Eighteenth-century London Research Articles

An Uneasy Pleasure: Representing the Dangers of Skin-to-skin Contact in Eighteenth-century London 'The William Bynum Prize Essay'.

This article considers the social function of contagious disease as moderator of class relationships in England during the first half of the eighteenth century and takes into account the ways in which the 'communicability' of the plague, great pox (syphilis) and smallpox (variola) was used by authors to crystallise social interaction and tension along class lines. The essay begins by examining the representation of the plague, syphilis and smallpox in the medical tradition, before shifting its attention to the practice of maritime quarantine, as laid out by Richard Mead in his Short Discourse Concerning Pestilential Contagion (1720). By foregrounding medical writing on contagion through skin contact, I suggest that pornographic texts such as John Cleland's The Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (Fanny Hill) (1748) had an interventionist function. Cleland is often charged with sanitising the true horrors of sex work in this period. This article proposes that if we take the time to appreciate the way infectious cutaneous diseases were believed to operate and spread we can recognise the moments in which he not only alludes to disease but invokes it for structural and thematic purposes. In proposing this, I am challenging the dominant interpretation that the problematic realities of eighteenth-century prostitution, especially disease, are subordinated to the narrative's greater interest in erotic pleasure.

Joseph Banks and William Hunter: where the Royal Society meets the Royal Academy

ABSTRACT During the second half of the eighteenth century London emerged as the centre of a growing scientific community, motivated and stimulated by an expanding empire. Within this closely connected metropolitan network, the figures of Sir Joseph Banks (1743–1820) and Dr William Hunter (1718–1783) exemplify the model of gentlemanly naturalist, each dynamically engaged in the pursuit of their interrelated interests in human and comparative anatomy, zoology and botany. Sir Joseph Banks's mansion at Soho Squre was a short stroll from William Hunter's Anatomy School at 16 Great Windmill Street and these homes of the President of the Royal Society and first Professor of Anatomy at the Royal Academy of Arts, respectively, acted as centres to the periphery, combining the accummulated knowledge of both institutions behind the domestic façade of their private homes. Both individuals commissioned a number of artists, combining the visual skills of the artist with the authentic expertise of the anatomist and naturalist. This paper describes these complementary approaches of Sir Joseph Banks and William Hunter, suggesting that while they each shared similar goals for the production of natural knowledge, these may have been motivated by quite different ideas on the purpose of their public roles.

The Puzzling Path of a Recondite Text: The Composition, Circulation, and Reception of theNotícias Recônditasin Eighteenth-Century England

The so-calledNotícias Recônditas, an anonymous account written in the context of the negotiations that led to the suspension of Inquisition-related actions in Portugal between 1674 and 1681, has been approached by historiography principally from the points of view of its controversial authorship, its compositional framework, and even the accuracy of its contents. This article proposes a different perspective, focusing on its circulation and reception in the eighteenth-century England. Comparing different handwritten and printed versions of this text reveals numerous additions, transformations, and adaptations of its contents and structure, from its moment of composition until its publication and even afterwards. Eighteenth-century London, where anti-Catholic polemical literature was flourishing, is the place of publication of the first editions. There,Notíciaswas also appropriated by Anglican polemists with one main purpose in mind: attacking the Catholic Church. This, however, did not suit the text's original goals of making contributions to reforms to the Inquisition in Portugal and raising awareness for the New Christian cause. Therefore, identifying and analyzing the discrepancies among the different versions of the text give way to new questions concerning the intervention of copyists, translators, compilers, and publishers in order to achieve specific objectives and to reach target audiences.

London 1600-1800: communities of natural knowledge and artificial practice.

This essay introduces a special issue of the BJHS on communities of natural knowledge and artificial practice in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century London. In seeking to understand the rise of a learned and technical culture within a growing and changing city, our approach has been inclusive in terms of the activities, people and places we consider worth exploring but shaped by a sense of the importance of collective activity, training, storage of information and identity. London's knowledge culture was formed by the public, pragmatic and commercial spaces of the city rather than by the academy or the court. In this introduction, we outline the types of group and institution within our view and acknowledge the many locations that might be explored further. Above all, we introduce a particular vision of London's potential as a city of knowledge and practice, arising from its commercial and mercantile activity and fostered within its range of corporations, institutions and associations. This was recognized and promoted by contemporary authors, including natural and experimental philosophers, practical mathematicians, artisans and others, who sought to establish a place for and recognition of their individual and collective skills and knowledge within the metropolis.

Walking in the City: Urban Experience and Literary Psychogeography in Eighteenth-Century London by Catharina Löffler

<i>Walking in the City: Urban Experience and Literary Psychogeography in Eighteenth-Century London</i> by Catharina Löffler

Of 'Rage of Party' and the Coming of Civility

Of 'Rage of Party' and the Coming of Civility

Reading Henry Tresham's Theatre Curtain: Metastasio's Apotheosis and the Idea of Opera at London's Pantheon

AbstractWhen London's new Pantheon Opera opened in 1791, the artist Henry Tresham, not long returned from Italy, was paid to paint the ceiling and proscenium of the new auditorium and to provide a drop curtain. The curtain provided a focus for the new institution's aspirations and for the audience's attention on those inspirations when they arrived at the theatre. Its elaborate nature – the zodiac, the music of the spheres, ancient and modern composers, the passions, and with a centrepiece of the apotheosis of Pietro Metastasio – was the subject of a series articles in the press explaining the curtain's allegory. All visual material was thought to be lost, but the recent identification of a preparatory watercolour of the apotheosis has offered an opportunity to re-examine both its place in the context of late eighteenth-century iconography and the place of Metastasio in the late eighteenth-century London opera house.

Joseph Banks and Charles Blagden: cultures of advancement in the scientific worlds of late eighteenth-century London and Paris.

This paper explores the relationship between Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society, and Charles Blagden, secretary to Banks and the Society between 1784 and 1797. Blagden is often referred to as one of Banks's key assistants, as a trusted adviser, collaborator and source of information. Yet, despite his significance, the nature of Blagden's association with Banks has not been explored in detail. This paper traces the development of their sometimes tumultuous relationship, exposing it as one in which Blagden, an aspiring gentleman, sought Banks's patronage to further his career and social ambitions. Key to Blagden's strategy was his role as a source of information for Banks from Paris. Yet, while Blagden pursued patronage with Banks in London, on visits to Paris he encountered a situation where merit, in terms of published scientific outputs, determined one's membership of the scientific community. Exploration of these conflicting cultures of advancement-patronage versus advancement through merit-here informs a re-assessment of scientific exchange at a key moment in Blagden's career, the 1783 'water controversy'. The limitations of Banks's patronage for ambitious clients are also explored, in the context of a rupture in the relationship between Blagden and Banks at the end of the 1780s.

The Smugglerius , re-viewed

This article offers a new reading of an object known as the Smugglerius (1776). Produced by the physician William Hunter and sculptor Agostino Carlini for London’s Royal Academy of Arts, the Smugglerius is a plaster cast moulded from the body of an executed man, whose corpse was first posed after a celebrated ancient sculpture, the Dying Gaul (1st–2nd c. CE), and then flayed to reveal the muscles beneath. Past analyses of the cast have focused primarily on its functional role as a tool of anatomical instruction, situating it in relation both to the Royal Academy’s pedagogical agenda and to Hunter’s decades-long practice as a teacher of anatomy to artists in eighteenth-century London. By contrast, I argue that the Smugglerius must also be understood as an aesthetic, material and affective object in its own right. Drawing on a range of contemporaneous visual and textual sources, I demonstrate that the cast elicited a variety of responses from Georgian viewers, from affection and irony to anger and contempt. These, in turn, were bound up with tensions and contradictions inherent in the Smugglerius itself, which draws together two discrete yet linked bodies: on the one hand, that of a modern, hanged criminal; and, on the other, that of an ideal classical figure, which, in the eighteenth century, was believed to represent not a Gaul but an ancient Roman gladiator.

Robert Pinsky, the Foundling Tokens, and Kinship Theory

Asserting that kinship is culture all the way down, the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins observes that kinship always takes shape as a “cultural particularity.” Robert Pinsky spotlights the cultural particulars of abandoned infants in eighteenth-century London in poems in At the Foundling Hospital (2016), also the focus of Lily Cole's film Balls (2018). In both, the cultural particulars called “foundling tokens” mournfully narrate reproductive motherhood as a lost horizon of meaning.

Robert Pinsky, the Foundling Tokens, and Kinship Theory

Asserting that kinship is culture all the way down, the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins observes that kinship always takes shape as a “cultural particularity.” Robert Pinsky spotlights the cultural particulars of abandoned infants in eighteenth-century London in poems in At the Foundling Hospital (2016), also the focus of Lily Cole's film Balls (2018). In both, the cultural particulars called “foundling tokens” mournfully narrate reproductive motherhood as a lost horizon of meaning.

The long after-life of Christopher Wren’s short-lived London plan of 1666

ABSTRACTImmediately after the 1666 Great Fire, Christopher Wren sought to persuade King Charles II to rebuild London according to the best principles of baroque urbanism, with wide straight streets, axial symmetry, monumental endpoints, and a waterfront with open quays. The plan was quickly rejected as impracticable and Wren’s creative energy went into the design of St Paul’s Cathedral and more than fifty parish churches. But his scheme was memorialized by his son and grandson as a scandal of lost opportunity, a noble vision ‘unhappily defeated by faction’. Widely reproduced by print-makers, it gained iconic status, influencing street improvement in eighteenth-century London, nineteenth-century public health reform, late-Victorian advocacy of municipal autonomy, and twentieth-century planning controversies including the Paternoster Square redevelopments of 1955 and 2000. The paper shows how archival research disproving the received narrative of Wren’s plan opened the way for different understandings both of the planning legacy of reconstruction after the Great Fire, and of his own accomplishments as a Renaissance architect working within a mediaeval street plan.

The Needle not the Spindle? Domestic Training at the London Asylum or House of Refuge for Orphan and Deserted Girls in the Eighteenth Century

This article considers the place of The Asylum or House of refuge for orphan and deserted girls amongst other mid eighteenth-century London charitable institutions. It was established in 1758 amid concerns about London’s working population not keeping pace with the demands for labour and while campaigners were fighting for the moral wellbeing of the metropolis. The article highlights the role played by some female subscribers who, through a Visiting Ladies committee, provided practical advice to the Guardians for improvements to the running of the institution and the quality of the girls’ training. Throughout the century, there was a demand for hand-spun yarn to supply the British textile industry. Poorer girls were taught spinning to meet this demand and so emphasise the perceived female characteristics of diligence and industry. However, needlework, not spinning, was the key component of the girls’ daily routine and training at the Asylum.

Time after time: individuals with multiple fractures and injury recidivists in long eighteenth-century (c. 1666–1837) London

Investigating injury recidivism and individuals with multiple injuries is an area of growing interest in bioarchaeology. Differentiating between whether an individual sustained multiple injuries, represented by antemortem healed fractures, in one incident or in multiple incidents over the life course, is a major challenge. This research analyzed the skeletal remains of 721 adults (402 males, 319 females) from five post-medieval cemeteries from London, UK, known to include working class individuals for evidence of skeletal trauma – fractures, myositis ossificans, subluxations/dislocations, blunt force trauma, and sharp force trauma. A total of 164 individuals had more than two fractures; males were significantly more likely to have multiple (2+) fractures than females. An investigation of fracture recidivism incorporating a relative timeline of fracture events was possible because 14 individuals (12 males, two females) were identified as injury recidivists, meaning they had a combination of antemortem healed, antemortem healing, and/or perimortem fractures. This paper examines the distribution and relative timing of these fractures, incorporating contemporary clinical as well as social and historical context, noting that the majority of the fractures were likely to be caused by accidental mechanisms.

‘OF THE TEMPERAMENT OF THOSE MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS’: CONSIDERING TIBERIUS CAVALLO AND THE SCIENTIFIC OBSERVATION OF MUSICAL SOUNDS IN LATE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LONDON

The connection of music to scientific exploration in late Enlightenment London can be considered from various perspectives, perhaps most evidently through the binary of amateur–professional. These two realms intersected within natural philosophical observation, a practice that often served concurrently as entertainment and as study. The development of scientific instruments for the observation of various phenomena appeared in both professional and amateur contexts, contributing to technological growth and research. Natural philosopher Tiberius Cavallo (1749–1809) and his 1788 article on musical temperament (‘Of the Temperament of Those Musical Instruments, in Which the Tones, Keys, or Frets, are Fixed, as in the Harpsichord, Organ, Guitar, &amp;c’) provide a captivating example of amateur interest overlapping effectively with the professional domain; as an amateur musician and professional scientist, Cavallo observed equal temperament in both mathematical and aesthetic terms. Consideration of his work promotes a more nuanced view of London as a place where scientific and musical ideas could meet and be ‘instrumentalized’, emphasizing the city's status as a vibrant arena for the interaction of scientific exploration, artistic endeavour and professional identities. In this sense, Cavallo's work on temperament was not merely a scientific activity; it reflected technological change during a stimulating period of scientific and musical progress in late eighteenth-century London. For example, instrument builders were actively developing ways to improve pitch control and tuning stability, as witnessed by numerous British patents for harp mechanisms, the addition of flute keys and keyboard construction.

Giovanna Sestini: An Italian Opera Singer in Eighteenth-Century London by Audrey Carpenter

Giovanna Sestini: An Italian Opera Singer in Eighteenth-Century London by Audrey Carpenter

“Equally Charming, Equally Too Great”: Female Rivalry, Politics, and Opera in Early Eighteenth-Century London

“Equally Charming, Equally Too Great”: Female Rivalry, Politics, and Opera in Early Eighteenth-Century London

Curiosity, Commerce, and Conversation: Nursery-Gardens and Nurserymen in Eighteenth-Century London

This article examines the cultural history of early commercial nursery-gardens in London (c. 1670–1730). It aims to establish nursery-gardens and their operatives as the objects of serious cultural-historical analysis, and to situate these sites and practitioners in relation to broader contemporary phenomena that are routinely cited as fundamental to the life of the eighteenth-century city: knowledge production, commercial prosperity, and urban sociability. The first section charts the growth of commercial nursery-gardening, with particular attention to questions concerning elite patronage. The second section interrogates the interwoven careers of the nurseryman Thomas Fairchild as a writer, experimental horticulturist, and successful businessman.

A Short Article on a Lively Subject: Geltruda Rossi, Sarah Siddons, and Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth à la Fuseli

In the 1784–85 London season, there was a conjunction between Shakespeare's Macbeth and three of the most thrilling artists of the eighteenth century: the dancer Geltruda Rossi, the actress Sarah Siddons, and the artist Henry Fuseli. They were thrown into figurative proximity when a commentator on Rossi's performance wrote in the Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser: “Madame Rossi, in Lady Macbeth, impresses one more with the recollection of Fusili’s [sic] painting, than of Mrs Siddons’s representation—indeed comparison would be doing an injustice to our critical and admired English performer.” While we know much about the art of Siddons and Fuseli, we know little about Rossi's performances, which makes the Morning Herald’s parallel worth exploring as an example of eighteenth-century London ballet d'action.

The Operatic Voice of Leoni the Jew: Between the Synagogue and the Theater in Late Georgian Britain

AbstractMichael Leoni, a leading singer in late eighteenth-century London, became famous for his role in Richard Brinsley Sheridan's anti-Jewish operaThe Duenna. He was discovered, however, at the Jewish synagogue, where his singing enthralled non-Jews in the early 1770s. Tracing Leoni's public reception, this article argues that the performative effect of his singing had a multifaceted relation to his audience's psychology of prejudice, serving to both reiterate and reconfigure a variety of preconceptions regarding the Jews. Leoni's intervention through operatic singing was particularly significant––a powerful, bodily manifestation that was capable of transforming listeners while exhibiting the deep acculturation of the singer himself. The ambivalence triggered by his performances would go on to define the public reception of other Jewish singers, particularly that of Leoni's protégé, John Braham, Britain's leading tenor in the early nineteenth century. Ultimately, the experience of these Jews' performances could not be easily deconstructed, as the Jewish performers' voices were emanating from within written, sometimes canonical, musical works. This representational impasse gave rise to a public discourse intent on deciphering their Jewishness, raising questions of interpretation, intention, and confession.