Early Nineteenth-century England Research Articles

The next 75 years

With this issue of Notes and Records of the Royal Society we come to the end of our 75th year of publication. Since our first issue in 1938, the world of periodical publishing in the history of science, technology and medicine has undergone profound changes. Many new journals have been founded,

Debating Bibliomania and the Collection of Books in the Eighteenth Century

The social categorization of the book collectors in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain informs the relationship between bibliomania and the private library. Much bibliomania was middle-class, with much emulation of celebrated aristocratic collectors and collections. Privacy, however, remained an important concern. Collectors often shared their books with others, but their passion was regarded as an individual one, with private space associated with the collecting habit. Paralleling the commercial restructuring of bookselling was a boom in the fashioning and equipping of domestic libraries, and by 1800 the middle classes were building more libraries than ever before, often to enhance their social prestige. The essay also interrogates the ambiguity of connoisseurship, which sometimes involved destruction as well as conservation. What needs further investigation is the motivation of library owners, as evidenced by correspondence and the prefaces to library catalogues.

Isaac D'Israeli and the invention of the literary character

Isaac D'Israeli's work on the literary character offers a distinctive analysis of the relation between the literary and history in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Britain. He argues that character can be constructed and shaped by literary activity. The literary character also has common traits across the ages and can be seen as a trans-historical ideal that has tangible, empirical effects. Isolated and part of a solitary community, the literary character is marked by an inherited disinheritance and dislocation from its own time and place. D'Israeli's account of the literary character suggests the need to re-think the relation between the literary and history.

The “New World of Children” Reconsidered: Child Abduction in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century England

AbstractThis article argues that in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England, changes in the perceived value of children, both materially and emotionally, put them in a new position of possible danger. The valorization of childhood brought new risks to children. Children were thought to be vulnerable to child abduction, or “child stealing,” as contemporaries termed it. Between 1790 and 1849, 108 cases of child abduction were tried at the Old Bailey and then recorded in its Proceedings or heard before magistrates in London's police courts and at county sessions courts and subsequently reported in newspapers. These cases, along with fictional accounts of child abduction, give insights into what were considered the most common motives for this crime. While some child abductors were motivated by poverty and saw children's clothes as economic assets that could be sold, others were driven by a desire to assume a mother role and represented stolen children as their own. Popular interest in abduction stories was sustained while contemporaries shared common fears about the loss of children and the limitations of adults to protect children from harm.

A Case Study of the Impact of Wealth on the Criminal Justice System in Early Nineteenth-Century England

Using a case study of the passage of the son of a wealthy, well connected East India Company merchant through the English criminal justice system from 1812 to 1815, this article examines the attitudes and strategies of his family, lawyers and prosecutors in order to assess the impact of wealth and influence at different stages of the judicial process. It demonstrates that complex questions of social, political and family allegiances determined when and how wealthy families chose to apply or abandon attempts to influence the course of justice. Both father and son could call on a number of relatives and elite acquaintances, but while the son expected their support, the father sought to prevent it because he wanted the law to stop his profligate son from defrauding society. In doing so he conflated the public good with private interest and, while he insisted on the impartiality of the law, his use of money to hire or fire legal counsel and his decision not to call on influential connections, was highly instrumental and had a significant impact at different stages.

Tasting the Rainbow: One Dye at a Time

T asting the rainbow : O ne dye at a time Alvin Huang food we eat. Food coloring is often forgotten in the larger scheme of one’s diet and health concerns, but it remains a factor nonetheless which deserves attention and proper knowledge. Food coloring has been a part of human food for centuries, though its regulation is more recent. Early records indicate that the Egyptians used food coloring in their drugs as early as 1500 BC. Later records show that the French enacted edicts preventing the coloring of butter and bread during the Renaissance to ensure that the products were not disguised as something else. More modern examples include the coloring of coffee and tea in early nineteenth century England and the subsequent concern for verifying the authenticity of the coffee and tea. This controversy served as the catalyst for beginnings of modern government regulation over food dyes. Modern uses of food coloring and its regulation in the United States began in the late nineteenth century over a curious conflict of coagulated fats. During this time, a new product was created that challenged the dominance of butter. Today, this product is called margarine. In this so-called “Margarine War”, the dairy industry became upset that the margarine manufacturers colored their naturally white product yellow to imitate butter. What followed afterwards were a series of back and forth attacks and advertisements between the two sides to convince consumers to buy their respective products. Eventually, the dairy industry petitioned Congress to pass legislation restricting the manufacture and coloring of margarine in the 1880s. The margarine industry tried to fight back via the Supreme Court, but they could do nothing as the legislation passed by Congress was upheld. This incident paved the way for government regulation of food coloring in the United States. The first major legislation that focused on food regulation was the Pure Food and B erkeley S cientific J ournal • C olors • F all • V olume 17 • I ssue 1 • 1 B S J Have a quick look at your food. Is it in a wrapper, in a can, or in a bag? Has it been processed or was it picked from a tree or vine? What are the ingredients on the label? One thing most people take for granted is the color of their food. An apple is red, salmon is pink, and butter is yellow. These are immutable facts that are never going to change. However, food dyes have been a staple in the food industry in the United States for well over a century. The use of artificial food coloring goes back to the late nineteenth century, but government regulation did not come about until the early twentieth century. Subsequent government oversight was enacted in response to the growing use of food coloring. Today, only certain dyes are allowed under the Food and Drug Administration, which faces ongoing challenge regarding the regulation of food dyes. All the while, a series of scientific studies have delved into the health consequences of food d y e s in t h e

Who Was ‘The Deluded Follower of Joanna Southcott’? Millenarianism in Early Nineteenth-Century England

This article re-examines a controversial group in English religious history: the millenarian followers of the prophet Joanna Southcott. The identities of many of Southcott's supporters have remained unclear, despite notable academic attention. Their relative social dislocation is most disputed; greater consensus characterises debates over women's attraction to Southcottianism. This article uses a recently-opened archive of Southcottian material, and reinterprets previously-known sources, to revise all existing pictures of who Southcottians were. Southcottian occupations in industrial regions indicate a similar social makeup to contemporary Methodism; Southcottianism had no distinct appeal to women. New evidence of the personal experiences of Southcottians further suggests that they may be best understood as a branch of the ‘heart religion’ of the period, one taking a distinctive view of the ways and means of direct communication between the divine and human worlds.

William Blake’s Golden String: Jerusalem and the London Textile Industry

RECENT WORK IN ROMANTIC STUDIES--INDEED, IN ENGLISH STUDIES more broadly--has called for a renewed attention to the material-culture contexts with which literary expression is always in dialogue. In the past decade, landmark studies in Romanticism have investigated everything from advertising and economics to the science of the mind and the gastronomic pleasures of the table. (1) Increasingly, Romanticism is studied as a movement that is fundamentally engaged with and shaped by the circulation and production of commodities and the culture that they generate, and we are a long distance from the old myth of dreamy poets living in a world of the disembodied imagination. Some Romantic-era commodities have received substantial scholarly attention. We know a good deal of important information, for example, about sugar and slavery, tea and opium. (2) Print culture is now well integrated into the field of study, and the names of periodical reviews and their editors are, today, nearly as familiar as the names of the era's great cartoonists and satirists. (3) Among the widely circulated and significant commodities of the Romantic era, however, there is one that provided late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain with some of its most powerfully resonant cultural symbols: textile-based fashion. Throughout British culture, Phrygian caps and sans culottes were shorthand for 1790s radicalism, and the buff and blue colors of the Whig party--a visual allusion to the military uniforms of American revolutionaries--were a silent statement of transatlantic and national political allegiance. The revitalization of the tartan in the early nineteenth century operated as a cipher for renewed Scottish nationalism, and, to caricature an educated literary lady, one only had to refer to her imagined bluestockings. When the young Lord Byron made his maiden speech in Parliament in 1812, he had originally intended to speak on the subject of the Catholic emancipation, a topic that was unquestionably among the most urgent and divisive controversies of the Romantic half-century. Instead, he turned his attention at the last moment to a topic that was no less urgent for many of his contemporaries: the textile riots of the Nottingham weavers. (4) These impassioned artisans had been far more patient than their London counterparts, who had been rioting already for decades. Cultural engagement, of course, was Byron's signature, and the assimilation of material-culture tropes in his poetic oeuvre would surprise few scholars of the Romantic period. Likewise, there is something quite natural about the idea that the affluent middle-class writers who dominated the literary movement that we now know as Romanticism should have reflected and deployed in their work the luxury commodities with which they were surrounded as active consumers of gentility. With an artisan-class writer such as William Blake, however, the world of fashion seems less immediately relevant--perhaps especially in that avowedly spiritual and perfectly Jerusalem (1804-20). (5) Yet, nothing could be further from the case. Jerusalem is not just a poem that engages the material history of fashion and the textile industry in the early nineteenth century, but I would contend that it is perhaps essentially about that subject. Or, at least, it makes essential and direct narrative and visual use of Blake's considerable knowledge about cloth manufacture to shape its poetic narrative--a narrative that is far less mad when relocated in the context of Romantic-period material culture. In making this case for the centrality of cloth production in Jerusalem, I argue here three broad points. First, I propose that our thinking about Romantic print culture as a paper-based communication network and about Blake as a printmaker within it needs to be expanded to include the textile industry. It is an argument that some may find contentious. For the past several decades, Blake studies, in particular, has been strongly focused on what we might call a positive and minute historicism--a detailed and intensive investigation into the implications of what has been understood to be Blake's very specific training in a narrow and specialized field. …

<em>Codification, Macaulay and the Indian Penal Code: The Legacies and Modern Challenges of Criminal Law Reform</em>, edited by Wing-Cheong Chan, Barry Wright, and Stanley Yeo

Reviewed by: Codification, Macaulay and the Indian Penal Code: The Legacies and Modern Challenges of Criminal Law Reform ed. by Wing-Cheong Chan, Barry Wright, and Stanley Yeo Douglas M. Peers (bio) Codification, Macaulay and the Indian Penal Code: The Legacies and Modern Challenges of Criminal Law Reform, edited by Wing-Cheong Chan, Barry Wright, and Stanley Yeo; pp. xv + 371. Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011, £75.00, $134.95. In 1860, the Indian Penal Code was introduced into India, the brainchild of Thomas Babington Macaulay who had drafted the code during his time in Bengal in the 1830s. Viewed by many as the best example of Benthamite legal principles put into action, with its emphasis upon “lucidity and accessibility of provisions, and consistency of expression and application” (vii), the Indian Penal Code would later be replicated in other colonial territories, notably Nigeria, Pakistan, Zimbabwe, and Malaysia (including Singapore). It provided the foundations for a stillborn attempt at codification in Great Britain in the late nineteenth century and would inform the evolution of criminal law in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The Indian Penal Code is consequently examined here through a very wide-angle imperial lens. Codification, Macaulay and the Indian Penal Code consists of four parts. The first consists of two chapters that provide a historical framing for the Indian Penal Code, locating its origins within efforts at legal reform in early nineteenth-century Britain. The following three parts, which comprise the bulk of this book, address the legacies of the Indian Penal Code, and in particular seek to provide some guidance as to how the Indian Penal Code, and those codes modeled upon it, can be refreshed and made more suitable to the societies in which they are operating. The essays are consistently of very high quality, and as they originated in a 2010 conference at the National University of Singapore that was expressly held to look at the Indian Penal Code on its 150th anniversary, the collection as a whole has a higher degree of coherence than is often the case with collections of essays. The discussions in many of the essays are underpinned by a concern over the fact that one of Macaulay’s key objectives was that the Code would be periodically revisited and revised by the legislative rather than the judicial branch of government. This foundational principle, however, was largely absent when it was enacted in 1860. Consequently, the history of the Indian Penal Code has been a “narrative of neglect and uneven amendment,” both in its original Indian form and its subsequent appearance elsewhere within the Empire (7). The stated aim of this collection is to encourage the articulation of a set of “general principles of criminal law” that could be implemented and which would be true to what Macaulay had laid out in the 1830s (13). Ironically, while legal scholars such as those assembled here are quick to recognize the significance of the Indian Penal Code, principally because of its current impact and capacity to inform further legal reform but also because of its potential to serve as a means through which we can explore nineteenth-century governmentality across a wide imperial landscape, historians of India and of empire more generally [End Page 749] have skipped over it. Macaulay is much better known for his sweeping denunciation of Indian learning: his statement “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabic” has become akin to boilerplate text in many works that detail the increasingly antagonistic views of India by Britons in the nineteenth century (“Minute on Higher Education” in Selected Writings, edited by John Clive and Thomas Pinney [1972], 241–42). Macaulay’s efforts to use education as a means to Anglicize Indians have been the subject of many studies, and as an example of colonial intent, its analysis is certainly merited. But the actual impact of his “Minute on Education” (1835) can be easily overestimated as compared with its rhetorical value. Not only was there a lack of consensus over who best and how best to educate (James Mill, the other great utilitarian figure associated with India in this period, disagreed...

The Clapham Women: Feminine Support for Public Reformers in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain

Melissa Gibbs is a senior at Armstrong Atlantic State University. She will graduate with a History major and a French minor. After graduation Melissa will pursue a Masters in European History. She loves to travel and hopes to one day teach abroad.

‘The land and its people’: reflections on artistic identification in an age of nations and nationalism

AbstractFrom the late eighteenth century onwards, increasing numbers of visual artists came to identify with their nations and with the homeland and its people. This development was strongly influenced by growing national cultural support and regulation of the arts by academies, art schools, museums and art markets in Western Europe. On a subjective level, the Rousseauan movement of a ‘return to Nature’, Herder's espousal of vernacular cultural self‐expression and, above all, the widespread Romantic cult of authenticity, were potent influences on the inner self‐identification of visual artists after 1800, and were manifested in the novel importance accorded to landscape and rural genre painting in Western Europe. Here I consider the role of national sentiment, the ‘return to Nature’ and the cult of authenticity, first in landscape paintings by Paul Sandby, J. M. W. Turner and John Constable in early nineteenth‐century Britain, and then in the rural genre paintings of Jean‐Francois Millet and Jules Breton in nineteenth‐century France and Josef Israels, Anton Mauve and Vincent Van Gogh in the later nineteenth‐century Netherlands. Their work reveals how nineteenth‐century visual artists became inwardly identified with the ‘land and its people’, and how they in turn contributed, especially through prints and engravings, to the dissemination of national imagery and a cultural nationalism.

Melancholy and Mourning: Black Banquets and Funerary Feasts

The article investigates a range of lavishly staged banquets evoking death and funerary rituals in history and fiction, comparing them with actual funerary practices involving food. Examples discussed range from the ancient world (Greece, Rome, Egypt) to Renaissance Italy, early modern Britain, and eighteenth and nineteenth century Britain and France. By exploring the symbols of food and dining as entertainment and ritual, it contrasts the elaborate melancholy of the black banquet with the cathartic effectiveness of the funeral feast, and assesses the heightened impact of the borrowing of funerary symbols for entertainment in periods where such rites had a much more prominent role in daily life. It concludes that whereas the funeral feast has a constructive contribution to make to the process of mourning, the black banquet is little more than a gratifyingly macabre—if entertaining—indulgence.

The Lancasterian monitorial system as an education industry with a logic of capitalist valorisation

The business side of the Lancasterian system of mass schooling has been highlighted by some researchers. However, this feature is usually considered of minor importance compared to other dimensions of that system, namely the social control role of popular education in early nineteenth-century Britain. The present surge of projects and mechanisms directed to capitalist valorisation within public education systems provides an enhanced relevance to the study of past experiments with similar meaning and content. In this paper, I seek to understand the processes of educational production and capital valorisation in the Lancasterian undertaking. Succinctly as it may be, I refer to initiatives originated in the Benthamite circle in support of the Lancasterian system and aimed at extending it to superior branches of knowledge and to other social classes.

Panics, payments disruptions and the Bank of England before 1826

The structures of the banking systems in early nineteenth-century England and later nineteenth-century America were quite similar. In each the multitude of independent country or interior bankers maintained correspondent accounts with bankers in the metropolis, London and New York respectively, to hold reserves and to clear and settle financial instruments used in intercity financial transactions. In spite of such similarities in structure, the performances of the two systems were, however, rather different. Although panics were frequent and their extent widespread in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England involving numerous bank failures, there was never a nationwide paralysis of the payments system such as had become a regular event in late nineteenth-century America. This was due to the Bank of England's functioning as a de facto lender of last resort even though such a role was not explicitly recognized or acknowledged until decades later.

‘Except where herein otherwise directed’: building with legal documents in early nineteenth-century England

To show every minute portion of a building by drawing is next to impossible, and would be more laborious than useful, and therefore description in writing is resorted to, by which much labour is saved, and the intentions of the architect more readily conveyed to the mind of the operative.This paper investigates the changes in architectural practice following the introduction of contracting in gross for the execution of building work in early nineteenth-century England. This particular new form referred to two different agreements, either contracting for a whole undertaking by a single builder who agreed to erect the whole of an edifice at a predetermined price and time, or contracting for the work of a specific trade only.The changes in contracting the building work are understood as changes in building practice, whose material product would be the building. In a similar manner the building contracts are considered as the material products of the architectural practice, including not only the working drawings, but also the legal obligations and building specifications. This paper investigates the contract documents that were to be produced in the architectural office in order to build on site as evidence for a response of architectural practice to the changes in building practice. It traces this process in the adaptation of the writings of the legal documents to contracting in gross by comparing the specifications of John Soane's building contract for Tendring Hall of 1784 with the instructions and model specifications of the early nineteenth-century handbooks and practical guides.

Malthus, gender and the demarcation of ‘dangerous’ bodies in 1996 US welfare reform

This article argues that populationism as a gendered narrative provides a crucial rhetorical architecture for welfare reform debates in the USA during the 1990s. Populationism, which Joni Seager defines as ‘the dogma and the rhetoric of population alarmism and population control,’ subtly legitimized efforts to control and marginalize poor women's bodies in the context of welfare reform. The populationism underlying welfare reform hinges on a deep fear of engulfing social chaos if ‘we’ do not check the fertility of poor women, and particularly women of color. This article historically situates contemporary welfare politics by tracing in some detail how Malthus' original writings on population were constitutively linked to debates about ‘poor relief’ in early nineteenth century England. Exploring the gendered linkages between Malthus and social welfare policy in the 1800s allows us to understand how Malthus continues to haunt discourses about social welfare in the 1990s and beyond, with direct consequences for poor women and particularly poor women of color.

Unemployment and Protest: New Perspectives on Two Centuries of Contention – Edited by Matthias Reiss and Matt Perry

The book is a collection of essays based mainly on papers presented at a conference organized by the German Historical Institute, London, in 2007 in conjunction with the Society for the Study of Labour History and consists of fourteen essays arranged in five substantive parts covering a 200-year panorama with an impressively diverse range of experiences from Beerbuhl's work on the Blanketeers of early nineteenth-century Britain through to Vietor-Englander's examination of ‘Unemployed Protest in Germany in the Internet Era’ and deals with countries as various as Austria, Britain, France, Germany, New Zealand, Palestine and the USA, although the majority focus on Britain and western Europe. However, there is a clear interest in the inter-war period with four essays grouped into a part entitled ‘The Golden Age of Unemployed Movements’, while five other essays are also located during this period. The essays are introduced and grounded in two themes. First, one of the two editors writes on ‘Marienthal’, an Austrian textile-producing village which during 1931–2 was the subject of ‘socio-graphic’ research into its two-year experience of high levels of unemployment by a team of Vienna-based researchers with a cross-disciplinary remit. Secondly, there is an exposition by Klanderrmans of the predominant social psychological theories underpinning unemployment as a social phenomenon. The collection attempts to challenge the accepted notion that the unemployed were essentially passive and seeks to demonstrate the variety of instances through which different individuals and organizations responded to the experience of unemployment.

Prosecution Associations in Industrial Revolution England: Private Providers of Public Goods?

AbstractIn early nineteenth-century England, there was no professional police force and most prosecutions were private. This paper examines how associations for the prosecution of felons arose to internalize the positive externalities produced by private prosecutions. Drawing upon new historical evidence, it examines how the internal governance and incentive structures of prosecution associations enabled them to provide public goods. Consistent with the reasoning of Demsetz (1970), I find that prosecution associations were economic clubs that bundled the private good of insurance with the public good of deterrence. Associations used local newspapers to advertise rewards and attract new members. Price discrimination was employed in order to elicit contributions from individuals with different security demands. Selective incentives helped to overcome free-rider problems between members.

Garden Pests and the Inculcation of Virtue in Early Nineteenth-Century England

Garden Pests and the Inculcation of Virtue in Early Nineteenth-Century England

Some Notes on Lycophron's Readers in Late Eighteenth- and early Nineteenth-century England

Lycophron: ‘the obscure’. In his dense, bewildering poem, nothing is ever named, everything becomes a reference to something else. Paul Auster, The Invention of Solitude, II: The Book of Memory