Early Nineteenth-century England Research Articles

Traveling with “Ancient Music”

In reforming psalmody in early nineteenth-century New England, participants in the so-called “Ancient Music” movement imported the solemnly refined hymn tunes and scientific rhetoric of Europe. This transatlantic exchange was in part the result of European travels by a generation of young members of the American socioeconomic and intellectual elite, such as Joseph Stevens Buckminster and John Pickering, whom scholars have not previously associated with hymnody reform. This study asserts that non-composers, particularly clergy and academics, played a crucial role in the “Ancient Music” movement, and offers a fuller picture of a little-examined but critical period in the history of American psalmody. Tracing the transatlantic voyages of figures like Buckminster and Pickering reveals that the actions and perspectives of active participants in the Atlantic world shaped “Ancient Music” reform and that hymnody reform was part of a broader project of cultural and intellectual uplift in New England.

The “luxury of woe”: The Deserted Village and the Politics of Publication

When it was first published in quarto in 1770, Oliver Goldsmith's The Deserted Village was received by reviewers as a work of polite sentimentalism. Yet by the Romantic period, the poem had become associated with the radical cause. The critical tradition explains this change in reception in terms of Britain's shifting ideological climate, but it was also conditioned by alterations in the poem's format. In luxurious quarto, The Deserted Village emphasized its speaker's “luxury of woe,” leading early readers to praise its poetry while rejecting its politics. The quarto's luxury status emblematized the contradiction at the heart of the poem and sentimental poetry in general: even while The Deserted Village voiced its sympathy for the downtrodden, this sympathy was figured as a luxury available only to wealthier readers. Soon, however, radical printers succeeded in appropriating The Deserted Village by excerpting it in cheap, small-format editions, transforming what was in quarto a celebration of the luxury of woe into an attack on the woes caused by luxury. Thomas Spence's Pigs’ Meat edition of the poem exemplified this radical appropriation and thus provides a provocative case study of the politics of publication in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain.

From Townsend and Malthus to the Poor Law Report: An Examination of the Influence of Ideas Concerning the Relationship of Public Aid and Reproduction on Policy Development, 1786-1834

From Townsend and Malthus to the Poor Law Report: An Examination of the Influence of Ideas Concerning the Relationship of Public Aid and Reproduction on Policy Development, 1786-1834 Stephen Monroe Tomczak Abstract Current welfare policies denying additional benefits to women who have children while on assistance are premised on the idea that the giving of aid causes reproduction, an idea that has its origins in earlier debates over aid policy. This paper examines ideas concerning the relationship of public aid policy to reproduction by its recipients in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century England, and the influence of these ideas on the poor law policy of the period. The thoughts of leading theorists on this relationship, such as early political economists Joseph Townsend and Thomas Robert Malthus, are analyzed. This examination shows that these theorists asserted that the giving of aid led to reproduction by its recipients. Further analysis of proposed and enacted policies, particularly the Poor Law Reform of 1834, shows that these ideas asserting a relationship between poor relief and reproduction appear to have influenced policy in this era. Full Text: PDF DOI: 10.15640/jssw.v3n2a4

The social purpose of Rev. Richard Dawes who taught the philosophy of common things

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to consider why Richard Dawes (1793-1867) academic, college business manager and Church of England priest developed a curriculum in a nineteenth century English village school with which he sought to modify differences in social class and achieved outstanding results in student engagement and educational attainment.Design/methodology/approach– The approach is documentary. It uses books and internet scans of original documents. It locates Dawes's work in the social movements of early nineteenth century Britain and associates Dawes's activities with those of Kay-Shuttleworth who was administrator of the British government's first move to provide education for poor children.Findings– Dawes emphasised tolerance and secular teaching within a school system devoted to instilling Church of England doctrine. He based classroom teaching on things familiar to children and integrated subject content. He used science to encourage parents of “that class immediately above that of labourers” to send their children to his school to overcome class differences. For his system to be widely adopted he needed science teachers trained in his practical teaching methods. Initial government support for science in elementary schools was eroded by Church of England opposition to state intervention in education.Originality/value– Dawes's pedagogic achievements are well known in the history of science education; his secular teaching in a church school and his valiant attempt to use science as an instrument of social change, perhaps less so.

The M Yarn: Price and Social Imagination in Early Industrial Britain

This essay explores market talk in early nineteenth-century Britain through a close reading of the correspondence of the cotton-spinning firm McConnel & Kennedy of Manchester between 1798 and 1813. I argue that two distinct “narratives” of price and value emerge from these letters, and that the cleave between them pointed both to a deep anxiety about the market, and to a clear and clever bargaining strategy. McConnel & Kennedy clung stubbornly to a definition of “value” that they understood to be fictive, in order to avoid frank surrender to what they saw as cannibalistic price-competition. Rhetoric was, then, no small thing to them. They conceived supply and value as being inversely related, and this idea, I argue, was implicit also in wider contemporary anxieties about the relationship between proliferation and meaning.

The M Yarn: Price and Social Imagination in Early Industrial Britain

This essay explores market talk in early nineteenth-century Britain through a close reading of the correspondence of the cotton-spinning firm McConnel & Kennedy of Manchester between 1798 and 1813. I argue that two distinct “narratives” of price and value emerge from these letters, and that the cleave between them pointed both to a deep anxiety about the market, and to a clear and clever bargaining strategy. McConnel & Kennedy clung stubbornly to a definition of “value” that they understood to be fictive, in order to avoid frank surrender to what they saw as cannibalistic price-competition. Rhetoric was, then, no small thing to them. They conceived supply and value as being inversely related, and this idea, I argue, was implicit also in wider contemporary anxieties about the relationship between proliferation and meaning.

Why Literary Periods Mattered: Historical Contrast and the Prestige of English Studies by Ted Underwood (review)

Ted Underwood. Why Literary Periods Mattered: Historical Contrast and the Prestige of English Studies. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2013. Pp. 216. US$35.00. The title of this monograph seems to promise a slightly different book. An historical analysis of the reasons why period surveys came to dominate the course catalogues of English departments and continue to do so and why the discipline of English studies became organized into scholarly societies based on literary periods would be a book to put on the shelf beside Gerald Graff's Professing Literature: An Institutional History. Such an analysis remains to be written, however. Instead, Ted Underwood argues, on the basis of the plots of several novels, that a new idea of the value of history to those not blessed with inherited wealth and status was implicit in the literary culture of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England. This new role for historical contrast, Underwood believes, inspired the developers of the first degree curricula in English studies and continued to subtend a curriculum based on the period survey until recently. As far as I can judge, this seems to be an argument about unconscious ideology rather than expressed intention. For example, Underwood suggests that the reason Foucault achieved popularity in literature departments in the 1970s was because his premises ... were far from iconoclastic. Professors of literature had been since the early nineteenth century that historical cultivation should be produced, not by continuous but by contrasting 'periods' that embodied incommensurable social systems (173). Were either of the sentences intended to capture what people said and thought rather than what they unconsciously believed without either thinking or saying, they would need to be supported, the one with complacent statements about Foucault quoted from a 1970s old guard not feeling particularly challenged by him, the other with quotations from professors of literature arguing since the early nineteenth century that historical cultivation should be produced, not by continuous narrative, and so on. I find the absence of an array of evidence of the latter kind particularly unhelpful to Underwood's argument as far as it concerns the apparently perennial appeal of period survey courses to literature professors. Underwood does cite some evidence that F. D. Maurice, who first introduced the period survey into the curriculum of King's College, London in the 1840s, thought that a vivid evocation of an earlier period would give students a sense of connection to the past, but it is oblique evidence since it concerns Maurice's published thoughts on the secondary school education of tradesmen rather than university education. …

Protest, politics and work in rural England, 1700-1850

Rural workers in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England were not passive victims in the face of rapid social change. Carl J. Griffin shows that they deployed an extensive range of resistances to defend their livelihoods and communities. Locating protest in the wider contexts of work, poverty and landscape change, this new text offers the first critical overview of this growing area of study.

Maria Edgeworth's Infant Economics: Capitalist Culture, Good-Will Networks and ‘Lazy Lawrence’

This article argues that in ‘Lazy Lawrence’, the lead story in The Parent's Assistant (1796; 1800), Maria Edgeworth used juvenile fiction to present an alternative to what she saw as the harmful values of Britain's flourishing late eighteenth-century capitalist economy. Edgeworth's innovative, realistic story about two children, one hard-working and one lazy, teaches young readers to value good economic character and communal well-being above individual self- interest. The article seeks to reveal the sophistication of economic thought in Edgeworth's juvenile fiction and to demonstrate that women authors of children's literature contributed to the debate over capitalism in early nineteenth-century Britain.

England’s “Bloody Code” in Crisis and Transition: Executions at the Old Bailey, 1760–1837

The most celebrated and influential history of execution in England, V.A.C. Gatrell’s The Hanging Tree (Oxford, 1994), uses a survey of execution rates to make two very striking and seemingly persuasive assertions. First, more people were being hanged in early nineteenth-century England than at any time since the early modern era; and second, that the end of capital punishment came far more suddenly than previous studies have recognized. This article acknowledges and extends the importance of Gatrell’s first insight, while arguing that he nevertheless both understates the complexity of developments and overstates the suddenness with which both the letter and the practice of capital punishment were abandoned. It does so through a careful recalculation and analysis of execution rates at London’s Old Bailey courthouse, where execution was practiced on a far larger scale than in any other jurisdiction in the Anglo-American world, and whose practice most profoundly shaped the perceptions of both critics and proponents of capital punishment alike.

William Thompson, bankruptcy and the west Cork estate, 1808–34

Historians of socialist thought have rated the Irish political philosopher and radical economist William Thompson (1778–1833) as the most influential theorist to emerge from the Owenite movement in early nineteenth-century Britain. Indeed, Gregory Claeys has judged him to be that movement's ‘most analytical and original thinker ... and a writer whose subsequent influence upon the history of socialist economic thought has been long established’. Furthermore, stressing Thompson's democratic values, Claeys insists that the Irishman ‘may rightfully be considered the founder of a more traditionally republican form of British democratic socialism’. While Robert Owen is remembered for his ambitious co-operative experiments, he was not a theoretical or deeply reflective writer and his intellectual legacy was minimal. The Corkborn Thompson, on the other hand, wrote assiduously on the theory and practice of early socialism, reputedly influenced Karl Marx and became a key figure in the history of feminism; nonetheless, our knowledge of this important Irish intellectual remains deficient.

Familiar Science in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Our opinion is, that cannot be too familiarly dealt with... Punch (1841)'INTRODUCTIONThe word appears in the titles to scores of introductory scientific works from late eighteenthand early nineteenth-century Britain. From letters on chemistry to A compend of geology, geography, A history of birds and conversations on interesting topics, many different disciplines were presented to new audiences in supposedly ways, exploiting everyday situations, objects, and language for explanatory ends. Indeed, by 1841 Punch was proposing a Very Familiar introduction to astronomy, a comic conflation of the banal and sublime which claimed that cannot be too familiarly dealt with. This paper takes seriously the ubiquity of avowedly writings and experiences in the mid-nineteenth century, to propose a new category for historians of science, that of familiar science. Through close readings of selected sources it introduces contemporary engagements with and representations of objects and familial life, and suggests one alternative way of examining a period for which the concept of the popular has become a disputed and unsatisfactory historical tool for understanding scientific practices.A monstrous and precocious child holds an everyday object, and addresses his rather myopic grandmamma (Fig. 1 ). Behind him a table overflows with experimental apparatus; she is pushed into a darkening comer. She holds a copy of Who Killed Cock Robin?; his toy basket contains Milton and Shakespeare, Newton and Boyle; his Algebra and Bacon lie on the floor. You see Gran 'Ma, the boyish brat explains, you Suck this Egg, or, more properly speaking, before you extract the matter contained within this shell by suction, you must make an incision at the apex & a Corresponding aperture at the base. Aye Dear! replies his beleaguered ancestor, How very clever! - they only used to make a hole at each end in my time. She ends with an exclamation: Well I declare they are making improvements in every thing!! George Cruikshank's 1828 caricature, The Age of Intellect, plays on the conflations and tensions I will analyse in the following article: of the everyday and of the childish with the scientific and technical; of the known and the unknown. It captures a desire to educate the rising generation of soon-to-be Victorian Britain in new language and sensory practices, and highlights the relationship between the childish tales of old and natural science, philosophy, mathematics and literature. And, of course, its humour relies on punning reference to the criticism that this type of what I shall call familiar science was indeed teaching your grandmother to suck eggs.2Recent academic work has made it increasingly clear that the simple designation of popularisation does not do justice to the rich variety of activities, sites and experiences in the heterogeneous culture of the nineteenth-century sciences; both to the importance of these practices and publications to defining and articulating what was, and also to its range of active participants and types of participation, not only its passive recipients.3 Once a useful rhetorical counterpoint to the overwhelming academic emphasis on the history of a few expert discoverers, the analytic category of the popular is also, now, a disputed historical tool for understanding scientific practices, yet few constructive new ways of mapping the landscape have been proposed.4 Rather than being predicated on a simple popular-professional dyad, and championing privileged places such as laboratories and observatories, the new history of the nineteenth-century sciences is focused on practical processes and all kinds of objects, on societal relationships and literary representation.5 Hence, historians of require new vocabularies to differentiate types and levels of participation and expertise in introductory engagement with the sciences, as well as strategies of presentation and kinds of audiences. …

Kindness and Reciprocity: Liberated Prisoners and Christian Charity in Early Nineteenth-Century England

This article interrogates historiographical debates over discipline and charity in the penal reform era. We cannot evaluate philanthropy solely in terms of class discipline or normalization, it argues, if we wish to understand the often intimate relationships binding agents and recipients of charity, even in the prison. While deconstructing the language of sympathy employed by penal reformers, historians have been sceptical of purportedly grateful prisoner testimony. This article proposes we re-consider such evidence to ask how “kindness” was understood and felt by benefactors and recipients. Drawing on new scholarship, it explores the active role of prisoners and their families in negotiating the philanthropic exchange. The article investigates a pioneering rehabilitation programme run by Sarah Martin, prison visitor at Great Yarmouth Borough Gaol, 1818–1843. Scrutinizing her accounts of working with offenders, it analyzes immediate and longer-term reactions by prisoners and their families to Christian instruction and welfare. Reconstructing the post-discharge experiences of forty-three “liberated prisoners,” it assesses the role played by Christian reclamation in desistance from crime, alongside employment and family ties. Testimony from former offenders and their relatives suggests many did not see Christian ideals of duty and fellowship as alien to their values; rather, these corresponded with a laboring-class ethics of kinship and neighborliness. If we want to appreciate the agency of the poor in the wider charity economy, we must examine how recipients acted in accordance with their own social and moral codes.

The Development of the Role of the Prosecuting Lawyer in the Criminal Process: Partisan Persecutorr or Minister of Justicee?

The role of the prosecuting lawyer in the criminal process has traditionally been regarded with suspicion and distrust, if not outright hostility. This unfavourable view extends to both the popular and the historical perception. The prosecutor has been regarded widely as a zealous and partisan advocate, a so-called persecutor, whose single purpose is to secure the conviction of the accused. This Article considers the development of the prosecutor’s role to the present day. It will explore the changing perception of the prosecutor from that of the zealous persecutor during the State Trials of the 16th and 17th centuries to that of the early 1800s when there seems to have been a fundamental shift in what was regarded as the proper role of the prosecutor. It became emphasised increasingly in a series of landmark cases from the early 1800s onwards that the prosecutor was not to regard himself or herself purely as a partisan advocate whose role was confined to seeking the conviction of the accused. Rather, the prosecutor owed a wider duty, that of a quasi-judicial “minister of justice” whose lofty purpose was to seek the truth of the case and to promote the cause of justice. This role has continued to the present day. It is my argument that to understand this dramatic transformation in the prosecutor’s role one must have close regard to the legal and social climate of the time in which it evolved. The development of the prosecutor’s role as a “minister of justice” was in response to both the major changes in the format of the criminal trial and belated appreciation as to the nenviable position of the accused in the criminal process of the time. In the 1700s the typical criminal trial in England had been an almost inquisitorial affair consisting of an informal dialogue between the private prosecutor, the accused, the judge and the witnesses. Lawyers, whether prosecuting or defending, were largely conspicuous by their absence. In the late 1700s and early 1800s the presence and involvement of lawyers in the criminal trial increased and the criminal process shifted sharply in form to an adversarial process. Furthermore the odds were stacked heavily against the typical accused in the early 1800s. Rights that would today be regarded as fundamental aspects of the right of an accused to a fair trial were sorely lacking. It is my argument that to alleviate the unequal status of the accused in the criminal process the notion gained acceptance that the prosecuting lawyer was to act, albeit within an emergent adversarial framework, as a “minister of justice” and not as a “normal” advocate. This Article will ask whether it is appropriate to accept the generally unchallenged assumption that the role of the modern prosecutor in Australia and England should remain that which evolved in the particular and very different circumstances of early nineteenth century England.

The Voice of Martha Ray

In 1798 Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth published a collection of poems entitled Lyrical Ballads. It is now critically acclaimed to be one of the defining moments in the history of English poetry. In the renowned Preface to the collection, Wordsworth asserted that they were intended to “speak a plainer and more emphatic language,” the “language really used by men.” One of the poems found in the Ballads was entitled The Thorn. Wordsworth later claimed that he wrote it whilst walking the Quantock Hills one wind-battered day. Its subject was child-murder and it purported to tell the story of Martha Ray. Few subjects were better calculated to engage public attention. Infanticide “scares” were frequent in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century England, discussion as to the efficacy or otherwise of infanticide law urgently engaged in parliament, in the press, and in popular literature. The Thorn remains one of the most striking contributions to this latter genre; a poem which was intended to make its readers contemplate rather more deeply the apparent injustices written into the law of child-murder in late eighteenth century England.

Sotherton and the Geography of Empire: The Landscapes of Mansfield Park

LYNN VOSKUIL Sotherton and the Geography ofEmpire: The Landscapes of Mansfield Park W ITH ITS RESTORATION OF ORDER AND HARMONY ON THE ESTATE, THE conclusion to Mansfield Park has often been read as Jane Austen’s paean to conservative ideology and the triumph of empire.1 By the final chapter, the adulterous Maria Bertram has been ostracized along with her prolix Aunt Norris; the rakish Tom has reformed after an extended, chas­ tening illness; and Edmund and Fanny have acceded to the living at Mansfield. On the event of Mr. Grant’s death, as the novel concludes in its final, awkward sentence, Fanny and Edmund removed to Mansfield, and the parsonage there, which, under each of its two former owners, Fanny had never been able to approach but with some painful sensation of restraint or alarm, soon grew as dear to her heart, and as thoroughly perfect in her eyes, as everything else, within the view and patronage of Mansfield Park, had long been.2 This picture of sedate and ordered well-being does indeed seem to depict what Moira Ferguson has called “a kinder, gentler plantocracy,” a privi­ leged vision of ease, concord, and familiarity that contrasts starkly with the I am grateful to the Victorian Studies Seminar at Rice University for reading and discuss­ ing an earlier draft ofthis essay, with special thanks to Helena Michie for her encouragement and support. 1. See, for example, Alistair M. Duckworth, The Improvement of the Estate: A Study ofJane Austen’s Novels (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), 80; John Halperin, “The Trouble with Mansfield Park,” Studies in the Novel 7, no. 1 (1975): 21—22; John Mee, “Austen’s Treacherous Ivory: Female Patriotism, Domestic Ideology, and Empire,” in The PostcolonialJane Austen, eds. You-me Park and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan (London: Routledge, 2000), 83, 91; and Savi Munjal, “Imagined Geographies: Mapping the Oriental Habitus in Three Nineteenth-Century Novels,” Postcolonial Text 4, no. 1 (2008): 4. 2. Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, ed. June Sturrock (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2001), 468. Further references to the novel will be indicated by page number within the text of the essay. SiR, 53 (Winter 2014) 591 592 LYNN VOSKUIL squalor of Portsmouth, the decadence of London, and the otherness of an Antigua that can only be imagined by most ofMansfield’s inhabitants.3 The “perfection” of Mansfield Park depicted at the end of this novel seems al­ most “doctrinaire,” to quote Claudia L. Johnson, a concluding scene that “appears to let conservative ideologues have it their way.”4 It is thus striking that Austen chooses to reintroduce the spatial perspec­ tive of landscape gardening into these final phrases—a profession that is critiqued elsewhere in the novel—positioning Fanny along with the par­ sonage and everything else she treasures “within the view and patronage of Mansfield.” The views of and from landed estates are matters for heated debate in this novel, with Humphry Repton, Austen’s contemporary and the most celebrated landscape designer of his day, invoked several times by name when the oafish Rushworth seeks to “improve” his estate. In a novel set among genteel country houses in early nineteenth-century England, it is not surprising that Repton’s figure would appear or that Austen would use her last sentence to take the long view (as if from the house) of the property surrounding Mansfield. It is surprising, however, that Repton’s landscapes—and the question of the novel’s landscapes in general—have not figured more prominently in recent postcolonial analyses of Mansfield Park. Spurred initially by Edward Said’s controversial interpretation of this novel, a small postcolonial industry has variably considered the imperialist implications of Austen’s gender politics, her aesthetic practices, and her awareness of British abolitionist debates and the condition of slaves in Antigua, to mention just a few topics that have recently occupied critics of her work.5 While such critics have opened up important issues in our con­ sideration of Austen’s fiction, however, they have tended on the whole to read between the lines and in the margins—focusing on the novel’s 3. Ferguson, “Mansfield Park-. Slavery, Colonialism, and Gender,” Oxford Literary Review 13, no. 1...

Mischievous Effects: Byron and Illegitimate Publication

The conflict between legitimate and ‘pirate’ booksellers in early nineteenth-century England was less about the direct loss of sales than issues of respectability and legality. As the best-known poet of his day and a controversial public figure, Lord Byron became embroiled in the ideological disputes over literary property. This essay examines the texts and paratexts of both authorised and pirated editions of Byron's work, such as Don Juan and William Hone's unauthorised collection, Poems on his Domestic Circumstances, within their economic and political contexts. It demonstrates how piracy impacted the poet's publication practices and reputation, forcing Byron to confront the phenomenon of Byronism and leading to innovations in the marketing of new books. The essay argues that the legal and ideological battles over piracy were a key factor in determining Byron's place in the literary canon and that this publication history represents a pivotal moment for the commodity status of books.

Fleeing the Flowing Commons: Robert Thom, Water Reservoir Schemes, and the Shift to Steam Power in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain

In the 1820s and 1830s, British industry faced a choice between two energy sources to fuel its expansion: water and coal. A series of water reservoir schemes were proposed to scale up the power capacity of rivers in the central manufacturing districts, but the schemes with the largest potentials were never realized. Instead, the industry veered toward steam power, fatefully linking self-sustaining growth to the combustion of coal for mechanical energy. This article presents the first inquiry into the fate of the reservoir schemes. It describes the work of Robert Thom, leading Scottish engineer, champion of water, and critic of steam, and traces the fate of several plans in Lancashire. It demonstrates that water, contrary to the dominant narrative of coal in the Industrial Revolution, was consistently the cheaper alternative. The reservoir schemes had the drawback of obliging manufacturers to coordinate their energy consumption, submit to planning, and contribute to collective funding of construction work. In an environment of free competition, this ultimately proved unfeasible. This raises questions on the perception of the role of energy in the Industrial Revolution, as well as of the prerequisites for a future transition to renewable energy sources. (Less)

D. Stewart and J. R. McCulloch: economic methodology and the making of orthodoxy

This article sets out to elucidate how economic methodology relates to the making of what came to be seen as orthodox in the emerging discipline of political economy, focussing on two influential lecturers in early nineteenth-century Britain, D. Stewart and J. R. McCulloch. These two discussed methodology at the beginning of their courses using a similar framework of concepts. At the same time, each of them adapted a framework to legitimise his own reading of his predecessors: a laissez-faire reading for Stewart and a class-harmonious reading for McCulloch. The similarities and differences in this and other collateral respects between the two highlight several formative aspects of the so-called orthodoxy in political economy, or, in other words, the embodiment of a supposed tradition that has been thought of as continually and lineally handed down from Smith through Ricardo to Marshall and beyond.

‘Fit audience, though few’: Romanticism and Physical Education in the 1820s

Early nineteenth-century England saw the emergence of any number of social, cultural and political practices – everything from a vogue for French cuisine to a nascent representative democracy – that have in subsequent decades and centuries become so fully woven into the fabric of everyday life as to seem routine. Such practices have now become veiled behind that ‘film of familiarity’ that, as Coleridge noted famously in the Biographia Literaria, makes them effectively invisible. One such innovation from the period is, surprisingly enough, a concern for purposive exercise, physical education, and physical fitness. Sparked in London by the ideas and practices of several refugees from the Continent, interest in ‘German gymnastics’ blossomed in the 1820s into an early but rather short-lived fitness boom: several private practitioners established themselves as what we would call ‘personal trainers’ or ‘physical therapists’, new gymnasiums opened offering fitness classes on a subscription basis to the general public, and at a meeting at the Mechanics’ Institute in 1826, the London Gymnastic Society was formed. This was a novel development for the British. While there had been occasional individual bouts of exercise devoted to improving a single person’s fitness or demonstrating some athletic feat to the astonished spectators, and while there had been organised physical training directed toward some broader purpose such as military service, ‘country sports’, or even pedestrian tourism, collective classes undertaken for the sole purpose of improving the participants’ level of physical fitness constituted an innovation of the era. In effect, the classes in step aerobics, cross-training, and pilates that keep people streaming in to the local gymnasium or fitness centre today are an unlikely product of the Romantic period. The present essay outlines the general history of this emergent concern with physical fitness and then suggests that a key reason for its flourishing in England in the 1820s and early 1830s was an implicit connection with, on the one hand, the discourses of literary