Early Nineteenth-century England Research Articles

‘An elegant and able practitioner’. Marian Mason and the rise of women’s calisthenics in nineteenth century Britain

ABSTRACT In 1826 Marian Mason was introduced to British society as a callisthenic instructor. Trained by P.H. Clias, a gymnast who oversaw physical training in the military and navy, Mason is the first high profile female fitness coach in British history. Despite her importance as a landmark figure, Mason's contributions, and indeed life, remain relatively obscured from the historical record. Studying Mason's heyday in public life from 1826 to the early 1830s, this article provides the first substantive examination of Mason's life, her social networks and wealth and, critically, the monograph she published in 1826. While acknowledging Mason's role as an early female fitness coach, the article provides a deep reading of Mason's successes, focusing on her class and relationship advantages, her ability to court medical favour and shrewdness in addressing broader societal concerns. This article is less a biography and more an examination of the broader social and medical trends in early nineteenth century England, which created a space for people like Mason. The article presents a simple argument – Marian Mason was an early female fitness coach who, drawing on broader societal concerns about the body, created a niche for her career by leveraging her expertise and familial connections.

Government, trusts, and the making of better roads in early nineteenth century England and Wales

Abstract Who develops infrastructure? This paper introduces new data to explain which actors developed better roads in early nineteenth century England and Wales. We find that central Government sponsorship and financing of new roads was limited to 100 miles on sections of the politically important London-Holyhead Road. By comparison non-profit turnpike trusts made almost thirty times more new road mileage by attracting both public and private capital. Although the London-Holyhead Road had the highest quality, most turnpike trust roads were good. By government working with and through trusts, a better road network developed, especially in industrializing areas and along Mail routes.

Chartist Studies and Malcolm Chase: A Re-appreciation

Abstract Malcolm Chase (1957–2020) was the pre-eminent scholar of the Chartist democratic movement, and more broadly, of working-class political and social action in early nineteenth-century Britain. His work in many respects shaped a shift in the study of Chartism within labour and cultural history. Rejecting the inward-looking diversion into the ‘linguistic turn’ of the early 1990s, Chase offered a broader and holistic view of not only what class, political radicalism and the land meant to working-class people, but also how it was a lived experience expressed in action as well as words. This article is a re-appreciation of Chase’s major contribution to the field. It charts the origins and development of Chartist studies, and surveys recent publications, including the wide range of articles published on Chartism in the English Historical Review.

Babel; or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution by R. F. Kuang

Reviewed by: Babel; or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution by R. F. Kuang Rachel S. Cordasco R. F. KUANG Babel; or The Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution New York. Harper Voyager. 2022. 560 pages. GIVEN THE SUBTITLE of this alternate-history novel about language, translation, colonialism, and war, one would be forgiven for spending most of one's time analyzing each of the novel's events to gauge whether or not said violence will indeed be necessary. It is this kind of leading (or perhaps distracting) element that mars what is otherwise a unique, if not wholly convincing, take on what the Industrial Revolution in Britain would have wrought had silver, rather than steam and other technologies, driven innovation. In R. F. Kuang's take on early nineteenth-century England, translators, rather than inventors, are the major force behind industrial innovations, with bridges, factories, banks, carriages, and more operating at beyond-peak efficiency thanks to pairs of silver bars activated by language. For example, a silver bar with the Chinese word wuxing ("formless, shapeless, incorporeal") engraved on one side and the English word invisible on the other could be activated if both words are spoken aloud by someone fluent in both languages—thus the speaker would be able to hide from view for several minutes. Throughout England, such bars are buried in gardens to facilitate growth and beauty, installed in bridges to strengthen them, placed in boats to expedite travel, all to improve British lives. Of course, upperclass Britons reap many more of the benefits of silver than the working class and poor, many of whom were thrown out of jobs as the Industrial Revolution passed them by. Into this world of translation and silver come four Oxford students (Robin, Ramy, Victoire, and Letty) who have been admitted to the prestigious translation program at a tower called Babel. Within this structure, professors and students work on using ancient and modern languages to plumb the depths of "match-pairs" to keep industry humming. [End Page 85] Wealthy and powerful, thanks to this magical silver, Britain has amped up its colonial program by the 1830s, focusing especially on China, due to its silver. As Robin and his friends eventually learn, China's resistance to Britain's pursuit of its silver through opium trafficking (Kuang's reference to the Opium Wars of the mid-nineteenth century) will eventually lead to war, which Britain will likely win. Robin, Ramy, and Victoire are especially concerned because they see themselves as pawns in this colonial game, used for their fluency in Chinese, Arabic, Kreyol, and other languages. As natives of China and India, Robin and Ramy resent how differently they are treated by white Britons (Victoire, as a black Frenchwoman, feels the same). Robin soon meets a half-brother he never knew he had—one who works for a clandestine organization that siphons off Babel translators to work against the British colonial program. Griffin insists that violent resistance is the answer and eventually steers Robin to the same conclusion, one that will (as Robin admits) disproportionately hurt lower- and middle-class Britons who won't be able to escape their cities once sanitation collapses, bridges fall, and food can no longer find its way to markets. The goal, though, is to stop Britain's secret planned invasion of China—planned, that is, by the heads of Babel and not the British government (think India and the British East India Company). Babel is creative in its exploration of the power of language and how translators can be used both to bring the people of the world together and to exploit other countries in pursuit of colonialist domination. Nonetheless, the novel often becomes bogged down in discussions about exploitation and injustice that would be better communicated by a more dynamic plot. The footnotes that Kuang includes are interesting asides, except when they, once again, tell instead of show. Ultimately, Babel offers an intriguing take on an Industrial Revolution driven by silver and language, and its fluid mix of actual and fictional history make it a compelling read. Rachel S. Cordasco Madison, Wisconsin Copyright © 2023 World...

Nineteenth-Century Palestine and the British Imperial Imagination: James Silk Buckingham and the Politics of Private Dissent

This article studies the account of travels in Palestine by one of the most controversial travel writers in early nineteenth century Britain, James Silk Buckingham, whose life, career, and writings sparked a political storm. Buckingham criticised British imperial and missionary activities in the East through his journalism and travel books which reached large audiences. He was the first writer in nineteenth century Britain to use a travel narrative about Palestine as a medium to develop and express liberal, anti-colonial attitudes at a time when Britain’s imperial stock in the Middle East was on the rise. While in Palestine, Buckingham uncovered evidence that confirmed and justified his liberal views. He exposed the hypocrisy of missionary activities and undermined the rising calls in Britain for restoring the Jews. He did not call for possessing the land and reconstituting it anew; nor did he see it, as his countryman the Earl of Shaftesbury did, as an empty land needing the restoration of its original Jewish possessors. Yet the fact that he saw the land as a repository of religious fanaticism to which all religions contributed indicate his limited understanding of the diverse communities of Palestine. As this article shows, Palestine, in Buckingham’s travelogue, constituted a test case, a laboratory for testing anti-colonial and liberal ideals rather than a land of invested identities and ways of life of equal worth to those in Europe.

Snug Retreats: The Romantic Essay’s Grammar of Domesticity

ABSTRACT The history of the essay as a genre notoriously began in a very peculiar room: the library of Michel de Montaigne’s estate near Bordeaux. After many centuries, the form has passed through many other rooms, such as Robert Burton’s and Sir Thomas Browne’s libraries or the apartments of Sir Isaac Bickerstaff and Mr. Spectator, retaining an undeniable conjunction to the lodgings of its author. The house of the essayists has always been a place to which their readers were granted a special right of entry. This article aims to reflect on the spatial dimension of the English Romantic familiar essay as exemplified by the writings of Leigh Hunt and Charles Lamb. In particular, I will discuss the importance both writers attributed to the domestic interior as the most congenial scenario in which the essayistic act should be performed. Romantic essayists seemed to be more attuned with the early modern model of Montaigne. This allegiance is striking as the most frequent outlet through which essays in early nineteenth-century England were published was the same periodical press that during the eighteenth century seemed to have repudiated the private space of the parlor in favor of the socialized communal dimension of the coffee house.

Crown, Mitre and People in the Nineteenth Century: The Church of England, Establishment and the State. By G. R. Evans

Early nineteenth-century England was a semi-confessional Protestant state in which subjects were expected to conform to the doctrines, worship, and discipline of the Church by law established, but in which there was almost full toleration for those who chose not to conform. The King-in-Parliament was the supreme temporal governor of the established Church of England, while in spiritual matters, the Church was governed by its bishops. The established Church provided religious instruction and pastoral care through a parish system, and religious discipline through a system of ecclesiastical courts. It was supported by tithes on agricultural produce, church rates, church lands, donations, and endowments. It was a national church, expressing the ideal that the state had a responsibility under God to provide religious instruction, observances, and pastoral care to all inhabitants and to act in accordance with divinely-ordained moral law. In this book, G. R. Evans, professor emeritus of medieval theology and intellectual history at the University of Cambridge, explores the semi-confessional state in nineteenth-century England and its complex, multifaceted union of church and state. A trained barrister as well as a respected historian of Christianity, Evans focuses her study on ecclesiastical law. Her book includes some fascinating discussions of the nature and proceedings of the ecclesiastical courts, the personalities and careers of leading ecclesiastical lawyers and judges, and specific legal cases. She also provides a detailed discussion of ecclesiastical legislation in Parliament and of the debates in the Convocations, or consultative assemblies, of the Provinces of Canterbury and York (after those convocations were revived in 1855 and 1861 respectively). As she demonstrates, much of nineteenth-century ecclesiastical law embraced wide areas of English social life, including registration of births, deaths, and marriages, legitimacy and inheritance questions, primary and higher education, blasphemy laws and freedom of speech, doctrinal orthodoxy, clerical discipline, seating in church services, burials, tithes and church rates, church patronage and clerical livings, repair of church buildings, and management of church properties. The union of church and state existed at many levels and affected people’s lives in a myriad of ways.

Organ-Building in Georgian and Victorian England: The Work of Gray & Davison, 1772–1890 by Nicholas Thistlethwaite

Reviewed by: Organ-Building in Georgian and Victorian England: The Work of Gray & Davison, 1772–1890 by Nicholas Thistlethwaite Karrin Ford Organ-Building in Georgian and Victorian England: The Work of Gray & Davison, 1772–1890. By Nicholas Thistlethwaite. (Music in Britain, 1600–2000.) Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 2020. [xxii, 552 p. ISBN 9781783274673 (hardcover), $99; ISBN 9781787446670 (e-book), price varies.] Illustrations, maps, tables, work lists, bibliography, index. Recent decades have seen a proliferation of research in organ history and organology, befitting a tradition whose history extends back well over a thousand years. To this corpus, Nicholas Thistlethwaite’s Organ-Building in Georgian and Victorian England: The Work of Gray & Davison, 1772–1890 represents a thoughtful and well-nuanced addition, focusing on an era of British organ building marked by radical and pervasive transformation of the instrument’s design and structure. Thistlethwaite’s earlier authorit ative account of the Victorian organ, The Making of the Victorian Organ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), provides a comprehensive survey of organ building in Britain from 1820 to 1870. His present tome expands on that work by examining the venerable and innovative firm of Gray and Davison, large-scale manufacturer of church and concert instruments active for the better part of two centuries. Founded by Robert Gray in 1772 and soon augmented by the addition of his brother William in 1787, the firm was responsible for some of the most significant installations in and around London in the early years of the nineteenth century, including instruments at St. Paul’s, Covent Garden, and St. Martin-in-the-Fields. Following the ascension of William’s son John to leadership of the firm in 1837, the company [End Page 247] continued to enjoy solid success, producing a plethora of instruments for churches in the London area and exporting instruments to Boston and Charleston. After the marriage of John Gray’s daughter to Frederick Davison and the subsequent death of Gray in 1849, the firm became known as Gray and Davison, with the latter serving as sole proprietor and manager. One of the most prominent organ building firms in early nineteenth-century Britain, Gray and Davison were responsible for an astonishing number of technical and musical innovations, which Thistlethwaite details with admirable perspective. Evolutionary and reformist in approach, the firm’s tonal schemes were typically characterized by delicate voicing and powerful reeds while retaining the presence of a strong and carefully graduated grand choeur. The contributions of Gray (1790–1849), who sought to create designs responsive to the changing vicissitudes of musical tastes and increased technical demands of the instrument in worship and concert, proved synergistically balanced by those of Davison (ca. 1815–1889), whose efforts were marked by steadfast prescience and pragmatism. British instruments of the age were hardly reflective of synchronous instruments on the Continent—indeed, most organs built in Britain before 1830 lagged far behind their European counterparts in size and scope—but the firm’s perspicacity and commitment to quality, coupled with a strong sense of business acumen, decisively altered the course of domestic building and installations, gradually bringing the British organ into greater alignment with contemporary European models. Nowhere was the firm’s nascent progressivism more apparent than in its bold commitment to standardization and independence of pedal compass and design. Thistlethwaite refers the reader to The Making of the Victorian Organ for a synopsis of pedal layout in earlier instruments, although the prevailing attitude toward an independent pedal could best be described as ambivalent. Fueled by allegiance to Samuel Wesley, the greatest English organist of the age and iconic disciple of Johann Sebastian Bach, Davison sought to design organs with pedalboards capable of performing the full spectrum of German baroque music, featuring an autonomous pedal division, expanded compass, and equal temperament tuning. Further aided by performances of Felix Mendelssohn- Bartholdy, whose historic recitals in London in the late 1830s showcased the organ music of Bach (and that of Mendelssohn himself), the firm soon rebuilt earlier instruments to conform to the new standard C-compass, adding pedal divisions congruous with European models. Gray and Davison’s larger installations were heavily influenced by contemporary French models, reflecting the cultural shift to a more symphonic...

‘Hairy honours of their chins’: whiskers and masculinity in early nineteenth-century Britain

ABSTRACT Studies of the Victorian ‘beard movement’ of the 1850s have demonstrated the close connections between facial hair and shifting ideas of, and concerns about, masculinity, gender, sexuality and modernity. The ‘beard movement’ is generally seen as the return of facial hair after 150 years of beardlessness. The turn of the nineteenth century, however, witnessed a new and previously overlooked fashion for side-whiskers among young British men, one that initially caused controversy and ridicule, but which gradually became acceptable as a male accoutrement, and spurred a market for cosmetic products. What might be termed the ‘whiskers movement’ of the early 1800s offers a new and earlier perspective on facial hair as a form of embodied masculinity, and its place in contemporary debates about manliness, male fashion and appearance, sexuality and effeminacy, and political and revolutionary affiliations.

The Parodic Inversion of Gothic Travels in Northanger Abbey

This article examines the significance of Catherine Morland’s travels in Northanger Abbey (1817), which is distinct among Jane Austen’s novels in that it revolves around a series of journeys its female protagonist undertakes. In parodying the gothic novel, Austen ironically inverts the journeys gothic heroines undergo by not only limiting Catherine’s travels to central England, but also eliminating the danger and excitement that often characterize the adventures of her female gothic predecessors. While Austen admittedly pokes fun at the conventions of gothic fiction, this article argues that she also employs them to illuminate the grim realities that women faced in early nineteenth-century England. In addition to examining how Austen modifies the geographical trajectory of gothic fiction to stress that the social and sexual dangers for women lie within England (and not beyond its national borders), I explore how she considers the liberating possibilities afforded to women in gothic romances, only to shut them down in the conclusion of the novel. By choosing to gloss over Catherine’s most dangerous journey, an intentionally missed opportunity where she could have related in detail the difficulties her protagonist encounters in her travels and the various ways in which she consequently matures, I argue that Austen depicts a bleaker picture of the female plight than suggested by the lighthearted tone of her parody.

Classical authors and “scientific” research in the early years of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, 1781–1800

ABSTRACT While a clear distinction was drawn between “classical learning” and “modern science” at Oxford and Cambridge Universities in the early nineteenth century, we see no such contrast being made in other spaces of knowledge making, such as the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society. Drawing on Bacon's insistence that his inductive method should apply across all fields of knowledge, early members of the Society interpreted “science” as referring to any systematic inquiry utilising an empirical approach. An investigation of the ways in which classical authors were used within the researches of early members of the Society raises important questions about how we should think about empirical method and scientific research in early nineteenth–century England. Frequently understood as primarily engaged in researching natural knowledge, the members of the Manchester Society concerned themselves with a wide range of subjects across all branches of knowledge. Crucially, classical authors were drawn upon as sources of empirical evidence across all types of inquiry, from investigations into the colours of opaque bodies to the origins of party feeling. It is possible to identify a common approach – “history as empirical method”, which, this article suggests, was developed from Bacon's call for a “just story of learning”.

Authority and Instability: Investigating Jane Austen’s View of the Church and Clergy in Pride and Prejudice

The Church of England, the greatest Anglican establishment and the symbol of Great Britain's imperialism, has been the juncture of English history and literature throughout history. Although, after industrialization, the British society went toward a religious reformation in the Victorian era, some historians consider the early nineteenth century England as the 'Golden age' of England's ecclesiastical imperialism. Jane Austen, in her six published novels, has scrutinized the true essence of the Church of England from her specific glasses of sharpness. So, with reference to Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, this paper engages in questioning whether her works, as famous literary works of the nineteenth century which satirically depict the original social context of the time, influenced the social mind toward the Victorian reformation. In Pride and Prejudice, Miss Austen doubts the power and real position of the church and shows her disdain for religion through the foolish narrow-minded characterization of the story's clergyman: Mr. William Collins. The present study aims to illuminate the true essence of The Church of England during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century according to what Jane Austen has depicted in her novel Pride and Prejudice. Hence, this paper first probes into the religious climate of the pre-Victorian era, then it investigates Jane Austen's role, as one of the greatest writers of the age, in Victorian religious reformation, and lastly, the study aims to conclude how the British society led to the decline of religion and ecclesiasticism in the modern age.

‘But to cover her shame:’ Respectability, Social Mobility, and the Middling Sort in Early Nineteenth-century England

ABSTRACT This article explores how one middling English family – the Wilkinsons, shopkeepers in industrialising Lancashire – experienced and negotiated threats to their respectability and social status during the early nineteenth-century. It contributes to the history of downward social mobility, responding to a recent call in this journal for more work on this topic. I use a rich epistolary archive to explore the Wilkinsons experiences.

Conservative politics and Whig colonial government, 1830–41

Abstract This article explores Conservative critiques of Whig colonial rule in the 1830s. Its case is that imperial administrative and constitutional issues occupied a more prominent place in the Tories’ politics of opposition during the ‘decade of Reform’ than historians have assumed. Conservative writers and politicians styled themselves as vigorous defenders of imperial integrity, colonial constitutions, and the colonial church, against the incoherent centralizing and liberalizing innovations of the Whigs. These arguments rested on wider assumptions about the inherent failings of Whiggism, Reformed government and the pernicious global consequences of ‘liberalism’. The article asks how these claims affect our understanding of Conservative politics after the Reform crisis, and reflects on the emergence of new forms of political engagement with issues of colonial government in early nineteenth-century Britain.

John Constable, Luke Howard, and the Aesthetics of Climate

In early nineteenth-century Britain, the painter John Constable and meteorologist Luke Howard experimented with new aesthetic forms in response to the challenges climate posed to representation. In landscape paintings, sketches, tables, and graphs, the artist and scientist grappled with climate’s temporal scale, which extended beyond the domain of immediate “feeling” associated with landscape representation. Their efforts to construct a stable representation of England’s climate took shape against the polluted atmosphere of industrial, imperial London, and in tandem with the modern state’s disciplinary visuality. In their work, an aesthetics of climate emerged that was responsive to an environment increasingly known through numeric data and abstraction.

Manuscript Notations and Cultural Memory

Manuscript Notations and Cultural Memory Michael Edson (bio) Historians using manuscript notes to reconstruct reading practices from the past have traditionally focused on single annotators with marginalia in many volumes. Think of William Sherman's work on John Dee, Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton's on Gabriel Harvey, or Heather Jackson's on Samuel Taylor Coleridge.1 Such studies have advanced substantially our understandings of reading, and we would not wish them away. But they point to dissonant trends. Where literary studies continues to shun single authors (at least as the subjects for new monographs) and to question the privileging of an author's biography as the key to interpretation, studies of single annotators still dominate histories of reading. Known marginaliaists, often wealthy and male, disproportionately define the field. And while undertakings such as Book Traces (University of Virginia) and The Reading Experience Database (The Open University) have enlarged awareness of marginalia by readers about whom often little is known, both projects are, at least currently, too miscellaneous to permit comparisons across many annotated copies—comparisons promising broad insights into collective reading practices at certain times.2 In response to these patterns in print and digital scholarship, I would like to propose another method of doing the history of reading: comparing [End Page 171] manuscript notations across many, if not all, surviving copies of single titles. This labor-intensive, comparative analysis has been done occasionally in the past, but largely, again, in terms of the intentions and biographies of authors and identifiable annotators.3 By contrast, I will show what possibilities emerge through the study of marginal notes by large numbers of readers without traceable lives or intentions. To illustrate, I will analyze the handwritten notations by the mainly anonymous readers of the roughly ninety extant copies of Lady Anne Hamilton's 1807 satire, The Epics of the Ton; Or, The Glories of the Great World: A Poem. Leaving behind a larger-than-usual number of annotated copies, Epics of the Ton is a perfect subject for a comparative analysis of marginalia. Part of a larger project, the analysis to follow will raise questions that our current methods and priorities are unable to answer. My suggestions here model one possible approach beyond the single-annotator study, revealing manuscript notation to be a potentially rich source for studying cultural memory, which is to say, for studying what was foremost in the minds of readers at certain times and how it got there. This approach also requires that we see satire like Hamilton's as a kind of literacy game, with the goal being above all to assign names to the satiric targets. Unable to offer individualizing accounts for the names left by the many unknown readers of Epics of the Ton, scholars must seek out larger, social explanations for patterns in notation, including partisan identities and competing information sources. Published anonymously, Hamilton's Epics of the Ton decries gambling and illicit sex in London high society. In part a defense of Caroline, Princess of Wales, for whom Hamilton (1766–1846) was for a time a lady in waiting, and in part a gossipy satire on philandering Regency elites, Epics of the Ton exploits the media-driven clamor for celebrity scandal in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England.4 The division into two gendered sections, titled the Male Book and the Female Book, makes Epics of the Ton unique among satires. The work ridicules seventeen men and twenty-five women, mainly aristocrat-politicians and society hostesses, who are identified in the Table of Contents and the section headers only by initials: D—of B—, V—C—, etc. (fig. 1).5 Additional blanks throughout the poem and its footnotes invite readers to put names to the textual clues, in effect doing the work Hamilton begs of her muse: "From next year's Lethe, and oblivion drear, / Come save the deeds" of the London beau monde.6 Reacting to the poem's "lust [for] personal defamation," the poet Anna Seward wrote that she wished Epics of the Ton would suffer a "total famine of readers."7 Yet feast, not famine, better describes the poem's brief, intense popularity, as it saw three editions, all...

CHILDREN AGAINST SLAVERY: JUVENILE AGENCY AND THE SUGAR BOYCOTTS IN BRITAIN

AbstractIn late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain, many contemporaries observed a striking phenomenon: that children were especially active in the boycotts of sugar produced by enslaved people. First-hand accounts often suggested that children's activism was unilateral and unmediated, whereas historians of British abolitionism have tended to assume that children were passive recipients of antislavery literature and adult influence. Engaging with both the historiography on British abolitionism and the new histories of childhood, this article examines the nature of juvenile engagement within the sugar boycotts. Collecting together some of the extensive but dispersed evidence of juvenile antislavery across the country, and focusing upon a case study of the Plymley household of Shropshire during the early 1790s, we explore the intricacies of children's involvement. Children's agency, we argue, needs to be understood as a specific, historicised phenomenon. Adults often chose to represent children's abolitionist activities as self-determined, for their participation in the boycotts affirmed both adult positions and their own child-rearing practices. However, whilst adults frequently solicited particular types of juvenile response, children often responded independently and in unexpected ways, negotiating their own positions in relation to their parents, siblings, and peers. We situate juvenile antislavery as a recursive process, operating within complex, intergenerational interactions.

The Melodramatic Moment: Music and Theatrical Culture, 1790–1820

The Melodramatic Moment: Music and Theatrical Culture, 1790–1820

From encyclopaedia to magazine: the Loudons, the public, and the architect in 1830s Britain

John C. Loudon and Jane Webb Loudon formed one of the most productive publishing alliances in the fields of gardening, botany, and architecture in early nineteenth-century Britain. They employed a range of genres with particular skill, such as the encyclopaedia, the magazine, and the manual. Between 1834 and 1838, they produced the first British architectural magazine — then still a young genre. They strove to improve architectural taste among anyone involved with architecture: from the builder, student, and architect to the client and occupier, including women. This article examines the shortlived Architectural Magazine and the claim that its inclusive approach documented a brief period of architectural democratisation during the 1830s, before the exclusionary tendencies of professionalisation and institutionalisation took hold. Who made up the early architectural magazine’s ‘public’, and in which ways can Loudon’s approach indeed be called ‘democratic’? To address such questions, this article considers the Architectural Magazine as a successor to Loudon’s Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm, and Villa Architecture. It explores the networks of readers and authors established by the Loudons, and the relationship between the public and the emerging architectural profession, in light of contemporary aesthetic and political theory.

Ladies with hammers – exploring a social paradox in early nineteenth-century Britain

AbstractIn the early nineteenth century, long before the Geological Society of London opened its doors to female members, geology was a fashionable science in Britain. Numerous women collected fossils and minerals, and read or even wrote popular geology books. There was also a considerable number of female helpmates to renowned pioneers of geology, acting as secretaries, draughtswomen, curators and field geologists. Access to a full geological education via universities, public libraries or membership in scientific societies, however, was largely denied to these women, causing considerable frustration. Wherever possible, women interested in geology pressed for changes by enlisting sympathetic husbands to speak on their behalf, by forcing admission to the meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science or by supporting political women's rights movements. They were, however, not the direct pathfinders for the first female members of the Geological Society. Increasing professionalization of geology rendered the female amanuensis of previous decades obsolete and, when university education was opened to women in the late 1870s, the Geological Society saw females as unwelcome competitors. Anti-discrimination laws in the wake of World War I finally forced the conservatives at the Geological Society to admit female fellows.