Late Seventeenth-century London Research Articles

‘A poor gentlewoman that cannot take mercenary courses for her bread’: Aphra Behn’s sister and the influence of colonialism in late seventeenth-century London

ABSTRACT This article presents a case study of the life of Frances Wright, an Englishwoman whose domestic circumstances brought her into contact with England’s colonial projects in the mid-to-late seventeenth century. It argues that English colonial expansion had an impact on the self-perception and behaviours of ordinary English people, as well as the elite, and discusses how English men and women from all walks of life came to define their social positions against others’ lost liberties. Arguing that Mrs Wright was the sister of Aphra Behn, the article then plots overlaps between England’s colonial projects and Behn’s plays on the London stage.

The queens’ dressmakers: women’s work and the clothing trades in late seventeenth-century London

ABSTRACT Increased patterns of consumption during the late seventeenth century afforded new opportunities in the fashion trades for women, establishing mantua-making as an enduring form of female employment. The rise of these women has not been well documented in England or outside of the guilds, organisations that traditionally sought to marginalise the place of women in the craft trades. This article utilises verb and noun methodologies, alongside qualitative and quantitative analyses, to examine the household accounts of Queens Catherine of Braganza and Mary II dating from 1684–94. These accounts demonstrate that women’s skilled work in an essential sector of pre-industrial labour was often characterised by ambiguity. Occupational titles, when given, often undersold the labour performed by women at this crucial time in a fast-evolving marketplace, where they competed with male tailors for patronage and favour. Early English dressmakers relied on their knowledge and training in both seamstressing and tailoring, their associations with new, fashionable and highly desirable French couturières and forms of female social capital for success. Significantly, the evidence found in their bills offers new ways of reconstructing women’s work tasks, skills and recompense, challenging previously held assumptions about women’s expertise during the early modern period.

News, Events, Publications, and Awards

News, Events, Publications, and Awards

A Landscape of Conflict: Speculators and Books in Early Modern London

This article examines the speculative building world of late seventeenth-century London, a context often associated with the birth of modern real estate culture. It examines existing literature on the subject, and identifies the economic and social conditions that converged in producing new paradigms of speculative construction, as well as the actors and instruments involved in its codification. Rather than through the design and authorial practices usually associated with architects, building was realized based on a constellation of conflicting and largely still unsystematized negotiations between the stakeholders, such as builders, landowners, investors, and lessees. This article discusses these paradigms, particularly in relation to a fundamental and overlooked genre of the operational publications produced to organize and codify professional roles and relationships in the business world. I ultimately argue that in order to make sense of our capitalist building culture, we should reconsider the contentious circumstances that produced it, as well as the knowledge base generated to normalize these circumstances.

News, Events, Publications, and Awards

News, Events, Publications, and Awards

News, Events, Publications, and Awards

News, Events, Publications, and Awards

Four Unpublished Letters from Nicolas Fatio de Duillier to Isaac Newton

Abstract This article analyses four unpublished draft letters from Nicolas Fatio de Duiller to Isaac Newton, dating from June to August 1693, and held in the Special Collections in the Universiteitsbibliotheek in Leiden. Overall, these letters enrich our knowledge of Fatio-Newton’s alchemical correspondence in June 1693, a phase which likely represents the peak of the two natural philosophers’ alchemical collaboration. By scrutinising the content of the letters, and situating them in relation to primary and secondary sources, the article will place Newton and Fatio’s epistolary exchange in relation to the social and historical background of late seventeenth-century London, bringing to light so far undisclosed aspects of the networks, alchemical practices, and expertise of the two natural philosophers.

‘They tell me they were in fashion last year’: Samuel and Elizabeth Jeake and Clothing Fashions in Late Seventeenth-Century London and Rye

This article examines high fashion culture in late seventeenth-century London and Rye, focusing on the ways that Rye merchant, Samuel Jeake (1652–1699), and his wife, Elizabeth (1667–1736), engaged with the London fashion market at a time when the transmission of fashion styles was still primarily by word of mouth. Both Samuel and Elizabeth were intensely concerned to appear fashionable in provincial Rye. Correspondence between Samuel and Elizabeth and their London relatives shows how fashion information was being communicated between London and Rye and the speed with which clothing fashions changed in the capital. The discussion of Samuel and Elizabeth’s engagement with fashion is framed by an analysis of contemporary satirical literature which takes the supposed obsession of the English with fashion as its theme.

Architecture, Anatomy, and the New Science in Early Modern London

Focuses on an important but overlooked building in late seventeenth-century London: the College of Physicians on Warwick Lane designed by the scientist and architect Robert Hooke in the 1670s. The building, which was commissioned in response to the previous college’s destruction in the Great Fire of London in 1666, was itself demolished in the nineteenth century. In this article, Matthew Walker argues that the conception and design of Hooke’s college had close links with the early Royal Society and its broader experimental philosophical program. This came about through the agency of Hooke—the society’s curator—as well as the prominence of the college’s physicians in the experimental philosophical group in its early years. By analyzing Hooke’s design for the college, and its prominent anatomy theater in particular, this article thus raises broader questions about architecture’s relationship with medicine and experimental science in early modern London.

Talking Plants: Botany and Speech in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica

INTRODUCTION: SPEAKING SCIENCEWilliam Wright, an eighteenth-century Scottish doctor and Jamaican botanist, was comfortable communing with plants. As he put it in the prefatory discussion of botany for his Hortus Jamaicensis, a three folio volume collection of some six hundred plant specimens from the island:The Man who inclines to this happy turn is never at a loss for society, whether in the Garden, In the Field, on the bleak summit of the mountain, In the plenteous Vale, in the sweet range of the Hedge Row or in the cool umbrage of the Wood, He never fails to meet with numerous acquaintances, whether adapted to the purposes of Health, Food, agriculture or to gratify the Sight, Smell or Taste.'Materialized into Wright's Hortus - via dried and pressed leaves, stalks and seeds, and the accompanying handwritten text - were both the fruits of and the basis for other forms of communication with a variety of interlocutors. Its elaborate title page, which imitated the conventions of a printed book, and its presentation to David Steuart Erskine, the 11th Earl of Buchan and a fellow of the Royal Society, opened up realms of gentlemanly conversation and scholarly debate about natural history and natural philosophy. Its plant descriptions also occasionally signalled other oral encounters. Wright's specimen of sugar cane (Saccharum officinarum), that most significant plant for eighteenth-century Jamaica's system of plantation slavery, took up a full page in the Hortus. The text on the opposite leaf noted that 'The Sugar Cane is probably a Native of Arabia as well as of Guinea and the Continent of South America. The new Negroes brought here well know its use and give an account of their boiling it into Syrup in Africa. Finally, in its discussion of the medical uses of plants, Wright's Jamaican herbarium let the doctor speak to his patients. For example, for Lignum Vitas as a treatment for the Lues Venerea, he noted that 'Ten drams of Gum Guiacum Six Drams of Speices of Edinburgh] Treacle and thirty drams of Corrosive Sublimate infused in a Bottle of Rum is our mercurial Tincture. Two tea Spoonfulls morning and Evening in a pint of Decoction made of Sarspariila & Lignum Vitae is a dose for a grown person. He would expect a cure in six weeks.2Wright's Hortus begins to demonstrate the range of ways in which speech was involved in the making of eighteenth-century natural historical (and natural philosophical) knowledge, and the ways in which spoken words flowed around and into and out of texts (in both script and print), images and objects such as dried specimens and mounted collections. It is not the case that speech has been entirely neglected in the history of science, although considerably more attention has been paid to texts, images and objects.3 For example, much has been made of the norms of civil conversation that underpinned truth-telling in the early Royal Society and of the contemporaneous chatter and clatter of coffeehouse lecturers and their audiences.4 Neither has the relationship between talk and text gone unexamined. Both Jim Secord and Adrian Johns, in their close examinations of the making and use of books in the construction of scientific knowledge, have found themselves drawn into worlds where what was spoken was of utmost significance. For Johns, it was the oral transactions conducted between natural philosophers and stationers in the printshops of late seventeenth-century London that were crucial to what got made and credited as knowledge of nature.5 For Secord, the of mapped out across mid-nineteenth-century Britain in his analysis of the reception of Vestiges of the natural history of creation is, in many ways, also a geography of speaking. This ranges across, and differentiates between, the gossip of London's literary salons, Albert reading aloud to Victoria in their Buckingham Palace drawing room, the high table mutterings of Oxbridge dons, Liverpudlian prelates denouncing evolutionary thought from their pulpits, and the excited speculations of Halifax mechanics. …

“The Horrid Popish Plot”: Roger L’Estrange and the Circulation of Political Discourse in Late Seventeenth-Century London by Peter Hinds

“The Horrid Popish Plot”: Roger L’Estrange and the Circulation of Political Discourse in Late Seventeenth-Century London by Peter Hinds

‘By Merit Raised to That Bad Eminence’: Christopher Merrett, Artisanal Knowledge, and Professional Reform in Restoration London

This article examines the career and reform agenda of Christopher Merrett as a means of evaluating the changing conditions of medical knowledge production in late seventeenth-century London. This period was characterised by increasing competition between medical practitioners, resulting from the growing consumer demand for medical commodities and services, the reduced ability of elite physicians to control medical practice, and the appearance of alternative methods of producing medical knowledge – particularly experimental methods. This competition resulted in heated exchanges between physicians, apothecaries, and virtuosi, in which Merrett played an active part. As a prominent member of both the Royal Society and the Royal College of Physicians, Merrett sought to mediate between the two institutions by introducing professional reforms designed to alleviate competition and improve medical knowledge.These reforms entailed sweeping changes to medical regulation and education that integrated the traditional reliance on Galenic principles with knowledge derived from experiment and artisanal practices. The emphasis Merrett placed on the trades suggests the important role artisanal knowledge played in his efforts to reorganise medicine and improve knowledge of bodily processes.

The Frozen Thames and Some Commercial Changes in Late Seventeenth-Century London

The Frozen Thames and Some Commercial Changes in Late Seventeenth-Century London

Peter Hinds. “The Horrid Popish Plot”: Roger L’Estrange and the Circulation of Political Discourse in Late Seventeenth-Century London. New York: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2010. Pp. 340. $100.00 (cloth).

Peter Hinds. “The Horrid Popish Plot”: Roger L’Estrange and the Circulation of Political Discourse in Late Seventeenth-Century London. New York: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2010. Pp. 340. $100.00 (cloth).

Publishers' Booklists in Late Seventeenth-Century London

In the middle of the seventeenth century London publishers began to include lists of other publications in books. Between 1646 and 1665 the number of publishers engaging in this practice grew from thirty-six to sixty-six. A close study of the booklists of two publishers, Thomas Parkhurst and Brabazon Aylmer, shows that these lists were plainly designed to bring very specific groups of readers and potential buyers into their shops. Lists of publishers’ advertisements on the spare pages of books distributed by other publishers support the idea that these lists helped to postulate and even to construct communities of readers of a rather specific bias, taste, and religious propensity.

'For the house her self and one servant': Family and Household in Late Seventeenth-century London

The 1695 returns for the marriage duty tax provide a unique opportunity to investigate the composition of London's domestic groups. Traditional schemes for the analysis of the early modern family and household fail to capture the complexities of metropolitan living, and a 'London-specific' methodology is outlined for use in the returns' classification. Application of this scheme to returns from two contrasting areas of London, a cluster of wealthy city-centre parishes and a poorer suburban precinct, reveals a series of structural differences in their families and households that are attributable to the wealth and social status of their respective populations. However, some aspects of the domestic experience within the two areas are more comparable than previous accounts would suggest.

Early retailing: London's shopping exchanges, 1550–1700

Location is an important aspect of retailing, and London entrepreneurs recognized it as early as the 1560s in building exchanges to house a collection of shops, taking them off the street. These shopping centres created a special shopping environment: shelter, safety, and shop agglomeration. Soon shoppers put on their own social display there, a further shopping attraction. Up to five of these centres existed in late seventeenth-century London, capturing about half of all shops. But the reputation of these facilities declined over time, the institution of shopping ‘mall’ apparently not continued or emulated again until the twentieth century.

Robert Hooke’s Collection of Architectural Books and Prints

When Christopher Wren visited Paris in 1665–66, he famously returned with ‘almost all France in paper’. His friend and colleague Robert Hooke, however, was not so lucky; his collection of architectural books and prints was acquired from London. This article outlines the contents of Hooke’s architectural library and considers the general availability of architectural publications in late seventeenth-century London.

RETHINKING POLITENESS IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND: MOLL KING’S COFFEE HOUSE AND THE SIGNIFICANCE OF ‘FLASH TALK’

HISTORIANS are rightly suspicious of axioms, those capsules of historical ‘truth’ that pass into the received wisdom about a particular time period. Part of our job is to explode historical myth, to scrutinise and re-evaluate existing versions of the past. Yet how hard it is to think outside of the paradigms that are the legacy of an impressive bibliography and a legion of footnotes. I myself became aware of one particular paradigm regarding the cultural history of early modern England in the course of postgraduate research. I found myself straying across one of those temporal boundaries that arises from the chronological fragmentation imposed by textbooks and course syllabuses. In short, I moved from the pre-Civil-War period, with which I was then more familiar, into the early years of the long eighteenth century. It appeared to me that the literary sources from the late 1600s, which were the subject of my doctoral research, had much in common with the popular literature of earlier periods – the almanacs and chapbooks so well described by Bernard Capp, Margaret Spufford and others. The popular press of the last quarter of the seventeenth century seemed familiar territory: monstrous births, providential occurrences, and various forms of advice to young people were as much the staple diet for readers of cheap print in late seventeenth-century London as they had been in the era of Gouge and Whateley. The observation of such continuities had little relevance, however, since the preoccupation of historians studying this later period had changed.

The politics of opera in late seventeenth-century London

To what degree does late seventeenth-century English opera contain politics? Some recent critics have assumed that political commentary conveyed by allegory is a pervasive feature of ‘Restoration’ masques and operas. Is this true? Quite a few political interpretations of particular works have been published but no one has systematically enquired to what extent allegory and/or ideology was presumed to be built into operas mounted in late seventeenth-century London. Theoretical statements of the time about opera are scant and contradictory, their authors disinclined to take up political issues. Some of the political content is glaringly obvious (the allegory in Dryde'ns and Grabu's Albion and Albanius); some of it is sharply disputed. How should we read a work like Dryden's and Purcell's King Arthur? Is it essentially a muddled adventure story? An expression of British nationalism rising above current politics? A piece of covert Jacobite propaganda?