the exercise of a mass franchise.The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures. 1 L ike much of the technology of elections, the secret ballot is often simply taken for granted. Voting in secret is now considered a 'universal human right' and an integral part of the praxis of democratic societies. There is in fact something like a global consensus that this is the only proper method of securing votes. From France to Argentina and India to South Africa, the secret ballot has been enshrined in constitutions all over the world. Thus, when today's statesmen, with

This article examines a neglected aspect of British urban history: the governance of common lodging houses in Victorian and Edwardian London. The aim of the article is to detail the multiple ways they exercised the limits of urban governance. Providing cheap, nightly accommodation for the outcasts of urban society, common lodging houses were neither easily conceived, nor easily regulated. It is argued that their governance attests to an abundant metropolitan modernity characterized by ongoing antagonism and multiple points of tension and instability.

This article examines Victorian public baths as institutions of active, embodied liberalism: as political spaces where subjects went to practise and enhance their powers of selfgovernment, and in so doing embody and perform a clean and respectable lifestyle. To some extent, public baths can be understood as disciplinary institutions. According to its promoters, personal cleanliness went hand in hand with sober, industrious habits and a conscientious sense of domestic and social responsibility. At the same time, they also formed significant ethical sites, for bathing was a privilege that had to be paid for and as such actively adopted as a lifestyle choice; and, to this extent, they were about facilitating, rather than coercing, a certain civilised freedom. Public baths also allow for an exploration of the material facets of Victorian liberalism, of its spatial and corporeal dimensions. Washing was a practice that not only took place within a privatising architecture but one that also entailed an intensified awareness of the materiality of the self, and especially its covering, the skin. As an art of the self, as a form of subjective individualisation, washing was at once an ethical and a sensory, a moral and a physical, enactment of power.