Georgian London Research Articles

Blackmail, Scandal and Revolution: London's Frenchby Simon Burrows�Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgian Londonby Gillian Russell

<i>Blackmail, Scandal and Revolution: London's French</i>by Simon Burrows�<i>Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgian London</i>by Gillian Russell

Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgian London (review)

Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgian London (review)

Chinese Indians: a James Gillray print, Covent Garden’s The Loves of Bengal, and the eighteenth‐century Asian economic ascendancy

This essay examines a James Gillray print, A Sale of English‐Beauties in the East‐Indies (1786), and Edward Topham’s Covent Garden farce, Bonds without Judgment; or, The Loves of Bengal (1787) in the light of the implications of André Gunder Frank’s ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (1998) and Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (2000) which outline the global economic ascendancy of China in the period up to 1800. The Loves of Bengal coincided with the impeachment of Warren Hastings. While it strikingly borrows a number of specific visual motifs from Gillray’s print and incorporates them into the farce’s comic action, Topham introduced two completely novel Chinese characters (Japan and Nankeen). Their dominant role in the play, together with the relationship of Topham’s drama to the anti‐slaving plays Inkle and Yarico (Colman, 1787) and Harlequin Mungo (Bates, 1787), reveals the presence of the underlying economic templates which both determined China’s premier role in the world economy and Britain’s marginality relative to it. Late Georgian London theaters presented remarkably nuanced representations of China in conformity to the general propositions concerning economic history pre‐1800 set out by Frank and Pomeranz.

A Taste of Italy: Italian Businesses and the Culinary Delicacies of Georgian London

The eighteenth century was a period of formidable economic and cultural achievement for Britain. The 'polite and commercial society' of Georgian Britain — as it has been defined by a well-known historian — was heavily influenced by foreign styles, fashions and consumer goods. Little, however, is known about the role played by Italy in shaping eighteenth-century English material culture. This article examines the consumption of foreign delicacies sold in eighteenth-century London by shops called — 'Italian warehouses'. These were high-class shops that specialized in selling all sorts of products from southern Europe. They were initially owned by Italians. The autobiography of the Tuscan Filippo Mazzei (1730–1816), owner of an Italian warehouse in Bond Street between 1764 and 1772, allows us to reconstruct the international network of a restricted commercial community, thus offering a unique portrait of London retailing and consumers' tastes in the late eighteenth century. It highlights in particular the complex connections between the world of consumption, the high forms of Italian culture, such as literature and music, and the economic interests of British and Italians alike. Italian shop owners were more interested in profiting from their peculiar social and cultural position rather than creating a sense of bonding with their compatriots. This explains why they did not produce a culinary tradition. By the early nineteenth century, their market was dominated by British shopkeepers selling all sorts of products. It was only after 1860 that Italian food re-emerged in London's culinary scene, obliterating the eighteenth-century world of the Italian warehouses.

Gothic Reflections: Narrative Force in Nineteenth-Century Fiction by Peter K. Garrett

MLR, I01.2, 2oo6 525 complexity of individual imaginings of "London"' (p. xiv). The inverted commas indicate that this is a tale of two cities: 'the actual spaces of the metropolis' and 'an imaginary "London", an interior world constructed from personal sensory and imaginative experience but also from verbal and visual representations'. There has, in Robinson's view, been too great an emphasis in recent critical writing upon the Laca nian concept of the 'symbolic order', and his aim is to reconsider the literary concept of the imagination in relation to subjective 'agency'. The result is a fascinating book of just eight chapters and forty well-chosen plates, inwhich he offers readings of ideas and impression of London over the long nineteenth century, focusing mainly upon themes relating to economics and gender. In his first two chapters, Robinson considers late Georgian London, and particu larly the relationship between art forms and modernization, and gender relations in a society shaped by market forces. Chapter 3, 'Capital City', examines the 'trans formations wrought by capitalism' that effected the transition toVictorian London (p. 45). In the chapter on Dickens that follows, Robinson is interested in the combi nation of reportage and social criticism in the work of one of many migrants from the Home Counties into nineteenth-century London. Visual culture figures prominently in the central chapters of ImaginingLondon, where Robinson asks why the response of French Impressionism to the upheavals of Second Empire Paris found no equivalent inVictorian London, and how the evolution of lateVictorian aesthetics relates to the commodification of female sexuality and to class anxieties. In the final two chapters, he discusses two aspects of Trollope's 'London'-capitalism and gender relations-and Henry James's 'entanglement' in contemporary debates about theWoman Question, sexuality, commercialism and mass culture, and poverty. Robinson has read very widely indeed and with remarkable insight. His sources range from themajor writers and painters to those obscure documentary sources that are uncovered only after painstaking research. His methodology is not inflexible, but draws mainly upon psychological andMarxist models. The book works best when he writes tightly to his title, and his handling of visual material is particularly assured. His connections are frequently highly original and enlightening. The publication of this book is something of an event in nineteenth-century literary and cultural history. WINCHESTER MICHAELWHEELER Gothic Reflections: Narrative Force inNineteenth-Century Fiction. By PETERK. GAR RETT. Ithaca, NY: CornellUniversityPress. 2003. iX+232pp. $I9.95. ISBNO 80I4-4156-0. Peter K. Garrett's scholarly study is remarkable for its refusal to ghettoize nineteenth century Gothic texts. Garrett declines to entertain simplistic divisions between a 'subversive' Gothic tradition and a 'mainstream' realist one, and sensibly maintains that both engage with similar questions of self-consciousness and narrative control. Joining an increasing wave of researchers in the field taking their lead from Chris Baldick and Robert Mighall's manifesto, 'Gothic Criticism' (in A Companion to the Gothic, ed. by David Punter (Oxford: Blackwell 2000), pp. 209-28), Garrett rejects the facile ascription of subversion to Gothic texts, arguing that destabilization and consolidation routinely occur within the same text. However, he does not take the historicist route Baldick andMighall recommend as an alternative, turning instead to Barthes and the Russian Formalists in an attempt to untangle the implications of the complex, self-referential narratives of the Gothic. The resulting thesis is a strong one, but has a somewhat repetitive quality, as Garrett establishes the duality of Gothic texts again and again from themiddle of the 526 Reviews eighteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth. The book is divided into three sections: the first deals with the first phase of Gothic, fromWalpole to Poe; the second with the nineteenth-century monsters of Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll andMr. Hyde, and Dracula; the third extends the argument to canonical texts by Dickens, Eliot, and James. The invaluable result is that the narrative strategies of the Gothic are seen as integral to nineteenth-century fiction as awhole: not grotesque aberrations, but part of awider literary scene. Poe in particular, through his criticism aswell as his fiction, takes on a new centrality that is both refreshing and timely. The most successful part of the book...

Bread and Arsenic: Citizenship from the Bottom Up in Georgian London

Bread and Arsenic: Citizenship from the Bottom Up in Georgian London

MUSICAL INSTRUMENT MAKING IN GEORGIAN LONDON, 1753–1809: EVIDENCE FROM THE PROCEEDINGS OF THE OLD BAILEY AND THE MIDDLESEX SESSIONS OF THE PEACE

Throughout the Georgian period London was the most significant British centre for musical instrument manufacture. Traditionally, research in this area has focused on the surviving instruments themselves, thereby emphasizing those makers in charge of flourishing workshops and those who were in the habit of signing their products. By examining archival sources, however, it is possible to glean a more complete picture of musical instrument production, through the identification of ‘hidden’ makers unrepresented by extant instruments, the establishment of patterns of settlement and the highlighting of relationships between different builders.Two principal sources form the basis of this study: the online edition of the Proceedings of the Old Bailey and the Middlesex Sessions of the Peace Records. While these sources are an important record of crime and punishment, it is the unwitting testimony of the trials rather than the crimes, the legal procedures or the punishments that is the primary focus of this study. Indeed, since the trials enable the identification of people involved at all levels of the musical instrument trade, it is arguable that they provide one of the most significant means of establishing some of the processes characterizing the industry during the second half of the eighteenth century.

The small house in eighteenth-century London: a social and architectural history

London's modest eighteenth-century houses - those inhabited by artisans and labourers in the unseen parts of Georgian London - can tell us much about the culture of that period. This fascinating book examines largely forgotten small houses that survive from the eighteenth century and sheds new light on both the era's urban architecture and the lives of a culturally distinctive metropolitan population. Peter Guillery discusses how and where, by and for whom the houses were built, stressing vernacular continuity and local variability. He investigates the effects of creeping industrialisation (both on house building and on the occupants), and considers the nature of speculative suburban growth. Providing rich and evocative illustrations, he compares these houses to urban domestic architecture elsewhere, as in North America, and suggests that the eighteenth-century vernacular metropolis has enduring influence.

The sooterkin doctor: the London career of John Maubray, MD (1700-1732), "andro-boethogynist".

Dr John Maubray (1700-1732) was one of the most prominent man-midwives of Georgian London. His emphasis on the importance of physical examination and a combination of theoretical and practical teaching seems to have foreshadowed later methods of training in midwifery. His espousal of the non-instrumental Deventerian system of obstetrics and his activities in the parish of St George's, Hanover Square in London, identified him with the dominant Whig party. Although he failed to acquire a major patron, his network of social connections enabled him to obtain charitable and public service appointments, culminating in his chairmanship of the Charitable Corporation.

Living and dying in Georgian London's lying-in hospitals.

This article uses previously untapped archival sources to revise the dominant, negative view of London's eighteenth-century maternity hospitals, by reconstructing daily life at the British Lying-in Hospital. Though the hospital in fact helped to support women's work as midwives, its institutional practices altered the experience of childbirth both negatively and positively, which inspired rumors, criticism, and inflammatory published attacks. The article illuminates how two unrecognized events in 1751-the hospital's first epidemiological crisis, and the arrival of a new man-midwife who used instruments-may have become intertwined in the public imagination and helped to shape the terrible reputation of lying-in hospitals, despite their overall positive eighteenth-century record.

Reviews

Book reviewed in this article: The Methodists and Revolutionary America, 1760–1800. By Dee E. Andrews.The Moral Tale in France and Germany 1750–1789. By Katherine Astbury. SVEC 2002:07. Graphic Design, Print Culture, and the Eighteenth‐Century Novel. By Janine Barchas. The Mariage de Figaro. By Beaumarchais. Edited by Gérard Kahn. SVEC 2002:12. Ape to Apollo: Aesthetics and the Idea of Race in the 18 th Century. By David Bindman. Visions of the Daughters of Albion. By William Blake. Edited by Robert N. Essick. Francis Hutcheson in Dublin, 1719–30; The Crucible of his Thought. By Michael Brown. Diderot's Endgames. By Derek Connon. French Studies of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, II. Goethés Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship. A Reader's Commentary. By Jane V. Curran. The London Corresponding Society. 1792–1799. Edited by Michael T. Davis. Political Actors. Representative Bodies and Theatricality in the Age of the French Revolution. By Paul Friedland. A Critical Bibliography of Daniel Defoe. By P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens. Colonial America. From Jamestown to Yorktown. By Mary K. Geiter and W. A. Speck. London und der Klassizismus in der Musik: Die Idee der ‘absoluten Musik’ mid Muzio dementis Klavierwerke. By Anselm Gerhard. Selected Works of Eliza Haywood. Set I, vol. I. Miscellaneous Writings, 1725–1743; vol.2, Epistles for the Ladies: vol.3, The Wife, The Husband, and The Young Lady. Set II, vol.I, The Dramatic Historiographer and The Parrot: vol.2, The Female Spectator, Volumes 1 and 2; vol.3, The Female Spectator, Volumes 3 and 4. Edited by Alexander Pettit. Revolutio germanica. Die Sehnsucht nach der ‘alten Freiheit’ der Germanen. 1750–1820. By Jost Hermand and Michael Niedermeier. Literature of the Sturm und Drang. Edited by David Hill. The Camden House History of German Literature 6. Austria's Wars of Emergence. War, State and Society in the Habsburg Monarchy 1683–1797. By Michael Hochedlinger. Primogeniture and Entail in England: A Survey of their History and Representation in Literature. By Zouheir Jamoussi.The Age of Cultural Revolutions. Britain and France, 1750–1820. Edited by Colin Jones and Dror Wahrman. Women's Writing and the Circulation of Ideas: Manuscript Publication in England, 1550–1800. Edited by George L. Justice and Nathan Tinker. Polski wiek Swiatel. Obszary swoistości [The unique features of the Polish Enlightenment]. By Teresa Kostkiewiczowa. ‘The Rule of Contrary’. Das Paradox in der englischen Komödie der Restaurationszeit und des Frühen 18. Jahrhunderts. By Burkhard Niederhoff. Daniel Defoe, Master of Fiction: His Life and Ideas. By Maximillian E. Novak. A Proper Reply to a Late Scurrilous Libel; Intitled, Sedition and Defamation Display'd (1731). By William Pulteney. Edited by H. T. Dickinson. La ‘Gazette d'Amsterdam’. Miroir de I'Euvope au XVIIIe siècle. Edited by Pierre Rétat. SVEC 2001:06. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Sciences of Life. Edited by Nicholas Roe. Georgian London. By John Summerson. Edited by Howard Colvin. Scandal Nation. Law and Authorship in Britain, 1750–1832. By Kathryn Temple. The Literary and Cultural Spaces of Restoration London. By Cynthia Wall.The Duke of Portland. Politics and Party in the Age of George III. By David Wilkinson. The Correspondence of Thomas Reid. Edited by Paul Wood.

Designs on the City: John Gwynn's Plans for Georgian London

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Mutuality Tested: The Rise and Fall of Mutual Fire Insurance Offices in Eighteenth-Century London

There is now a considerable body of theoretical literature on the comparative efficiencies of mutual and stock forms of corporate organisation in financial services. However this question has received comparatively little attention from business historians. This article examines the factors behind the dramatic rise and fall of three large mutual fire insurance offices in Georgian London, addressing issues of their financial structure, organisation and governance, in the context of modern theories of mutual formation. It is concluded that changing levels of aggregate uncertainty in the market - rather than internal agency conflicts - provide the best explanation for the early success and subsequent failure of these financial institutions.

Georgian London revisited

Sir John Summerson was a very influential figure in the historiography of London and his work, Georgian London, first published in 1946, is rightly regarded as a classic text on the history of the city. This paper explores the background and context in which the work was conceived, paying particular attention to Summerson's involvement in recording and preserving the architectural heritage of both London and the rest of the country. It examines the main themes that underpinned the work, including the role of the market, the significance of taste and the importance of social mobility. It examines the methods used by Summerson to develop his ideas, including first hand accounts of the buildings themselves as well as visualisation and exemplification of the evidence. Finally, it describes the way in which the work was received by contemporaries and its impact on urban history more generally.

“Thoughts that Flash like Lightning”: Thomas Holcroft, Radical Theater, and the Production of Meaning in 1790s London

During the 1790s, political speech in London's public spaces and commercial sites of leisure came under intense governmental surveillance. Fearing revolutionary infection from across the channel in France, the Pitt ministry sent spies into popular organizations such as the London Corresponding Society and turned more attention to other sites as well, including coffeehouses, taverns, debating-club rooms, and the street. Recently, historians too have explored the ways in which radicals manipulated the ludic vocabularies of urban sociability to critique the regime, protest persecution, and argue for reform. In this article I address a site that figured prominently as a place for radical speech in the 1790s: the Theatre Royal at Covent Garden. Although it was a site whose content was strictly regulated by the state through the office of the Examiner of Plays, the royal theater was, like other eighteenth-century theaters, a place where performances multiplied: viewers watched the play, but in the well-lit and noisy pit, boxes, and galleries, they watched other viewers intently. All were engaged in a complex process of performance, reception, and counterperformance. Indeed, as scholars have shown, theater audiences in late Georgian London were highly skilled at appropriating a theatrical grammar by which to demand their perceived rights as English subjects. Such strategies revealed the potency of theatrical representation in a society where, as Gillian Russell notes, “performance, display and spectatorship were essential components of the social mechanism.”

Inigo Jones and the Origins of the London Mews

One of the defining characteristics of Georgian and Victorian London is the mews, a small building for horses and coaches at the rear of a terraced house, connected to it by a garden or yard, but approached from the street by a separate alley. As a building type the mews is a particularly British and overwhelmingly London phenomenon. It is so familiar, especially in Mayfair, Belgravia and South Kensington, that its existence is largely taken for granted. This article sets out to trace its hitherto unidentified origins, to show that like so much that we consider Georgian its roots lie in the middle years of the seventeenth century, and, in particular, to highlight the role played in its development by Inigo Jones.

What Merchants Did: London Traders in the British Atlantic

London-the political, financial, and commercial heart of the British empirehas suffered an odd fate in the historiography of the eighteenth-century Atlantic. More colonial trade circulated through London than all other English ports combined during the first three quarters of the century. Yet despite its precedence in the imperial economy, the breadth and complexity of London's Atlantic commerce has failed to receive extended examination. Surveys concerned with British overseas trade accord prominence to the metropolis, and fine studies exist of individual merchants and particular branches of commerce. No published work on Georgian London, however, equals the scholarship on trade through Glasgow or Bristol, cities for which port books and firm records survive in greater quantity.1 For historians of early America, the deficiency is serious. In the absence of a view from London, those seeking a broad perspective on the operation of Britain's commercial empire find themselves with peripheries and no core. David Hancock helps fill the void with an intensive inquiry into the work of twenty-three loosely affiliated merchants active in the five decades before the close of the American Revolution. Six owned and operated a slaving fort on Bance Island in the Sierra Leone river from 1748 to 1784; the remaining seventeen represent all known partners in the other ventures conducted by the six principals-Augustus Boyd, John Boyd, Alexander Grant, John Mill, Richard Oswald, and John Sargent. The associates, as Hancock terms this group, represent the increasingly diverse origins of the London mercantile community. They hailed from the provinces, a majority from Scotland and Ireland, and labored, at first, outside the chartered companies and at the perimeter of established trading networks. In Hancock's words, they were marginal men, opportunistic in seizing new prospects for profit, prepared to direct multiple enterprises on a global scale in ways that integrated

Moral trespass in Georgian London: gaming,gender, and electoral politics in the age of George III

ABSTRACTIn the late eighteenth century, the British electorate began thinking about politics and statecraft in a new way. Britons challenged the natural rights of the nation's aristocracy to rule, and actively linked the personal behaviour of individual noblemen and women to real or imagined public consequences. Aristocratic gaming provided Britons with a rich vocabulary for voicing such concerns. The noble gamester, perceived as erratic, self-interested, and without honour, personified those aspects of private aristocratic vice most likely to undermine national well-being. The 1784 Westminster election specifies two aspects of this controversy. The political unworthiness of notorious gamester Charles James Fox (a front-runner in the election) was linked early on to his personal financial mismanagement, which intimated, in the public mind, his potential abuse of public funds. Fox further contaminated his suitability for public office by allowing the fifth duchess of Devonshire, herself a gamestress, to canvass for him. Her presence in Westminster not only dramatized Fox's gamester persona, but effeminized it. Pittite propaganda stressed Fox's culpability on both counts, and emphasized a new concern with private virtue as fundamental to the moral prerogative to rule.

Medical lecturing in Georgian London.

Viewed in the light of the discussions ofscientificlecturing in eighteenth-century London contained in this issue, the case of medicine may be said to be both more of the same but also something different.

REVIEWS

Journal Article REVIEWS Get access Theatre and Disorder in Late Georgian London. By MARC BAER Pp xvi+292. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992 £37 50. DAVID W. LINDSAY DAVID W. LINDSAY University of WalesBangor Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of English Studies, Volume XLVI, Issue 181, February 1995, Pages 105–106, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/XLVI.181.105 Published: 01 February 1995