Early Nineteenth-century London Research Articles

The professionalisation of the art trade in early nineteenth century London: Exploring the business model of Christie’s auction house

By 1800, the city of London had developed into a major hub for the art trade and numerous auction houses vied for market share in this competitive environment. Combining data from the Getty Provenance Index® and a unique set of journals preserved at the Christie’s archives in London which contain presale evaluations for paintings during the 1820s, this paper explores the business strategy of the auction house. We gauge the relationship between the estimates and the hammer price or highest bid in the subsequent public auction, and the reserve price when available. We argue that Christie’s developed the expertise and engendered the trust among sellers to secure consignments of desirable works of art, which were estimated at realistic and attractive levels that gave the company a competitive advantage in the booming London art market.

Jorunn S. Gjerden, Kari Jegerstedt, and Željka Švrljuga, eds., Exploring the Black Venus Figure in Aesthetic Practices

Since the days of her infamous exhibition in early nineteenth-century London and Paris and her posthumous dissection at the hands of French naturalist Georges Cuvier, the story of Sarah Baartman returned to public attention in 1985 with the publication of two ground-breaking articles by Stephen Jay Gould and Sander L. Gilman, who both remarked that Baartman’s remains were still on display at the Musee de l’Homme in Paris. In 1994, newly elected President Nelson Mandela visited President Franc...

The Ecosystem of Exhibitions:Venues, Artists, and Audiences in Early Nineteenth-Century London

The Ecosystem of Exhibitions:Venues, Artists, and Audiences in Early Nineteenth-Century London

“… Dreamt of, Indeed, but Utterly Unknown!”: The Earle Panoramas of the Tasman World

ABSTRACTIn the early nineteenth century London society had the opportunity to view large panoramas of the Australasian settlements of Sydney (1828–30), Hobart Town (1831), and the Bay of Islands, New Zealand (1837–39). These were based upon the drawings and information supplied by the travelling artist Augustus Earle, who had circumnavigated the world between 1818 and 1830. Each show was accompanied by an illustrated commentary indicating natural resources, the state of development, and representative people. Fortifications, penal institutions, industries, shipping, government, churches and missionaries, colonists, and indigenous people were illustrated and described. Each panorama presented a layered society which connected to complex networks extending across the globe. Despite these shows’ shared colonial status and common geographical location, there were significant differences between their respective compositions that aligned with their specific contexts. Each presented narratives that were developed to satisfy attendees’ fascinations, community leaders’ aspirations, and the political and economic imperatives driving future development. Examination of the composition and reception of the panoramas provides insight into prevailing attitudes towards empire, criminality, and race. Finally, Earle’s contribution to the panoramas is found to be substantial, establishing their significance within his oeuvre.

Of Ships and Spectacles: Maritime Identity and the Politics of Authenticity in Regency London

This article considers three case studies – the first aqua-drama at Sadler's Wells in 1804, the naumachia in Hyde Park of 1814, and the launching of HMS Nelson at Woolwich, also in 1814 – in order to discuss maritime spectacle in Regency London. I identify an essentially political distinction between the representation of ships and the role of sailors, linked to wider questions of authenticity as understood by contemporary London audiences. I argue that the Thames riverscape itself contributed to Londoners' self-identification as nautically literate connoisseurs, unlikely to acclaim spectacles they perceived to be inauthentic. By this reading, the maritime spectacles of early nineteenth-century London constitute a misstep in a longer and more successful history of nautical theatre and melodrama, that remained fundamentally entangled with questions of democratic representation, the real versus the represented, and London's maritime identity.

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London: Politics from a Distance eds. by Constance Bantman and Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva

Reviewed by: The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London: Politics from a Distance eds. by Constance Bantman and Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva Jessica Queener (bio) Constance Bantman and Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva, eds., The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London: Politics from a Distance ( London: Bloomsbury, 2018), pp. vi + 232, $114/ £85 hardcover; $102.60/ £85 e-book. Decades of work have gone into dissecting the importance of periodicals and newspapers in the United Kingdom and, increasingly, its empire, and still many avenues of scholarship are yet to be undertaken. As the editors of this volume point out, resources that have been digitized "remain overwhelmingly biased towards English-language publications" while scholarship in the long nineteenth century "retains a mostly national focus" (2). To address this gap, Constance Bantman and Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva have assembled a collection that examines what will likely be a new area of periodical study for many VPR readers: political periodicals created by [End Page 566] exilic and immigrant communities based in London. While it is a condition of the study of print culture that there will always be more investigation to be done, the strides made in the study of periodicals, as they relate to issues like imperial and transnational networks, gender, race, and class, to name a few examples, prove that there is always a capacity to revisit, complicate, and expand our understanding of an already very full, very complex field. The most exciting aspect of The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London: Politics from a Distance is that in pursuing the "link between personal mobility … and the circulation of political ideas," the editors provide us with yet another lens through which to view nineteenth-century print culture (2). The editors have chosen to cover an expansive period from the start of the nineteenth century through the first two decades of the twentieth. Nineteenth-century scholars will no doubt appreciate the context this range offers, particularly as the book encompasses such a variety of socio-political circumstances. Furthermore, the chronology, selection of exilic communities, and introduction help to create a narrative across the nine chapters. The writings of political exile begin with the waning of older European empires and the rise of new nations in Latin America. In the first chapter, Karen Racine offers a usefully broad look at Spanish-American publications in early nineteenth-century London. This is followed by Daniel Muñoz Sempere's examination of the rise of Hispanic Liberalism in exilic papers from 1810 to 1841. The collection then progresses through the dissolution of monarchies and the rise of new republics. For example, Daniel Alves and Paulo Jorge Fernandes carefully explicate the complex ideological conflicts among different groups of Portuguese political exiles. Thomas C. Jones and Constance Bantman provide a very useful overview of French publications in London over the course of fifty years, from 1848 to 1905. We see the emergence of increasingly radical politics while moving through chapters about writers in exile from Italy, Germany, and Russia. And in the last chapter, Ole Birk Laursen focuses on Indian political papers published in Britain, positioning the stages of "nationalist organization, parliamentary agitation and violent resistance" in a far more trans-national, cosmopolitan tradition of radicalism than anti-imperial works published in India could (188). This final chapter drives home a key point of the collection: these writers and publishers were part of the periodical landscape within England, not just nebulous voices from abroad. The arrangement of these chapters stresses not only increased radicalism as the nineteenth century wore on but also a commitment to the liberal exchange of ideas in London—a city that welcomed refugees and provided an opportunity to produce works that created a shared discourse within far-flung political communities. [End Page 567] Some key themes emerge throughout the collection. On the whole, the chapters all demonstrate how London's free press helped disseminate radical political discourse and how periodicals intervened in the development of liberal revolutions, anti-authoritarian causes, and attempts to agitate for a new social order. Abbreviated runs and troubles with funding were often the order of the day, but each community seems...

Troubling agency: agency and charity in early nineteenth-century London

Troubling agency: agency and charity in early nineteenth-century London

Immigrant Communities, the Police and the Courts in Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth-Century London1

Research on English courts in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries has indicated the vital role that ethnicity and migrant status played in determining the ways the accused were treated. This article examines the experiences of immigrant communities in dealing with police and the courts during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century London. The criminal justice system and its main officials – police, magistrates and judges – had a serious tendency to discriminate against migrant minorities. Yet the treatment of different ethnic groups at the Old Bailey suggests that the criminal justice system was rarely systematically biased against immigrants. So, although the Irish were overrepresented amongst defendants at London courts and often given harsher verdicts and sentences at the Old Bailey, other ethnic groups, such as the Welsh, were sometimes treated more favourably. The treatment meted out to migrants accused of crime at the Old Bailey reflected the complex and ambivalent attitudes of the London population. The micro-history case studies examined also show that any attempt to generalise runs into major difficulties. To understand both the justice and the injustices meted out by the eighteenth and early nineteenth-century criminal justice system historians have to use both micro-studies and quantitative sources, for both the shadows and the light that each casts on the other are indispensable.

Black people and the criminal justice system: prejudice and practice in later eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century London

This article explores how attitudes to black people were translated into practice by examining how the latter fared as victims, witnesses and especially as the accused when they came to the Old Bailey in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It concludes that there was no significant discrimination against black people as prosecutors and witnesses. Moreover, between 1791 and 1805, when a source containing systematic evidence on the ethnicity of the accused is briefly available, black people probably formed a smaller proportion of the accused than they did of the London population as a whole; and those who were prosecuted were less likely than average to be convicted and more likely to have their charges reduced. Although punishment patterns for black convicts included rather greater emphasis on transportation, an investigation of criminal justice practice in London reveals little or no systematic prejudice towards black people, thus indicating important contrasts with the experience of black people in colonial contexts and with the ways in which other ethnic groups such as the Irish were dealt with at the Old Bailey.

Women Who Kill: An Analysis of Cases in Late Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century London

In late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century London, the number of women prosecuted for murder was quite small with only forty women reaching the felony court at the Old Bailey for trial between 1783 and 1815. Despite the small number of prosecutions, the cases do reveal important information about gender and criminal justice. Accusations demonstrate difficulties women had with a wide range of interpersonal relationships, their lives in the city, in addition to domestic and substance abuse. Sentencing patterns, too, are illuminating. For those women found guilty, the courts often hesitated to convict to the fullest extent of the law. Juries and judges presiding in homicide cases in London regularly employed discretion when making their decisions, demonstrating that they apparently heavily weighed numerous personal factors presented in trial. While the law gave judges substantial leeway in capital case sentencing, juries and judges focused their full convictions and harshest penalties, capital punishment, on women who violated important gender-based behavioral expectations.

Disrupting the Quotidian: Hoaxes, Fires, and Non-theatrical Performance in Nineteenth-century London

In this essay Jim Davis considers two examples of everyday non-theatrical performance in nineteenth-century London: hoaxes and fires. Whereas an element of hoaxing can be perceived in some contemporary performance events and in the practice of ‘invisible theatre’, usually with some ethical intention, hoaxes in early nineteenth-century London were perpetrated for the sake of creating disruption and making dupes of unsuspecting witnesses. A more visible form of disruption and spectacle was created by fires and firefighting itself, which, at least after Captain Eyre Massie Shaw took control of the London fire brigade, became a form of public performance. Although hoaxes were common in pantomime and farce, and conflagrations often strengthened the impact of sensation melodramas, the disruptive effects of extra-theatrical hoaxes and fires on everyday life created a less reassuring and more dystopian sense of the metropolis. An earlier version of this paper was originally delivered at ‘The Audience through Time’ conference at Queen Mary College, University of London, in December 2011. Jim Davis is Professor of Theatre Studies at the University of Warwick. His his most recent books are Victorian Pantomime: a Collection of Critical Essays (2010) and Lives of the Great Shakespearian Actors: Edmund Kean (2009). He is also joint author of Reflecting the Audience: London Theatregoing 1840–1880 (2001).

When William Met Mary: The Rewriting of Mary Lamb’S and William-Henry Ireland’S Stories in Peter Ackroyd’S The Lambs Of London

Abstract Peter Ackroyd’s London novels represent a distinctive component in his project of composing a literary-historical biography of the city. Understanding London as a multilayered palimpsest of texts, Ackroyd adds to this ongoing process by rewriting the city’s history from new, imaginative perspectives. For this he employs approaches and strategies such as parody, pastiche, genre mixture, metafiction, intertextuality and an incessant mixing of the factual with the fictititious. The aim of this article is to explore the various ways in which he toys with historical reality and blurs the borderline between fiction and biography in The Lambs of London (2004), offering thus an alternative rendering of two unrelated offences connected with late eighteenth and early nineteenth century London literary circles: Mary Lamb’s matricide and William-Henry Ireland’s forgeries of the Shakespeare Papers.

Parish apprenticeship and the old poor law in London

This article offers an examination of the patterns and motivations behind parish apprenticeship in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century London. It stresses continuity in outlook from parish officials binding children, which involved placements in both the traditional and industrializing sectors of the economy. Evidence on the ages, employment types, and locations of 3,285 pauper apprentices bound from different parts of London between 1767 and 1833 indicates a variety of local patterns. The analysis reveals a pattern of youthful age at binding, a range of employment experiences, and parish-specific links to particular trades and manufactures.

The End of Gatekeeping: Underwriters and the Quality of Sovereign Bond Markets, 1815–2007

We provide a comparison of salient organizational features of primary markets for foreign government debt over the very long run. We focus on output, quality control, information provision, competition, pricing, charging and signaling. We find that the market set up experienced a radical transformation in the recent period and interpret this as resulting from the rise of liability insurance provided by rating agencies. Underwriters have given up their former role as gatekeepers of liquidity and certification agencies to become aggressive competitors in a new speculative grade market.

Was Dick Whittington taller than those he left behind? Anthropometric measures, migration and the quality of life in early nineteenth century London?

Using a new source of evidence we explore the mobility of mid-nineteenth century seamen. Among seamen born outside London, the tall, the literate and those who could remember the exact day, month and year when they were born, characteristics that we suggest mark them out as men with more choices in life, were more likely to migrate to London. Contrary to what might be inferred from contemporary descriptions of urban disamenities or from persistent differentials in mortality, London appears as a desirable destination for those who could choose. The conclusion must be that London was not so bad, and we should adjust our perception of the problems of urbanisation accordingly, with implications for the wider debate on the standard of living during the industrial revolution. The paper’s methodological interest is the use of height as an explanatory variable in the analysis of migration. Although correlated with other variables that are routinely used in anthropometric studies to indicate life chances, such as literacy and the ability to know and recall date of birth, height has empirical advantages over these alternatives in that it exhibits higher levels of significance. Moreover while literacy and heaping are in essence binary variables, height is a (near) continuous one, and one that allows us to test for linear and non-linear responses, as we do with interesting results in this paper. Perhaps the most fruitful use of height in historical analyses may turn out to be as an explanatory variable; at the very least such a research strategy provides anthropometric historians with further opportunities.

Kaleidoscopic Vision and Literary Invention in an "Age of Things": David Brewster, Don Juan and "A Lady's Kaleidoscope"

David Brewster's Kaleidoscope caused a sensation in early nineteenth-century London and introduced a new and potent visual metaphor which still animates modern parlance. Yet the kaleidoscope's considerable cultural impact has received scant critical attention, partly because it lacks the uncanny proto-cinematic verisimilitude of the diorama, the panorama, or the stereoscope. This article reconstructs this overlooked reception history, moving back in time from recent theoretical engagements with the kaleidoscope to David Brewster's own account of his invention and its contemporary reception by both consumers and writers. This history reveals a sustained interrogation of the concept and experience of a unique form of visual transformation that never allows the eye to rest.

Pauper protests: power and resistance in early nineteenth-century London workhouses*

*I am grateful to Craig Bailey, Simon Gunn, Hilary Guite and the participants in the ‘Long Eighteenth Century’ seminar at the Institute of Historical Research for comments on earlier drafts of this...

Isaac Frost's Two Systems of Astronomy (1846): plebeian resistance and scriptural astronomy

In early nineteenth-century London audiences flocked to a variety of lectures and shows on astronomical topics. While the religious and social positions of the lecturers and showmen varied significantly, the vast majority adopted a Newtonian cosmology incorporating a belief in the plurality of worlds. This paper focuses on Isaac Frost's 1846 book Two Systems of Astronomy in an attempt to gain a fuller understanding of how some thinkers in plebeian London responded to and resisted this emergent astronomical orthodoxy. Central to this analysis is research that reveals how changes in the intellectual world of Frost and his Muggletonian co-religionists prompted this formerly non-proselytizing Protestant sect to become increasingly vocal during the nineteenth century. This research is based upon a thorough examination of the Muggletonian archive in the British Library together with a collection of approximately thirty Muggletonian letters deposited in the Oxfordshire Records Office in 1993 and not examined by previous historians. It is concluded that the unorthodox or anti-Newtonian cosmologies advanced by several early nineteenth-century thinkers were often intellectually coherent and embodied in receptive social contexts.

The Commodification of Civic Culture in Early Nineteenth-century London

The Commodification of Civic Culture in Early Nineteenth-century London

The Commodification of Civic Culture in Early Nineteenth-century London

This article re-examines the forces at play in antiquarianism and their impact upon the use of antiquarian design in the remodeling and expansion of London during the Regency and early Victorian periods. It contends that the commercial aspects involved in the antiquarian movement were manifest in the adaptation of the design traditions it retrieved and particularly for the construction of the new shopping precincts in London developed by John Nash. The cultural prestige of historical motif, purveyed like much fashionable taste through new print media, was appropriated to create new spaces of commodification. This profitable regulatory appropriation of knowledge was, however, subject to the disruptions attendant upon later modern urban expansion.