Georgian London Research Articles

Susan Mitchell Sommers, <i>The Siblys of London: A Family on the Esoteric Fringes of Georgian England</i>

Even though William and Catherine Blake are mentioned on only a handful of pages, Blakeans will be thoroughly intrigued by Susan Mitchell Sommers’s The Siblys of London: A Family on the Esoteric Fringes of Georgian London for its portrayal of groups and eclectic discourses close to, and sometimes touching, the Blakes. The Siblys were a family of booksellers who specialized in the occult, publishing on such topics as astrology, alchemy, witchcraft, and prophecy. The book focuses largely on the two oldest brothers, Manoah (1757–​1840), a Swedenborgian minister and Bank of England employee, whom the Blakes almost certainly met, and Ebenezer (1750–​99), a bookseller, freemason, quack, astrologer, political operative, bigamist, and self-described male midwife and alchemist. As Sommers points out, when the Siblys have been considered at all, they have been examined from various disciplinary frames that often misconstrued their larger lives and work. Accordingly, one of the real strengths of the book is Sommers’s careful engagement with, and correction of, the existing scholarship, based on detailed, documented research.

Taking Money from Strangers: Traders’ Responses to Banknotes and the Risks of Forgery in Late Georgian London

AbstractSelling to strangers was a significant occupational hazard for retailers in late Georgian Britain, one that was hard to avoid. The dangers were especially great in larger towns and cities, where shopkeepers were dependent on a steady stream of passing trade composed of a large number of customers that they did not know. Though traders risked financial loss and even possible prosecution by accepting counterfeit banknotes, refusal to accept them meant losing vital custom. In areas of growing urban populations, tradesmen and women thus faced an increasingly tricky dilemma in their day-to-day business as they dealt with more strangers whose trustworthiness and personal credit were extremely hard to gauge, at a time when banknote forgery was on the rise. The decisions that retailers made about both banknotes and the individuals who presented them for payment illustrate some of the ways that town dwellers sought to navigate the rising anonymity of urban society in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This article suggests that traders relied on a series of techniques that in previous experience usually worked: examining banknotes and those strangers who presented them with care, relying on the expertise of neighbors and members of their household, and dealing by preference with individuals who appeared to be linked to their local community. These behaviors demonstrate that “modernity” might have affected the lives and outlooks of ordinary Londoners in unexpected and contradictory ways, some strongly linked to older forms of society.

"Other Women Were Present": Seeing Black Women in Georgian London

"Other Women Were Present": Seeing Black Women in Georgian London

The Georgian London Town House: Building, Collecting and Display, ed. Susanna Avery-Quash and Kate Retford

The Georgian London Town House: Building, Collecting and Display, ed. Susanna Avery-Quash and Kate Retford

City of Beasts: How Animals Shaped Georgian London. By Thomas Almeroth-Williams. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019. xvii + 309 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. Cloth £30.00.

<i> City of Beasts: How Animals Shaped Georgian London. </i> By Thomas Almeroth-Williams. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019. xvii + 309 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. Cloth £30.00.

The Watchdogs of Georgian London: Non-human Agency, Crime Prevention and Control of Urban Space

Property crime was a major concern in Georgian London and previous studies have noted that this spurred on the development of locks, security regimes and policing. Until now, however, the role played by dogs in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century crime prevention has been overlooked. When thinking about Georgian canines, historians have tended to focus on nuisance strays or spoilt lapdogs. By contrast, this article reveals that domestic dogs of all shapes and sizes made a significant contribution to the London economy by protecting valuable property, both commercial and domestic, from thieves. In doing so, it challenges the assumption that access to private space, a key battleground in Georgian power relations, was controlled solely by people. Moreover, it argues that the presence and behaviour of dogs shaped human behaviour and social relations in the city, as well as debates about crime, taxation, social order and the rights of citizens. As such, this article calls for dogs and other non-human animals to be integrated into social and urban history, and to be accorded agency.

London: Prints and Drawings before 1800. By Bernard Nurse

As the former Librarian at the Society of Antiquaries, Bernard Nurse is uniquely well placed to tell the story of the antiquarian Richard Gough (1735-1809) and his collections. Attractive and lavishly illustrated, this book easily fulfils its stated aim of making the collection ‘better known to scholars and the general public’ (p. 16). It provides 123 illustrations of prints and drawings of London subjects, accompanied by texts succinctly summarising existing scholarship on each. When Nurse focuses on Gough and his collections, particularly in the section of the intro duction about Gough and the two appendices on his letters and how to use his collec tions, the writing is fluid and informative, and hints at valuable avenues which are yet to be explored. The main body of the book is arranged topically into seven sections covering maps of London, the City of London, the Buck brothers’ pano rama of London and Westminster, Westminster, the Thames, the environs of Georgian London, and ‘London Life: Illustrating the News’. Each begins with a short thematic introduction peppered with plate references for illustrations to follow, and then the images are described in the course of thematic sections which tend to focus more on the history of the area depicted than why the images were made and collected.

The Last Royal Rebel: the Life and Death of James, Duke of Monmouth The Beau Monde: Fashionable Society in Georgian London

The Last Royal Rebel: the Life and Death of James, Duke of Monmouth The Beau Monde: Fashionable Society in Georgian London

‘A very mistaken identification’: the ‘sultana’ or ‘cither viol’ and its links to the bowed psaltery, viola d’amore and guittar

The origins and development of the ‘sultana’ or ‘cither viol’ constitute an organological enigma. Usually considered as the bowed equivalent of the wire-strung guittar, the ‘sultana’ or ‘cither viol’ has been described by several authors as a wire-strung type of viola d’amore with no sympathetic strings that was introduced in the 1760s by Thomas Perry, the well-known violin- and guitar-maker of Dublin. This article will present new evidence that has come to light from the examination of written sources, iconography and surviving specimens, aiming to reveal the true identity of this forgotten instrument while underlining its close connections to the viola d’amore and guittar. Furthermore, it will provide new details on the manufacture and trade of the instrument by referring to the influential work of Frederick Hintz and Reinerus Liessem, two important instrument-makers and dealers of German origin working in Georgian London. Finally, the article will provide an overview of the instrument’s promotion and reception in the British Isles during the late 18th century, with particular reference to Scotland and Ireland where the instrument seems to have enjoyed a considerable popularity, and will additionally investigate its musical role by analysing the only known example of music composed for it in an extant manuscript.

The ‘stormy latitude of the law’: Chancery Lane and street improvement in late Georgian London

Using newspapers, plans, London guides and parish records, this article describes the arguments concerning improvement of the street environment in Chancery Lane, from around 1760 to 1815. This area of London was marginal to the great centres of Westminster and the City and, therefore, analysing its development challenges the standard binary model of the metropolis, generally used by historians of the late eighteenth century. The importance of local political conditions to the success of street improvement is examined, including the fragmented jurisdictions of local parishes and the popular association of Chancery Lane with the legal profession.

The Power of Illusion

In this article, I examine how two English theatrical phenomena used stage technology to produce illusions for certain political ends. The two phenomena of interest are the court masque of the early 1600s and the illegitimate genres of the late Georgian London theatre. My focus will be on the latter, through an examination of the pantomime The Picture of Paris – opening at Covent Garden in 1790. Whereas a political reading of the court masque is well established in theatre studies, the same cannot be said regarding a political understanding of the theatre culture of the late Georgian period. Furthermore, those who have focused on the political aspects of this theatre culture have not been interested in the role played by stage technology. This is where this article aims to contribute to the existing body of knowledge. Although the court masques and the illegitimate genres used much of the same stage technology, they differed in how they used it and to what political ends. Whereas the masque could be understood as a conservative statement of royal powers, asserting their right to rule, the illegitimate genres approached the governing powers and policies in a more subversive manner. Late Georgian cultural politics, censoring the spoken word on stage and patenting the performance of tragedy and comedy, gave rise to new theatrical genres where visual aspects – by legal necessity – took centre stage. The resulting spectacular theatre of action and visual image was exempt from government censorship, making possible a special kind of political freedom of expression in these genres. It was during performance, through their use of dumb shows, setting, stage machinery and special effects that government criticism could unfold within these genres.

Traffic in corpses and the commodification of burial in Georgian London

ABSTRACTThis article argues, using evidence from Georgian London, that historical demographers need to revisit the effects of two inter-related phenomena: the effects of burial fees on interment practices and the ebb and flow of a very considerable ‘traffic in corpses’. By the eighteenth century burial space in London was at a premium and there was an active market in the provision of suitable, and affordable, burial grounds. This article is based on the sextons' books of the Westminster parish of St Martin in the Fields. These books are very unusual in recording exported ‘certificate’ and ‘arrears’ burials. The ‘traffic in corpses’ revealed by this source is analysed in some detail and burial fees turn out to be of great importance in understanding local fluctuations in interment practices. A neighbouring parish, St Anne, Soho, was acting as a veritable ‘clandestine burial centre’ which interred non-parishioners for profit on a huge scale for most of the eighteenth century. The ‘commodification’ of burial, driven partly by considerations of cost, thus had a major impact on interment practices in the eighteenth-century metropolis. A key finding is that, due to this postmortem flow of corpses, the total number of recorded burials in any one parish may not necessarily have been driven by fluctuations in local mortality rates.

Collecting African Money in Georgian London: Sarah Sophia Banks and her Collection of Coins

Sarah Sophia Banks (1744–1818) is less well known than her brother, Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society. Like her brother, she was a keen collector, and assembled a substantial collection of printed ephemera, as well as an important numismatic collection. Both these collections were deposited at the British Museum on her death in 1818, and they remain uniquely important resources for scholars of late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century collecting. This article looks at one particular part of her collecting — money from Africa — to explore the purpose of Sarah Sophia Banks’ numismatic collection, and the place that material from Africa had in it, during her lifetime, as well as at the British Museum after her death.

All the News That's Fit to Film?: Copying the Nichols Collection of Early London Newspapers

Working with early newspapers is notoriously difficult, not to say onerous. Aside from questions of definition - what sort of format, content, or periodicity constitutes a newspaper? - tracking the multitude of serials that poured from the presses on a weekly or daily basis in later Stuart and early Georgian London has tested bibliographers and historians alike. Publishers lost count of their issue numbers, especially when a hasty reprinting of a day's edition was needed to meet unexpected demand, or, occasionally, to create demand by deliberately inflating these same numbers to give an exaggerated sense of the paper's regularity cum longevity. Compounding these bibliographic headaches is the hijacking of titles. Rival publications bearing the same nomenclature appeared on the capital's streets within hours of each other. Since it was not unusual for a title to be printed at more than one press, first readers were themselves not immediately aware of any counterfeit.

According to QueeneyAccording to Queeney Beryl Bainbridge Abacus £8.99

I grew up in an area of south London that once was Streatham Park. It was the country retreat of the Thrale family, who were leading lights in Georgian London society. The estate became a rural bolt-hole for their famous friend Samuel Johnson. This novel gives flesh to the bones of a tale I had been familiar with since childhood. It is a fictionalised tragi-comic portrait of the great man of letters and his complex association with the wealthy and influential Thrales.

William Smellie and William Hunter: two great obstetricians and anatomists

William Smellie and William Hunter: two great obstetricians and anatomists

Sex, Scandal, and Celebrity in Late Eighteenth-Century England. By Matthew J. Kinservik. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007; pp. 272. $80 cloth. - Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgian London. By Gillian Russell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007; pp. 308. $110 cloth.

Sex, Scandal, and Celebrity in Late Eighteenth-Century England. By Matthew J. Kinservik. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007; pp. 272. $80 cloth. - Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgian London. By Gillian Russell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007; pp. 308. $110 cloth.

Fashionable Acts: Opera and Elite Culture in London, 1780–1880

Fashionable Acts is a welcome addition to the new theatre history. For 15 years now the previously rather sequestered, somewhat antiquarian and too-easily-disregarded study of the theatre of the past has slowly been finding its place in the main flow of social history and cultural scholarship, and beginning to consolidate an historiography that responds to, and belongs within, modern scholarly discourse on the past. The process began some time around the publication of Marc Baer's Theatre and Disorder in Late Georgian London (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), and has built a body of work since then, in a series of important essay collections as well as in monographs. These include radical departures into histories of performance such as Tracy C. Davis's Stages of Emergency: Cold War Nuclear Civil Defense (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), but this late-twentieth-century example is unusual: the larger body of the new work is in earlier periods, and forms an interesting concentration in the long eighteenth century. The list includes not only Baer's book on theatre riots, and Jane Moody's study of the same decades in her Illegitimate Theatre in London 1770–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) but also valuable studies such as Paula R. Backscheider's Spectacular Politics: Theatrical Power and Mass Culture in Early Modern England (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), John O'Brien's Harlequin Britain: Pantomime and Entertainment, 1690–1760 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004) and Gillian Russell's The Theatres of War: Performance, Politics, and Society, 1793–1815 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). This eighteenth-century concentration may be related to the use by mainstream cultural and political historians of the concepts of ‘performance’ and ‘the theatrical’ as tools in characterizing social conduct in a way peculiarly significant in that period. In works like Linda Colley's Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992) the reading of social performance begins to be more important than setting out simple taxonomies of class and power, and comes to be understood as a key hegemonic tool. Theatre historians are beginning to demur at the idea that all social behaviour is to be read as performance, and to assert that the difference between what happens on stages, on the one hand, and in the auditorium or indeed the streets and coffee houses, on the other, is still fundamental to the understanding of drama and music and their reception. Nevertheless, we have benefitted from the wide acceptance of the idea that at certain social moments, especially perhaps in the eighteenth century and immediately beyond, some groups used performative behaviour as an important aspect of their self-definition; and that such public appearances included attendance at the theatres. In reciprocation, as it were, for the transfer of this element of theatre discourse to analysis of the wider public sphere, performance historians are increasingly willing to acquire the techniques and undertake the labour, particularly in the form of the statistical analysis, that are the basic tools of mainstream social history.

Pain and Degradation in Georgian London: Life in the Marshalsea Prison

The Marshalsea Prison in Southwark was London’s most important prison for poor debtors in the eighteenth century. In 1729 it came under parliamentary scrutiny by James Oglethorpe’s Gaols Committee which revealed a scandalous abuse of power involving the deliberate starvation of prisoners, torture, even murder. The prison’s deputy keeper, William Acton, stood trial on four charges of murder but was acquitted on each; there seems to have been political manipulation at the highest level to ensure that no charge was proven against Acton or any of the other gaolers prosecuted as a result of the Gaols Committee’s endeavours. We are afforded an intimate glimpse of life in Acton’s Marshalsea through the diary of John Baptist Grano, a musician imprisoned there for debt at the time of Oglethorpe’s inquiry. Grano shows us the reality of two prisons subsisting in one establishment: the ‘master’s side’ for those who could pay Acton for their keep and the dreadful ‘common side’ where prisoners were deprived of all charitable assistance until they were helped by their friends or until they starved to death. In an era of increasing gentility and politeness, the Marshalsea reminds us of the structures of injustice, oppression and rapacious profiteering that underpinned daily life in the eighteenth-century metropolis.

John Hunter: learning from natural experiments, 'placebos', and the state of mind of a patient in the 18th century.

Maverick, Scottish-born 18th-century surgeon John Hunter was Georgian London's most popular surgeon in the late 18th century.1,2 He made exceptional contributions to advancing the understanding and practice of medicine through observation and experiment. John Hunter studied anatomy for 12 years alongside his brother William, at their school in Covent Garden. After a few short spells of hands-on surgical practice in London hospitals, he signed up in 1760 as a surgeon in the British army.