Late Georgian England Research Articles

Wesley and the People Called Papists: Recusancy, Methodism, and Religious Tension in Eighteenth-Century Britain

ABSTRACT Scholarly interest in Wesley’s views of Catholicism and his conceptions of catholicity has increased significantly. This article examines how British Catholics, especially Bishop Richard Challoner of London and Fr Arthur O’Leary of Cork, engaged with Methodism in late Georgian Britain. Despite the proscribed status of the Catholic Church during this period, Catholics participated to an impressive degree in the controversies surrounding Methodism by defining themselves against Wesley both theologically and politically. Their actions aroused considerable interest and controversy, thus demonstrating the vitality of the Catholic community in an age when the Anglican confessional state was under considerable pressure.

Stage, Street, Garden, or Parlour: The Ubiquitous Popular Songs of Late Georgian England

ABSTRACT This article explores the ubiquity of popular songs across print traditions, performance venues, and social classes in England during the late Georgian era. It examines the formatting and presentation of an eighteenth-century chapbook, contextualizing it within contemporaneous print cultures before exploring how the songs in this item of cheap literature relate to music from English comic operas, pleasure garden entertainments, and domestic spaces. Through this case study, the article aims to illuminate a compelling era of English song before the “elite” became exclusive of the “popular,” when songs moved fluidly between social contexts and print traditions and were heard, known, and performed by multiple classes of English society.

Queering Fashion in Hajji Baba: James Morier, Mirza Abul Hassan Khan, and the Crisis of Imperial Masculinity

James Justinian Morier’s The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan (1824) shaped orientalist stereotypes until the early twentieth century. Scholars have examined the novel’s racism separately from gender and class anxieties in the often-neglected sequel, The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan in England (1828). Reading these two novels jointly reveals a British imperial masculinity in crisis during a precarious period in Anglo-Persian relations: the embassy of Mirza Abul Hassan Khan Shirazi Ilchi from Qajar Iran to late Georgian Britain in 1809–10 and 1819–20. This essay argues that Abul Hassan’s celebrity status in the tabloid news media inspired Londoners to adopt Persian fashions queerly, their gender deviancy informing Morier’s fiction about a foppish cross-dressed upstart from Ispahan. I argue that Abul Hassan’s mediatized body drove Morier to satirize fashionable Englishmen as a foreign race, allowing him to claim British gentility. Less concerned with Persians than with their effeminate admirers in England, his satire suggests that the “Orient” was constituted by intersectional gender, class, and racial identities in flux.

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.

Genteel or Respectable? the Material Culture of Rural Clergy in Late Georgian England

The vicar and rector often formed part of the elite in English rural communities, elevated in social and moral terms, but also economically and materially. They occupied what was frequently the largest house in the village and sometimes enjoyed close links with the local gentry – as even a cursory reading of the novels of Austen and Elliot makes clear. Indeed, lucrative livings formed one possible option for the younger sons of gentry families. Beyond literary representations, however, we know relatively little about the material lives of these men: the ways in which their houses were furnished or decorated. How deeply did gentility penetrate their domestic arrangements, equipping them to participate in the social rituals and cultural lives of the elite? In this paper, I draw on a collection of sale catalogues for rural and small town clergymen in Northamptonshire, in the English Midlands, to discover the nature and quality of their domestic material culture, from porcelain to cooking pots and from beds to books. Comparisons are drawn with the houses of neighbouring gentry to determine whether these clergymen were genteel, respectable or occupied a particular social and material niche.

Millennium and Enlightenment: Robert Owen and the Second Coming of the truth

ABSTRACT This article aims to explain the family resemblance between the early socialism that emerged in France from the aftermath of the Revolution and Owenite socialism, which emerged out of the very different political and religious circumstances of late Georgian Britain. While the ‘sciences’ of Henri Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier were conceived to end the crisis produced by the French Revolution, Owen’s newfound principle, what he called the ‘science of the influence of circumstance’, emerged from his A New View of Society and his ideas on formation of character, was directed to the solution of the problems of industrial Britain during the French wars and after. The article shows that, contrary to the arguments of the pathbreaking work of Gregory Claeys, Owen’s ideas had less to do with a Republicanism that, for Claeys in following the work of J.G.A. Pocock, had its roots in the Renaissance, and more to do with the emergence of the science of society whose origins lay in the late Enlightenment and the shared concerns of English, Scottish, and French thinkers on trying to understand an emerging and new social order.

Looking Awry at Georgian Caricature

This article investigates the applicability of certain aspects of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to the study of visual satire and/or caricature. Lacan’s treatment of the phenomenon of visual anamorphosis can provide a fruitful new way of thinking about the art of caricature. The visual exaggerations and distortions central to the art of caricature function as they do, as works of social or political satire, by virtue of the extent to which they expose the psychological emptiness or hollowness (castration) which inheres in all human social or symbolic activity. This argument is then applied to the political circumstances prevailing in late Georgian England: in particular, the visual satirical treatment devoted to the nature and status of the monarchy during this period is examined in the light of foregoing arguments.

Selfhood and ‘Nostalgia’: Sensory and Material Memories of the Childhood Home in Late Georgian Britain

AbstractFocusing on autobiographies written from the 1790s to the 1820s, this article demonstrates that material, emotional and sensory memories of the childhood house and its location were integral to constructions of self. First, it traces the interplay between prevailing cultural forms, family memory and identity, and proposes that these changed over time, shaped by cultural, social and economic factors. Second, in analysing these personal memories, it contributes to the debates around the meanings of the ‘emotional disposition’ of nostalgia, arguing that it was central to the formation of both national culture and individual selfhood.

The Business of Satirical Prints in Late-Georgian England. By James Baker

The Business of Satirical Prints in Late-Georgian England. By James Baker

Being a guitarist in late Georgian England

Late Georgian England has long been a poor relation to other countries in modern histories of the guitar. Yet in England, as elsewhere, the guitar enjoyed a considerable vogue in the early 19th century that only began to wane in the 1840s. In London, as in Paris or Vienna, the guitar was widely agreed to be a very serviceable instrument for accompanying the voice, and a substantial number of method books and songs for the instrument were issued. In addition to these primary materials of the guitar vogue there is a wealth of ancillary evidence in the form of anecdotes, caricatures, reviews and newspaper advertisements. This material is difficult to gather—or indeed to use—in a systematic manner. This article organizes the results of a protracted search in relation to two fundamental questions: what was it like to play the guitar in early Georgian England, and who was doing the playing?

Theatre History and Historiography: Ethics, Evidence and Truth. Edited by Claire Cochrane and Jo Robinson . Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Pp. vii + 205 + 11 illus. £58/$95 Hb; £45.99/$69.99 Eb. - Comic Acting and Portraiture in Late-Georgian and Regency England. By Jim Davis . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. vii + 274 + 68 illus. £64.99/$99.99 Hb.

Theatre History and Historiography: Ethics, Evidence and Truth. Edited by Claire Cochrane and Jo Robinson . Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Pp. vii + 205 + 11 illus. £58/$95 Hb; £45.99/$69.99 Eb. - Comic Acting and Portraiture in Late-Georgian and Regency England. By Jim Davis . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. vii + 274 + 68 illus. £64.99/$99.99 Hb.

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.

Prophecy and politics of salvation in late Georgian England. The theology and apocalyptic vision of Joanna Southcott. By Matthew Niblett . Pp. xiii + 239 incl. 19 figs. and colour plates. London–New York: I. B. Tauris, 2015. £62. 978 1 78076 878 6

Prophecy and politics of salvation in late Georgian England. The theology and apocalyptic vision of Joanna Southcott. By Matthew Niblett . Pp. xiii + 239 incl. 19 figs. and colour plates. London–New York: I. B. Tauris, 2015. £62. 978 1 78076 878 6 - Volume 68 Issue 1

Jim Davis, Comic Acting and Portraiture in Late-Georgian and Regency England (Cambridge Univ. Pr., 2015) 287 +76 illus. £64.99

Jim Davis, <i>Comic Acting and Portraiture in Late-Georgian and Regency England</i> (Cambridge Univ. Pr., 2015) 287 +76 illus. £64.99

The Patent Medicines Industry in Late Georgian England: A Respectable Alternative to both Regular Medicine and Irregular Practice

Patent medicines in late Georgian England have been misunderstood. Rather than just being visible constituents of irregular practice, they were a separate, substantial, industry providing a wide range of popular products. Most of the prominent medicine owners were either reputable tradesmen who did not practice medicine, or medical professionals; they operated from fixed premises for substantial periods of time, and they employed practices specific to the industry. A minority of nationally-available medicines were indeed owned and distributed by irregulars who were regarded as quacks by contemporaries, yet even these participants attempted to follow regular medicine. Wholesaling was initially led by London booksellers, but later moved to medicine specialists and chemists. The patent medicines industry was a separate entity, different from regular medicine and from irregular practice though linked to both of them, and restoring it to its rightful place changes our picture of late Georgian healthcare.

A Naturalist’s Notebooks

A Naturalist’s Notebooks Beth Fowkes Tobin (bio) This essay uses a set of notebooks written by the naturalist Dr. Richard Pulteney (1730–1801) to explore how notebooks, as a paper-based technology, operated in the world of Enlightenment natural history. Eighteenth-century notebooks, ranging from the homemade to the commercially available, were basically sheets of paper stitched together, characterized by blank pages offering themselves up to users to fill with whatever struck them as important enough to remember.1 Notebooks were used in a variety of social settings, sharing much in common with artists’ sketchbooks, poets’ commonplace books, traveller’s journals, ladies’ pocketbooks, and diarists’ memorandum books in that these book-like objects were designed to be a repository for the user who could store, manage, and retrieve data, usually in the form of words, numbers, or images. In general, a notebook’s appeal depended on its portability and flexibility as an archiving tool, and it often dealt with data that was in process, preliminary and contingent rather than polished and finished. Notebooks were effective means of storing data, but their social uses could extend beyond their utility as memory-keeping and data-retrieval devices to operate in the world in powerful ways. Notebooks, designed to manage information, circulated as material objects within the social world of natural history, and as such they were used to forge ties between naturalists, amateurs and professionals [End Page 131] alike, and to establish expertise and authority within these circles in late Georgian Britain. I first came across Pulteney’s notebooks several years ago in London’s Natural History Museum when I was researching Margaret Cavendish Bentinck, the Duchess of Portland, and her relationships with other naturalists, including Pulteney. They corresponded regularly for over fifteen years, working with each other as they catalogued their shell collections. When these lovely little booklets were delivered to my desk at the museum’s Zoology Library, I fell in love with them at first sight. (fig. 1) Their size—small enough to fit in one’s hands comfortably—made me want to pick them up. But what captured my attention (and heart) was their handmade materiality: stitched down the middle with thick thread, one bound with marbled paper, another with sturdy blue paper, another with cream. The interiors—made of cast off paper, including an old printed lease and an advertisement for cocoa—were endearing. I data-mined these notebooks, using them to find evidence to prove that Duchess of Portland did not just buy all her shell specimens; she had gathered many of her English shells herself along the Dorset coast. Two summers ago, I returned to the library to clear up a few queries about the duchess, and I found myself requesting these notebooks again even though I did not have a particular reason for doing so other than wanting to see them again. As I stood over them, handling them, admiring them, I felt that these notebooks were important in and of themselves, not as carriers of information only, but as entities unto themselves. To access their significance as material objects, we need to “make them talk,” as Bruno Latour has written, referring to the problem of how to recover the agency that objects (Latour’s “non-human subjects”) possess in their assemblages with humans. More specifically, we need to ask what these notebooks did for Pulteney.2 This essay begins with a description of the notebooks as data management devices and moves to a discussion of how this capacity for storage was used by Pulteney to navigate the socially complex world of Enlightenment natural history. Dr. Richard Pulteney, a physician, was one of the founding members of the Linnean Society, a well-respected amateur botanist, and author of a volume on Dorset’s natural history and two books promoting the Linnaean system of classification.3 Though a minor figure in the pantheon of British [End Page 132] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. One of Dr. Richard Pulteney’s handmade shell notebooks. © The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London. [End Page 133] naturalists, Pulteney was well connected within the Enlightenment world of natural history, corresponding with Sir Joseph Banks...

The Origins of Compassion for Animals: Legal Privileging of Non-Wild Animals in Late Georgian Britain

In 1822, towards the end of the Georgian period in Britain, the first substantial law was enacted to protect some animals from human abuse: An Act to Prevent the Cruel and Improper Treatment of Cat...

“Announcing each day the performances”: Playbills, Ephemerality, and Romantic Period Media/Theater History

GILLIAN RUSSELL “Announcing each day the performances”: Playbills, Ephemerality, and Romantic Period Media/Theater History O F THE DIVERSE RANGE OF PRINTED EPHEMERA IN LATE GEORGIAN BRITain , the playbill, with the significant exception of the lottery ticket, was the most ubiquitous. Its presence as part ofa late Georgian media ecol­ ogy is apparent in a comment made by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in a letter to Sara Hutchinson in 1802. Fancying himselfas a stage manager ofthe de­ ity’s theater of nature in the Lake District, Coleridge writes: “Blessings on the mountains! to the Eye & Ear they are always faithful. I have often thought ofwriting a Set of Play-bills for the vale ofKeswick—for every day in the Year—announcing each Day the Performances by his Supreme Majesty’s Servants, Clouds, Waters, Sun, Moon, Stars, &c.”' Coleridge imagines himself as a kind of diurnal historiographer, the playbill repre­ senting the possibility of inscribing and retaining traces of the constantly changing beauty of the natural “scene.” As stage manager of God’s theater of the world Coleridge not only exemplifies a Romantic poetics of ephemerality—which in its epistolary instantiation is itself to the moment—but also the embeddedness of such a poetics in the practices of collecting, as indicated by the fact that a file of playbills for the Keswick Theatre does in fact survive, in the playbill collections of the British Li­ brary.2 These playbills serve as a correlative of and also, we might say in their status as printed ephemera, an enabling condition of Coleridge’s the­ ater historiography of the everyday natural world. The playbill, which is of central significance to the history of Georgian ephemerology, thus deserves to be recognized as having a place in a cul1 . Coleridge, Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs, vol. 2: 18011806 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 825. 2. British Library Playbills, 291. SiR, 54 (Summer 2015) 241 242 GILLIAN RUSSELL tural history of Romantic textuality as a whole? Throughout her career Jane Moody was attentive to how the playbill could evoke the specificity in time and place of the performance event, vividly imagining, in Illegitimate Theatre in London, “many a spectator poring over the contents of a bill by the light of a candle in a gloomy rented two-pair back?’3 4 5 The playbill enunciated the play to be performed, the actors, the existence of the play­ house, and implicitly, a potential audience, while at the same time signify­ ing dimensions oftheater and theatricality beyond the specific performance event. This dual dimension of the playbill, I want to suggest, accounts for why Georgian men and women were attracted to it, why they collected it, and why, for such an apparently “ephemeral” document, so many play­ bills survive. I am interested in the playbill as an artifact ofboth the theater and Romantic print culture, a zone in which print textuality and theatri­ cality are profoundly imbricated. The playbill can be said to make visible the performative aspects of print, specifically its embedded orality and ocularity—the appeal to both “the Eye & Ear”—that made Coleridge think that the playbill was an appropriate metaphor for the panorama ofthe vale of Keswick. Holding the Playbill to the Light The importance of the playbill in theatrical and urban culture dates from the early modern period, the records of the Stationers’ Company showing that a succession ofprinters were authorized to produce playbills from 1587 onwards. As well as being distributed within and around playhouses, these bills would have been posted on walls and doorways, amplifying the impact ofthe theater, as Tiffany Stern has argued, within the cityscape as a whole? No playbills survive from this period. It was in the eighteenth century, with the expansion of both the print trade and the theater that the playbill became widely used and also archived. The production of playbills was a significant dimension of the jobbing trade for printers, both in London and the provinces. Some of the major metropolitan theaters had their own in­ house printing shops, while there was a close association between local 3. “Ephemerology” was the body ofknowledge about quotidian life, associational culture, customs and amusements, the mundane and the marvellous...

Cirque du Soleil and Its Roots in Illegitimate Circus

Cirque du Soleil and Its Roots in Illegitimate Circus

Sons of the Prophets: Domestic Clerical Seminaries in Late Georgian England

The late Georgian Church was not exclusively the preserve of the graduate clergyman: Oxford and Cambridge universities produced too few graduates to supply all the titles for orders. My current study of ordination records indicates that between 1780 and 1839 about one in four new entrants to the Church had no degree and that the majority of ordinands in Wales and the Northern Province were non-graduates, generally termed by contemporaries as ‘literates’. Why is this relevant to the subject of the household? The answer lies in the way in which these non-graduates prepared for ordination. There were various well-trodden routes: for instance in Wales and north-west England some grammar schools provided tertiary level study. But most non-graduate clerical aspirants followed a schoolboy classical education with private study, often assisted by a clergyman. This essay is concerned with a subsection of this type of preparation, the domestic clerical seminary, in which students prepared for ordination while residing in a clergyman’s family. It will consider the markets for such institutions, the nature of the pre-ordination training provided by them, and what a recognition of the operation of these seminaries contributes to an understanding of the channels through which emerging currents of ideology and professional practice flowed in this period.